What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?
The almost giddy pleasure they take in ridicule of religious founders and their followers.
That this ridicule of religion has animated liberalism for a long time in America is a given. Just ask any devout Christian, if you can still find one, how Serrano's Piss Christ made him feel.
But conservatives, on the other hand, have always believed above all in self-restraint, without which there cannot be any such thing called limited government. As Oswald Spengler reminded us in the 1930s but everyone seems to have long since forgotten, Christianity is renunciation and nothing else. The exploding ignorance of this knowledge had already gone hand in hand with the development of totalitarian forms of government in Spengler's own time, and has only gotten worse since. The world is now dominated as a consequence by two forms of fascism which ended up winning against communism, one of the left and one of the right: the one is in China and the other in the United States. The reason? Fascism is more successful at production and consumption than communism, which is all there is to materialist philosophers. To them self-restraint is as much of an enemy as it was an opiate to Marx.
The most uncomfortable example of self-restraint for our own time has been self-censorship, which is nothing more than the recognition of the existence of the evil inclination inside of every human being, a recognition only made possible by an openness to a moral vision of the universe. That moral vision says that that evil inclination must be restrained by the free choice of the self if civilized society is to survive. But our supposed political allies today in conservatism and libertarianism want nothing to do with that. They have together more in common with liberalism than with the transcendent world of which I am writing.
Self-censorship in fact used to be seen as a virtue in America, when it was a more religiously informed country. "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil", said the founder of our religion. The idea was to live and let live because the evil and the good had to grow up together until the harvest. Otherwise the wheat would be lost with the tares. Accordingly, to be wise meant often to hold your tongue and keep your peace, even when you knew you were right, and to forgo arguments especially over religion because you were free to go to your church or to no church at all, and I was free to go to mine. "Strive for peace with all men", said another of our authorities. If Christians have been given their own form of jihad, that has been it, but they have failed miserably at it.
It must be stated plainly, nothing distinguishes what is different about Islam from us more than its opposition to peaceful coexistence, however poorly we have lived up to our own ideals. Islam means submission to its law, its prophet and its God. A Muslim is "one who submits". Peace only exists between the two of us when we submit to them. Which is why it follows that inviting Muslims into Christian countries is a recipe for conflict.
All around us this week so-called conservatives are urging us to join them in unloading a barrage of invective against Islam's founder, Muhammad. They do not want to live in peace. They want a war, which threatens to destroy us all.
Here's Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media:
"Were I (per impossible) editor of The New York Times, I would run those cartoons of Mohammed on the front page of the paper every day for a month."
Here's Ralph Peters at Fox News:
"Even if those terrorists are tracked down and killed - and I hope they are killed and die miserably - the end result of this is going to be we're going to continue to self-censor."
"The correct response to this attack, by all of us in journalism ... if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times tomorrow. They won't be."
And
here's a local libertarian in Michigan, one Steve Gruber:
It was blood thirsty little pieces of crap-spawned from the repugnant womb of modern Islam that murdered a dozen innocents inside an office for a French satirical magazine. Screaming glory be to Allah while executing 10 staff members and two police officers the vile nature of modern Islam was on display for all to see once again. Why did they attack the magazine? Because the magazine routinely skewered just about anyone and everyone and had the courage to publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. Well too damn bad. ... In the spirit of America let me say to hell with Mohammed and any of his followers if they think it proper to murder cartoonists or anyone else in the name of Allah.
What these individuals, were they conservatives, should be calling for is separation, keeping Muslims at a distance from Christian civilization, because the two are fundamentally not reconcilable until Muslims undergo a reformation of their own which renounces the inspiration of Koranic surahs legitimating violence against infidels. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before that happens because the so-called conservatives cannot see that the so-called innocents were anything but. They were as much the enemies of what made the West the West as the Muslims are.
Instead all that these ideologues of ours offer is ridicule of Islam, but from the safe distance of an increasingly less intact West. They call this courage, but shrink from what real courage requires: The courage that doesn't need to justify itself in the face of mortal danger, but which freely and quickly acts to excise the cancer and banish it, as well as abolish the tenuous economic cords made of petroleum from which it profits. Libertarian devotion to first principles of freedom of movement, trade and the like all work together to sabotage this doctor from performing the necessary surgery. All they can do is insult, and retreat to the safety of the drone war against an implacable enemy, ala John Galt.
Having grown up in a Christian denomination which held very dim views of everyone else's religion but was convinced everyone else was worth converting to our way of thinking because Christ died for them too, I find the overt lack of charity toward a whole religion and its founder a sign of profound decadence in our own civilization, criminal acts by religious fanatics notwithstanding.
We have to live together in the same world, but it were better if we grew in separate gardens to the extent that that is possible. The only constructive policy with Islam going forward is utter disengagement with its worst elements, and repression of those when called for, such as now in Yemen. Unfortunately for the West, this means withdrawing from Muslim lands, especially Arabia, and actively choosing to promote independence in energy to the extent that whether Islam reforms or does not reform, we can live without them and prevent them from harming others.
We cannot continue to serve God and mammon. Otherwise we are no different than them.
