ASK
SPENGLER Know your
enemy (including Commentary
magazine)
Dear
Spengler, First let me say I love your
essays. I get excited every time I see a new one posted.
I must partially disagree however, with your concluding
sentence of your last column. "In the form of Islam, the
West confronts a challenge quite different from
communism."
A compelling case can be made that
communism, fascism and even Islam were all reactions to
"liberal capitalism". While Marx's writings can easily
be seen as a reaction to 19th century laze faire
capitalism, a similar "reactionary" form can be seen in
the Koran.
The great creed of Islam - "There is
no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet" - can be
seen as the keystone to Muhammed's reaction to his
perception of the Christian Trinity - three Gods. The
foundations of liberal capitalism can be traced to
Christianity. In a sense then, both Islam and communism
are responses to Christianity. One much older, some
1,200 years older. One now near extinction, the older
experiencing a revival.
The common theme of
returning to traditional self-contained "community"
through bloody "revolution" - jihad - is interesting as
well. Isn't Mao's idea to discard trade and commerce and
maintain self sufficient communities very similar to the
goals of militant Mohammedans? Jim Hughes Green Bay, Wisconsin, US
Dear Mr
Hughes, Thank you for your generous praise and
thoughtful remarks, but I still disagree. Consider the
following: How many emigrants from the former Soviet
Union until its demise continued to sympathize with the
communist cause? (Answer: virtually none). How many
emigrants from the Islamic world sympathize with radical
Islam? (Answer unknown, but the proportion is large).
The West won a bloodless victory over the Soviet
empire during the 1980s, although considerable blood was
shed earlier in proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam and
elsewhere. Victory against radical Islam is by no means
assured, and if the West achieves it, I expect it to be
at far greater cost. The threat, I maintain, is
essentially different.
This may sound like a
quibble, but I do not see how Islam could be construed
to be a reaction to liberal capitalism, which did not
flourish in the empires of the Near East and South Asia
during the 7th century. Liberal capitalism might be said
to have arisen from a form of Christianity some eight
centuries later, but that reformed Christianity stood in
open rebellion against the reigning currents of the low
Middle Ages.
If I were to take your side of the
argument, I would put it this way: Islam’s spirit of
equality bears at least some resemblance to that of
communism, whose hymn (from the Paris Commune of 1870)
proclaims, "Arise! ye prisoners of starvation/Arise! ye
wretched of the earth." Islam swept through the Indian
subcontinent by converting the true wretched of the
earth, namely the lowest castes of Hindu society. Like
communism, it juxtaposed the austere virtues of the poor
to the lascivious corruption of the Persian and
Byzantine Empires.
That is where the similarity
ends, however. Communism presupposed an urban
proletariat estranged from traditional society, with no
connection to the past and little stake in the present.
The Communards of Paris sang, "No more tradition's
chains will bind us." Marx believed that a New Man would
emerge from this uprooted mass, guided by science rather
than superstition. Marxism, to be sure, had religious
characteristics, along with the trappings of an
established church, dissenters, persecutions for heresy,
and so forth. One might go further, along the lines of
Paul Johnson (in Intellectuals) and argue that
Marx, the son of a Rhineland rabbi, caricatured the
prophets of his Hebrew ancestors. Similar things are
said about Siegmund Freud, doubtless with some
justification.
Far from being a new class,
Marx's proletariat was a passing phenomenon, not quite
as ephemeral as the American cowboy on the open range,
but most impermanent nevertheless. Rising skill levels
brought middle-class living standards and middle-class
habits to industrial workers, and geographical
dispersion shifted the manufacturing base away from the
place of its creation. Despite Marx's hope, the
proletariat never broke with traditional society to the
point of embracing a synthetic new religion. Russia's
communists reverted to the habits of the czars, and
exterminated the Bolshevik intellectuals (many of them
Jewish) who sincerely believed in Marx’s synthetic
religion.
Hitlerian fascism, imbued with race
mysticism and larded with bits of the old pagan cults,
might be characterized as a religion as well. Ba’athism
sprouted from the Nazi trunk, as Marc Erikson showed in
an ATol series entitled Islamism, fascism and
terrorism (Nov 5, 2002). One
might argue that Saddam Hussein's effortless
transmogrification from secular Ba'athist into Islamist
betrays the underlying identity of the two
belief-structures. Daniel Pipes argues that modern
Islamism has less to do with the traditional religion of
the past than with the totalitarian political movements
of the 20th century.
There is something missing
from these arguments, I believe, and that is the
desperate nostalgia that draws educated Muslims back to
Islamic radicalism. Mohammed Atta and his companions did
not live in the West, so much as haunt it. The habits
and longings of traditional society clung to them as
they made their desultory way through engineering
courses at European universities. To the Arabs and some
of the peoples converted to Islam, the creative
destruction of the West offers a great deal of
destruction and very little creation. China and perhaps
India will emerge as the beneficiaries of Pax Americana,
while the Arab world (which, apart from oil, exports as
much as Finland) will languish in backwardness and
poverty. What does the West offer the Arabs but sex,
drugs, and rock-and-roll? Consider today's Japan, where
teenage girls sell themselves to older men for pocket
money, green hair is normal, and the adolescent suicide
rate is the highest in history. The American dream has a
nightmarish aspect as well, and that is what Muslim
traditional society fears.
Communism offered a
credible alternative only to the intellectual with the
mental tools to delude himself. Islamism appeals to the
educated man or woman uprooted from traditional life,
unable and unwilling to merge into the melting pot of
the West, fatally wistful for the certainties of the
past. Of some clinical interest is Orhan Pamuk’s
fictional poet "Ka", whose inspiration revives after his
visit to an Islamist circle in a provincial town
(In defense of Turkish
cigarettes, Aug 24, 2004).
"Tradition's chains shall bind us forever!" they sing,
in contrast to the Communards of Paris.
As much
as food or water, men require the promise of
remembrance, the assurance that their lives have
significance for those whom they remember, and for those
who will remember them. Before the fall of the Soviet
empire, the misery of its victims was unique. Clusters
of men stood silent on the street corners of every city
in Eastern Europe, empty-eyed and drunk. The truth is
that after the purges of the 1930s, there were very few
communists left in Russia, much less in Eastern Europe.
The twisted idealists were dead, and parroting
careerists ruled in their place. That is why communism
gave up without firing a shot. The Russian military knew
that the communist system could not provide it with the
technological means to compete with the United States.
Outside of Western universities, no one had a
passion for communism. But the passion for Islam has
reawakened among millions of educated Arabs, Turks,
Pakistanis and others who a generation ago would have
considered themselves secular. That, I maintain, is why
the challenge is so different. The passion for Islam is
an existential matter.
I was intrigued to
discover a summary of my August 14 essay (Islam: Religion or political
ideology) on a religious Jewish
website, www.amhaaretz.com. Because the summary might be
clearer than my original, I reproduce it
here:
Spengler observes: People
search for immortality. The Jews are [or consider
themselves - Spengler] an immortal nation, in
accordance with God's promise. Thus, Jews, as a
people, have no worries about dying out. All other
peoples, on the other hand, are susceptible to death.
Christianity was born during calamitous times,
when the mortality of nations was clearly visible. The
Christian term "original sin" means the inherent
mortality of the Gentile nations. To combat this
inherent mortality, Christianity offers individuals
membership in a new nation, which they hope is
immortal, and which they call "new Israel". Individual
Christians leave their dying nations of birth and come
into this new nation. Thus, Christianity does not even
attempt to save whole nations from their death, only
the individuals who have decided that they want to
live.
Islam, on the other hand, attempts to
save its follower nations from their mortality by
making a direct effort to save these nations as they
are, in their traditional forms, rather than saving
individuals while allowing the nations themselves to
die (which is what Christianity attempts to do).
Islamic nations feel threatened by the West because
the West is change, change that means the death of
traditional society. The only logical response under
Islam is jihad - to fight the impending death tooth
and nail, until the end.
In jihad, the fragile and threatened traditional
society turns the tables on the cosmopolitan
civilization that threatens to absorb it. "I will not be
absorbed!" swears the jihadist, "but instead I will
break you, and remake the world in the image of
traditional society." Existential desperation of this
sort implies a frightening sort of nihilism. Communism
styled itself the true vehicle for technological
progress, and held out an optimistic vision of the
future. Radical Islam extols the traditional life of the
past and threatens to destroy the industrial base of the
West. "My grandfather rode a camel," one correspondent
characterized the mindset of today’s Saudi radicals,
"and I will ride a camel again." This is a different
sort of challenger to the West, in one respect less
fearsome than the nuclear-armed Soviets, but in other
ways less tractable. Spengler
Dear Spengler, In your response
to Eponymous M, you claim: "World War II destroyed the
intellectual centers of Jewish life of Europe, and
nothing has emerged elsewhere to replace them"
[Spengler responds to
readers, Aug 17]. The problem is
that World War II destroyed all the intellectual centers
everywhere. The post-modern bohemian trash that passes
for intellectualism these days offers no hope for a
young Rosenzweig or Soloveitchik. They'd immediately be
denied tenure and wind up either teaching Talmud or
writing for Commentary magazine. Andrew Berman
Dear Mr Berman, Your point is well
taken, and would be stronger if you were to add that
some of the intellectual centers of Europe (the name
Martin Heidegger springs to mind) helped to destroy
themselves. But Rosenzweig write for Commentary, the
house organ of the neo-conservatives? The journal's
intellectual flavor derives from the old Partisan
Review, in which the critic Clement Greenberg taught the
world to adulate the besotted, talentless
paint-spatterer Jackson Pollack. The desire to be
conservative and cutting-edge at the same time permeates
the pages of Commentary, except that the avant-garde of
the 1940s have become the old fuddy-duddies of today. In
cultural matters, Commentary remains frozen in time,
standing with High Modernism against Post-Modernism,
progressive jazz against rap, Stravinsky against Boulez,
and so forth. If Norman Podhoretz goes to hell, I
suspect that his punishment will be to spend eternity
with Commentary's culture correspondent Terry Teachout.
Franz Rosenzweig soared above such concerns. No
spirit more intrepid breathed the air of the 20th
century. Although I disagree with him frequently, the
abandon with which he threw himself at the philosophical
demons of his time quickens my blood. That is
intellectual heroism.
Irving Kristol (Commentary
editor 1947-1952) once remarked that he had wanted to
learn German in order to read Rosenzweig, but never
found the time; his protege Norman Podhoretz (Commentary
editor 1960-1995) evidently had less patience than
Kristol, judging from his 2003 book The Prophets
(Neo-conservatives in a religious
bind, Nov 3, 2003). There
Podhoretz remarks that Islam is less tolerant of
idolatry than Judaism itself, quite the contrary of what
Rosenzweig believed. Such blunders are common to
polemicists who are thrashed by their own straw men.
Kristol and Podhoretz are feuilletonistes, "men of
letters" rather than scholars. To Kristol I give full
credit for the most important political innovation of
the past 30 years, namely that evangelical Christians
and their concerns would change the balance of power in
American politics. Leo Strauss, who played the gypsy
Melchiades to the Macondo of American conservatism,
influenced Kristol more than any other thinker, with
unfortunate consequences.
No, Mr Berman, I do
not believe the editors of Commentary could stomach
another Rosenzweig, were the good Lord to send us such
another. The high culture of the West is nearly
inaccessible, like an ancient language decipherable only
to a handful of sages. I know some of these, noble men
and women who work in quiet, whose academic papers are
read by a few hundred pairs of eyes. Perhaps after the
storm has broken upon the West in earnest, another
generation will dig into the past to explain the
upheaval that so changed their lives. Spengler
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
ASK
SPENGLER 
