Page 1 of 2 It must be the end of secularism
By Spengler
Secular liberalism stands helpless before a new century of religious wars,
Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla concedes in "The politics of God", a
despairing vision of the political future published in the August 19 New York
Times Magazine. [1] It is one of those important statements, like the "end of
history", that will repeat on us indefinitely, like a bad curry. It comprises
most of the Times weekend magazine, presented with all the pomposity the
newspaper can summon.
For the few of us who asked not how to avoid religious war, but
rather how best to fight it, Lilla's essay provides double validation. Not only
does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal
position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this
position from the beginning. Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates
Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to
surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the
Muslims, particularly to Professor Tariq Ramadan. If that sounds strange, it is
not my fault. It is all there in black and white, as I will report below. But
first, here is Lilla's de profundis:
For more than two
centuries, from the American and French revolutions to the collapse of Soviet
communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and
revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity - these were
the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our
problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves
entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine
duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own
fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir
up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no
longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions
from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
That
is well enough, and Exhibit 1 for the prosecution is the president of Iran,
Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Lilla quotes his May 2006 letter to the US president at
some length, eg, "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to
help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed.
Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of
the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems ... Whether we like
it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice,
and the will of God will prevail over all things."
Yet by wink and nudge, Lilla conjures us to believe that the true problem is
not resurgent fanaticism in the Muslim world at all, but rather the new
ascendance of Christian faith in the West. He presents not a shred of evidence
for this outlandish charge. The reader will peruse the essay in vain for a word
of explanation concerning the origins of Muslim fanaticism. Instead, the entire
content is devoted to presenting the history of a Christian fanaticism that
does not exist, and has not existed for a century or more. It may be that
Lilla, a follower of Leo Strauss, is trying his hand at what Strauss called
esoteric writing - concealing a message for adept readers. Whatever the motive,
his argument is inconsequential and silly. Fascism, communism, neo-orthodox
Protestantism, Zionism - any movement that elicited passion and commitment -
all are summoned to the prisoner's box to hear Lilla's bill of indictment.
The generation that survived World War I, he writes, "craved a more robust
faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole
modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal
theologians had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set
for just this sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois
propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most
daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse
- one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian
believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation
with the divine." Karl Barth, the anti-Nazi Swiss theologian, and the young
Zionist Martin Buber are just as guilty as Marxists and Nazis.
Before all these dreadful people brought faith back into politics, Lilla avers,
17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had saved civilization from
religious wars by changing the subject of political thought to tolerance and
compromise:
Over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John
Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order
in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in
power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of
retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and
institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish,
free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable
rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This
liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate
today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive
passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by
political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.
Precisely how Hobbes accomplished all of this is a mystery known only to
political scientists who take themselves far too seriously. The masses, after
all, did not rally in the public squares waving little books of quotations from
Chairman Hobbes. Never mind that the United States, which defined the modern
democratic state, was founded by radical Protestant refugees from Europe who
set out to build a New Jerusalem, and that impassioned religious faith has
characterized American discourse from its founding. Lilla desires us to believe
that an elite of political scientists much like himself managed to re-engineer
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