In the recent decade perhaps nothing has gripped the American attention so much as its relationship with the Islamic world. In the receding wake of the Soviet collapse, neither a unified Europe nor a China ascendant has captured the same attention and concern as what is happening in these many countries sandwiched between the world’s primary power bases. Russia, eager to reclaim influence it relinquished so suddenly and ignominiously, appears still as a world power to the American people, but not a competitor. Earlier we worried about Europe’s economy as it eclipsed that of our own, but we resigned ourselves to be smaller in size, comforted in that per capita we’re still ahead. China, making bold economic moves as only an authoritarian regime can, expanding its military and advancing its level of technology in order to compete with us, is still viewed with a fair measure of indifference. Per capita we’re richer, they remain decades behind us in some technologies, and there is question as to whether their social and political structures, especially considering an aging population, can sustain their growth.
The Islamic world however is another matter. Instinctively, we are aware of being confronted on an entirely different plane, perhaps one where the playing field is neither level nor in our favor. On the surface, this may seem another East West struggle, but to average American the Soviet strength was perceived as comparable to our own; they could match us in most areas. Alternately, we may view it as a struggle of values, perhaps simplified to Judeo-Christian traditions (by association, even if the particular players are not religious) pitted against Islamic. But if this were the case, Judeo-Christians are voluntarily yielding ground at a rate foreign to most centuries of their existence, deferring to Islamic customs, taking great pains to afford equal if not preferred status even on our own turf to what is still a minority. At any rate, American Christianity has largely sat out a number of cultural struggles prior to the appearance of Islam as a competitive worldview in this country.
What the rise of Islam as a culture presents to the world, where it is a credible threat to prevailing culture, is a struggle against post-modern philosophy and sensibility; an arena in which Western Christianity long ago capitulated and only now in these late times is getting back into the fight.
Within a post-modern worldview, it is the moment – the here and now – that alone has any significance. If everything is fleeting, then nothing can have any permanent value. Absolutism, objectivism is replaced by relativism. If truth cannot be accurately known, then the best we can do is by definition subjective and one man’s truth must be –objectively (ironically) – valued no higher than another’s. It can’t be known, and at any rate, it doesn’t matter. Leveraging their common power in language and history, we still use words like “truth, right, wrong, ethics, and morality” but in a post-modern world these concepts are by definition suspect.
At best a post-modern society defines its highest virtue as tolerance, and even then it is a subjective term because it is frequently more than tolerant of other intolerant societies (China, Iran, North Korea) in a bid to exemplify tolerance to outsiders. Within the tolerant sphere however no native worldview may be permitted to consider itself dominant or superior. What appears exceptional in history, even pre-dating the rise of nationalism in the world, is that at no point have successful nations considered themselves as anything other than exceptional, superior, offering their worldview as a path to success. However, in the United States, American exceptionalism – the notion that what we have to offer to the world is truly worthy and superior -- remains heavily debated, under withering fire. It is chic to point out this country’s problems, to graciously apologize on the world stage for failings perceived and real, in an effort to evidence a higher plane of morality. It becomes uplifting to rise above all petty sentiments of nationalism, to view one’s country as irrelevant, and to usher in the era of world citizenry and citizenship of mankind as a whole: the new man. And it is this new man who alone has the strength of character to reshape the world to the limits of his imagination. But the first step is to decry the antiquated traditions and wisdom of the old man. Here tolerance becomes a weapon against the old worldviews; the label “intolerant” as a slur. Rich parallels exist between the distributed post-modern efforts of Western intelligentsia and the modernist struggle of the Soviet new man or the German übermensch to remake the world to their respective visions.
Tolerance however is not a worldview, but a practice regarding them. Post-modernism offers little more than disregard of worldviews as its worldview. It offers nothing to compete against another established worldview, especially where it grants blanket exemptions to the foreign, intolerant worldview; instead targeting any perceptions of native intolerance however minor in comparison. This bizarre behavior serves only to delegitimize further the notion of tolerance as a supreme virtue or worldview. A U.N. body, seeking to be all inclusive, elects representatives to human and women’s’ rights commissions from countries that have appalling records. American feminism, so instrumental in improving the lot of women many decades ago, remains disturbingly quiet on the abuses in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, concentrating only on the evils of countries where women enjoy the most freedom. If the Western way of life is under such directed fire from its own philosophies, small wonder that another competing worldview, even one that has been largely irrelevant to modern Western history and the formation of this country, may be felt instinctively as a potent threat to our way of life. Or alternately, as a refreshing beacon of stability where one is cast adrift in a sea of relativity. It need not be the strongest worldview, but in this society, so long as it remains the strongest of the surviving worldviews proclaiming absolute truth, unapologetic in declaring right from wrong, unreserved in confronting the culture and unashamed of its own naked sense of exceptionalism, it stands to compete in the mainstream and win dominance by default.
Whether or not it so characterizes individual Founding Fathers, America’s beginning is steeped heavily in Judeo-Christian tradition and worldviews. While it draws from Classical and Enlightenment philosophy, it is from those worldviews that we derive a moral compass, that stubborn sense of right and wrong, honor and shame, and a respect for human life and freedom. These are worldviews that historically have competed successfully against all others. From it our way of life is taken, and a cultural narrative is constructed and enshrined into the American mind. But that way of life is precarious, unstable once post-modernism undermines the validity of the foundational worldviews.
The greatest threat to our standing in this world is this fading of American exceptionalism; not just the simple belief that we are exceptional (which is under assault) but the practical reality of an exceptional productive culture. That is, freedom of religion strikes us as a particularly good principle, but becomes worthless in a society that hardly values religion itself. Who will die for a freedom that makes little impact in one’s own life? Freedom of speech is highly valuable to a culture where a cacophony of ideas and voices enrich a life and create and produce. But when the voices start to sound the same for lack of careful thought, when freedom of speech is most commonly interpreted as the freedom and mandate to express what one is feeling at a given moment, whether another listens or not, cares or not, this is no longer a treasured freedom. Writers from Solzhenitsyn who, finding the freedom to critique, opine and understand long denied him in the Soviet Union, lamented the trivial expressions of that freedom he encountered here, to Postman to McLuhan to Bloom, have spent careers attempting to understand the decline in the quality of Western thought among the general population. Freedom is not the end in and of itself, but necessary for a great many ends, so long as those ends are sought after. And when they are not, those freedoms cease to be a critical part of the social narrative.
We’ve seen even in this last century, prominent societies change due to the presence of a strongly worded, well spoken minority when they refuse to compromise, leading to bloodless (or largely bloodless) internal upheavals of the establishment. While the credit most often goes to those minorities, it is really a function of the society’s unwillingness to address or confront the newcomer that permits it in. In the early 1900s, following the deposition of the Czar, the Bolsheviks were not a sure bet. Nor were the National Socialists in the Weimar Republic when they began winning seats in the Reichstag. Iran’s overthrow of the Shah might have resulted in a beautiful democracy populated by intellectuals, if not for a well-organized, determined minority. In recent years, secular Turkey has made alarming shifts towards Islamic hard lines, jeopardizing economic and even military relations with the most functional democracy in the Middle East and our strongest regional ally. The groundwork is laid slowly, often with little real opposition.
Despite popular concerns regarding outside influences, including the increasing presence of Middle Eastern-style Islamic influence within our borders, the greatest threat to the American way of life may be the loss of our sense of America as an exceptional country, with something that ought to be presented to the world, as not one nation among many, but one with a duty to lead by example. Someone will pick up our flag where we put it down, but they do so because we have put it down of our own volition.
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