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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| "The West and the Rest." Review |
| 2004-12-28 |
| ELF Right from its opening lines, the book goes against the canons of political correctness: "Samuel Huntington's celebrated thesis that the Cold War has been succeeded by a 'clash of civilizations' has more credibility today than it had in 1993, when it was first put forward."But what follows is even more abundantly surprising. If the liberty of which Western civilization boasts also includes the possibility of that civilization's rejecting itself — and Scruton reserves one of his most brilliant chapters to this pervasive culture of rejection — then "this is a matter of a civilization aiming at its own destruction." Likewise, Islam defines itself not in terms of liberty but in terms of submission, and this submission is also self-destructive. It is the prisoner of a sacred text, the Koran, which will make every Muslim a rootless person so long as it is read outside the context of history and the present. In the preface to the Italian edition of the volume, Khaled Fouad Allam —an insightful intellectual of the Muslim diaspora, Algerian by origin with Italian citizenship —fully attests to this condition of the disappearance of the self, for Islam within modernity. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 I read the review quickly so perhaps my "take" on Scruton's book is off the mark. Scruton believes that the West/the USA will ultimately prevail, but are Scruton's reasons unrealistic? He says the greatest things about the USA in particular are: a)territorial jurisdiction and national fidelity b)Christianity as an essential element of this citizenship capable of giving identity to the West and of bringing together "the West and the rest," even amid religious diversity The cornerstones that Scruton rhapsodizes about are being eroded in the USA 24/7. Our sense of nationalism and fidelity has been down played in recent years. Immigrants can and do hold 2 even 3 citizenships; the pledge of allegiance is being put on the back burner in many schools so as not to offend some immigrant/religious groups in the student body; our border protection from invasion of illegal immigrants is a pathetic joke. Even the Iranian Foreign Minister recently mocked it in a response to Rummy requesting that Iran do a better job of protecting its border with Iraq. The Foreign Minister laughed and said the US has no room to criticize any country about not protecting its borders, what with their own southern border with Mexico being so porous. As for Christianity, well the ACLU has succeeded in making the mention of God in a US public place a dirty word. The Christophobes in the MSM have made Catholocism if not Christianity generally to be associated in the public's minds with pedophilia. The MSM never mentioned once that 99.9% of the child abuse cases were male on male-all the MSM reported constantly was that priests sexually molested children. So based on Scruton's text, I'm not so sure about the West being victorious in the clash of civilizations, since the the strengths he identifies are now significantly diminished. I'll need to buy the book to read the full text. Thanks Tipper for the heads up on the title. |
| Posted by: joeblow 2004-12-28 2:11:13 PM |
| #2 Think about it - the worst we have to deal with are: 1. Possible IRS audits but very unlikely 2. TSA patdowns but only if you are a size 36+ 3. DMV lines and the inevitable result of having missed some important documentation requirement 4. Your team not making the playoffs 5. Wal-Mart 6. McDonalds Not much to worry about and lots of things to die for - thats the difference. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back 2004-12-28 1:19:24 PM |
| #1 This could be put in simpler terms: modernity vs. primitivism, or civilization vs. barbarity. The irony was that in its time, like many other religious and cultural movements, Islam was a marked improvement over primitivism, in this case, extreme tribalism and pantheism. Yet like so many others, it had no mechanism for continued invention. Worst of all, it evolved fundamentalist anti-invention and xenophobic philosophers who prohibited the evolution of doctrine and secular culture. So it ended up on the losing end of the Darwinistic struggle, its eventual end seen in an utter loss of identity, the religion just become a label, lost in a sea of secularism. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-12-28 10:47:24 AM |