markfiend wrote:sultan2075 wrote:markfiend wrote:Do most followers of Islam have such "a different understanding of the purpose of life"? Most Muslims just want to get on with their lives, do their jobs, bring up their children. I think it's overly simplistic, and potentially dangerous, to frame this as Christianity versus Islam, or even as secularism against Islam; I believe that we risk alienating the huge numbers of Muslims who don't support ISIS by doing so.
In fairness, if anyone is framing it that way, it's ISIS, al Qaeda, etc.
You may be right, but I see a lot of commentary, especially from the right, that seems happy to follow that framing. There are voices calling for forced conversion of western Muslims to Christianity for example.
No remotely serious person has called for the forcible conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Ann Coulter advocated it in 2001.
markfiend wrote:
sultan2075 wrote:That being said, I think you're making the same assumption that the neoconservatives did: you're assuming that everyone really just wants the fruits of bourgeois liberalism. Inside everyone is a bourgeois liberal just waiting to come out! But that is not necessarily the case, and many voices from that part of the world have rejected bourgeois liberalism on the grounds that it offers freedom, but it is a freedom to be a moral degenerate.
I think that convincing people with "the fruits of bourgeois liberalism" has failed because the only of those fruits they ever see are bombs, drone-strikes, and occupying armies.
Of course, this is simply untrue. The 9/11 hijackers were well-acquainted with bourgeois liberalism. They were educated people and had lived in the West. Most of the funding ISIS has worked off of (at least prior to the capture of oil fields and subsequent oil smuggling, and capture of territory and subsequent taxation) came from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait. These are not nations which fit your description. ISIS has historically been funded by fabulously wealthy, well-educated elites. These are not ignorant peasants, nor were al Qaeda. They are quite familiar with "the fruits of bourgeois liberalism."
markfiend wrote:
sultan2075 wrote:One needn't be a member of ISIS to look at western moral relativism with a jaundiced and suspicious eye.
I don't really know what "moral relativism" has to do with anything. I've most frequently seen it used as a phrase used to beat up a straw-man version of secular humanism and to suggest that humanists, atheists, etc. have
no morality.
Surely
descriptive moral relativism is uncontroversial? People do in fact disagree about that which is moral: ISIS find it morally acceptable to behead people; we do not.
I have suggested no such thing. However, when we, as a civilization, adopt the view that morality is simply relative to culture (or to put it another way, that there is no such thing as the possibility of moral knowledge or moral truth) we have lost all ability to give a rational defense of Western civilization. The position of al Qaeda, ISIS, etc., in regard to the West includes a well thought out moral critique of Western civilization. The West cannot offer a coherent response insofar as it has accepted the postmodern position whereby neither reason nor revelation can serve as a guide for life.
I do think normative moral relativism is a philosophic dead end; descriptive moral relativism, however, does not lead to it necessarily (as Aristotle points out in the
Nicomachean Ethics 2000+ years ago, descriptive moral relativism leads to more and deeper inquiry). Nevertheless, some variation on normative moral relativism is the reigning moral ideology in the West today.
markfiend wrote:
sultan2075 wrote:More importantly, secular governments in the Middle East have nearly all been tyrannies. Secular western liberalism has been discredited in the eyes of many.
But this is self-contradictory; secular liberalism has been defeated because people in the Middle East have never seen it?
Yes, that's a misstatement on my part; they have adopted Western political ideologies (the Baath party borrowed heavily from the worst of the West, for example). The point is that secular (illiberal) Western politics has been tried and been discredited. Liberal democratic politics require liberal democrats, which are few and far between in the middle-east. Since secular politics has proved to be a failure, the turn back toward a religious politics is inevitable.
markfiend wrote:
sultan2075 wrote:Whether they are right or wrong to conclude that secular politics is a failure is a different story. Nevertheless, if God has given you the Law, and the secular politics you imported from outside has failed, where do you turn? You turn back the Law, which is what ISIS is doing.
But I don't in fact think that they do see us in the West as "secularists", they see us as Christians and this conflict as an extension of the Crusades, a view shared by many on the right in the West.
"Crusaders, Christians, Jews, and infidels" covers a lot of territory. As far as ISIS and al Qaeda are concerned, these are
kuffir. Arguing the distinction between Christians and secularists is like arguing the distinction between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front. It's all very important to the members of those two groups, but not to anybody else. More importantly - and this was the point I was trying to make earlier - you can't separate the development of Western secularism from Christianity. Secularism
is a Christian development. It doesn't exist in the classical world, for example. It comes into existence as result of two crucial factors.
First, the Christian separation of the things of Caesar from the things of God allows for the autonomy of human reason in the things of this world; hence St. Thomas's natural law theory argues, in essence, that reason alone, unaided by revelation, can guide you in this world. In fact, that's the entire point of the natural law: you can know your moral duties without religion.
Secondly, while the classics and the medievals generally thought that there was an inherent and unresolvable tension between reason (which is aims to transcend political society) and the political community, the modern project is predicated on the reconcilability of the two. The Enlightenment is predicated on the view that they can be reconciled on terms favorable to reason (Kant, I'd say, is the classic statement of this, but it's also in Descartes): reason will trump the particular, the historical, or the social. Reason is universalizable. This is the fundamental premise of world government (unless that government is to be a mere tyranny). The Counter-enlightenment project tries to reconcile reason and culture as well, but it argues that reason is always subsidiary to or an outgrowth of culture or society or history (Hegel, for example, says that philosophy is only the spirit of the age expressed in thought. Contemporary historicism and moral relativism are derivative of the counter-Enlightenment. Hegel and Rousseau occupy this space, as do traditionalist conservatives).
Because Christianity leaves a space for the autonomous use of reason in response to moral and political problems, the Enlightenment is possible (perhaps even inevitable). Judaism and Islam, as religions of law, leave much less room for this autonomous, self-legislating reason. Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, declared elections in Iraq to be blasphemous. Why? Because God has already given you the law. Who are you to make your own?
