One of the better essays I have read on the topic.
Author: Bill Vallicella
The Incompatibility of Islam with the West
From an astute correspondent:
So we come back to the concept of Sharia, which you rightly mentioned in one of your posts. This is really the thing where Islam stands out from other religions, the idea that religious belief should be the basis of law. Here I found Islamic Law: The Sharia from Muhammad's Time to the Present (Hunt Janin, André Kahlmeyer) useful. The concept of Sharia is essential to Islamic belief. See Sura 33:35—36. Islam means ‘submission’: the primary duty of human beings is to submit totally to the will of God. The sharia shows the faithful how this submission should be put into practice in daily life.
[The sharia] does not grow out of, and is not moulded by, society as is the case with Western systems. Human thought, unaided, cannot discern the true values and standards of conduct; such knowledge can only he attained through divine revelation, and acts are good or evil exclusively because God has attributed this quality to them. In the Islamic concept, law precedes and moulds society; to its eternally valid dictates the structure of State and society must, ideally, conform.
Notwithstanding the great outpouring of books and articles which have appeared in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the Islamic world is still not understood in the West today. The sharia is, beyond any question, one of the most important concepts of Islam, but most non-Muslims know almost nothing about it.
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I wholly endorse the foregoing as an understanding of Islam. Islam is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political system. Sharia, or Islamic law, is essential to it. Coming from God, it cannot be questioned by man: man must submit to it. The primary meaning of 'Islam' is submission. God's law must be imposed on all and woven into the fabric of everyday life. There is no provision in Islam for mosque-state separation. But that is to put it in the form of an understatement. Islam positively rules out mosque-state separation.
John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale UP, 1989, pp. 48-49):
From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam [submission to Allah] the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular. The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere of God's absolute claim and limitless compassion and mercy. And so islam, God-centredness, is not only an inner submission to the sole Lord of the universe but also a pattern of corporate life in accordance with God's will. It involves both salat, worship, and falah, the good embodied in behaviour. Through the five appointed moments of prayer each day is linked to God. Indeed almost any activity may be begun with Bismillah ('in the name of Allah'); and plans and hopes for the future are qualified by Inshallah ('if Allah wills'). Thus life is constantly punctuated by the remembrance of God. It is a symptom of this that almsgiving ranks with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and confession of faith as one of the five 'pillars' of Islam. Within this holistic conception the 'secular' spheres of politics, government, law, commerce, science and the arts all come within the scope of religious obedience.
What Hick calls a "holistic conception," I would call totalitarian. Islam is totalitarian in a two-fold sense. It aims to regulate every aspect and every moment of the individual believer's life. (And if you are not a believer, you must either convert or accept dhimmitude.) But it is also totalitarian in a corporate sense in that it aims to control every aspect of society in all its spheres, just as Hick points out supra.
Islam, therefore, is profoundly at odds with the values of the West. For we in the West, whether (old-time) liberals or conservatives, accept church(mosque)-state separation. We no doubt argue heatedly over what exactly it entails, but we are agreed on the main principle. I regularly criticize the shysters of the ACLU for their extremist positions on this question; but I agree with them that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." This implies that the government shall not impose any religion upon the people as the state religion.
This raises a very serious question. Is Islam – pure, unEnlightened, un-watered-down, fundamentalist, theocratic Islam — deserving of First Amendment protection? We read in the First Amendment that Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion. Should that be understood to mean that the Federal government shall not prohibit the establishment and free exercise of a totalitarian, fundamentalist theocratic religion in a particular state, say Michigan?
The USA is a Christian nation with a secular government. Suppose there was a religion whose aim was to subvert our secular government. Does commitment to freedom of religion enjoin toleration of such a religion?
Obviously not! Sharia is essential to true Islam. But Sharia is subversive of our system of government. So we are under no obligation from the Constitution to tolerate Sharia-based Islam. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. This implies that Muslims who do not renounce Sharia should not be eligible for positions in the government.
"But this violates Article VI of the Constitution!" No it doesn't. There we read that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." But this cannot possibly be interpreted in such a way as to allow into the government elements subversive of the system of government the Constitution defines.
Why is Islam incompatible with the West? It is because Islam violates the separation of the religious and secular spheres. But why should they be kept apart? One reason is that we in the West have come to realize over the centuries that no one can legitimately claim to know the answers to the Big Questions about God, the soul, the purpose of human existence, the nature of the good, and so on. Only if one were absolutely certain of the answers to these questions would one be justified in imposing them via state power on everyone and forcing everyone to live in accordance with them. If we know that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and that God has condemned sodomy, and sanctioned the killing of sodomites, then we would perhaps be justified in outlawing sodomy and punishing it by death as it is indeed punished in some ten Muslim countries.
But surely no one of us KNOWS that God exists, let alone that God has revealed himself to man, let alone in a particular book or set of books, let alone inerrantly. Not knowing these things we have a good reason to tolerate homosexual and heterosexual sodomites, subject to certain restrictions, e.g. 'between consenting adults,' etc. We have reason to allow such behavior as legally permissible even if it in fact morally impermissible. For again, even if sodomy is is in fact morally impermissible because condemned by God , no one can legitimately claim to KNOW that it is.
The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years
On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union. They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't the decadent weaklings we have become, unsure of ourselves, and unwilling to defend our nation against deadly threats.
Why, for example, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, still alive? He committed his crimes to the cry of Allahu akbar in 2009, was sentenced to death in 2013, but is still alive. Why hasn't he been executed? Why the endless appeals?
We need a judicial fast track to execution for convicted terrorists.
We have lost our way. We now longer believe in ourselves. We have elected and re-elected a hate-America leftist fool who actually had the temerity to refer to Hasan's terror as "work place violence." And it is a good bet that he will be elected for a third term in the guise of Hillary Milhous Clinton.
Moral Narcissism
As defined by Roger L. Simon1:
Briefly stated, moral narcissism is this: What you say you believe or claim you believe — not how you actually behave — defines who you are and makes you “virtuous” in your own eyes and the eyes of others. Almost always, this is without regard to the consequences of those beliefs, because actual real-world results are immaterial and often ignored.
If you have the right opinions and say the right things, people will remember your pronouncements, not your actions or what happened because of them.
That is moral narcissism.
We see this in the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a moral narcissist par excellence who, rarely revising a half-century-old worldview, trumpets the virtues of socialism with scant reference to the cost of its programs or to its often-totalitarian outcome.
I would add that moral narcissism fits nicely with the denial of objective truth, one of the features of contemporary liberalism. If there is no objective way things are, then all that matters is how one postures and what one says. If you say the 'right' things, the politically correct things, the 'sensitive,' 'nonjudgmental,' 'inclusive,' things, then you are good person whether or not any of it can be expected to work out in reality.
For example, it sounds really good and 'caring' to say that the state should provide free college educations at public institutions for all and to call for an expansion of social services generally. And its sounds 'racist' and 'xenophobic' and 'mean-spirited' to insist on the stoppage of illegal immigration. But put the two together, freebies and open borders,and you get an objective absurdity that cannot work out in reality.
Not to confront this contradiction shows a lack of concern for truth.
Obviously, a sustainable welfare state requires strict immigration control. Or, if you prefer open borders, then you need a libertarian clamp-down on entitilements and social services. One or the other. Reality places us before this exclusive 'or.'
Sanders the socialist thinks he can have it both ways: a massive welfare state with open borders. That is objectively unworkable. Reality will not allow it. But if there is no reality and no objective truth, then no problem! One can say all the right things and posture as virtuous.
And when disaster occurs, you can always plead your good intentions.
That's moral narcissism.
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Three Defining Features of Contemporary Liberalism
Here:
The three defining features of modern liberalism are an intense aversion to the Constitution, a denial of objective truth, and a penchant for intentionally abusing the English language with an aim to mislead the public. No issue exemplifies these three features better than the “debate” about the AR-15 and “assault weapons.”
Well said, my man, well said, with pith and punch.
I Pity the Poor Activist
I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.
We need to battle them in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.
Friday Cat Blogging! Henri, the Existentialist Cat
‘Homegrown Terrorist’
An obfuscatory leftist phrase. And therefore used by Obama the Mendacious. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.
It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.
Language matters!
Name the Trope!
In the following entries I engage in a form of creative anachronism:
Epictetus Advises Imelda Marcos
With respect to the third entry, a young man with an overly literal mind wrote to inform me that while my Heidegger quotation was from 1935, Cassius Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, did not see the light of day until 1942. So how could Heidegger be commenting on Ali?
In this sort of literary trope what one does is take contemporary individuals such as Marcos and Ali as tokens so representative of their types as to count as types. The quoted commentary is then to be read as directed against the type. Since the type is relatively timeless, the anachronism is innocuous. What is true of the type is true of every token thereof, whether past, present, or future.
The worth of my trope, like the worth of many, is its contribution to concreteness. Imelda Marcos as opposed to a shoe fetishist. Cassius Clay as opposed to a prize fighter.
Now here is my question: Is there any accepted name for this literary trope, can we subsume it under an extant trope, or should we coin a name and add it to the list of tropes?
Apophasis
I wrote recently, "Fear not, I shall not report on the state of my bowels, which is excellent, nor pull a Trump and crow about the efficacy of my schlong."
The sentence illustrates the literary trope called apophasis. Wikipedia:
Apophasis is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up.[1]Accordingly, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony.
The device is also called paralipsis (παράλειψις) – also spelled paraleipsis or paralepsis – or occupatio,[2][3][4][5] and known also as praeteritio,preterition, antiphrasis (ἀντίφρασις), or parasiopesis (παρασιώπησις).
Epictetus Advises Imelda Marcos
Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. E. Carter, XXXIX:
The body is to everyone the measure of the possessions proper for it, as the foot is of the shoe. If, therefore, you stop at this, you will keep the measure; but if you move beyond it, you must necessarily be carried forward, as down a precipice; as in the case of a shoe, if you go beyond its fitness to the foot, it comes first to be gilded, then purple, and then studded with jewels. For to that which once exceeds a due measure, there is no bound.
Indeed, as one may observe here.
Camus on Crybullies, Safe Spaces, and Trigger Warnings
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 73:
Too much security for the child's heart, and the adult will spend his life demanding this security from people — even though people are only opportunities for risk and freedom.
Related articles
Of Socialism, Violets, and Asphalt
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 61:
Socialism, according to Zochtchenko, will be when violets grow on asphalt.
Bernie Sanders take note.
Translator's footnote: Mikhail Zochtchenko (1895-1962), Soviet writer and humorist persecuted by Stalin.
How Responsible is Sartre for the Decline of Continental Philosophy?
A London philosopher sends the following along which I take to be a quotation from Jasbir Puar:
One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness as sexual identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations.
The London friend then comments:
Bill, to me this reads like a parody of Continental Philosophy. What are ‘corporealities’? ‘Identitarian’? ‘Deprivileges a binary opposition’?? What other kinds of opposition are there?
Sartre has a lot to answer for.
A lot of recent Continental 'philosophy' is gibberish, and the above passage reads almost like a parody of it. So my London friend and I agree that the above is rubbish, and as such, beneath critique. How would one even begin to criticize writing like this?
What is Puar trying to tell us in the first sentence? Continentals are big on verbal inflation. So Puar can't just write bodies, she must write corporealities. It sounds impressive to the unlettered. She wants to give the impression that she is engaging is some really deep theorizing here. Referring to a body as a corporeality is like referring to a method as a methodology or a truth as a verity.
It makes some sense to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been "problematically conceptualized," to use another pretentious phrase. To supply my own politically incorrect example, you would be 'problematically conceptualizing' the dick of a homosexual male if you maintained that it was but a social construct. But for a body to be problematically conceptualized via Muslim sexualities makes no sense at all. Is she trying to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been dubiously understood or perhaps wrongly understood by Muslims? But then how do sexualities come into it?
Puar has a thing for the plurals of abstract substantives: corporealities, sexualities, exceptionalisms. But we are only half-way through her meaningless opening sentence. We are told that dubious theories about homosexual bodies somehow support U. S. exceptionalisms. Who would have thought? What does it even mean?
It only gets worse, so enough of this.
Now if this junk were merely the scribblings of some crackpot on her personal blog, we could ignore it. But she is an associate professor at Rutgers University. File this under Decline of the West.
As for Jean-Paul Sartre, I would say say that my insular friend is not being quite fair. A lot of important work has been done by Continental philosophers up to an including the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. (I confess to not having studied Critique of Dialectical Reason.) Here is a list of (some) Continental philosophers who are well-worth close study: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.
I would point out to my London correspondent, who is interested in medieval philosophy and logic, that Paul Vincent Spade, no slouch of a scholar, has a lively interest in the early Sartre. See here.
So I don't think too much can be laid at Sartre's door step. The rot sets in in good earnest later with characters like Derrida who, according to John Searle, "gives bullshit a bad name."
John D. Caputo is another Continental 'philosopher' that I criticize in a number of entries. He is not as bad as Puar, however. But he is very bad!
List of Islamist Terror Attacks
From the 1980s to the present. Some lists are 'static,' some 'dynamic.' The Ten Commandments is static whereas the list of Islamist outrages is unfortunately dynamic, highly dynamic.
Exercise for the reader. Compile a list of Christian terror attacks from the 1980s to the present and compare its length to that of the Islamist list. Make sure that you put on this list only those acts whose justification lies in orthodox Christian doctrine, and not acts by people who just happen to be residents of 'Christian' lands.