The Crusades Were Defensive Wars
For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Leftists and Civility
The Right has not cornered the market on civility, not by a long shot. But in my experience, liberals and leftists are worse in the civility department than conservatives. If you don’t agree with me on this, then this post is not for you. To try to prove my assertion to libs and lefties would be like trying to prove to them that such major media outlets as the New York Times tilt leftward. To achieve either goal, I would have to possess the longevity of a Methuselah, the energy of a Hercules, and the dogged persistence of a Sisyphus – and I still would not succeed.
So, given that conservatives are more civil than libs and lefties, why is this the case? One guess is that conservatives, for whom there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things, are more civil due to a natural piety with respect to received modes of human interaction. Civility works, and conservatives are chary about discarding what works. They were brought up to be civil by parents and teacher who were themselves civil, and they see no reason to reject as phony or ‘precious’ something that is conducive to good living. They understand that since we live in a world of appearances, a certain amount of concern with them is reasonable. They also understand that by faking it a bit, one brings oneself to actually feel the emotions that one began by faking. For example, by saying ‘Good Morning’ when I don’t quite feel like it, I contribute to my own perception of the morning as good.
But leftists, many of whom are of a rebellious and adolescent cast of mind, have a problem with what they perceive to be phoniness. They are always out to unmask things, to cut through the false consciousness and the bourgeois ideology. Connected with this hatred of phoniness is a keen sensitivity to hypocrisy. So when Bill (William J.) Bennett was caught wasting money on the slot machines in Las Vegas a while back, the libs and lefties pounced and denounced: "Hypocrite!" they cried.
So pouncing and denouncing, they proved that they do not know what hypocrisy is. Although Mr. Bennett’s behavior was suboptimal, it was neither illegal nor immoral: he’s got the dough to blow if that’s his pleasure. Given his considerable accomplishments, is he not entitled to a bit of R & R?
A hypocrite is not someone who is morally perfect or who fails to engage in supererogatory acts. Nor is a hypocrite one who preaches high ideals but falls short. Otherwise, we would all be hypocrites. For if everyone is, then no one is. A hypocrite is someone who preaches high ideals but makes no attempt at living up to them. The difference is between failing to do what one believes one ought to do and not even trying to do what one says one ought to do.
The leftist obsession with perceived phoniness and perceived hypocrisy stems from an innate hatred of moral judgment, a hatred which itself seems fueled by a confusion of moral judgment with judgmentalism.
So perhaps the answer is this. Leftists are less civil than conservatives because they do not see civility as a value. They don't see it as a value because it smacks of a bourgeois moral ideology that to them is nothing but a sham. Adroit unmaskers and psychologizers that they are, incapable of taking things at face value, they think that none of us who preach civility’s value really believe what we are preaching. It really has to be something else, just as the desire for democracy in Iraq really has to be something else: a desire for economic and military hegemony.
How About a Six-Month Suspension Without Pay for Barack Obama?
It's a funny world. NBC anchor Brian Williams lied about a matter of no significance, in an excess of boyish braggadocio, though in doing so he injured his credibility and, more importantly, that of his employer, NBC. We demand truth of our journalists and so Williams' suspension is as justified as the Schadenfreude at his come-down is not.
Journalists are expected to tell the truth. President Obama, however, lies regularly and reliably about matters of great significance and gets away with it. Part of it is that politicians are expected to lie. Obama does not disappoint, taking mendacity to unheard-of levels. There is a brazenness about it that has one admiring his cojones if nothing else. Another part of it is that politicians are not subject to the discipline of the market in the way news anchors are. Loss of credibility reduces viewership which reduces profits. That's the real bottom line, not the expectation of truthfulness.
(By the way, that is not a slam against capitalism but against our greedy fallen nature which was greedy and fallen long before the rise of capitalism. Capitalism is no more the source of greed than socialism is the source of envy.)
Here is a recent instance of Obama's mendacity.
Obama is a master of mendacity in the multiplicity of its modes. There is, for example, bullshitting, which is not the same as lying. Obama as Bullshitter explains, with a little help from Professor Harry Frankfurt.
There is also the phenomenon of Orwellian Bullshit.
Pelosi's Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment documents, wait for it, Nancy Pelosi's Orwellian mendacity.
“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”
I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In many of its forms it borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of petty, ego-enhancing benefits, a sort of Cosmic Candy Man, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery. Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.
Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable. Some of it simply reflects, excusably, our misery and indigence. (Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?) But much of it is. What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material benefits?
The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits. In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not so much to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.
The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.
At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.
For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence. So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.' A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread.
But this morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian. The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical. 'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30) What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day. On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*
This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Not by physical bread, but by meta-physical bread.
"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day. And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it? Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian. The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance.
Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical
Here is a question that vexes me. Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically? Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?
"Man is spirit." Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor? "Man has a higher origin." 'Higher' is metaphorical. "Man is made by God in his image and likeness." Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?
I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract. I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense. But I got nowhere as could have been expected: anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction. It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation.
The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.
___________________
* For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without 'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.
President Snark
"Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president."
Tenured Professor Loses Job over Blog Post
"Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible."
More evidence, as if more evidence is needed, that the universities of the land are increasingly becoming leftist seminaries, hothouses of political correctness. Story here in The Atlantic.
Hat tip: Tully Borland
Did the Universe Have a Beginning in Time?
Some of you may remember the commenter 'spur' from the old Powerblogs incarnation of this weblog. His comments were the best of any I received in over ten years of blogging. I think it is now safe to 'out' him as Stephen Puryear of North Carolina State University. He recently sent me a copy of his Finitism and the Beginning of the Universe (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2014, vol. 92, no. 4, 619-629). He asked me to share the link with my readers, and I do so with pleasure. In this entry I will present the gist of Puryear's paper as I understand it. It is a difficult paper due to the extreme difficulty of the subject matter, but also due to the difficulty of commanding a clear view of the contours of Puryear's dialectic. He can tell me whether I have grasped the article's main thrust. Comments enabled.
The argument under his logical microscope is the following:
1. If the universe did not have a beginning, then the past would consist in an infinite temporal sequence of events.
2. An infinite temporal sequence of past events would be actually and not merely potentially infinite.
3. It is impossible for a sequence formed by successive addition to be actually infinite.
4. The temporal sequence of past events was formed by successive addition.
5. Therefore, the universe had a beginning.
Premise (3) is open to a seemingly powerful objection. Puryear seems to hold (p. 621) that (3) is equivalent to the claim that it is impossible to run through an actually infinite sequence in step-wise fashion. That is, (3) is equivalent to the claim that it is impossible to 'traverse' an actual infinite. But this happens all the time when anything moves from one point to another. Or so the objection goes. Between any two points there are continuum-many points. So when my hand reaches for the coffee cup, my hand traverses an actual infinity of points. But if my hand can traverse an actual infinity, then what is to stop a beginningless universe from having run through an actual infinity of events to be in its present state? Of course, an actual infinity of spatial points is not the same as an actual infinity of temporal moments or events at moments; but in both the spatial and the temporal case there is an actual infinity of items. If one can be traversed, so can the other.
The above argument, then, requires for its soundness the truth of (3). But (3) is equivalent to
3*. It is impossible to traverse an actual infinite.
(3*), however, is open to the objection that motion involves such traversal. Pace Zeno, motion is actual and therefore possible. It therefore appears that the argument fails at (3). To uphold (3) and its equivalent (3*) we need to find a way to defang the objection from the actuality of motion (translation). Can we accommodate continuous motion without commitment to actual infinities? Motion is presumably continuous, not discrete. (I am not sure, but I think that the claim that space and time are continuous is equivalent to the claim there are no space atoms and no time atoms.) Can we have continuity without actual infinities of points and moments?
Some say yes. William Lane Craig is one. The trick is to think of a continuous whole, whether of points or of moments, as logically/ontologically prior to its parts, as opposed to composed of its parts and thus logically/ontologically posterior to them. Puryear takes this to entail that a temporal interval or duration is a whole that we divide into parts, a whole whose partition depends on our conceptual activities. (This entailment is plausible, but not perfectly evident to me.) If so, then the infinity of parts in a continuous whole can only be a potential infinity. Thus a line segment is infinitely divisible but not infinitely divided. It is actually divided only when we divide it, and the number of actual divisions will always be finite. But one can always add another 'cut.' In this sense the number of cuts is potentially infinite. Similarly for a temporal duration. In this way we get continuity without actual infinity.
If this is right, then motion needn't involve the traversal of an actual infinity of points, and the above objection brought against (3) fails. The possibility of traversal of an actual infinite cannot be shown by motion since motion, though continuous, does not involve motion through an actual infinity of points for the reason that there is no actual infinity of points: the infinity is potential merely.
We now come to Puryear's thesis. In a nutshell, his thesis is that Craig's defence of premise (3) undermines the overall argument. How? To turn aside the objection to (3), it is necessary to view spatial and temporal wholes, not as composed of their parts, but as (logically, not temporally) prior to their parts, with the parts introduced by our conceptual activities. But then the same should hold for the entire history of the universe up to the present moment. For if the interval during which my hand is in motion from the keyboard to the coffee cup is a whole whose parts are due to our divisive activities, then the same goes for the metrically infinite interval that culminates in the present moment. This entails that the divisions within the history of the universe up to the present are potentially infinite only.
But then how can (1) or (2) or (4) be true? Consider (2). It states that an infinite temporal sequence of past events would be actually and not merely potentially infinite. Think of an event as a total state of the universe at a time. Now if temporal divisions are introduced by us into logically prior temporal wholes such that the number of these actual divisions can only be finite, then the same will be true of events: we carve the history of the universe into events. Since the number of carvings, though potentially infinite is always only actually finite, it follows that (2) is false.
The defense of (3) undercuts (2).
So that's the gist of it, as best as I can make out. I have no objection, but then the subject matter is very difficult and I am not sure I understand all the ins and outs.
February in the Zone
February brings to the Sonoran desert days so beautiful that one feels guilty even sitting on the back porch, half-outside, taking it all in, eyes playing over the spring green, lungs deeply enfolding blossom-laden warmish breezes. One feels that one ought to be walking around in this earthly heaven. And this despite my having done just that early this morning. Vita brevis, and February too with its 28 days. The fugacity of February to break the heart whose day is at its center. It's all fleeting, one can't get enough of it. Joy wants eternity.
And now, I head back outside, away from this too-complicated machine, to read simply and slowly some more from Stages on Life's Way and to drink a cup of java to stave off the halcyon sleepiness wrought by lambent light and long vistas on this afternoon in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.
Pleonasm
Professor Windbag censured the student's use of 'added bonus' as pleonastic and redundant.
The Moral Idiocy of Barack Obama
Horribile dictu, our president is a moral idiot. Dennis Prager makes the case clearly and convincingly.
Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence "is unique to some other place" — meaning outside the Christian West — as getting on a "high horse."
Is this true? Of course, not. In our time, major religious violence is in fact "unique to some other place," namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities and other such atrocities?
The answer is, of course, no other religious group. Therefore massive violence in the name of one's religion today is indeed "unique to some other place." To state this is not to "get on a high horse." It is to tell the most important truth about the world in our time.
[. . .]
Furthermore, it is difficult to see why comparing Muslim behavior today to Christian behavior a thousand or five hundred years ago provides a defense of Islam. On the contrary, isn't the allegation that Islamic evil at the present time is morally equivalent to Christian evil a thousand years ago a damning indictment of the present state of much of Islam?
And as regards the substance of the charge, this widespread use of the Crusades and the Inquisition is ignorant of the realities of both. The Crusades were Christian wars to retake territories in the Holy Land that Muslims had forcefully taken from Christians. Unless the question of "who started it?" is morally irrelevant, and therefore all wars are immoral, the Crusaders' war on Muslims in the Holy Land is a poor example of evil in the name of Christ.
[. . .]
We live in an age of moral idiocy. Moral equivalence is the left's way of resisting fighting evil. It did it during the Cold War when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were morally equated, and it is doing it now when it morally equates all religions and societies. Take, for example, this imbecilic equation by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, defending the president's comments on Islam and Christianity by invoking slavery: "Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now."
There is a major moral crisis in one religion on earth today — Islam. To say so is not to get on a high horse. It is to identify violent Islam as the greatest evil in the world since Nazism and Communism.
Feser on Sex, Part II
The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality, as witness his second in a series on sex. It concludes:
So just what is the deal with sex, anyway? Why are we so prone to extremes where it is concerned? The reason, I would say, has to do with our highly unusual place in the order of things. Angels are incorporeal and asexual, creatures of pure intellect. Non-human animals are entirely bodily, never rising above sensation and appetite, and our closest animal relatives reproduce sexually. Human beings, as rational animals, straddle this divide, having as it were one foot in the angelic realm and the other in the animal realm. And that is, metaphysically, simply a very odd position to be in. It is just barely stable, and sex makes it especially difficult to maintain. The unique intensity of sexual pleasure and desire, and our bodily incompleteness qua men and women, continually remind us of our corporeal and animal nature, pulling us “downward” as it were. Meanwhile our rationality continually seeks to assert its control and pull us back “upward,” and naturally resents the unruliness of such intense desire. This conflict is so exhausting that we tend to try to get out of it by jumping either to one side of the divide or the other. But this is an impossible task and the result is that we are continually frustrated. And the supernatural divine assistance that would have remedied this weakness in our nature and allowed us to maintain an easy harmony between rationality and animality was lost in original sin.So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess. And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism — treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body — or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal. The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex. The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position — specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure.
A New Probabilistic Argument for God
A reader sent me an argument expressed in an idiosyncratic and unnecessarily technical terminology. But his idea is a very interesting one. I'll present and then evaluate my version of the reader's argument.
1. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of God. Call them God-positions. One who occupies a God-position takes a stand on the existence of God, yes or no.
2. All but one of these God-positions are theistic: they affirm the existence of God, though they differ as to the divine attributes.
3. Only one of these God-positions is atheistic: only one affirms the nonexistence of God.
4. Exactly one of these God-positions is true.
Therefore
5. The probability that one of the many theistic God-positions is true is much greater than the probability that the one atheistic God-position is true.
Therefore
6. The claim that God exists is much more likely to be true than the claim that God does not exist.
I should think that the first three premises need no support: they are well-nigh self-evident. If support is wanted for (4), it can be found in logic. By Bivalence, there are exactly two truth-values. By Excluded Middle, every proposition is either true or not true.
But how is (5) supposed to follow from (1)-(4)? Here is where I think the problem lies. Intuitively, (5) does not follow from the premises.
Consider a parody argument. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of the Lost Dutchman Goldmine. All but one of these LDM-positions are affirmative of the mine's existence; the remaining one is negative. But only one LDM-position is true. Therefore, it is more likely than not that the LDM exists.
This is obviously a fallacious argument. If it is, then so is the original argument. But this leaves us with the task of explaining why both are fallacious. This is not so easy.
Either the LDM exists or it does not. At most, these contradictory propositions are equiprobable. (Given my knowledge of the geology of the Superstition Wilderness, I would deny that these propositions are equiprobable; but let's assume that they are.) The number of different conceptions of the LDM has no bearing on the probability of its existence. One cannot raise (lower) the probability of the mine's existence by adding to (subtracting from) the conceptions of the LDM. Why not? Well, if the mine exists, then exactly one of the conceptions is instantiated, and all the other conceptions are uninstantiated. And it seems obviously true that the probability of some concept's being instantiated does not vary with the number of similar concepts that might have been instantiated instead.
The same goes for God even if the existence and nonexistence of God are equiprobable. There are many different conceptions of God even within a broadly Abrahamic ambit. On one conception, God is triune and simple; on another, triune but not simple; on a third, simple but not triune. And so it goes. Some hold God to be absolutely unlimited in power; others hold that logic limits God's power. And so on. Each of these conceptions is such that, if it is instantiated, then God exists. But surely the number of God-conceptions has no bearing on the probability of one of them being instantiated.
The Crusades: Misconceptions Debunked
A review by Thomas F. Madden of Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Some excerpts (bolding added):
It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”
Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.
[. . .]
St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.
All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.
[. . .]
And yet, so ingrained is this notion that the Crusades began the modern European assault on Islam that many moderate Muslims still believe it. Riley-Smith recounts : “I recently refused to take part in a television series, produced by an intelligent and well-educated Egyptian woman, for whom a continuing Western crusade was an article of faith. Having less to do with historical reality than with reactions to imperialism, the nationalist and Islamist interpretations of crusade history help many people, moderates as well as extremists, to place the exploitation they believe they have suffered in a historical context and to satisfy their feelings of both superiority and humiliation.”
In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. Crusade historians sometimes try to yell across it but usually just talk to each other, while the leading churchmen, the scholars in other fields, and the general public hold to a caricature of the Crusades created by a pox of modern ideologies. If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.
Michael Walzer, “Islamism and the Left”
Very interesting. I am tempted to 'fisk' the whole of it. We'll see how far I get.
In the three and a half decades since the Iranian revolution, I have been watching my friends and neighbors (and distant neighbors) on the left struggling to understand—or avoid understanding—the revival of religion in what is now called a “post-secular” age. Long ago, we looked forward to “the disenchantment of the world”—we believed that the triumph of science and secularism was a necessary feature of modernity. And so we forgot, as Nick Cohen has written, “what the men and women of the Enlightenment knew. All faiths in their extreme form carry the possibility of tyranny.”1
BV: Two comments.
First, what might the triumph of science be if not the triumph of scientism, which is not science, but a philosophical view according to which the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge? (I provide plenty of nuance as to the definition of 'scientism' in my Scientism category.) After all, if science triumphs, it triumphs over something, and what would that be? If you say 'religion,' then I will point out that science and religion are not in the same line of work and so not in competition; hence science cannot triumph over religion any more than religion can triumph over science. But scientism can triumph over religion because scientism and religions are worldviews. Scientism is logically incompatible with religion; this is particularly clear in the case of theistic religions. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, the ontological doctrine that reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. If naturalism is true, then of course there is no God, and contrapositively: if there is a God, then naturalism is false. But there is nothing in science that rules out the existence of God. If you think there is, then you are confusing science with scientism.
Second, while it is true that most if not all religions in their extreme forms carry the possibility of tyranny, this is also true of non- and anti-religious ideologies such as communism. If one fails to point this out, as Walzer does fail to point it out, then then one can be suspected of a lack of intellectual honesty. Communist tyranny alone led to the deaths of upwards of 100 million in the 20th century.
Today, every major world religion is experiencing a significant revival, and revived religion isn’t an opiate as we once thought, but a very strong stimulant. Since the late 1970s, and particularly in the last decade, this stimulant is working most powerfully in the Islamic world. From Pakistan to Nigeria, and in parts of Europe, too, Islam today is a religion capable of inspiring large numbers of men and women, mostly men, to kill and die on its behalf. So the Islamic revival is a kind of testing moment for the left: can we recognize and resist “the possibility of tyranny?” Some of us are trying to meet the test; many of us are actively failing it. One reason for this failure is the terrible fear of being called “Islamophobic.” Anti-Americanism and a radical version of cultural relativism also play an important part, but these are older pathologies. Here is something new: many leftists are so irrationally afraid of an irrational fear of Islam that they haven’t been able to consider the very good reasons for fearing Islamist zealots—and so they have difficulty explaining what’s going on in the world.
My main evidentiary basis for this claim is the amazingly long list of links that comes up when you Google “Islamophobia.” Many of them are phobic; I focus on the anti-phobic links, and so I have entered the online world of the left. It is a large and exciting world, highly diverse, inhabited mostly by people new to me. It’s also a little disheartening, because many of the pathologies of the extra-internet left haven’t disappeared online. Obviously, there is no left collective, on or off the internet, but the people I am writing about constitute a significant leftist coterie, and none of them are worrying enough about the politics of contemporary religion or about radical Islamist politics.
For myself, I live with a generalized fear of every form of religious militancy. I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, of messianic Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially feverish and fervent. Indeed, the politically engaged Islamist zealots can best be understood as today’s crusaders.
BV: I wonder if Walzer's fear extends to every form of ideological militancy, including anti-religious militancy such as communist militancy. If not, why not? If not, why the double standard?
Walzer needs to be reminded that we conservatives also harbor a rational fear, a fear of leftists who have no problem with using the awesome power of the state to destroy the liberties of individuals.
There is also a distinction that needs to be made and I don't see Walzer making it. It is the difference between 'rampaging,' say, because your religion enjoins such behavior and 'rampaging' in defense of your life and livelihood and religion. Islamic doctrine enjoins violent jihad; there is no Buddhist equivalent. This distinction at the level of doctrine is crucial and must not be ignored. Doctrine is not mere verbiage; doctrine is at the root of action.
Walzer is equivocating on 'religious militancy.' If some Buddhist monks go on a rampage, then, that could be called religious militancy, but not in the same sense in which Muslim destroyers of Buddhist statuary or Muslim beheaders of Christians are religiously militant. For in the latter case the militancy flows from the tenets of their religion — which is not the case in Buddhism.
Can Islamist zealots best be understood as today's crusaders? Hardly. For one thing, this ignores the fact that the Crusades were a response to Islamic jihad.
[. . .]
The Christian Crusades have sometimes been described as the first example of Islamophobia in the history of the West. The crusaders were driven by an irrational fear of Islam.
This is absurd. The Crusades were a defensive response to a Muslim land-grab. If someone grabs your land, is your fear of that party irrational? There is no point in going on with this. While Walzer is not a bad as the typical leftist loon, he has already made enough mistakes to justify my wishing him a fond fare well.