Doubting Timmy

Guest post by Eldritchfan.

The god-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious. There we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of our past. Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion.

Carl Jung

A good quote to sum up this book, which exposes some of the misconceptions liberals make when dealing with terrorism, as well as exploring the difficulties many liberals have when confronting terrorism and the motives behind it.

Ultimately it comes of a failure to recognize the reality of pathological mass movements. That humans are not rational by default, but can very easily become romantically obsessed en mass with irrational and destructive beliefs.

In the secular West we value rationality and reason. Not to say we are rational, we just value these traits, and that is not universal.

Berman outlines the thoughts and philosophies behind such phenomena as the anarchist movement in Russia and beyond, the rebellion in breaking down the social order celebrated by Camus and the more grotesque works of later artists.

He gives an illuminating look into the Islamic response in an analysis of Sayid Qutb, founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood and his massive 30-volume analysis of the Koran and modern society, “In the Shade of the Koran.”

It is, by Berman’s analysis, a towering masterpiece of the totalitarian mind and a window into the thought process of an extremely intelligent man whose full intelligence is devoted to his religion and who views all reality through the distorting lens of the Koran.*

It can be enlightening to see yourself through an enemy’s eyes, and Berman gives an interpretation of this latter day O’Brien’s impression of our society, here quoted verbatim:

The whole purpose of liberalism was to put religion in one corner, and the state in a different corner, and to keep those corners apart. The liberal idea arose in the seventeenth century in England and Scotland, and the philosophers who invented it wanted to prevent the English Civil War which had just taken place, from breaking out again. So they proposed to scoop up the cause of that war, which was religion, and, in the gentlest way, to cart it off to another place, which was the sphere of the private life, where every church and sect could freely rail at each of the others.

Liberalism wanted to carve up life into different slices and keep each of those slices in its proper spot. The churches, from their place in private life, would be free to bestow blessings and curses. But they would not be able to enforce their blessings and curses by calling out the police. The state, by contrast, would be free to call out the police – but would not have the power to bestow blessings and curses. The idea of maintaining a separation between material powers and spiritual powers was wonderfully practical, but also more than practical. There was a grandeur in that idea. It held out a vision of freedom not just for one group of people and their favorite doctrine, but for everyone – a society in which each and every individual might entertain religious or spiritual doctrines of his own, perhaps in harmony with everyone else’s, or not, but freely either way.

That was exactly what Qutb could not abide. He understood very clearly how religion is treated in liberal societies. In Milestones, he described the kind of social system in which, unlike in Communist society, “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule one earth suspended.”

(snip – brief digression into the hypocrisies and injustices of the West which Qutb overlooks)

He took liberal society at its best – a society in which Muslims would, in fact, enjoy the same religious freedom as everyone else. But liberalism at its best held no appeal to him.

Ironically, it is those very perceived weaknesses that I would call our virtues.

Or as Hitch put it: “Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall!”

Sam Harris once wrote that liberals simply do not understand what it’s like to really believe in God. I would go it a step further and claim very few conservatives truly understand what it’s like to believe in God. The blessings of secularism have so permeated the West that all but the most extreme of believers view the world through some measure of this mindset, and even the worst Dominionists who fight the hardest against secularism understand that there is another option.

Berman concludes by underlying the inherent enmity between secular liberal society and Islam and the wrongheaded impression of liberal thinkers such as Noam Chomsky who provides an insightful yet oversimplified analysis of world events.

Read for an interesting look at the philosophies behind the pathological mass movements of today and yesterday.

*Now to lay my cards on the table, I haven’t read through the thing. It’s hard to get a translated copy and I really don’t have time to read it if I did, but I’ve read up on Qutb himself and his opinions, as well as several summaries, and after wading through the brain-twisting doublethink muck of rationalized irrationality (to use novelist James Morrow’s term) of apologists like BS Lewis I find Berman’s analysis easy to credit.

Guest post by Eldritchfan

It’s written that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

But it’s also written that faith can move mountains, so passing through the eye of a needle shouldn’t be all that hard. Such is the philosophy of America’s secret cabal of Christian power brokers in their innocuous blanket fellowship, “The Family.”

In this chilling book Jeff Sharlet takes the reader deep into the twisted brain of American fundamentalism. We’re all of us familiar with the heart of fundamentalism, with the more vocal and public face of American Christian fanaticism (hint, they’re often very loud, very angry, and very armed) Sharlet shows us the other side. The power brokers and intelligentsia. The strategists and schemers. The quiet, conservatively dressed, respectable men who sit down to their prayer breakfasts sunny and smiling and plot genocide abroad and the destruction of secularism and democracy at home.

These are men who believe themselves the Elect, they are Christ’s living body on Earth, destined to rule the world for Christ and to remake America into their tool. Men who quite consciously model themselves after the leadership of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Men who have reduced the contradictions and uncertainties of Christianity into one simple but powerful phrase: “Jesus plus nothing.” In short, the worship of power.

This is not political in a strictly left-right sense. In many respects the left-right dichotomy is illusionary and while it’s true that the Republican Party is vastly more co-opted than the Democrats, the Family has made significant inroads into the donkey’s tent as well.

They’re primary aim of this Christian mafia (their own term), as Sharlet explains, is power. Ally with it where they can, build it where needed.

Theirs is overwhelmingly an ideological movement, yet with some simple verbal legerdemain they can claim they are not a religious or political organization, since they operate within both parties and their primary goal is building influence, not spreading faith.

If this is sounding more and more like an Illuminati conspiracy, this only goes to prove their ability to project an unromanticized version of their own plans and methods when they speak of a “New World Order”. The Family is real. Their actions are real. The damage they do is real and documented.

Indeed, The Family is the opposite of the fictional Illuminati in one important respect: while the Illuminati are supposedly enlightened, members of The Family are even more completely under the delusion than average Christian on the street. That makes them all the more dangerous.

Read the book to understand The Family and how tightly their tendrils have coiled around the levers of American power.

For a sample of Sharlet’s expose.

Guest book review, by Eldritchfan

The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West by Lee Harris

This is a very depressing book.

I’d go further: it’s the book that nearly broke me.

Harris takes the themes he addressed in Civilization and its Enemies and ups the ante by exploring nothing less than the development of the West’s culture of reason itself.

There was a time when people thought humanity was progressing to a better future and America and the West was simply ahead of the curve. There was a time when people believed reason and rationality were sure to liberate us from our savage past, a conviction exemplified in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise.

Lee Harris sounds the grim death knell for that optimistic outlook.

He argues that the high value we of the Occident place on reason and rationality is simply a cultural prejudice, and far from a universal or inevitable state.

Our culture of reason is, to put it bluntly, a fluke. A result of a confluence of several factors, and one not likely to reappear. Western liberal civilization is far from humankind’s destiny, and bringing democracy to the rest of the world will be doing none of them any favors.

Against this analysis of our culture he sets the political, social and cultural phenomenon that is Islam, a movement with a devastating track record of consuming and utterly assimilating every society where it has become ascendant. It is a chilling look at Islam’s methods and the mindset that, he says, makes it nearly impervious to rational appeal.

More, Harris adds that people are driven not by reason, but by emotion, and by one emotion beyond all others.

Shame.

Harris documents cases throughout history where people faced hardship, terror and death rather than break the shaming code, and in such cases the object of shame is utterly irrelevant

Harris argues that way rationality became a value for the West in general and America in particular.

Mind you, he does not say that people in our society are rational, merely that rationality is valued.

Simply put: behaving in a reasonable manner is trained in children from a young age not by an appeal to reason, but through a process of intense shaming.

He would be one who would disagree with Sam Harris’ assertion that no society has suffered from too much critical thinking. Lee Harris would and has argued that reason used to criticize a culture’s beliefs (rather than simply used to simply expand a culture’s power) serves to dilute a people’s sense of identity, destiny and unity of purpose. Fatal when confronted by an enemy enflamed by jihad.

Harris is a very intelligent man. He is a very eloquent man.

But he is not a nice man.

He poses a difficult question: can a society of individualistic Nietzschen Last Men stand against Islam’s sense of destiny and the concerted action represented by the institution of jihad?