[RC] Islam vs. Liberal Democracy

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

The American Conservative
 
 
Islam vs. Liberal Democracy
By _Rod  Dreher_ (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/rod-dreher) 
 • June 8, 2016

 

 
_Here’s  another great piece by The Atlantic’s Emma Green._ 
(http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/the-meaningless-politics-of-liber
al-democracies/486089/)  This time, she  interviews author Shadi Hamid, a 
liberal Muslim who argues in his new book that  we’re getting it all wrong if 
we try to understand Islam through the model of  Western secularism. 
Excerpt: 
Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not  necessarily 
favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not  believe 
all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to  rational 
Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should  they. There are some 
basic arguments for this: Islam is growing, and  in some majority-Muslim 
nations, huge numbers of citizens _believe_ 
(http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/07/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/)
 
  Islamic law should be upheld by the state. But Hamid also thinks there’s  
something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of  
overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these  countries 
that 
can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in  the U.K. might feel 
drawn to martyrdom, for example.  This is not a dismissal of democracy, nor 
does 
it  comprehensively explain the phenomenon of jihadism. Rather, it’s a note 
 of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of 
pushing  that model on other cultures and regions.
>From the Q&A portion of Green’s piece: 
Green: You emphasize the importance of taking the “metaphysical”  
propositions of Islam seriously, over and above the material circumstances of  
violence. What is lost in focusing on the material rather than ideological  
factors in the politics of Muslim countries? 
Hamid: As political scientists, when we try to understand why  someone 
joins an Islamist party, we tend to think of it as, “Is this person  interested 
in power or community or belonging?” But sometimes it’s even  simpler than 
that. It’s about a desire for eternal salvation. It’s about a  desire to 
enter paradise. In the bastions of Northeastern, liberal, elite  thought, that 
sounds bizarre. Political scientists don’t use that kind of  language 
because, first of all, how do you measure that? But I think we should  take 
seriously what people say they believe  in.

It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation at a time when many  
people, including outside the Middle East, are losing faith in technocratic, 
 liberal democracy. There’s a desire for a politics of substantive meaning. 
At  the end of the day, people want more than economic tinkering. 
I think classical liberalism makes a lot of sense intellectually. But it  
doesn’t necessarily fill the gap that many people in Europe and the U.S. seem 
 to have in their own lives, whether that means [they] resort to  ideology, 
religion, xenophobia, nationalism, populism, exclusionary politics,  or 
anti-immigrant politics. All of these things give voters a sense that there  is 
something greater.
_Read  the whole thing. _ 
(http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/the-meaningless-politics-of-liberal-democracies/486089/)
  I find 
myself sympathizing with Hamid a lot more  than I would have a few years ago, 
not because I have developed a new attraction  to Islam, but because I have 
thought more deeply into the problems of liberal  democracy in a 
post-Christian context. 
Today I’m finishing up a chapter in my forthcoming Benedict Option book 
about  sex and sexuality, and in light of the way premodern Christians saw sex, 
erotic  love, and, well, the cosmos, modern hedonism seems like such a 
paltry thing.  Spend enough time reading about the premodern era and you come 
to 
a realization  that people today not only have no understanding of it (they 
think people of  that time are just like us, only with worse dentistry and 
more church), but they  have an utterly unjustified belief that the way we 
live today is far better than  what our ancestors had. 
>From a material point of view, they’re certainly right. And they’re also  
right from the point of view of individual freedom. But what if those ends 
are  not the most important thing to a person? What if freedom and prosperity 
are not  enough? What if people crave meaning? 
Liberal democracy says, “That’s fine. We’re here to facilitate the choices 
 that give your life meaning.” What’s the problem with that? _Theologian  
Stanley Hauerwas, in a 1995 essay, explains:_ 
(http://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/05/003-preaching-as-though-we-had-enemies)
  
The moral threat [to Christianity] is not consumerism or materialism. Such  
characterizations of the enemy we face as Christians are far too 
superficial  and moralistic. The problem is not just that we have become 
consumers of 
our  own lives, but that we can conceive of no alternative narrative since 
we lack  any practices that could make such a narrative intelligible. Put 
differently,  the project of modernity was to produce people who believe they 
should have no  story except the story they choose when they have no story. 
Such a story is  called the story of freedom and is assumed to be 
irreversibly  institutionalized economically as market capitalism and 
politically as  
democracy. That story and the institutions that embody it is the enemy we 
must  attack through Christian preaching. 
I am aware that such a suggestion can only be met with disbelief. You may  
well think I cannot be serious. Normal nihilism is so wonderfully tolerant.  
Surely you are not against tolerance? How can anyone be against freedom? 
Let  me assure you I am serious, I am against tolerance, I do not believe the 
story  of freedom is a true or good story. I do not believe it is a good 
story  because it is so clearly a lie. The lie is exposed by simply asking, “
Who told  you the story that you should have no story except the story you 
choose when  you have no story?” Why should you let that story determine your 
life? Simply  put, the story of freedom has now become our fate. 
Consider, for example, the hallmark sentence of the Casey decision  on 
abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept  of 
existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  
This is exactly the view of freedom that John Paul II so eloquently 
condemns  in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor. A view of freedom like that  
embodied in Casey assumes, according to John Paul II, that we must be able to  
create values since freedom enjoys “a primacy over truth, to the point that  
truth itself would be considered a creation of freedom.” 
In contrast, John Paul II, who is not afraid to have enemies, reminds us  
that the good news of the Gospel, known through proclamation, is that we are  
not fated to be determined by such false stories of freedom. For the truth 
is  that since we are God’s good creation we are not free to choose our own  
stories. Freedom lies not in creating our lives, but in learning to 
recognize  our lives as a gift. We do not receive our lives as though they were 
a 
gift,  but rather our lives simply are a gift: we do not exist first and  
then receive from God a gift. The great magic of the Gospel is providing us  
with the skills to acknowledge our life, as created, without resentment and  
regret. Such skills must be embodied in a community of people across time,  
constituted by practices such as baptism, preaching, and the Eucharist, which 
 become the means for us to discover God’s story for our lives. 
The very activity of preaching—the proclamation of a story that cannot be  
known apart from such proclamation—is an affront to the ethos of freedom. As 
 the Church, we stand under the word because we know we are told what we  
otherwise could not know. We stand under the word because we know we need to  
be told what to do. We stand under the word because we do not believe we 
have  minds worth making up on our own. Such guidance is particularly 
necessary for  people like us who have been corrupted by our tolerance.
In other words, “freedom” is not the same thing as “truth,” and freedom 
as  conceived by modernity is not the same thing as freedom proclaimed by the 
 Bible. 
Muslims, obviously, have their own story. The point is that all these 
stories  cannot be true. Liberal democracy is meant to make it possible for 
people who  believe competing, contradictory stories to live together in peace. 
It has done  a good job of that. But it is being stretched past the breaking 
point, because  it provides no satisfying answer to the question, What is 
life  for?  
If you have not read _Paul  Berman’s 2003 essay about the Islamist 
philosopher Sayyid Qutb_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html?pagewanted=all) , you 
really  should. Excerpt: 
In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every  
thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature 
 and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a  
specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on  
these themes back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Qutb had already identified the kind 
 of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 
must  have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a 
modern  world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life 
exists  somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk 
while  dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past 
—
 the  agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The 
secular,  the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated — a life of 
confusion  unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.
What is life for? Islam has firm answers. They are mostly the  wrong 
answers, I believe, and heaven knows I would rather live in Western  liberal 
democracy than under an Islamist government. But it is not hard for me  to see 
why it is more compelling to many people than the dead-end liberal  nihilism 
under which we godless Westerners  live.

-- 
-- 
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community 
<RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to radicalcentrism+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.