Shake it up

So here's an interesting twist on the old "challenge-and-response" theory of civilization. It seems most of the world's civilizations, at least in ancient times, were built near tectonic plate boundaries and fault lines. Why the connection? Such regions have more underground water supplies and richer soil (from volcanoes). But maybe a shake-up now and then isn't a bad thing either.

Meantime, the Shroud of Turin is being tested again for authenticity. It's doubtful anyone will ever prove that is was Jesus' burial shroud. But "authenticity" here just means, is it from the first century? Earlier radiocarbon tests in 1988 indicated that the Shroud came from the 13th century. But such test results can be distorted by contaminants, and there's a lot of scientific skepticism about the 1988 tests. So more tests are coming ....

Leviticus again

It's that levitical-sacrificial thing calling again. It's already next week's portion, Vayiqra.

I was thinking about the strangeness to us today of animal sacrifice. Last year, I pointed how both Judaism and Christianity derived central tenets from ancient sacrifice, even while abandoning the practice itself.

Sick as it sounds, the sort of terrorism practiced by al Qa'eda is intended, in part, to be sacrificial, but with humans, not animals. It's derived from Islamic concepts, yet in a completely twisted way.

Muslims (some Muslims, at least) do still practice animal sacrifice for certain holidays. Here's a interesting December 2007 story from NPR about the Eid ul-Adha sacrifice in north Texas - with an unspoken subtext.

The end of Europe? III

"I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes - to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolutely safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal in perfect harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to the intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

"So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection - absolute permanency."

- H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

For most of his adult life, Wells was a socialist by conviction, believing that progress could continue only if controlled and directed by a central authority, the kind that traditionally has not ruled free societies except in times of war. Only in his last years, during and after the Second World War, did Wells finally come to accept the obvious: socialism could be achieved - but only by reorganizing society on a permanent war footing. War had already led to socialism in the Europe and the rest of the world; continued socialism would just mean a permanent prospect of war. And even then, society could not be made to stand still in the way the vision-bewitched, power-hungry socialist planners wanted. Socialism could not be a permanent stasis, only a stopping point on the way to decline or self-destruction. In other words, Wells late in life grasped what his and the preceding generation of European intellectuals had led their civilization to: disaster. This same despairing realization lies at the bottom of Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, three years after Wells' death. Thus far Wells the prose stylist and popular social thinker.

But in his science fiction, Wells knew better: his artistic intuition was stronger and better than his political beliefs. In his bones, regardless of whatever socialist opium he deluded himself with, he understood the real situation, probably because in his youth, he had absorbed the new, dazzling, and penetrating ideas of Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers: your biography doesn't stop until your dead, and history doesn't stop until and unless humanity becomes extinct.* There's no PAUSE button. The evolutionary idea had a fatal implication for the socialist utopia: the world of stasis - the heaven-on-earth of the socialists - is a religious fantasy.

Europe might come to that sad end, within our lifetimes. But it's also imperative, before arriving at such a conclusion, to take the longest view possible of European and Western history and see its unusual features in the light of centuries and millennia. Compared with other societies and civilizations, Europe's demography has always been unusual: delayed marriage, exceptional accumulation of capital and knowledge, escape from the Malthusian trap of food supplies saturated by population growth. With these came other unusual traits: starting with feudalism, contractual government in place of autocracy; individualism, romantic love, feminism. These distinctive features originated in the much-misunderstood Middle Ages and Renaissance (which, contrary to a common confusion, should be considered a unit). This era marked the formative age of the modern West. The Western habit of extending adolescence allowed for rapid and sustained social change, so much so that the West now takes innovation and progress for granted. The American branch of the modern West goes a step further in "lightweight," low-overhead civilization. Not so for typical pre-industrial civilizations, where a static ideal always reigned in theory, if not in practice. In place of closed systems of thought (religious and philosophical dogmas), we have learned to live with partial and incomplete truths and take for granted the never-ending possibilities thus opened up.

This is all radically different from any human society that existed before about 300 years ago. Europe's overseas descendants and the societies of east and south Asia have absorbed this dynamic and made it their own, germinating new civilizations along the way. And all of this because Europe failed in a crucial way: it failed to be a successful pre-industrial society - unlike, say, China, by any measure, the world's most successful. (That's before the shock of its encounter with the modern West). Fruitful failure is often much more interesting and charged with possibility than simple success. Simple success tends to halt progress. Progress - real progress, not the fake "progress" of the left - requires repeated failure. One failure, once, won't do much; but repeated trying and failing changes everything. Repeated failure at one thing can lead to other and new things that no one had thought of before. That is one of the main lessons of the 1200 or so years of the history of the modern West.**

We should keep such facts in mind as we survey Europe's recent past and possible futures. These are especially important to keep in mind when we consider the triple roots of modern Western culture: the barbarian peoples (Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.), the classical Greeks and Romans, and the Hellenistic-Hebraic hybrid of Christianity. It keeps a reasonable perspective on the views of such Catholic or conservative writers as George Weigel, a view that, for all its value, tends to overemphasize the ancient classical and biblical sources of the modern West, to the detriment of the distinctive contribution of the Dark Age barbarians. Their individualistic restlessness kept Europe from becoming too civilized, too successful and complacent at any one thing. That is why the legend of Faust is so dead-on about the modern West. It is perhaps the supreme story that modern Western literati have played with about their own civilization.†
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* And what is history, but biography writ large?

** This is a larger point to grasp about human evolution. Humans are not better chimps or apes - they're good at something else entirely. Presumably, the ancestors of humanity were at some point primate failures and in danger of extinction. But they evaded an otherwise inevitable doom as failed primates by becoming a successful something-else. It is the unusually long adolescence of humans makes this possible. It also makes culture - as opposed to pure instinct - a human necessity. Culture is (part of) human nature.

† Worth reading in Goethe's version, at least Part One and bits of Part Two - see such modern translations as Kaufmann's.

The end of Europe? I

But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days ... it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them .... [T]his same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigor .... I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of which will accurately convey ... the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words "despotism" and "tyranny" are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it ....

.... Above this race of men [would stand] an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. ... [T]he supreme power then ... covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind ... might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: ... they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings [harness], because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again .... [T]hey think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

- Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1838)

More than a year ago and several times since then (see here and here), Kavanna took a look at the situation in Europe and came to rather negative conclusions. But there's only so much a few blog postings can convey about this profound and many-sided topic. More comprehensive are the armful of excellent books on Europe that have appeared in the last few years: Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept (2006), Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (2006), and Walter Laqueur's The End of Europe: Epitaph for the Old Continent (2007). Laquer's book is a shocker, a sign that the trend is serious and no mere epiphenomenon. The author of the earlier Europe in Our Time: A History (1992) - a laudatory account of Europe's post-1945 reconstruction - Laqueur's view of Europe has obviously changed in recent years.

While all these books are important, Claire Berlinski has the distinction of kicking off serious discussion in the US with a stream of articles and her book, Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's Too. Berlinski writes regularly for the Washington Post, National Review, etc., and now lives in Istanbul. She's even written a couple of well-received novels. Menace in Europe was published in late 2005. Nothing has happened since to lessen its validity and much that re-validates it.

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Before starting with Berlinski's book, we need to clear away some myths that get in the way of informed discussion of contemporary Europe. There are three major misconceptions. One is that what's happening in Europe doesn't matter to America. This myth has some currency on the center and right of American politics. Two other myths are still widespread among American liberals and leftists. These are the "Europe is more sophisticated than America" myth and that stubborn urban legend, "It's all W.'s fault, and the problem will vanish when he leaves office." None of these myths is true.

What's happening in Europe does matter - Europe is the West's "other half," and if Europe fails, the United States will need a Plan B for many things. And what happens there is paralleled, in certain ways, by what happens here. Nor is it all, or even mainly, W.'s fault. European anti-Americanism has a history stretching back to the 1920s, to the immediate aftermath of part one of Europe's civilizational suicide. It surged in the 1970s and early 80s, died down afterwards, then reappeared in the late 90s, with globalization and Europe's glaring failure in Yugoslavia. While Bush's actions and political style have aggravated the problem, anti-Americanism has also dissipated somewhat compared to a few years ago - but it will not disappear when he leaves office. Fresh events and new personalities will keep the kettle boiling. As for European sophistication, read on and judge for yourself.

Part of the problem is that older Americans have a distorted picture of Europe picked up in the immediate postwar period, when much of Europe's traditional culture was still alive; and that all Americans have misleading experiences as tourists spending time admiring an older European civilization that isn't where and how most Europeans live today.

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The most painful chapter of Menace in Europe is the one on Britain. It is, in part, an excursus on Britain's Muslims, largely of south Asian origin, and the heritage of British imperialism. But it also, by comparison, makes telling observations on Britain's non-Muslim former imperial subjects and why, upon immigration to Britain, they have so few of the problems that Muslims do.

The causes are partly socioeconomic: many, although not all, of Britain's Muslims come from villages; the other immigrant groups are overwhelmingly educated, urban, and middle class. The causes are also partly connected to the history of the Indian subcontinent, spanning the whole of British-ruled India before 1947 (encompassing modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Britain's empire in India was at first strictly economic-exploitative, run by the private East India Company, the same whose tea was dumped in Boston Harbor in a well-known incident. Later it became a political entity - an empire within an empire - created at the expense of India's minority Muslim rulers, the Mughals. The British Raj, first unwittingly, later wittingly, became a powerful force on behalf of India's Hindu majority, its non-Muslim minorities, and (after 1920 or so) its women.

This mixed Anglo-Indian heritage is visible today in India, but especially in Britain, where the south Asian Hindus, Christians, Parsees, and Sikhs do well, but the Muslims often do not. The baleful heritage of the Deobandi school of Islam, south Asia's verion of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam, sticks out clearly in this generation of anti-assimilated south Asian British Muslims and their attraction to Islamic militancy.

Berlinksi's most fun chapter is that on the French port city of Marseille. Although it might surprise some of her readers (it shouldn't), her evaluation of France, the French, and France's secular republican ideal is very positive, even as she acknowledges that that ideal has probably outlived itself and met an insuperable barrier in the form of Islam.

Affectionate yet disapproving is her other chapter on France, an extended and satirical take on antiglobalization activist José Bové, exposing the layers of Europe's mystical and apocalyptic movements that stretch back 1500 years, to the origins of modern Europe. Here we are treated to the successive reincarnations of the charismatic romantic mystic, with his striking eccentricities and strong sex appeal. Until the 18th century, they were religious revolutionaries, proclaiming the coming of heaven on earth, the abolition of wealth, rank, and distinction, and (before the Reformation) demonizing the Jews as the people of Satan. The first modern (secular) revolutionary of this type was Rousseau, the founder of leftism and creator of the "noble savage" myth - the origin of all politics of adolescent rage against modern civilization. Modern Europe's angry, mystical political movements are secularized re-creations of these older religious movements, with virtually the same themes.* The chapter is a mixed-mood piece because Berlinski herself feels disturbed by the anonymous nature of globalization and questionable nature of modern factory farming and food production, harmful to animals and sometimes to humans. The spectacular British case of "mad cow disease" just underscores the point.**

The mosht dishtuurbing chapter is that covering Germany and its famous heavy metal band, Rammstein. (They're all over the Web - see here.) Berlinski uses Rammstein as a foil to explore the return of nihilistic late Romanticism - Expressionism - as a feature of German kultur. This is a crucial theme in modern German history, Germans as the people of nihilism and the people of Faust. Important German thinkers (Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann) were themselves acutely aware of this aspect of "national personality." You can't imagine Rammstein's songs sung by anyone, say, French or Italian. British and American heavy metal bands are about personal rebellion and angst. But in Germany, where music exposes the national soul, juvenile angst is automatically political, with an unmistakable esthetic familiar from the 1930s and 40s.

While French, British, and American Romantic tendencies have usually taken the form of personal rebellion, and its political form consists of delusional searching for the noble savage somewhere else - among workers, brown and black people, or among animals - in Germany, Romanticism was xenophobic from the start: the German Romantics decided that they didn't need to look elsewhere for noble savages. Rather, they felt that the Germans themselves were the noble savages, possessing deep Germanic "culture" in opposition to the superficial and materialistic Anglo-Franco-American "civilization" or the "mere barbarism" of the Slavs. This view, increasingly important in the 19th century, became, after 1918, the sickness of much of German-speaking Europe. In exploring this history, Berlinski's personal venom is evident here, understandable given her family's history in Germany. This disapproving chapter is not at all affectionate.

Germany sadly remains a crime scene still cordoned off after all these years, with people continuing to stand around and wondering what the hell happened. Germany's civilized and semi-civilized neighbors have all peered into the gloom of the dark Teutonic forest. They squint and scratch their heads.

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Berlinski's final chapter, "To Hell with Europe," seems flippant at first sight. But she doesn't mean, to hell with France, or Britain, or Germany, etc. Her point is the "persistence of national personality." When she writes "to hell with Europe," she means just that: to hell with the false unity of the EU, the pretense that Europe's real nations have been made to go away, and that Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, etc., are now all just Europeans.

The modern West has its origins in the Dark Ages that immediately followed the collapse of the western Roman empire, which was replaced with a variety of what historians once called "petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and principalities." Europe in some ways has never left that state. The barbarian peoples - the Celts, the Germans, and later, the Slavs and others - rebuilt civilization from what was left in the Roman wreckage, including the Church. Modern Europe has rejected these sources of its civilization, leaving an immense spiritual, cultural, and political void. Into the void step what Berlinski calls "black-market religion" (Bové) and "black-market nationalist hate/nihilism" (Rammstein). No pan-European unification project since the end of the Roman Empire has succeeded - not the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Napoleon, Hitler, or the Communists - in spite of the attractive appeal of new religions and utopias. In reminding her readers of these facts, Berlinski is passing on an essential perception of modern Europe's history, its arc from origins to finish.

Berlinski recommends some sensible changes as a necessary start to saving Europe - none of them is original, as she acknowledges: reforming its deadly economic mix of overregulation and unsustainable entitlements; dealing with Islamic extremists - both as individuals and institutions - in a more consistent and punitive way; applying Western legal and social standards equally to Muslim men and women without apology. (This is one of a number of her points of admiration for the French, whose policy towards Islamic radicalism is one of zero tolerance.) Major changes will happen soon: Europe's social democratic systems will either be reformed or collapse; its demography will change dramatically in the next generation; the political unification project will fail. Some of these changes are already starting. Other possibilities are more speculative.

Menace in Europe has a fragmentary form, which might at first make it seem like a jumble. But its thematic and stylistic unity is powerful; Berlinski grabs her readers and shakes them, saying "See?" and "See?" She has a Web site of her own, and you can listen to a podcast interview with her here.
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* I mean identical in some cases. For example, the program of the anonymous German Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, circulating in manuscript just before the Reformation, called for the expulsion or extermination of the Rhine Valley Jews, the end of Germany's economic relations with the outside world, the independence of a unified Germany from the Papacy, and the creation of a new religion mixing Christianity and a restored pantheon of old German gods. Reading it, you get confused: is it from 1500 - or 1933?

Then there's Joachim from the Italian town of Flora: his speculative tripartite theory of history, published in manuscript around 1300, postulated a three-stage historical evolution leading to an Age of Pure Spirit, where everyone would be living equally in a barracks or a monastery. The tripartite stuff sounds a little like Hegel and a lot like Marx; the equality of the barracks and the monastery, like the pre-Marxian socialists whom Marx himself ridiculed as "utopian."

In laying bare the religious and utopian origins of the modern West's extremist political movements, Berlinski and the rest of us are profoundly indebted to the works of Norman Cohn, especially his classic In Pursuit of the Millenium (1957). Cohn's work explodes the claim that these modern movements made about themselves, that they were "scientific," "progressive," or "enlightened." There's nothing scientific or enlightened about Marxism or race theories; these movements repackaged tribal, mystical, and apocalyptic ideas in a superficially modern garb of pseudoscience. Environmentalism bears strong traces of the same.

** Consider too America's industrialized food production, with its heavy use of subsidized corn, bestowing upon us the dubious blessings of corn syrup, corn feed, and ethanol.

Meet the thinkers: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I just finished reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel. You can read here about her opinions and thoughts on politics, the West, and Islam. But in this book, she wisely chose to tell her story personally. Abstractions often wash over and through our minds - easy come, easy go - but facts and events like those of Ali's life will not wash over and through anything - they will stick in readers' minds for a long time. Infidel is a powerful book and must reading for anyone in the West who wants to understand the unfolding confrontation of Islam and modernity, and avoid diversionary rationalizing. Women, particularly young women, should especially read it. Muslims should read it as well, for a whole set of different, if overlapping, reasons.

Ali's books (Infidel, as well as the earlier The Caged Virgin) and film Submission Part I (the later parts remain unmade after her partner Theo Van Gogh's murder) don't force her own answers on her viewers and readers. But they do push unavoidable questions to the fore and provoke everyone to consider their own answers. Her attitude is a refreshing and positive contrast to the proselytizers of the "new" atheism popular of late.

Her encounters with Christianity and its concept of a covenantal or "partnership" relation between man and the divine forced her to see something contrasting about Islam, a word that means "submission" in Arabic. (Muslim means "one who submits.") Lurking around here is an old argument about whether a "social contract" style of civil government is even possible in the Muslim world. The "social contract" of Western governments has its ultimate roots in the the biblical notion of covenant. It's different from autocratic government (rooted in conquest and overlordship) or the clan-aristocratic political culture of the ancient and medieval worlds. Theocentric in its original form, the humanized covenant becomes a contract among people, reflected in constitutions and consensual and representative forms of government.

What is a consistent approach to this war for the world, this contest between Islam and modernity?* This is not a conflict we can decide; Muslims have to. But we can consistently follow the rule that sticking to our rights is the best policy: defend ourselves and maintain the firm view that peaceful interaction between Muslims and the outside world is possible - if Muslims are willing to treat non-Muslims and "deviant," liberal, and secularized Muslims as equals. That's a big "if." The decision is theirs to accept or reject, not ours. But our response to the Muslim decision, either way, should be unapologetic.

Ali's larger and unmistakable point is that the West must abandon the claptrap of multiculturalism and its attendant subcults of victimhood and noble savagery. Ayaan, daughter of Hirsi, great-granddaughter of Ali, has been there and done that, and it's no fun. People are equal; cultures are not.

POSTSCRIPT: Read Ali's brief self-explanation here at Cato (PDF), and listen to a 2007 NPR interview with her here.
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* And, by the way, these days, the world's only real war on women. Read Anne Applebaum's review of Infidel at the Amazon page.

The age of babble

For an example of what once-respected institutions - in this case, National Geographic - have twisted themselves into so they can play media whores, read this about the Gospel of Judas.

This non-canonical gospel was made famous in last year's media-sensational, PC-tinged, and seriously flawed mistranslation of the original Coptic/Greek text from the 3rd century Gnostics of Egypt.

Clarification of language

A minor dispute over language has broken out in the blogosphere over the use of the term "Islamofascism." And back in the real world, some objection was raised to "Islamofascism Awareness Week," organized on campuses by David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. At one point, Binah also objected to this term, although on fairly narrow grounds. Christopher Hitchens defends the term here, and I want to register my basic agreement, with some qualifications.

Sometimes such criticism is both patronizing and ignorant. For example, the pathetic and ridiculous Tony Judt has attacked even the use of, not just "Islamofascism," but the term jihad.

Objection here to "Islamofascism" was in connection to the influence European fascism had on secular Arab nationalism earlier in the 20th century. Secular, modernizing dictators like Nasser, Ghaddafi, and Saddam were under the strong spell of Mussolini and Hitler, as were many of the Third World populist demagogues of the postcolonial era. Later, after the late 1950s, they were seduced by Soviet and other types of Marxism. But such secularist, modern ideologies have been in decline since the 1970s and, in the Arab world, were effectively dead by the time Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Hitchens is using "Islamofascism" more as an analogy or parallelism and compares it to clerical fascism, a phenomenon important in Catholic countries from the end of the 19th century until the end of World War Two. Neither created nor approved by the Church, clerical fascism (which is a fair term for someone like Franco) was generally led by more junior and renegade clergy, but mostly by lay Catholics. (Americans should think of Father Coughlin.) Its politics was more strictly reactionary than fascism of the Benito-Adolf type. Insofar as a cross-civilization analogy is possible at all, the shoe fits - on bin Laden, Nasrallah, the Iranian theocracy, et al. The fact that these leaders are often not traditional hierarchs within their religious establishments, but in fact, usurpers and renegades, only reinforces the point.

At a deeper level, all such analogies break down, because we're comparing two different civilizations in crisis, with different histories and different relations between religion and political power. Both claim to represent the Near Eastern monotheistic heritage and both were, in their greatest periods, also strongly influenced by classical Greco-Roman antiquity. But large differences remain. Christianity started as a persecuted minority in the later Roman empire and spread mostly through missions and voluntary conversion. The early Church did fuse with the Roman imperial structure to create what we know today as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Even then, however, "holy war" was not in their vocabulary until the arrival of Islam. (Christians fought wars, but did not think of them as "holy." War was just another bad thing - like sex or money - in a fallen world controlled by Satan.) Jihad has acquired many meanings over the centuries - from a vague notion of defending Muslims or Islam, to "inner struggle" - but its classical meaning is spreading Islam as a religion and Islamic political rule by force.* Christians picked up the idea of holy war from Muslims and from it eventually formulated the Crusades as both an imitation of jihad and a reaction to it.** Christians only abandoned religious coercion after some centuries of religious wars. Most Christian religious violence historically has been directed at other Christians, not at non-Christians. It usually started with attempts to impose a self-styled orthodoxy, often in alliance with a secular ruler who viewed himself as champion of that orthodoxy.

Muhammad, unlike Moses or Jesus, arrived into his promised land, on this Earth, in command of political power and an army. Ideally, spiritual, political, and military leadership in the Islamic world are fused in one person, a caliph or successor to Muhammad. After a few centuries of their own internal conflicts, Muslims found themselves without a single legitimate caliph, but some form of the ideal has remained even until today.

The modern wave of Islamic radicalism started in the 1920s with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. All radical Islamic groups, figures, and ideas today can trace themselves back to that moment. They're not secularizing or modernizing like Mussolini and Hitler. But they represent a crisis of political and religious reaction, as Muslims stand at the threshold of the modern world - a world largely created by their erstwhile rivals, the Christians, with significant pieces contributed by a despised minority, the Jews.† The Muslim Brotherhood and its derivatives, while rejecting the secularizing component of fascism, welcomed its reactionary and antisemitic features. Later on, the Muslim Brotherhood and its derivatives, while opposed to godless communism, were nonetheless strongly influenced by Soviet antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda. People aren't always willing to admit where they pick up things.

With such qualifications in mind, "Islamofascism" is fine - imperfect, but it gets the point across, of violent religious reaction that turns into a brutal tyranny if it acquires power. And the term jihad is not only completely defensible, it and its derivatives are precisely the words Islamic radicals themselves use. There's no reason why everyone else can't.
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* That includes its cognates, such as mujahed, one who struggles or fights. A different word, shaheed, originally the Arabic translation of martyros, Greek for "witness," later acquired the connotation of one who dies in spreading Islam or Islamic rule by force.

** The First Crusade was declared in 1095 by Pope Urban II.

† Although many "Christians" in the West nowadays don't think of themselves that way. Some (like Hitchens) even think of themselves as atheists. But civilizational conflict brings out deeper truths. Even if Hitchens and others like him technically are atheists, they're Christian atheists. Anyone who's spent time in the Middle East will understand: over there, your religion is your nationality - it doesn't matter if you are believing or church-going or not. Many Western people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this fact. Five hundred or a thousand years ago, Western people (all Catholics then, except for a small minority of semi-tolerated Jews) would have understood without even thinking about it.

Charles Maurras, the head of the clerical fascist Action Française before World War II, put it perfectly when he admitted to being an atheist, but added that he was a Catholic atheist.

The blessed B's get it right :: Remembering Fallaci :: Angry brown males

Barack Obama tells us that the Democrats are the "party of reaction." That's been true for a long time. Back in the late 1970s, with some help from then-sane Kevin Phillips, then-editor of the New Republic Michael Kinsley identified "reactionary liberalism" as the probable future of the Democratic Party, and he was right. It's a major theme of liberal blogger Mickey Kaus.

It is nice to hear a Democratic politician say it, though. I'm not sure I'd vote for Obama at this point, but he has my attention. It would be even nicer if we had two serious parties, instead of one serious but flawed party and a second, unserious one. Conservative journalist Jim Geraghty of National Review has a new book about this distressing situation. This podcast interview with Geraghty obviously betrays a conservative yearning for a more balanced and competitive politics and a Republican party better disciplined by a credible rival.

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Oriana Fallaci, postwar Europe's most important journalist, was a fixture of my youth. She died this past Friday. A fearless woman of the democratic Left, Fallaci started her career as a teenaged member of the anti-Mussolini Italian partisans (partigiani) in 1943-45, after Italy's official surrender to the western Allies in September 1943 and the consequent German invasion of Italy. (Germans: invading Italy for 1600 years!) She remained a woman of the Left, but would have no truck with political correctness and thus drifted away from the transformed post-modern and nihilistic Left that emerged from the 1960s, with its fantasies of Third World noble savages. Her final cause was attacking the rise of radical Islam in Europe and sounding the warning. A Cassandra? Look at Europe and judge for yourself. See here, here, and here for more remembrances of this remarkable woman. And Cassandra was right.

Closely related are the recent and entirely appropriate remarks of the new Pope about Islam. It would be a shame if the Pope had to retreat in any substantive way from what he said: a principled rejection of the use of force in religion (something stipulated in the Qur'an but historically observed usually in the breach) and an historically-informed defense of the Western intellectual tradition of reason in philosophy, science, and religion, starting with classical Greece. It's especially gratifying to hear a Pope say such things and especially revealing to watch how much of the bankrupt pseudo-intellectual establishment of the West can't process it.

What will get the West to stop enabling the weird mixture of the medieval and the post-modern (charges of blasphemy mixed with bogus claims of victimhood) that dominates this conflict between civilizations? That's how we end up with angry, violent Muslims protesting stereotypes of angry, violent Muslims -- which just confirms what Fallaci and the Pope said. Another woman of valor, Anne Applebaum, makes the same point: non-Mulsims need to stop apologizing and start stating the plain truth, over and over. All of us need to get off the "Muslim rage" bus and look for a different route. Political correctness does not work.

This Pope's predecessor made stunning progress in undoing the damage done by the Church's history of religious persecution, and the Christian churches in general have spent 500 years (often unwillingly) returning to Christianity's original, pre-Constantine status as a free religion not annexed to a civil power. Can Islam do the same? If the current Pope helps this along, he will fulfill the literal meaning of his name, Benedict.