Why Westerners rush to yield to Islam

In response to the blog entry by Roger, “Western dhimmitude peaking?”, Dimitri K. offers this very interesting comment:

It seems to me that at the root of the European dhimmi attitude to Islam is the adoration of a brute inhuman force. Have you seen a rocket starting, or a metallurgic furnace burning? The kind of awe that people have towards deadly force started with Western worshipping of technical and scientific progress. The progress is not judged by its usefulness to people, but rather as a virtue in itself. Now, people of the West got a habit of being attracted to any such force. The force of collective instincts is also rather a natural phenomenon than a human behavior. After all, liberals want us to embrace everything that is “natural.” And the rising Muslim uproar is exactly such kind of a force—huge, terrible and inhuman.

LA replies:

This sounds alarmingly like Fr. Seraphim Rose’s account of the Vitalist stage of Nihilism, in which, as I’ve written,

people deliver themselves over to an unending search for sensation and excitement, for the exotic and the experimental, for ever-greater freedom and satisfaction of desires, for the “riches of diversity,” for the transforming “energy” that is produced by a society in constant change and motion—and with all these things being seen as, even explicitly promoted as, a substitute for any inherent truth and goodness in existence.

Mark P. writes:

The problem, especially if a root-cause is suggested, is that the West is perfectly capable of generating huge, terrible and inhuman forces all on its own. The West could just as easily satisfy the Vitalist stage of Nihilism by flattening entire Muslim cities just to see the fireworks show generated by a giant mushroom cloud.

Wouldn’t that be both virtuous and useful?

LA replies:

There are different kinds of Vitalist Nihilism. Dimitri has described one, you’ve described another. Your Vitalist Nihilism is that of an externally aggressive society, which gets a charge from its own huge, terrible and inhuman power to destroy others. Dimitri’s Vitalist Nihilism is that of liberal society, which gets a charge from the huge, terrible and inhuman power of the Third-World Other who is destroying us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 31, 2006 06:53 PM | Send