The terminal inability of a liberal to grasp reality.

The much admired Victory Hanson, known in these parts as the liberal universalist with a gun, writes at the Corner:

Watching those film clips and pictures of the Taliban kidnapping Afghans who were de-mining the countryside, and Iranian thuggish police in black hoods hanging a sort of slop bucket around the necks of free-speech dissidents, and the various semi-official and popular Iranian, Pakistani, and Middle Eastern new threats to Sir Rushdie—while a silent West worries instead that the meals for Guantanamo inmates cost only 2-3 times more than the soldiers who guard them—and wondering on a Saturday morning how a post-civilized West can marshal the will to win a war of ideas against pre-civilized Islamists.

I feel like taking Hanson by the collar and yelling at him: Listen! Even if the West weren’t post-civilized, and even if it were brimming over with will and self-confidence, it could not “win a war of ideas” against Muslims. That is because Muslim inhabit a different mental and spiritual universe from us, a universe defined by the Koran, the Hadiths, and sharia. It is a universe you have done nothing to try to understand. Your innumerable columns on the Islam threat have shown not the slightest effort to grasp Islamic doctrine and history. You keep talking about Muslims as though their problem was that they were stuck in the early Middle Ages, which further implies that the right ameliorative efforts by us can help them “progress” out of the Middle Ages. The truth is that nothing we do can have any direct influence over their beliefs, which are commanded by their god and are unchanging. Therefore we cannot reform them. We cannot democratize them. We cannot assimilate them. Also, we cannot destroy their religion, which is so dangerous to us, unless we physically destroy the Muslim world. Therefore the only thing to do is not to try to change them, but to isolate and contain them in their own lands where they will not have the ability to affect or harm us.

Perhaps Hanson’s momentary state of discouragement as he describes in the above passage will lead him beyond his liberal naivete concerning Islam. But if it does, that will only show once again that liberals never give up their liberalism a result of a rational and intuitive thought process about the nature of liberalism, but only as a result of unendurable disasters brought on by liberalism.

In Greek myth, Prometheus gave fire and metallurgy to man, while his brother Epimetheus foolishly married Pandora who released all evils upon man. Prometheus means forethought, and Epimetheus means afterthought. Liberals are the eternal Epimetheus of mankind. Because they deny the existence of evil, of enemies (except for a tiny and unrepresentative group of “extremists”), and of unassimilable differences between human groups, they can never foresee in advance the likely consequences of their non-discriminating well-intended outreach to others, such as the Bush/neocon campaign to persuade Muslims to embrace democracy. Nor do they learn from their mistakes (such as the Hamas ascendancy) and recognize that liberalism itself is the problem. Instead, they just keep getting blown up in the face by their liberalism, and keep being “surprised” by this (surprise being the liberal’s characteristic mental state), and keep making bigger and bigger unprincipled exceptions to their liberalism to avoid its worst consequences. But they never recognize that their liberal beliefs are themselves false.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 25, 2007 12:36 PM | Send