There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world; and its enemies
Sometimes in life, a certain natural coincidence makes ideas fall into place. I read some articles yesterday. The first concerned one Hirsi Ali, a feminist that I can respect and salute with my whole heart, because she is Islamic, and she seeks to overturn the repressive, woman-hating cruelty of those polygamists, with their arranged marriages and their female genital mutilation.
I noticed in passing one little sentence toward the middle of the article. She speaks of her rebellion against tyranny: such rebellions always start with a rebellion against the ideas of the tyrants.
“How could a just God – a God so just that almost every page of the Koran praises his fairness – desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s, I would think, Why? … The spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit.”
Ali credits Harlequin romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right.
The next time someone looks down upon romance novels as popular trash, just pause a moment to remember Hirsi Ali, who was lured toward a love of freedom by reading books about love.
The Romance, as an art form, is a Christian invention–even the name speaks of Rome. Marriage is romantic, and therefore a wild adventure: one may chose one and only one woman for life, and there is no backing out of the choice, or putting asunder what God joins together. It is dramatic the way all sacred things are dramatic. Polygamy is a matter of the convenience of the man, or a means of using women to signify alliances between families, or to breed heirs. It is less romantic than horse breeding. It is a trade, but less romantic than horse trading, with the bride’s future as the trade goods.
Polygamy also gives a bored man more women to beat. Do you think I am kidding? The article contained a glimpse into the hatred-eaten souls of our adversaries —
A series of incidents this week placed the forces she [Hirsi Ali] battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls.
The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.
On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls’ school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.
On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls’ school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.
And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women’s rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out “Allah Akhbar.” She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.
Read the whole thing.
I found out to my shock and disgust that this bravest of women, bold as Joan of Arc and Susan B. Anthony, is held in contempt by the very people who are always wailing and yammering about freedom for women.
IN HOLLAND, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny – the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim minority. […]
While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard in army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for the Dutch establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the country and the parliament. […]
HIRSI ALI moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she continues to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy.
In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it propagates in the name of divinity.
She holds a mirror up to the Free World and demands that we defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline.
Christopher Hitchens, lovable socialist drunk, is apparently the only one on the Left with the manhood to remember what the ideals of the Left are supposed to be: freedom for all men, social justice, charity to the poor, rationality rather than patriotic zeal in politics, et cetera. He is apparently the only one who notices how badly the Left has gone off its rails. He writes about Hirsi Ali here and here.
If the Left were true to itself, a woman like this would be their saint. Instead she is shoved to the margins, treated with reproach. Why?
G.K. Chesterton, with his typical sound common sense, points out the paradox in the parallel case from his time, and answers the puzzle. Here is from his article called The Case of Spain. By mere coincidence, I was reading THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS on that same day when I saw the Ali article.
I preface these remarks by saying that I was for a long time a Liberal in the sense of belonging to the Liberal Party. I am still a Liberal; it is only the Liberal Party that has disappeared. I understood its ideal to be that of equal citizenship and personal freedom; and they are my own political ideals to this day [….]
[In Spain] Socialists suddenly jumped up and did exactly everything that the Fascists have been blamed for doing. They used bombs and guns and instruments of violence to prevent the fulfilment of the will of the people, or at least of the will of the Parliament. Having lost the game by the rules of democracy, they tried to win it after all entirely by the rules of war; in this case of Civil War. They tried to overthrow a pacific Parliament by a militarist coup d’état. In short, they behaved exactly like Mussolini; or rather they did the very worst that has ever been attributed to Mussolini; and without a rag of his theoretical excuse.
And what did Liberalism say? What did my dear old friends of liberty and peaceful citizenship say?
Naturally, I assumed on opening the paper that it would rally to the defence of Parliament and peaceful representative government and rebuke the attempt to make a minority dominant by mere military violence. Judge of my astonishment, when I found Liberals lamenting aloud over the unfortunate failure of these Socialistic Fascists to reverse the result of a General Election.
I had been a Liberal in the old Liberal days; we were not unacquainted with Tory and Unionist victories at the polls; we had often gone contentedly into Opposition. It had never been suggested that when Balfour or Baldwin constitutionally became Prime Ministers, all the Nonconformists should go out with guns and bayonets to reverse the popular vote; or the Leader of the Opposition begin to throw dynamite at the elected Leader of the House. The only inference was that Liberalism was only opposed to militarists when they were Fascists; and entirely approved of Fascists so long as they were Socialists.
Now that is a small and purely political point. But to me it was very awakening. It showed me quite clearly the fundamental truth of the modern world. And that is this: there are no Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world; and there are its enemies. Its enemies are ready to be for violence or against violence, for liberty or against liberty, for representation or against representation; and even for peace or against peace.
It gave me an entirely new certainty, even in the practical and political sense, that I had chosen well.
There is your answer, friends. The agnostic, morally relativistic Left has swallowed up the idealistic socialist Left, who, even if they were foolish and illogical ideals, at least had ideals.
The relativist holds as his principle that there are no principles, and so, when the fight comes, even with an enemy designed by fate to be their perfect antithesis, they cannot raise a hand. Being practical men, proud of their worldly reasoning power, they saw no practicality in religion or philosophy or mystical notions of patriotism. Such a rejection of mysticism, of course, turns out to be ultimately impractical. Without the anchor of idealism, they are adrift.
An ideal is a mystical truth: a vision. Their vision of a socialist world was ugly, but it was at least a vision, and visions cast the light by which we see real things.
A man can only fight with his whole courage for an idea he cannot put into words, because if the idea is not bigger than himself, he cannot die for it, and if it is bigger than himself, he cannot put it into words. Only a man who believes in a mystical necessary being can necessarily reason about contingent things. A man who believes in a creator that sustains the laws of nature, the laws of logic, and the commandments of morality, can draw conclusions in confidence concerning moral necessity: otherwise reason casts a reasonable doubt on the ability of reason to reflect reality, doubts on the nature of cause and necessity, and morals become nothing more than statements about utility, or expressions of arbitrary personal preference, or socially-conditioned “narratives”, i.e., lies. An agnostic about God also must be an agnostic about logic: he can say that logic works, but he cannot say why it should work: he must be agnostic about a great many fundamental philosophical principles.
If the universe betrays no intelligent design (if I may use that phrase) why should we assume it contains an intelligible design? Without the assumption that there is an intelligible design to be found, what becomes of science and economics and mathematics or other attempts to find design in nature? Without metaphysics, one is left only with ad hoc rules of thumb: logic is said to ‘work’ but what is meant by work is difficult to define. Ad hoc is the philosopher’s version of a policy: tactics without strategy, a small picture without a big picture.
When the sinking ship of the Left threw overboard their socialist ideals after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they threw away the hope of revolution and utopia for which they had once been willing to fight and die. Instead, they are left with a cluster of unrelated causes: animal rights activists, gay marriage activists, environmentalism. They have lost their ideals and substituted policies.
What is the difference between an ideal and a policy? No one is willing to die for a policy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
