Since Trump has caused many (including me, in my last post) to think dark thoughts about the end of Western civilization , a short post on what brought Western Civ down

Is Islam the Rock on Which the Liberal Order Broke?

Excerpt:

Back in 1992, Fukuyama wrote his (much maligned, frequently misunderstood) book about the End of History and had this to say:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

People jumped on him for all sorts of reasons, but I don't remember any broad feeling that the Western liberal project had failed. Its most visible Western critics at that time tended to be postmarxists and postmodernists, whose entire existence (from their university appointments to every detail of their lives) was itself an appendage of Western liberal democracy and had no meaning outside of that system, and whose real-life ability to bring down Western liberalism appears insignificant (i.e., if and when it falls, it will not fall to these clowns).

More "real-life" opposition came from the "Confucian authoritarians" (or postmarxist fascists, or whatever you want to call them) in China (and in smaller but influential exemplars, like Singapore). But while these groups had power, they had no great legitimizing ideology. They are only winning as long as they provide more and more goods to more and more of their people. And even while they do so, their people are watching "Friends", picking up liberal memes and dreaming of making Shanghai "better than Manhattan". It is hard to say this was a coherent ideological opposition.

Internal opposition did come from people who rejected liberalism more deeply. But currents like Great Russian Fascism or illiberal Western ideologies (from the "almost inside the Overton Window" Pat Buchanan to Christian identity folks and a few hundred actual fascists) was always there ,but was also treated as a fringe affair. Triumphant liberal ideology had internal divisions, weaknesses (including the above-mentioned defection of many university trained intellectuals to postmodern/postcolonial/critical theory etc) and lacunae, but no serious competitor; The way of thinking that puts humanity, rationality, freedom and the individual at the center of the world and includes memes (not necessarily unique to it, not necessarily derived from first principles, but aggregating in a recognizable meme-complex) like legal equality, secularism, democracy and human rights, was so dominant it was taken for granted. These were the legitimizing ideas that all modern states at least paid lip service to. Democratic socialism, by the way, is just another variant of this post-enlightenment meme complex; even Marxist socialism is a variant of the same (Marxist revolutionaries, for example, idealized the same memes of equality, liberty and rights, but claimed that mainstream liberal Democracy failed to match its ideals, was a sham, etc.).

The place where this whole meme-complex really hit a solid rock was in the Islamic world. It was not immediately apparent that this was so. Many Western post-enlightenment ideals were popular among the Westernized intellectuals of the postcolonial Muslim world. But the grip (and even the personal commitment) of these intellectuals was shallow. This was not immediately apparent to liberal contemporaries (and frequently, even to themselves; it is doubtful whether someone like Jinnah ever really understood the illiberal nature of his demand for Pakistan for example). The difference between Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals,whether in the third world or the first, could be seen as one of degree; i.e. non-Muslim intellectuals too had older loyalties and identities that belied their liberal ideals, but the difference of degree was always in the same direction, and it was significant enough that the quantitative difference can be seen as a qualitative difference; more on this some other day).


THIS challenge proved most difficult for Western liberalism to process; large numbers (probably clear majorities) of Muslims simply did not accept the most fundamental assumptions of the post-enlightenment Western worldview. This was such an alien thought (especially to those on the Left side of the liberal spectrum) that it was repeatedly obfuscated under other categories ("poverty" , "colonialism", etc). For this resistance exposed and undermined the universal validity of the whole liberal project. And it continues to do so. And as these events multiply, they evoke rethinking in other groups. The emperor can start looking ragged, if not completely naked. (e.g. the resistance of Muslim populations to joining the mainstream in countries they migrated to is neither total nor unique, but it is greater than that exhibited by contemporary Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist migrants, and again, always in the same direction. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but when it happens again and again, people start looking for explanations. Of course, not necessarily for good explanations..).

As a result, all the other alternatives (most of them much stronger in "real-life" material terms than any Muslim country or party) like Great Russian Nationalism and its Orthodox Christian backstop, Chinese nationalism with Confucian and fascist characteristics, nascent Japanese nationalism, Hardcore Hindutva in India; all of them have become stronger because Islam has already wedged the door open and thrown open the possibility that the liberal project itself may be incoherent; that it does not map to the real world, that it may even be dangerous to non-Muslim groups to stick to it..

In short, here is the thesis question for the day:

If and when modern humanism and liberalism (broadly defined, you know the drill) crashes and burns (who knows, it may not), will future historians look back and say that Islam was the rock on which it first and decisively broke? Was Islam the kid who asked about the emperor's clothes with sufficient naive determination and clarity, and stubborn unwillingness to accept "the facts".. and thus opened the way to the future (which looks suspiciously like the illiberal past)..