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Posted on 10/01/2001 4:31:45 AM PDT by IronJack

September 11th's unprecedented assault on the World Trade Center may prove the event that galvanizes moral support in defense of American interests, much to the chagrin of the attackers, and probably to the ultimate detriment of Islam around the world. For in the appalling slaughter of innocents, the Muslim extremists demonstrated a savagery that must disturb even the most complacent bystander, and force those spectator nations to declare their allegiance either to the enlightened faith of the West, or to the dusty regime of terror that marks the laughably named "Cradle of Civilization."

Religion begets morality (though some would debate the cause and effect) and morality is the primary shaper of culture. If a religion teaches that the only solution to disagreement is torture and death, then that culture is unlikely to play well with another religion founded on tolerance and love. In terms of social Darwinism, the less tolerant religion has the advantage, since it can eliminate its opposition, and with extreme prejudice. However, the battle for cultural supremacy isn't always won at the point of the sword. Ostensibly, the Normans won the Battle of Hastings, but there is little French about England today. The conquerors were themselves assimilated, and the cultural momentum of the Saxons trumped the broadaxes and chevaliers of the invader.

So too in this religious war against Islam. Ultimately, even if all Westerners were loving, practicing Christians who were willing to turn the other cheek to be smitten, the oppression inherent in the Taliban's iron regime would do it in. As conservative social scholars have long noted, license is always an easier sell than self-discipline. There are a lot more strip joints in the world than monasteries. In our hearts, we all know that a certain amount of self-denial is good for the soul, and that overindulgence, while amusing in an ephemeral way, usually results in long-term decay, if not disaster.

However, when it's taken to the point of denying your essential human-ness, when every sapient stirring is considered the devil's handiwork, then you're living a lifestyle so repressed as to be either transcendent or explosive. That is to say, you're either the Dalai Lama or you're Jim Jones. Osama Bin Laden ain't the Dalai Lama. And the Peoples Temple is just a footnote in history.

On the other end of the continuum, Western culture may have become TOO civilized to engage the eye-to-eye bloodletting necessary to prosecute this war. We may need to take a hint from the Hezbollah's help page. Historically, those civilizations that become too indifferent to their own defense eventually succumb to the cultures that make aggression a staple. The Greeks did. The Romans did. To a large degree, the English did. True, where cultures of equal aggression collide, technology is usually the tie-breaker. It happened to the Aztecs and the American Indians. But the bloodlust of Christianity is at the other end of the spectrum from Islam, and maybe to our detriment. Sadly, we may need to abandon some degree of our humanity in order to battle a force more primitive yet.

And the enemy will need to forsake his total barbarity in favor of technology. Inflamed though his passion, unbending though his resolve, a bedouin with a pointed stick is no match for an Apache with a Vulcan nose cannon. You don't develop technology like that by blowing up each other's factories and crucifying your scientists. You don't educate scientists in a flyblown hovel by the light of a guttering candle, or do optic research in the back of a burned-out bus.

As each society bends to accommodate the exigencies of this conflict, each assumes more of the other's identity, until the gap is narrowed, and we finally find something in common. It's the Hegelian dialectic written in human suffering, with margin notes scribbled in gore.

Yet Islam seems to admit of no common ground. Forced to confront the outrages of the Taliban in their own back yards, the Afghan people seem willing to shoulder the burden of Bin Laden's jihad rather than defy him. Apparently there is enough energy left in that ravaged country to invigorate the inquisitors, the handful of vigilantes who horsewhip insolent women, burn books, and kedge the cultural anchor right back to the Dark Ages. Amid the ruins, there are still those who can fathom only continued devastation, whose crushed hopes translate into nihilist resignation, and antipathy born of despair. They have no fire left in their souls, so they must extinguish that fragile glimmer in others. All that's left to them is a barbaric devotion to a merciless god who promises in the afterlife all those things he denies in this.

It's odd that a number of the Trade Center murderers were trained as engineers, people who usually spend their lives imagining how to build things better, not studying the accomplishments of others with an eye toward their ultimate destruction. The former career promises an opportunity to benefit mankind, as well as to profit nicely for your efforts. It is telling that the killers eschewed that constructive course in favor of the science of demolition. It is always easier to destroy than to build, just as it is easier to criticize the works of others than to approximate them yourself.

Apparently, Islam is content to shun those cultural developments that have moved man slightly farther from the jungle, values like enlightened self-interest, a sense of global community rather than ideological isolation, and tolerance instead of xenophobic hatred. Those facts make it a religion particularly unsuited to a shrinking world, where cultural collisions can no longer safely be resolved by violence. In the days of geographic insulation isolation and slingshots, age-old hatreds could be nursed and the bloody ballet reprised periodically with only the keening of widows as its accompaniment. As we've just seen, nowadays the whim of a madman can result in the instant death of thousands, destruction of the symbols of our progress, and a disruption of global stability. No man should have that much power, certainly not one guided by delusions his own scholars don't support. And no ideology should be able to propagate its oppression to "infidels" half way around the world by borrowing a firestorm from the pits of Hell itself.

The pressures on Islam arise from its increasing irrelevance, not from Judeo-Christian imperialism. Those cultural pressures will ultimately do it in , unless its disciples learn to get along with others. If they choose another course, they doom not only their religion, but the culture it breeds. It would perhaps be the most fitting irony if it turns out that Allah's holy warriors destroyed more of their own spiritual infrastructure on Sept. 11 than they did ours.

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