I think so too. But we have utopians on our side too.
Is this about envy and fading power among some Moslems? Clearly, but also it has to be noted that the abundance and excess the modern world generates undercuts or overthrows all community norms and narratives, not just those of Muslims or totalitarians. Go to a big shopping mall, flick the hundred channels of cable or go into the big city and you can see perhaps that anyone who comes from a simpler world would be overwhelmed by the complexity, variety and excesses of the world we have created. Perhaps something good has been or can be created in this new world, but many of our own ancestors would be startled by this world and critical of it.
Make no mistake, the terrorists are the enemy. We have to take them out or no one will be safe. Freedom is the main characteristic of our world. But I'd be wary of embracing the modern world too closely. Here's E.M. Forster writing during another world crisis: "So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three." I'd gladly give a cheer or two for modernity and support it against its enemies. It permits criticism and allows dissent. But I don't want to take it too closely to heart or demand that all bow down before it. I don't demand that it vanquish all earlier forms of civilization and cover the world with its characteristic buildings and institutions. What I fear is that the warriors at NR demand that kind of prostration before modernity and enthusiasm to sweep away all that opposes or ignores or withstands it.
Excellent as always, x.
I agree with your take on NR. (Not the fan I used to be in college).
Just a each age might provide the more critical eye for another, it's true that they also would applaud the improvements as existed therein. I think that's an operation of our common human nature ... and our individual human nature (as a whole of sorts in each age) always being slightly out of balance one way or another.
I'll agree that the terrorist needs stamping out ... but at the source. I still maintain the source for most, if not all, of the last 100 years or so of terror and repression clearly are those who've been bent on "world revolution".
I remembered the other night that I had a book called "Reading the Muslim Mind" on my shelves. While it's illuminating for its insights to true Islam and Muslim society, it's also a goldmine of clues to the keys for co-opting of "radical" Islam.
It's my hope I'll distill two posts out of the book: one defending faithful Muslims and a second outlining (for comparison purposes to "New Age", Green, and other marxist cells) the points at which truth can be bent.
I'll flag you, if you don't mind. I love to read your thoughts. Regards.
The article is Muschamp's rallying cry for a new modernist monument at the tip of Manhattan to replace our Lost Towers. It was one of those rare pieces that was so infuriating that I literally had to force myself to skim it for fear of inducing a stroke. Nevertheless, I did find these choice points:
1) The attack on the towers is a sad reminder that "religious authority," while largely suppressed in the West is not yet totally vanquished in the rest of the world.
2) The same attack provides us with a prime opportunity to "reclaim progressive architecture" and reaffirm our belief in the Manifest Destiny of Modernism.
3) And my personal favorite: that our religion is not Talibanism or (Heaven knows) Christianity but "progress."
Hard to know where to begin with this nonsense. I suppose one could both begin and end with the fact that the 20th century religion of "progress" was the bloodiest experiment in the history of man, with some 200MM+ sacrificed on its sleek altar of glass and steel.
Why is any of this important? I'm not sure that it is, except that as the "retro-hero" of the moment Churchill said, "we shape our buildings, and then they shape us." Muschamp and his kind know this, and they have already begin the work of reconstructing the modernist edifice, before the bodies are even extracted from what our local firemen call "the Pile."