The civilization that engineered the sleek, antiseptic, bulky rectangles on the tip of Manhattan island will NOT be able to prevail, in the long run, against it's many enemies. It's too fragile--too rootless. But maybe, with some sort of miraculous intervention, the civilization that inspired the tiny church at the base of the Trade Towers--crushed in the collapse--will.
Casting your pearls before swine again, I see? :-)
Too many of the knuckle-dragging, chest-thumping, flag-waving crowd cannot distinguish between friend or foe, or between those who want to defend the West by reversing its slide into decadence, from those who want to destroy the West because (for various reasons) the West is an affront to their very being.
The article (apart from whatever motivations are driving the author) is actually fairly good in communicating a number of facts about Islamic culture which Westerners don't understand. Actually, this was all explained in great detail by Oswald Spengler in the Decline of the West, and further elaborate on by Lawrence Brown in the Might of the West (a difficult book to find nowadays).
Every civilization has its own form of nations; for the classical civilization, it was the polis or city-state. For the West it is the nation-state. For the Levant (what Spengler calls the Magian civilization), it was the sect-nation.
The sect-nation has no borders; it exists wherever its members (believers in its sacred books and religion) exist. The sect-nation may have a state of its own (as the Orthodox sect-nation did under Byzantium, as the Zoroastrian sect-nation did under the Sasanian dynasty of Persia, or later, as the Islamic sect-nation did under the first caliphs and their successors), or it may not.
Other sect-nations either never had their own state, or lost control of it; as is the case with most Levantine sect-nations, in fact: the Jews, Samaritans, various Christian sect-nations (Nestorians, Monophysites, Marcionites, Arians, etc.), various Gnostic sects, Mandeans, Manicheans, "neo-pagans" (i.e., neo-platonism and the "pagan church" of the Emperor Julian), Buddhists (as they then existed in Central Asia/Afghanistan), etc. These stateless sect-nations lived under the authority of their host sect-nation, but seperately and according to their own laws. So, for instance, Jews lived under their own laws under both Christians and Moslems; Monophysites and Nestorians lived under Orthodox rule; later under Moslem rule; etc.
The West may have gotten its religion from the Levant, but it quickly transformed it to make it suitable to Western assumptions and Western values. As such we have never had anything comparable to the Levantine sect-nation. It is not suprising that the Islamic world has had great difficulty dealing with the West: it simply is not used to organizing itself in the manner Westerners are used to. Existing Arab states, for instance, are the product of Western imperialism against the Ottoman Empire in WWI; the regimes in these countries are not "national" in the Western sense, but are merely the personal property, as it were, of the ruling families controlling the Arab states in question, to do with as they see fit. Not suprisingly they are corrupt (this is very different from Islam before Western influence, when the state was very limited and decentralized).
As it is with the form of the nation, so too with science. Every civilization has had its science, which asked questions basic to the nature of the civilization. Do not confuse Western science with all science, as such. No other civilization produced Western science, not because they were stupid, but because they were not thinking as Westerners do. They did not ask the question "by what mechanism does Nature work, if a certain thing comes to pass". Westerners unconsciously asked this question centuries before they had a science capable of producing modern technology, but only by asking these questions - thinking like a Westerner - could the fruits of Western science eventually be produced.
The Levant did not think this way - and this goes not just for the Moslems, but for the Christians, Jews, and all the rest, as well (don't confuse Western Christianity with Levantine Christianity, or Westernized Jews with non-Westernized Jews). Instead of asking the Western question about the mechanism of Nature (assuming a thing is to happen), the Levant asked "what is the means by which we may have foreknowledge of how things will happen (according to the will of God)....or, what is the causality of the actual event?" The causality of the actual event (ie, asking not "what causes things to happen, if they happen, but rather, asking "how can we know this will happen, or not"?) leads to the creation of sciences which we Westerners do not think of as sciences at all (anymore): Astrology and Alchemy, for instance. But even though we consider divination unscientific and irrational, it is neither, if one is working within Levantine assumptions.
Levantine science produced a vast store of knowledge about many things - in medicine and math, particularly. It was far in advance of anything the West would produce until the 1600's. However, Islamic civilization was never, ever, going to lead to Western style science, nor could it ever produce the vast new fields of technology and industry which Western science was going to eventually produce. One cannot build such a science on the "causality of the actual event" (nor is Western science in any way a continuation of Greek science, which was built on quite different assumptions, and asked different questions, then those that Western science would ask).
Worse, for Islam, was the fact that even this level of science and learning was going to be destroyed. There is a book which exists from the end of the flowering of Arabic science which lists all of the scientific texts and books of learning which existed in the Arabic language at that time (some of them translated into Arabic from Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit). Of this vast collection of books, less than one in a thousand exist today (imagine where we would be if 99.9% of the titles in the Library of Congress were to disappear from the face of the Earth). The Mongol invasions, which were truly genocidal, have been blamed for this, but that is only partly the cause, and mostly an effect, of this loss of learning.
The real root of the problem was that the Islamic world lost interest in learning, and reverted to religious fundamentalism. Since God is the cause of each and every event, it follows that one cannot study nature to discover the laws of nature, because these "laws" are illusory: God is the cause of the actual event; to attribute the cause to something else is therefore blasphemous. Once this fundamentalist religous attitude gained widespread popularity, scientific learning became increasingly difficult until it withered altogether. An Islamic culture still interested in learning could have repaired the damage of the Mongols; instead it ignored the books and let them molder unread until they were no more. The will of God, and his word (the Koran) were the only things the believer needed.
Because of this, Islam stagnated, and found it impossible to learn from the West (whereas the West had no problem learning what it could from Islam during the early middle ages). Worse, the radical Islamicist elements inside the Islamic world today are trying to reverse what little progress has been made towards modernization. Their attitudes are not unkown amongst some religious types (or irreligious political types) within the West, but these have never had much influence.
Getting back to your comment, I agree with you about the fragility and rootlessness of the West today. Rootlessness is one thing the fundamentalists do not have to worry about: they are quite sure that they have the answers to everything. So the question is open, whether the West is to be eaten from without by alien fundamentalisms, or from within, by native fundamentalisms (whether of the religious or the political variety).
Are we going to go the way of the Roman Empire (which was gradually transformed from within by the rising Levantine culture of the time), or are we going to find some way to preserve the West at the expense of its enemies? Preserving the West also demands reforming the West, of course.
Your post #64 was really interesting. It highlights one of the weaknesses of the internet--that these conversations are so difficult to keep up---not like sitting around a blazing fire conversing.
Just a few chaotic thoughts----Don't forget that Rome transformed as well as being transformed. The simplistic Gibbonesque view is not adequate the task of understanding Western Civilization---or the lastingnature of Rome. One of the most frustrating things for me is the current lack of knowledge about the many tidepools that fed into our civilization---what's left of it. I find myself so impatient with so-called Christian fundamentalists---obviously educated in American Public schools---who have no knowlege of Western Civilization--except perhaps a visit to the Museum of the Holocaust on the Washington Mall---and accordingly what they do know, they hate---as all good enlightened folks must do to the dark and wicked past.
My mind also went off in many directions when thinking about the task of preserving the West while reading through one of the "evil Skakel/Kennedys get their cumeuppance" threads.
Our Ruling Class is remarkable for its barbarism. American political, cultural, economic Elites are totally unconnected to the land in any way. The subtext of the most oppressive legislation pouring out of Washington for the past 50 years (or even longer) has been the destruction of a landed, rooted way of life by wandering barbarians. Whenever one reads of an incident, like the murder of Martha Moxley, one is struck by the lack of community solidarity that characterizes so many of our rich and influential people.
I just finished reading a hair-raising book about the struggle over school busing in the seventies and there it is again--that struggle between powerful, savage barbarians in Washington and an uncomprehending, helpless peasantry. The Elite who forced that unnatural way of life down the throats of the benighted red-necks were cosmopolitan folks; people who spent every holiday in a different locale.
I think of the Normans and the incredible contributions to human history they made---after they set down roots. I see no hope for such an event in America or Europe---quite the contrary. The myths of Free Market mercantilism, the deforming effects of democracy worship, and the passivity and cluelessness of a huge portion of the population (maybe they're punch-drunk) make renewal impossible, in my opinion. Certainly it would require applied violence and the political and religious Elite have promulgated an artificial teaching of passivity--wrapped in the warm, fuzzy security blanket of "non-violence--so effectively that the American middle class--the class upon which any renewal would depend--is totally unsuited to the task.
I don't know if you happened to see this thread but it is another tiny piece of evidence in my case---or my rant, if you prefer:
You will notice how passive, how helpless the natives are. But the article ends with a great big slurp of American middle class Kool-aid---
"... Forces far beyond our control drive this transformation. The key to successful accommodation requires recognition of this relentless change. Our best bet is to prepare our children for the changing economy and rejoice in their success. Only excellent education will provide it. This, not attempts to recapture the past, is our best investment. Buy it...."
Another passing thought---compare the treatment given "right-winger" Pym Fortuyn in the Western press to that given Jean--the demon from hell---Marie Le Pen. This remarkable difference goes a long way towards revealing what will be allowed and, more importantly, what will not, in the struggle for Western identity.
And, what will be allowed, is essentially, nothing......