Today’s New York Times
editorial on the Garland, Texas affair protests a bit too much.
One might expect liberal journalists to express solidarity with their murdered
colleagues at Charlie Hebdo. Instead, the Times offers outright condemnation:
Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly
believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is
hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on
millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. As for the
Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is
simply hogwash.
Not to
quibble, but a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, like the 2005 Mohammed
caricatures in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the 2014 Charlie Hebdo
depictions, only reached a large Muslim audience because Muslim organizations
chose to make an issue of images that appeared in obscure publications with a
small circulation. The cartoonists did not cause the anguish of millions of
Muslims: Muslim authorities of various sorts elicited the anguish of their
constituents by denouncing them. If Muslim leaders had ignored the cartoons,
the millions of devout Muslims cited by the New York Times would have gone
about their daily lives suffering anguish from another source: the cruel and
inevitable encroachment of modernity on traditional life.
Islam is
fragile, far more fragile than the traditional Catholicism which flourished in
Italy, Spain, Ireland and Quebec only two generations ago and now is in
shambles. We know this because the number of live births to Muslim women is
falling faster than in any documented case in the history of the world.
Fertility
and faith are inextricably linked; academic literature on the theme is deep and
persuasive (I reviewed it in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is
Dying, Too). As Mary Eberstadt argued in her 2013 book How the West
Really Lost God (which I reviewed here), sterile societies lose their desire
to bring children into the world before they admit that they have lost their
faith.
Europe
had two centuries in which to adapt to the great wave of secularization, and
the old adage about how to boil a frog comes to mind: drop a frog into hot
water and it will leap out of the pot, but a frog left in cold water that is
slowly heated will not notice that it is being boiled. The Europeans suffered
the latter fate, although traditional society in some cases raged against its
end, for example Spain’s Civil War. Europe had the advantage of two centuries
of wealth creation, an explosion of scientific knowledge, social mobility and
modern governance; Islam has the disadvantages of two centuries of economic
stagnation, isolation from the scientific revolutions, the prevalence of tribal
society and governance that is as cruel as it is corrupt. Modernity crept up on
the Europeans, but has hit most of the Muslim world with the suddenness of a
boiling bath.
That is
the source of the anguish of millions of Muslims. Unlike their grandparents,
who sent missionaries to the Muslim world to open Western universities that
would bring the benefits of Western civilization to Muslims, today’s liberals
agonize over Muslim anguish. A notable example is President Obama’s mother Ann
Dunham.
Ms.
Dunham abandoned her young son to return to Indonesia to complete her doctoral
dissertation, entilted, “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against
all odds.” Her struggle to help the traditional craftsmen of Indonesia in their
resistance to globalization clearly formed Obama’s view of the world. He
(or perhaps Bill Ayers) wrote in Dreams of My Father;
And yet
for all that poverty [in the Indonesian marketplace], there remained in their
lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes
to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day
beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence
of such coherence that made a place like [the Chicago housing projects] so
desperate.
Nostalgia
for the supposedly halcyon past of traditional society, and fear for the
consequences of modernity, lead the likes of the New York Times’ editors to
twist themselves into pretzels when they address such issues. The Times in 1999
endorsed the showing at a public museum in New York of a supposed art work
consisting of a crucifix in a vial of urine, arguing, “A museum is obliged to
challenge the public as well as to placate it, or else the museum becomes a
chamber of attractive ghosts, an institution completely disconnected from art
in our time.” This blatant contradiction at the Times has become a staple of
conservative bloggers.
In
Yiddish, one says: es soll gor nisht helfen (it won’t help at
all). Europe’s confrontation with modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries was
tragic; Islam’s encounter with modernity, I believe, is more likely to be
terminal. Some parts of the Muslim world cannot sustain the transition. A
Chinese expert on South Asia told me not long ago, “Pakistan is simple. DO NOT
MODERNIZE. Keep them feudal. Just make sure that the army chief of staff is the
biggest feudal landlord.” That is sad to hear, but the Chinese are connoisseurs
of civilization. China is proof that large populations can make the
transition to modernity from traditional life. But China was “modern” in a
sense from inception: it united countless ethnic and language groups into a
culture founded on a common system of characters and a system of governance
that at its best was a meritocracy, often destroying unruly barbarians on its
borders who failed to assimilate. Most of the Muslim world by contrast is
tribal. Where Muslim societies try to modernize, they typically proceed from
infancy to senescence in a single generation (as in the collapse of Iran’s
fertility rate from 7 children per female in 1979 to 1.6 children in 2012).
Civilizations
that become aware that they have past their best-used-by-date typically destroy
themselves. That is not inevitable. Some Muslim countries may succeed. Egypt is
most likely to, after rejecting a brief experiment in Muslim Brotherhood rule
in favor of a true moderate, President al-Sisi. Most, however, will not.
There is
no greater anguish than knowing that your grandchildren–if any there be–will
look with disgust at your photograph, at the quaint costumes of
traditional society and antique poses, the relics of a world with which they
have nothing in common. To know that the certainties of your daily life will
dissolve and disappear, to be replaced by alien nations, is a kind of
living death. That is the fate of traditional society everywhere. It was the
fate of many of the Europeans a generation or two ago and it is the fate of the
Muslims today. The survivors–if any there be– will be countries whose culture
was modern from the outset–the United States of America in one way, China in
another, and in yet another way Israel.
Muslim anguish will deepen, whether or not
anyone publishes nasty cartoons about Mohammed (which I do not do, because I do
not like vulgar insults against anyone’s religion–although I will defend
to the death the right to do so). Liberals will agonize along with them. The
millions of devout Muslims mentioned by the Times deserve a modicum of
sympathy, for life has dealt them a losing hand. The liberals on the other hand
provide a fine opportunity for Schadenfreude. Author: David P. Goldman Asia Times
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