Sunday, July 15, 2007

The Suicide Of Reason

We are not dealing with an anomaly, as our use of that word “fanatic” would suggest, but with an alien social order that is perfectly viable on its own turf, and within its own terms, whose premises are entirely non-Western.

We in the West, and especially we in such places as North America and Australia, have lived so long and so comfortably with the contrary premises, that we cannot look at the enemy without translating his behaviour into what is familiar to us. We imagine him to be playing by our rules, even when he is obviously not. We dream about “negotiating.” We suffer hallucinations in which we describe the means and ends of the Jihadists in our own political vocabulary of give-and-take. We have been made myopic by the very success and endurance of our own social order, forgetting that it is itself a fluke of history.
And there is no law of nature that ensures the triumph of reason over zealotry. Reason itself demands that we rethink the defence of reason.
Time to buy another Lee Harris book methinks...