The Javelineer

In the 1930s, Walter Duranty travelled to the Soviet Union and witnessed the planned famines that eventually wiped out 20 million kulaks. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty lied. He promoted an idyllic image of the Soviet Union, even as mass starvation and state terror decimated the Soviet peoples.

Near the end of the Great Depression, Americans read Duranty’s idylls about Soviet life. Seeking jobs and a better life, lured by Duranty’s false dreams, some American leftists emigrated to the Soviet Union. Few of them survived.

William Underhill is the new Walter Duranty.

In an article published in Newsweek this week, William Underhill tells the magazine’s readers that “fears of a Muslim takeover [in Europe] are all wrong.”

The article was published one week after Muslim youths, during consecutive nights of rioting, torched hundreds of cars and burnt the entire business district of the French town of Firminy to the ground.

Perhaps Mr. Underhill was unaware of the events in Firminy, as are many Europeans and even Frenchmen, because the media are loath to report facts like these. In the Fall of 2005, a wave of nightly rioting by young Muslim thugs suddenly disappeared from the news when the press, at the request of the French authorities, stopped reporting about it.

In France, over 750 territorial enclaves have been given up by the state and are no longer controlled by the French authorities. These are the so-called “zones urbaines sensibles” (ZUS, sensitive urban areas). They have even been listed as such on an official website. The ZUS are run by Muslim gangs, while the inhabitants live under a combination of Shariah law and mafia rule.

Warnings concerning the loss of Europe to Islam is referred to by Mr. Underhill as “rabble-rousing stuff” and “alarming and highly speculative projections.” While conceding that “about half of respondents in Spain and Germany [hold] negative views of Muslims,”Newsweek pretends to know better than the 50 per cent of Europeans who feel uneasy about their daily confrontations with men in djellabahs and women in hijabs (if not niqabs and burkas), and with the construction of huge mosques in their home towns.

Read it all. Underhill is a dunderhead.

Simon Blackburn expects a proof. He gets a stage play instead. With reservations, he seems to likes it.

This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world’s best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can’t you fail. This is Armstrong’s principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern “militant” atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

This is the problem with recent attacks on theism. They attack a small, albeit irritating, strain of Christianity as though it is all of theism. They refuse to acknowledge the good in historical Christianity, namely the creation and sustainment of Western Civilization against dire physical and cultural attacks from the Far East and the Muslim Near East.

Indeed, the scientific Enlightenment seems to have decadenced us, to have made us out of step with one another, to have made our society decadent, incapable of advocating for itself against illiberal, Muslim cultural colonization. Science doesn’t move the passions of the people, nor does it cause them to cohere in troubling times.

While Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris swing hard at a pell, Blackburn’s critique strikes deadly on the real thing.

The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding – only a kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words.

Yes, just. Yet, isn’t that experience of being moved, the passions inflamed by art, the very thing that – well – moves us. I think Theodore Dalrymple has it right in his book In Praise of Prejudice. Because our minds are finite and because of the economic fact of time scarcity, we rationally and correctly choose prejudice over pure ignorance. Then what is important is to have the right prejudices, the right habits of mind, to keep us generally on the right path. Religion seems to have satisfied that function pretty well over the long history of Western Civilization.

Also, I agree with Madison. Religion has an important function in maintaining our liberties.

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic, — is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments. Does it consist in the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest? In an equal degree does the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Instead of shrouding religion in a white garbage bag and tossing it in a heap, perhaps we should cover it carefully in a clean sheet and store it in the attic with our crazy old aunt. We might need them again.