Simple and Cutting

Yesterday I mentioned in passing (with this link) two of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's prominent critics. One of those critics is Ian Buruma, and his arguments are handily dispatched here by Paul Cliteur, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. The refutation is simple and effective, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be reiterated constantly. The question is, why? Relativism is a real danger, but it's fast becoming as exhausting to write or read about as "political correctness" has been for years. Nobody wants to make a speech to an empty room; nobody wants to hear a speech about a subject he knows already. Read the following, all perfectly true, and see at what point your eyes begin to glaze over.

Because every commitment to universal values is a kind of fundamentalism, the world is seen as one great clash of "fundamentalisms," with none superior or inferior to any other. For the postmodern relativist, all lifestances and worldviews are of equal value. Sim's solution is to reject commitment to universal values. But is that sensible advice? This attitude, it seems to me, would make Western societies very vulnerable to the ideological challenge that religious terrorism poses. Liberal democracy, with its institutions of free speech is, not necessarily better than alternatives. The only thing that the postmodernist wants to argue against is evangelical zeal. What this attitude leads to can also be gauged in "Murder in Amsterdam", a recent book on the Van Gogh killing written by the Dutch-American journalist and scholar Ian Buruma. Like Sim, Buruma holds a postmodern relativistic outlook. He tries, again like Sim, to apply postmodern relativism to the problem of religious terrorism. He also contends that an orientation toward the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment is not significantly better or preferable to an orientation toward radical Islamic ideology. Radical Islam is a fundamentalist position, but the same could be said about "radical Enlightenment." Both are to be rejected. This relativistic stance comes to the fore when Buruma constructs a comparison between the worldview of Mohammed Bouyeri, Van Gogh's murderer, and the people he considers the most outspoken critics of radical Islam in the Netherlands: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and law professor Afshin Ellian (blog). While Bouyeri defends radical Islam, Hirsi Ali and Ellian defend "radical Enlightenment." According to Buruma, they are basically the same. The first point of agreement is that they are all "warriors." Bouyeri is a warrior with the sword and the knife that he used to try to decapitate Van Gogh. Hirsi Ali and Ellian are warriors with the pen. But these differences are less important than the similarities for the postmodern relativist: all are warriors. A second point of agreement is that all are "radical." Islamists are radical in the sense that they do not shy away from radical interpretations of their holy scripture. If scripture calls for the death of unbelievers and apostates, the true believer should not shy away from fulfilling the will of God and killing the unbelievers and apostates, in particular if they have committed the crime of blasphemy. Adherents of what Jonathan Israel called "radical Enlightenment" are "radical" as well. The one is "radically secular, the other radically religious," but both are "radical." A third point of agreement is that both radical parties believe in universal values. Both parties believe they are struggling for a righteous cause and for that very reason are not relativists. So both are fundamentalists from the perspective of postmodern radical skepticism. After he sketches the tenets of the ideas of the protagonists of radical Enlightenment, Buruma writes: "The same could be said, in a way, of their greatest enemy: the modern holy warrior, like the killer of Theo van Gogh." With his qualification "in a way," Buruma seems to have hesitated.

Yes, but our author later makes his own qualification, and he doesn't just "seem" to hestitate: "If Western societies think they have no core values important enough to fight for (by peaceful means), then there is no reason for immigrant minorities to accept them." By peaceful means? Is that all we're willing to stake? No wonder the "fight" against relativism seems so tedious. It takes as its real enemy not the barbarians being let in through the back door, but the intellectual showboats and charlatans hogging all the attention. In real life, at the end of the day, the sword can inflict quicker and more terrifying harm than a hundred pens. We ought to start acting like we understand that.