I also think Hitchens is too optimistic about the prospect of the nation coming to its senses: the march of “progressive” sociology through the institutions has been so thorough that there is no constituency left which could preserve the kind of traditional limited polity that he believes Britain once was and which he would like to see restored.

Now that is pessimism. Mr. Dalrymple is a bard of pessimism; or, more nearly, a bard of realism. He writes with authority on an astonishing variety of subjects. His value as an observer of Man, and a diagnostician of the fantasies and pathologies of his mind, is beyond measure. See, for example, his recent City Journal essays on France and Empire.

No. I don’t think it does. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.’” The modern world has lost all contact with the great noble idea of self-denial or asceticism; it has forgotten the profound words of St. Benedict, who said, “Laborare est orare” —- to labor is to pray. Every man has a cross to bear. The Church does not condemn the pleasures of fine drink; yet a recovering alcoholic knows he can never again, without risking disaster, partake. Our Lord taught us to pray “lead us not into temptation,” because He knew the weakness in our hearts. Maximos Davies articulates some solid insights about self-denial in a recent First Things essay:

Celibacy in Eastern Christianity is viewed primarily as a form of asceticism. Asceticism means, in essence, to live at the same time on earth and in heaven. It means to understand that everything we see in this life, everything we touch, taste, think, and feel, is in some way a revelation of the life to come. This means far more than an understanding that this life will come to an end and be replaced by another one. It means that the life we live right now and the life we will live for eternity are in some mysterious way one and the same. “The darkness is passing away,” says St. John, “and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:8).

For an ascetic, time reveals eternity. The ascetic thus wants to be freed from a merely human way of looking at time as a cycle of work and rest, life and death. Instead, the ascetic lives in time as though in the undying freedom of eternity. Therefore the ascetic prays. For an ascetic, food reveals the heavenly Feast. He is freed from a merely animal attraction to food and instead tastes only the spiritual promise that lies hidden inside earthly appetites. Therefore the ascetic fasts. For an ascetic, possessions reveal the many–mansioned Kingdom of Heaven. The ascetic is freed from the slavery to things by seeing in everything the Creator of all things. Therefore the ascetic gives alms.

It is the same with sexuality. For an ascetic, all human relationships—even the sexual act itself—reveal divine love. Hidden beneath the surface of all smaller loves lies the immeasurable abyss of God’s love. The ascetic realizes that what other people give him by way of love finds its true and deeper meaning in the One who is the source of all love. Celibacy is the practical recognition of the reality that lies behind the image, of the prototype behind the icon. Human love without celibacy is at best mere sentiment, at worst a form of idolatry.

Nevertheless, we must not forget that homosexuals are called to a more exacting duty in the area of sexual morality.

The second thing to be said about this is that Sen. Santorum, in his most explosive comment, made a statement of unassailable logic:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

I see no flaw in this logic. By enshrining so expansive a right as one which protects all private consensual sex, the Supreme Court will have made it functionally impossible for any legislative body to proscribe bigamy, polygamy or incest —- and indeed it will be increasingly difficult to “hold the line” on pedophilia, because of the very real difficulty of defining minority. If the Court inflates the already manufactured “right to privacy” to a size anticipated here, it will have effected an unprecedented usurpation of legislative prerogative. It will have made the whole huge question of sex a matter not for the people of the states or the American people, but of the federal government alone; more specifically, the federal judiciary alone.

A little constitutional history may, by analogy, be instructive here. To wit: Why did the framers of the Constitution neglect to include protections for free speech, assembly, worship, etc. —- that is, the liberties embraced by the First Amendment —- in the original document? Why did those rights have to appear as an amendment? It’s not as if they just didn’t think about them —- in fact, a proposal very similar to what is now the First Amendment was taken up during the Philadelphia Convention, and it was rejected unanimously. That’s right, unanimously. There were many reasons for this, but one in particular germane to our purposes here.

With characteristic brilliance, the framers perceived that such an itemized “free speech” clause (I’ll use that phrase as a shorthand for the bevy of rights encompassed by the First Amendment) would actually injure liberty, not secure it; it would effect not an expansion of individual freedom but a diminution. The reasoning is simple, if counterintuitive: By enumerating precisely what government cannot do, one installs within the very fabric of the Constitution the dangerous assumption that government is authorized to do everything else. We place the burden of proof not on the state to defend, on constitutional grounds, its use of any given power, but on the citizen who opposes that use of power, to explain why the state has no such authority. The principle of enumerated powers holds that there is no need for a “free speech” clause because the federal government has no powers not specifically granted to it. Why restrict the government’s power over things for which it has no charter to address in the first place? To do so is not merely redundant but dangerous because it begins to erode the crucial principle enumerated powers.

It is important to note that this doctrine of enumerated powers applied to the federal government alone: this is why the First Amendment begins with, “Congress shall make no law” and why the Bill of Rights included the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” It was only much later that the enumerated powers principle was effaced and the Tenth Amendment repealed, in practice if not in law.

I bring all this up in some detail to make the following point: Giving authority over sexual morality to the Federal Government of the United States, through its judiciary, is perilous business, even if it is accomplished by means which appear to expand individual liberty. To my liberal or libertarian readers I offer this question: What happens, after the final consummation of a sexual regime presided over and guaranteed by the courts, when the composition of the Supreme Court changes, to the detriment of our glorious notions of sexual liberation? The precedent set, if the Texas sodomy law is overturned, is a precedent that effectively nationalizes sexual morality, and, whatever your view of sexual morality may be, it makes the articulation and protection of it depend on the enormously blunt object of federal judicial rulings. Each such ruling will henceforth be applicable over the whole country indiscriminately, with no recourse by citizens to their august legislative assemblies. Have liberals already forgotten their dismay at momentous judicial rulings going against them? I had thought that a certain election several years ago opened liberal eyes to the perils of judicial usurpation. Once give the state power over some feature of life and that power remains to it for abuse. And few venerate in their minds, or respect in practice, the principles of federalism and of enumerated powers when they sit in positions of great power —- precisely because those principles act to restrain power.

My larger point is to affirm the merit of legislative over judicial authority. If Congress undertook to reduce, humiliate, and finally break up the power of the other two branches of government (a thing which, in fact, Congress has the instruments to undertake), we would still be in possession, most likely, of a free constitution and a free country, particularly if state legislatures yet retained to themselves a liberal range of authority. There are few institutional checks, for example, on the power of Parliament in Great Britain. I would not welcome such a course of action, as I agree with Publius that threat of majoritarian tyranny is a real one; and I revere the delicate system of equipoise between branches and levels of government assembled by the American Founders. I would not welcome such a course of legislative aggrandizement, but I would not greet its advent with loathing and dread, as I do the trend toward bleak despotism augured by the judicial usurpation, by steps of sophistry, of each aspect of controversy in our politics.

If the American people, acting through their duly-elected representatives sitting in deliberative legislative assemblies, cannot use the instrument of the law to enforce the moral standards of the community, can we still be said to live in a republic? “The restraints on men,” wrote Edmund Burke, “as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” And if we are to continue to say, with the Founders, that governments are “instituted among men” to “secure these rights,” then we must trust their security to republican institutions. That is, we must trust them to the legislation of the people’s representatives; we must not yield them to nine robed attorneys in Washington in a fit impatience. The Supreme Court has no authority here; for it to arrogate to itself this authority is to accomplish a grave usurpation.

Take the attempt undertaken by Science to subjugate Religion. It is the action of an empire: aggressive but anxious and paranoid; ignorant, but full of self-righteousness and total assurance. There is, first, the idea of Evolution and its attendant superstition The Big Bang, together the primary instruments of imperial aggrandizement, as it were. Now perhaps something like the Big Bang did occur, or is occurring, or is retreating; I do not know; and anyway the question is irrelevant. What is relevant is what happened before the Big Bang. If the answer is, Nothing —- if, that is, Science posits, against the Christian story of an omnipotent God who created everything out of nothing, that nothing just sort of turned itself into everything, as Chesterton wrote, like “an ever-increasing flood of water pouring out of an empty jug,” then what we have is indeed pure dull superstition; not even superstition, because superstition has a certain narrative élan, a poetic element to it, while this has nothing but tedious unreason. If, on the other hand, Science maintains that there was something before the Big Bang, something that generated or caused it, then the theory does not even approach the whole question of Creation; and God’s tremendous question in the Book of Job, “Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” remains unanswered, and unanswerable.

Notwithstanding this and a myriad of other problematics along similar lines (another is the, in many ways admirable tendency of Science to overthrow its own icons: Newton and Linnaeus have fallen, how long will Einstein and Darwin stand?), Science keeps rumbling on, an empire on the march. Objections based on the much richer, because much older traditions of philosophy and theology, when raised against efforts by the innovators of imperial Science to rend the fabric of human nature, or discard prescriptive institutions, are dismissed with derision, as when the arguments of human cloning opponents are disparaged as “emotionalism” or as “merely theological.” The ambition seems to be to swallow up each of the provinces of human enterprise under the exclusive privilege of Science, until the only admissible form of knowledge is the empirical, the only form of logic, the inductive, and the only method of thinking, the rationalistic. Intuition, sentiment, veneration, wonder, awe, instinct, even humor —- these things will diminish, because they are difficult to defend on empirical or rationalistic grounds.

What Science has forgotten is that it is fundamentally a instrumental entity: it does not choose its own ends. Theology, philosophy, ethics —- these things precede Science, and their authority over it, adjudicated through a political process, is final; thus also, of course, politics precedes Science. In practice, this means that one need not be a trained scientist to speak to its uses, and speak against its abuses. It is absurd to exclude the non-specialist from judgments about how we ought to use this instrument, just as it is absurd to restrict the driving of automobiles only to mechanics. One need not be a railroad engineer to identify a train wreck; nor to conclude that conducting a train blindfolded is criminal in its stupidity. Yet many of our practitioners of Science, from within the cacophonic rush of the train toward calamity, declare presumptuously that none can say anything against their wild rush, because they know not how a train works.

What this is, it seems to me, is not science but scientism; and when men argue that philosophical or theological objections to theory X or procedure Y ought to be discounted, and the decisions about its use made purely on the basis of “good science,” it is very difficult for a detached observer to conclude that they mean what they say. Some philosophical system must animate science’s interaction with human endeavors. There is no way around this: it cannot illuminate its own applications. The scientific method tells us how a discrete question is to be answered; it does not tell us how to apply the answer to life. We want to discover whether genetic cloning at the embryonic stage is possible: science can answer that question. But it can tell us almost precisely nothing about whether such technology ought to be used by men (the only assistance I can imagine science providing on this latter question is to inform us that cloning carries high risks of failure.) Bereft of first principles, Science is nothing but a decaying mass of unconnected facts, or an organ with no mind to command it. Practically speaking, the demand for decisions to be made on the basis of science alone has meant that while profounder schools of philosophy are excluded, a sort of gaunt and shallow utilitarianism reigns, a dull calculation of pleasure and pain which scorns all concerns about the wider social state, much less the wider moral order.

“Utiltarianism,” wrote Russell Kirk,

is a philosophy of death: its morbidity is the consequence of Benthamite emphasis upon Doubt. With Descartes, the Utilitarians doubt all things in heaven and earth; and this is consummate folly. For Doubt is a surly, envious, egotistical emotion, a bitter denial of everything but the sullen self; and one learns nothing by doubting.

But imperial Science welcomes utilitarian ascendance, because it welcomes the doubt cast on all other orders of intellect; that it may more easily subdue and discredit Religion when young people are taught that to doubt authority is the first step on the road to wisdom. In fact, radical doubt marks a road to nowhere.

N.B.: I realize the above can be fairly described as a philippic. It was originally the product of exasperation over some now-forgotten piece of journalism; and it may one day come to embarrass me. Nevertheless, I let it stand. Readers should feel free to highlight my fallacies as necessary. I conclude with a long quotation from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University:

It is necessary, however, Gentlemen, for the sake of the illustration which I am setting before you, to imagine what cannot be. I say, let us imagine a project for organizing a system of scientific teaching, in which the agency of man in the material world cannot allowably be recognized, and may allowably be denied. Physical and mechanical causes are exclusively to be treated of; volition is a forbidden subject. A prospectus is put out, with a list of sciences, we will say, Astronomy, Optics, Hydrostatics, Galvanism, Pneumatics, Statics, Dynamics, Pure Mathematics, Geology, Botany, Physiology, Anatomy, and so forth; but not a word about the mind and its powers, except what is said in explanation of the omission. That explanation is to the effect that the parties concerned in the undertaking have given long and anxious thought to the subject, and have been reluctantly driven to the conclusion that it is simply impracticable to include in the list of University Lectures the Philosophy of Mind. What relieves, however, their regret is the reflection, that domestic feelings and polished manners are best cultivated in the family circle and in good society, in the observance of the sacred ties which unite father, mother, and child, in the correlative claims and duties of citizenship, in the exercise of disinterested loyalty and enlightened patriotism. With this apology, such as it is, they pass over the consideration of the human mind and its powers and works, “in solemn silence,” in their scheme of University Education.

Let a charter be obtained for it; let professors be appointed, lectures given, examinations passed, degrees awarded: —- what sort of exactness or trustworthiness, what philosophical largeness, will attach to views formed in an intellectual atmosphere thus deprived of some of the constituent elements of daylight? What judgment will foreign countries and future times pass on the labours of the most acute and accomplished of the philosophers who have been parties to so portentous an unreality? Here are professors gravely lecturing on medicine, or history, or political economy, who, so far from being bound to acknowledge, are free to scoff at the action of mind upon matter, or of mind upon mind, or the claims of mutual justice and charity. Common sense indeed and public opinion set bounds at first to so intolerable a licence; yet, as time goes on, an omission which was originally but a matter of expedience, commends itself to the reason; and at length a professor is found, more hardy than his brethren, still however, as he himself maintains, with sincere respect for domestic feelings and good manners, who takes on him to deny psychology in toto, to pronounce the influence of mind in the visible world a superstition, and to account for every effect which is found in the world by the operation of physical causes. Hitherto intelligence and volition were accounted real powers; the muscles act, and their action cannot be represented by any scientific expression; a stone flies out of the hand and the propulsive force of the muscle resides in the will; but there has been a revolution, or at least a new theory in philosophy, and our Professor, I say, after speaking with the highest admiration of the human intellect, limits its independent action to the region of speculation, and denies that it can be a motive principle, or can exercise a special interference, in the material world. He ascribes every work, every external act of man, to the innate force or soul of the physical universe. He observes that spiritual agents are so mysterious and unintelligible, so uncertain in their laws, so vague in their operation, so sheltered from experience, that a wise man will have nothing to say to them. They belong to a different order of causes, which he leaves to those whose profession it is to investigate them, and he confines himself to the tangible and sure. Human exploits, human devices, human deeds, human productions, all that comes under the scholastic terms of “genius” and “art,” and the metaphysical ideas of “duty,” “right,” and “heroism,” it is his office to contemplate all these merely in their place in the eternal system of physical cause and effect. At length he undertakes to show how the whole fabric of material civilization has arisen from the constructive powers of physical elements and physical laws. He descants upon palaces, castles, temples, exchanges, bridges, causeways, and shows that they never could have grown into the imposing dimensions which they present to us, but for the laws of gravitation and the cohesion of part with part. The pillar would come down, the loftier the more speedily, did not the centre of gravity fall within its base; and the most admired dome of Palladio or of Sir Christopher would give way, were it not for the happy principle of the arch. He surveys the complicated machinery of a single day’s arrangements in a private family; our dress, our furniture, our hospitable board; what would become of them, he asks, but for the laws of physical nature? Those laws are the causes of our carpets, our furniture, our travelling, and our social intercourse. Firm stitches have a natural power, in proportion to the toughness of the material adopted, to keep together separate portions of cloth; sofas and chairs could not turn upside down, even if they would; and it is a property of caloric to relax the fibres of animal matter acting through water in one way, through oil in another, and this is the whole mystery of the most elaborate cuisine: —- but I should be tedious if I continued the illustration.

Brilliant stuff —- a century and a half old.

Mr. Cosh writes,

If we are to be actuated in foreign policy by an acute concern for human heritage, after all, our model and guide must inevitably be —- yes, the British Empire, which, by such a standard, would easily qualify as the political arrangement that has contributed the most to human good. The British dispersed legions, almost literally, of classically-educated amateur historians, linguists, archaeologists, and —- dread word —- Orientalists over two hemispheres. They preserved languages which have no indigenous written form, sent trillions of dollars’ worth of distinguished objets home to the relative safety of the British Museum, subjected arcane tribal gradations to objective analysis and recorded their details as part of their quotidian work. Of course, American society is not now structured to undertake that sort of project. In Britain, it required generations of self-conscious obsession with education, of routinely turning geniuses into schoolmasters because that was deemed the most important work for them, before Empire could be conducted with anything resembling benignity and wisdom. These strange new American “anti-imperialists,” who find themselves accusing the Bush administration of failing to take up The White Man’s Burden with sufficient alacrity and efficiency, have long years of work ahead of them.

On the other hand, as Steve Sailer has remarked, it is disgraceful to have conservatives uttering apologias for rioting and looting that “Jesse Jackson would be ashamed to use.” As James Madison might have said, the grip of faction on the minds of men is fierce indeed.

Consider recent papal reflections on the war in Iraq. “Whenever you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you’re time is up,” Michael Moore said, cleverly, at the Oscar ceremony. The general trend of reporting has it that Pope John Paul II has passionately condemned the war. But “condemned” is too strong a word, as this article demonstrates: the Pope opposed the war; he did not condemn it. And as the Roman Catholic Church is in the business, among other things, of making moral distinctions, this distinction is important, it is frequently, whether intentionally or not (I imagine not) elided over in the media, and it is evidenced by the calls of prominent Catholic pacifists for papal statements that do not “leave loopholes for parentheticals and hairsplitting.”

But those pesky parentheticals point to an indispensable component of the Just War teaching, viz., the division between just cause and just war. In fact, the Pope has affirmed that the disarmament of Iraq was a just cause; what he opposed was the prudential decision by President Bush and Tony Blair to vindicate that cause by a resort to armed conflict. This, in my view, was a wise judgment by the Pope —- for it would be quite awful for the Catholic Church to lend its blessing to any but the most unambiguously justified war; a war which, I confess, it is difficult to imagine in the modern world.

In the media, one rarely if ever hears of this delicate nuance in the Pope’s pronouncements and public judgments; for these things are simply too complicated for the soundbite world of the modern media.

A further problem is that “democracy,” properly understood, is not a desideratum. Democracy does not mean freedom or individual rights or rule of law or representative institutions or limited government or separation of powers or checks and balances or any of the other good things we say we believe in. It simply means rule by the people, which, as our founders well understood, can be as lawless and tyrannical as rule by a single man or a despotical elite. Up through the mid 20th century, we described our form of government not as a simple “democracy” but as a federal republic, a representative republic, a constitutional, democratic republic. We saw America as a “mixed government,” a republican balancing of political forces that assures liberty, not a democratic unitary state. Our more recent description of America as a pure democracy, and thus as an expression of pure will, has coincided with a devastating loss of traditional political —- and cultural —- understandings.

That is very well said. He also quotes a 1811 letter by the Duke of Wellington which stands as a cogent admonition against utopian thinking, and against the emboldened promoters of permanent revolution:

The enthusiasm of the people is very fine and looks well in print; but I have never known it to produce anything but confusion. In France what was called enthusiasm was power and tyranny, acting through the medium of popular societies, which have ended by overturning Europe and establishing the most powerful and dreadful tyranny that ever existed . . . I therefore urge you, wherever you go, to trust nothing to the enthusiasm of the people. Give them a strong and just and, if possible, a good government; but, above all, a strong one, which shall enforce them to do their duty by themselves and their country.

Imagine the furor that would greet an announcement, however dutifully couched in platitudes, that the military would have to scrutinize Muslim soldiers more thoroughly; or that would greet a more vigorous —- indeed, ruthless —- policy of border patrol, by the military if necessary. Even most soi-disant conservatives couldn’t swallow that last one.

It is this profound feebleness in the face of grave but uncomfortable threats that worries me most. Our mastery of technique is unquestionable; our mastery of our own demons is highly questionable. We are like a well-conditioned fighter who cannot give up the narcotics which injure his constitution and slowly but relentlessly drain his strength. (Links via Parapundit.)

Mr. Zakaria flies his colors bright and bold. That is to say, the editor of Newsweek’s international edition sails comfortably within a classical liberal tradition recognizing that the limitations on government are more important to the freedom and prosperity of any given people than how or whether its government is elected. At the moment that’s a timely message, with Donald Rumsfeld’s blitzkrieg having just cleared the path for Iraqis to build something the Arab peoples do not yet have: a free society.

He goes on to discuss the example of Hong Kong, which example, I think, forces every clear-eyed observer to at the very least acknowledge that British colonialism was something more —- more complicated, more human, more impenetrable, and yes, more beneficial —- than its bitter defamers would have it.

This public confidence cannot be legislated; it must be built up, like the rule of law itself, over decades. In Hong Kong it impressed even Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen. Another was Tsang Ki-fan, an old newspaperman who, like many Chinese nationalists, had originally felt humiliated at having been forced to find his refuge from communism in a British colony. Yet just before he died in 1989 he put it this way: Hong Kong was “the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of 100 years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese societies —- a time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door.”

In the Philippines, by contrast, at least since the People Power revolution of Cory Aquino, Filipinos have “enjoyed” elections. But how many Filipinos would tell you with a straight face that they have either the rule of law or government “of the people, by the people and for the people”? The sorry upshot is that a land rich in natural resources, located smack dab in arguably the most dynamic part of the world and boasting one of the world’s most talented, hardworking people, still sends thousands of college-educated women abroad to work as other people’s maids because there is no opportunity at home.

We Americans, it seems, were less successful in our own colonial adventures; let us hope that this new imperial thrust in Mesopotamia, this thrust of democratic imperialism, will turn out more along the lines of the British model in Hong Kong and perhaps India. It is probably too much to hope that it will turn out along the lines of the British model in North America. (That last link comes via the intrepid Orrin Judd.)

There are many things about the academic life as I imagined it that appeal to me: here was a life in which one could devote oneself to reading great books, talking about them with intelligent colleagues and eager students, and writing about them for interested readers. I love academic libraries, those great repositories of thought. But I soon learned that there was a great distance between my picture of academic life and real academic life. The warning bells went off quite early, in fact. I first encountered Derrida in college. He was all the rage among some of my teachers. I made a dutiful attempt to see what the fuss was about. I concluded that he was a clever charlatan. The same thing happened when I was prevailed upon to read Paul de Man. It happened again with the work of Michel Foucault. I had an ingrained allergy to the work of such people. It was partly a revulsion to their style —- hermetic, all-knowing, rebarbative —- but more basically it was a revulsion against the nihilistic assumptions that provided the emotional fuel for their work and the logical solecisms that put it over on protègès, whose cynicism about traditional culture was matched only by their credulousness when it came to the latest French import.

Don’t miss this one. Mr. Kimball is a rising giant.

Ministers have approved plans to fine householders more than £500 a year if they do not prove that they are recycling enough of their rubbish.

Guilty until proven innocent. And then, of course, the requisite tincture of deceit and manipulation:

Ministers will seek to limit the political fall-out from the rubbish tax [the “rubbish tax” —- how can you not love that?] by presenting the new levy as a discount that rewards good behavior.

Ah yes: like “a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd,” as the oracular Tocqueville envisioned in 1840.

Nevertheless, the scheme will be highly controversial as it will also require dustmen to “snoop” on each home’s recycling performance. Councils will set down rules as to the amount of recycling required per household and those adjudged not to be meeting standards will face fines of £10 a week.

This is precisely the sort of despotic impulse that led a certain collection of colonies to rebel against their imperial masters. Why, in point of fact, the Brits recently had imposed on them none other than a Stamp Duty. Fancy that. I do not anticipate a rebellion.

Update: Speaking of timid and industrious animals, Jeremy Lott unearths this brilliant column by the late Michael Kelly. It is a good example of how Mr. Kelly's writing could soar to the level of genius.

And this term “they” —- this amorphous third person plural pronoun that can mean so much and so little —- is a concept that we are going to have to rehabilitate after having prematurely condemned it to the trash bin of history for its atavistic connotations: “Us versus Them” being the code of the vendetta and the blood feud from which the West has long since heroically freed itself.

We are going to have to rehabilitate it because it is the way our enemy thinks when it thinks about us. We may reject this way of thinking, and condemn it; but it would be dangerous folly to pretend it doesn’t exist. If we are to be successful, we must take the leap of the imagination that is required to see us as they see us. We are their necessary villain —- the one whose existence explains all their failings. If something is wrong, we did it. And that is why whatever we do is bad, and whatever is done to us, no matter how ghastly, is good.

As Mr. Harris wrote in a previous piece, the Islamist fantasy manages to reduce everyone to symbols —- abstractions which stand in for some delusive emotional reaction to a reality which cannot forthrightly be participated in. America and Israel have become, for these pitiable creatures, abstractions for evil incarnate, for aberrations in the moral order: “we are their necessary villain”; while the pure, virtuous Arab street is both victim and hero.

This cannot go on; the fantasy must be discredited, the gruesome illusions shattered, the fever broken. But how? The pessimist in me says this thing cannot be done from the outside; or, even if it can, that we have not the sophisticated ruthlessness to carry it off. Instead, we will muddle through as always, fighting ourselves and our self-loathing as much as we fight the enemy. But I do not think that al-Qaeda will bring down in ruins what we have erected with such toil; if that grand edifice should fall, it is we who will bring down upon ourselves.

Umm Qasr is essentially a void now in the daily briefings of the Iraqi disinformation minister. His last mention of Umm Qasr was a vow that it would never fall into the hands of the “pirates” (arrrrrrrgh) and “gangsters” (mama mia!) of the coalition. This is essentially true, in that the coalition is devoid of either. American and British troops did take the city, though, and are in the process of… doing nefarious things like public works projects.

There has to be as many aid workers and civil engineers running around the coalition-occupied territory of Southern Iraq as there are fighting troops now. And the last I checked, the pirates of the Caribbean were not especially concerned with the welfare of those they invaded.

And I’m short a parrot, damn it.

We’re, as Vegitales puts it, the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. Except we’re doing a lot.