Enough with the compliments.

It would be difficult to imagine a more irresponsible speech than what Mr. Gore delivered on Monday. It was bitter, disingenuous, misleading, and incoherent; it added nothing to the debate over Iraq policy expect rancor and diversion; and it emboldened other Democrats to further displays of irresponsibility, namely Tom Daschle, who fulminated two days later against the “politicization” of the war by, he said, the President. This was classic displacement, of a vaguely Freudian variety —- for though the President may have been sloppy with some campaign rhetoric, it was in fact Al Gore who degraded the war debate with shameless political calculation; which calculation, of course, was focused on 2004, not 2002, and mainly threatens potential Democratic primary contenders, including one Tom Daschle.

When was it, precisely, when the Democratic Party developed such disdain for democracy? We ought to thank Providence that this war debate comes during an election season, allowing we the people to have a real voice in this critical political decision. President Bush says to Congress and the nation (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase): “Are we serious? Are we serious about what it takes to defend this country? I take as my principal duty the protection of the people of this country; and I regard as the gravest threat we face the possession of weapons of mass slaughter in the hands of anti-American madmen, the first of which is Saddam Hussein. This man has violated every agreement he has ever signed, and has flaunted pledges he undertook to save himself from the wrath of the U.S. Army, which could have rolled right up to his front door ten years ago. I know there are other terrorists, other madmen, other organized threats arrayed against us, but this one is the most serious, and we must deal with it. Can we not walk and chew gum at the same time? Are we serious about this war?” And the Democrats replied, very simply: “Of course we’re not serious. And how dare you expect us to be serious in an election season?”

Fortunately, the Democratic Party does not consist of politicians exclusively. It consists also of thinkers and writers and serious people, who have taken up the debate with vigor and, well, seriousness (a few examples are here). “The battle is joined,” Peggy Noonan wrote Friday.

It will be waged over the next six weeks. It is going to be hot. It is going to dominate public discourse. This is good. We need and deserve a debate that is worthy of the moment, and worthy of the people —- the millions of them —- who could be affected by America's decision one way or another.

And by the way, it is not bad for a critical world to see how a great democracy, the world’s oldest, goes about resolving questions of the utmost gravity. This is a good time to remind them who, and what, we are.

I was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Tam’s missive. In the past year, I’ve been called a hatemonger thousands of times by various correspondents, but this is one of only a handful to accuse me of factual error. Most sail past anything so prosaic as facts and simply say that the column in question is “hateful.” (“No free speech for hate speech!” as they say at Concordia, in between beating up Holocaust survivors.)

That last remark refers to several horrifying events at Concordia University in Montreal involving a riot among Palestinian protestors, some mob violence against Jews –- you know the storyline (See here and here).

This is in line, incidentally, with the general emotionalism of the anti-war crowd. This week, The Guardian in London accused Mr. Bush for the umpteenth time of “arrogance.” So what if he is? Jacques Chirac’s arrogant, so’s John Ralston Saul, and Pierre Trudeau, and Bob Hope. “Humility? I pass.” That was Bob, but it could just as easily have been Pierre or John or Jacques. Ol’ man Yasser struck me as pretty arrogant when he was squawking away to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (“You have to be accurate when you are speaking with General Yasser Arafat! Be quiet!”) and then hung up on her. But, even if he were charmingly modest and endearingly sheepish, it wouldn’t change my view of him: His manner is not the issue.

Mr. Steyn goes on to reassert, with conclusive additional evidence, the fact called into question by his correspondent; which fact, namely, is the percentage of rapes committed in Denmark by criminals of “foreign origin” –- in plain language, by Muslims. His reassertion, as I say, is conclusive.

Then, a point so rudimentary it verily boggles the mind that the thing requires such elaborate rhetorical and logical calisthenics to establish:

What should the West do about this problem? Well, we could start by acknowledging it. Fact: Almost all Denmark’s rape victims are ethnic Danish girls or women. Fact: An ethnic Danish girl is far more likely to be raped by a Muslim than an ethnic Dane. Fact: Immigration means that more Danish women get raped. You can argue about the way to change these stubborn facts —- curtail immigration vs. increase outreach, cut welfare vs. educate immigrant parents —- as the People’s Party and the Muslim Youth League are doing. These are tenable positions in the debate. But, when you insist someone’s a “hatemonger” even for mentioning these awkward demographic trends, you’re just trying to shut down the debate . . .

Of course, plain unassailable logic will hardly convince anyone among Mr. Steyn’s voluble and fierce interlocutors. Yet more grounds for resigning ourselves to a fact I wrote about before: reason does not hold sway over the minds of most people.

Professor Esposito has an academic partnership with one Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian residing in London. They have co-edited a book. Tamimi has published another book in a series edited by Esposito (in the preface, Tamimi calls Esposito “my ustadh,” my teacher). Tamimi also runs something called the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. Esposito sits on its board of advisors—the only American to do so. In short, this seems to be a close liaison. The problem is, Azzam Tamimi is Hamas.

Mr. Tamimi also gave an interview to a Spanish newspaper last November in which he declared his admiration for the Taliban and pronounced that “everyone” in the Arab world celebrated the fall of the Trade Towers. His anti-Semitism, it goes without saying, also is palpable and lethal.

Whatever value of Mr. Esposito’s scholarship, and that has been called into question (see here and here), his judgment is, to say the least, untrustworthy.

Last year, the Trinidad-born British writer V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though virtually no one doubts the power, suppleness, and aesthetic facility of his works of fiction, he was nonetheless a highly controversial Prize-winner, chiefly because of his blunt renunciation of the insidious ideology of political correctness that pervades much of the literary establishment. This repudiation is most salient, perhaps, in his works of nonfiction; and therefore the controversy is most potent surrounding these as against his novels. In particular it surrounds his Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, an admirable piece of cultural journalism drawing on Mr. Naipaul’s travels through the non-Arab Islamic world, from Iran to Indonesia.

It is clear early-on to the reader of Among the Believers why it generates so much indignation: Mr. Naipaul combines subtle and eloquent prose with considerable powers of observation and discernment to produce a work of immense, analytical, candid insight about a failed civilization. Moreover, the author’s unmistakable sympathy, even tenderness, for the people he encounters makes his judgments all the more resounding in their bleakness. Islamic civilization, he says, is desolation.

This is not a conclusion likely to be absorbed serenely by those of a more politically correct disposition. The very notion that a civilization can fail; that, by implication, some are superior to others, is anathema to all that political correctness asseverates. So Mr. Naipaul’s tragic judgments, irrespective of their accuracy, are positively unpalatable to many of his peers among the literati.

Among the Believers was published in 1981; it’s follow-up, Beyond Belief, in 1998. We tend, these days, toward greater impatience with ideological-inspired spinelessness that limits hardheaded judgment, particularly when that judgment concerns those who plot our destruction, and who target us for death for our association with a single idea: America. Perhaps it was impatience with political correctness, too, that animated the Swedish Academy last fall. Or perhaps it was mere coincidence that scarcely two months after Islamic fanatics reduced the World Trade Center to a crematorium the world’s most prestigious literary award was presented to one of the world’s greatest interpreters of the crisis of Islam.

Whatever the reasons —- there are many available —- for the honor bestowed upon him, Mr. Naipaul’s perceptive inquiries and his incandescent musings should be allowed to speak for themselves. Here I offer them in short, pertinent excerpts:

A central theme of Among the Believers is that within Muslim societies Islam cannot be contained; there is no civil society, no secular buffer to the fiery passion of fundamentalist Islam. The situation is profoundly unhealthy: Faith spills forth into the other areas of life —- political, economic, aesthetic, individual —- effacing all that was there. It leaves the society barren of everything but Islam. Mr. Naipaul quotes Sir Mohammed Iqbal, a poet whose ideas about a separate Indian Muslim state were crucial to the establishment of Pakistan in 1947: “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.” Muslims must have an Islamic state; church and state must be united for Islam to thrive. Mr. Naipaul then speaks of the “simple, terrible flaw” of this ideal:

Muslim passions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state; institutions and administration remained as they were in the British days.

Into that void rushed the military, the only organized political entity; and then came, almost inevitably, military despotism. A populist dictator followed, with no relief from the secret police. He goes on,

The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute —- the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship —- men lost sight of the political origins of their state.

Mr. Naipaul then asks the hard, incisive questions:

Wouldn’t it have been better if the creation of Pakistan had been seen as a political achievement, something to build on, rather than as a victory of the faith, something complete in itself? . . . Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

Mr. Naipaul’s sympathy for the Muslims of the subcontinent is evident, but it does not yield to his unflinching analysis —- and what an analysis it is!

Another overarching theme is the incapacity of Muslim societies to reconcile themselves to the matrix of creativity and freedom that powers the Western world —- the engine of technological and material prosperity. They look upon Western energy and see only decadence and spiritual sterility, things that are unquestionably there —- I have written of them frequently. But to mistake the waste products of freedom for freedom itself is a miscalculation of shattering proportions. It is precisely that miscalculation which lies at the heart of Muslim folly, and Muslim frustration, and rage.

After hearing a speech full of rage and fulmination and malevolence from Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Mr. Naipaul writes,

It was his call to the faithful . . . He required only faith. But he also knew the value of Iran’s oil to countries that lived by machines, and he could send Phantoms and tanks against the Kurds. Interpreter of God’s will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilization. That civilization couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

Again, he writes of the phenomenon of rejection: “That expectation —- of others continuing to create, of the alien, necessary civilization going on —- is implicit in the act of renunciation, and is its great flaw.”

And again, this time of Malaysian Islamic extremists: “Their rage —- the rage of a pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world —- is comprehensive. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is their way of getting even with the world.” This hardened theology and the psychic refuge it provides “is passion without a constructive programme. The materialist world must be pulled down first; the Islamic state will come later —- as in Iran, as in Pakistan.”

Those are poignant, deeply uncomfortable words, written as they were twenty years ago. It seems it is Mr. Naipaul’s vocation to be uncomfortable, unsparing —- as is often the vocation of the great writer. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is undeniable that in matters of material excellence and creative energies, the West surpasses the Muslim world by leaps and bounds. But in matters of the spirit, it seems also true that Islam exceeds the West, though the spirit has been tortured, as I wrote before, by infusions of Western radicalism. Who among us feels such fervency of faith that he comes to disdain life itself? There is in the West virtually no concept of martyrdom outside of the ancient tradition of the Catholic Church, and that a martyrdom of capitulation, not violence, like St. Francis who longed for a martyr’s fate but did not seek it actively. To us moderns the very idea: martyr seems uniquely disturbing, alien in what it says about the faith of our enemies.

Mr. Naipaul has seen, first hand, and with true acuity, the rumbling tumult in the collision of these twin discrepancies. We would do well to consider even the discordant, contrarian voices, like Mr. Naipaul’s, that are among us —- for in those voices there can be great insight, and now is not the time to recoil from insight because we do not like what it tells us.

I have not seen Barbershop, but it appears to be a magnificent breath of fresh air, a truly liberating piece of art amid the welter of mendacious malice and rarefied bigotry that passes for art in Hollywood.

Mr. Dreher concludes,

Here’s the best news: Before Eddie [one of the characters in the film] begins his iconoclastic monologue about Rosa Parks, et al., he prefaces it by admitting that he wouldn’t say this in front of white people. Of course, the filmmakers knew white people would be watching this movie, which makes this line both a confession and a sly declaration of independence, an acknowledgement that the sense of racial solidarity that kept these things from being discussed openly is outdated, and no longer serves the interests of black Americans. Barbershop is an example of black self-confidence, and an affirmation of traditional values against the culture of grievance, shiftlessness, and dependency that has kept so much of inner-city black America down. And its makers defiantly say they don’t need anybody’s permission to say these things.

Three cheers for them.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

It will always be a bit exasperating to hear from people that our grandfathers may know us better than we know ourselves; that the Greeks, say, understood democracy better than we; that, to wit, progress of the intellect is a myth. Mr. Patrick Ruffini senses the approach of this ever-unpopular asseveration and communicates a mild and understandable irritation with it. Instead, he offers a sort of dialectical dynamic, where competing ideas face off and ultimately the superior ones emerge victorious, albeit in an amalgamated form. The welter of forces impinging on the culture will, after some trial and error, and the operation of reason, perhaps some rational self-interest, produce something satisfactory or better.

I must admit that I am deeply suspicious of this kind of optimism, because I am less than sanguine about Man’s sensitivity to reason. No amount of evidence will drive most people to abandon long-held beliefs, much less a complete ideology; the socialist enterprise, despite catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure, yet endures in the minds of an astounding number of people, and would indeed be re-implemented, history, experience, evidence be damned, if these people, who are never very far from power, were to dramatically reclaim it. Mr. Ruffini speaks of the failed social policies of the 1960s, which plunged many American cities into ugliness and decrepitude and squalor, and remarks that had we known in 1955 what these policies would do, things would have been quite different. But as Mr. Judd points out, we did know. In fact, “we” knew long before the policies were even formulated: Tocqueville wrote a book of stunning penetration, which is not exactly obscure, about the beguiling tendency of democracy to reduce men to bondage.

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

That sparkling sentence was written some one hundred and sixty-five years ago, and I’ll be damned if a more consummate and prescient arraignment of the welfare state has been written since. Well, John Derbyshire came close when he wrote of the English underclass, similarly produced by idiotic social policy:

Americans may find it surprising that most of the people wallowing in this slough of ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, bastardy, intoxication, vice, folly, lawlessness, and hopelessness are white English people. Much of what is described here is the sort of thing Americans instinctively associate with this country’s own black underclass. There is some satisfaction, I suppose, though of a very melancholy kind, to be drawn from the revelation that sufficiently wrong-headed social policies, persisted in with sufficiently dogged refusal to face simple truths, will visit moral catastrophe on people of any race.

Now it bears a moment’s attention to note that Britain’s experience came predominantly after America’s own; that, in other words, even the stark exhibit of failure across the Atlantic did not disabuse the British socialists of their social policy dogmas. And of course the Brits are not alone in this despondent, incorrigible “refusal to face simple truths”: opposition here to welfare reform, perhaps the single most successful domestic policy in a generation, is still truculent and inspired, and its potential to roll back what was achieved continually threatens.

Reason alone is simply not a solid enough foundation upon which to build a civilization; it does not hold final sway over the minds of human beings; stronger elements must be employed: habit, prejudice, prescription. That was Burke’s teaching, and I do not think it has been refuted, neither by argument nor by experience. Burke does not disdain reform. But it must be done with care for the organic thing that is human society, for the traditions into which men of genius and of modesty alike have infused their hard earned wisdom and lessons for posterity. Tradition should be venerated; that the past is full viciousness and injustice only strengthens the necessity for taking it seriously.

I want to emphasize that I have no reason to believe that Mr. Ruffini has any dispute with all this. His piece was just a mild demurral from something previously remarked, which provoked the above inscribed thoughts.

The Resistance faces off with one of the most barbaric regimes on earth in Sudan —- a regime which aims at Taliban-style theocracy and maintains the most extensive trade in human chattel slavery in the world. Records Mr. Novak,

The Sudanese may have suffered more than any other people in the world during the last two decades from torture, enslavement, the carrying away both of women and young men for sex slavery, the enforced starvation of scores of thousands at a time, imprisonments, beatings, amputations, lashes, the forced migration of millions, indiscriminate shelling and mining of civilians from armies in the field, and high-altitude bombing of field hospitals and food centers and refugee camps, in an effort to prevent peoples from settling in one place. Yet they remain, if their resistance leaders are any example, capable of an extraordinary warmth, comradeship, and mutual acceptance of differences, showing a delicacy of feeling and courtesy that are, as the world goes, striking.

The leaders of the Resistance were intensely interested in what Mr. Novak had to say on the thorny problems of the interaction between church and state. The Muslims among them abhor Islamofascism, but love Islam; the Christians search for a path between a dangerous radicalism of their own and the dreary, deracinated secularism of the West. And they echo Mr. Novak in making a penetrating point that has been much overlooked in the many discussions of radical Islam and its clash with the West. The term “fundamentalist,” deployed censoriously to at once describe and condemn religious militancy, is intolerable: it obliterates important distinctions and thus damns the innocent with the guilty.

The press and pundits of all sorts should stop speaking of politicizers and abusers of Islam as “fundamentalists.” Why approve of their own false propagandistic claims? They are “extremists,” not fundamentalists. They contradict the fundamentals of Islam. What they are proposing is a flagrant abuse of Islam.

One of the ideological architects of political Islam in Sudan is a man named Turabi, who quite frankly admitted that his teaching was modeled on a careful study of Stalin and the Fascists of the early 20th century. Any and every means possible should be used, he learned, in the effort to organize cadres to build up a utopian, perfect, totalistic regime.

In other words, so-called “radical Islam” or “Islamic fundamentalism” of the new political type is in fact a bastard modernization of authentic Islam, corrupting Islam by the worst of all modern impulses. As one of our professor-guerrillas put it, If they were going to modernize Islam, why didn't they choose the best features of modernity to bring into Islam, like the Universal Declaration, and democracy, and human rights? Why the worst features —- Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler? He expressed the last sentence with exquisite disdain, to vigorous agreement from others.

This, I think, is a crucial point. Whenever I hear references to the “fundamentalist” or “medievalist” nature of our enemies, presumably drawing on the disdainful popular half-memory of, say, the Spanish Inquisition, I cringe, and reflect on two historical facts: 1) Whatever the horrors perpetrated by the medieval Inquisitors, they pale in comparison to what modern man has produced. Over half as many people died on September 11 alone as did in the entire three-century history of the Spanish Inquisition, and these latter were at least favored with a trial of some deliberation, indicating an individual rather than collective idea of guilt. Those whose bones were ground to dust under molten steel in Lower Manhattan were not given so much consideration. 2) The Inquisition is not called the Catholic or Christian Inquisition for good reason: it required the mobilization of the Spanish state to operate; and recall that the state is an innovation of modernity.

Now this is not some romantic cri de coeur for a return to the Middle Ages. But it is a cry for humility to a people generally ignorant of history. I myself know very little about the Middle Ages; but I know enough not to tar them with broad, implacable comparisons to a violent politico-religious death cult which counts its salvation by the numbers of massacred innocents. Moreover, I firmly suspect that when historians have achieved a sufficient detachment, they will begin to look on the Modern Age, with its mountains of corpses sacrificed by wild-eyed utopians at the altar of the State, with a bit less triumphalism than we do. Indeed I am tempted to agree with the great Evelyn Waugh, whose lapidary delivery was without peer, when he wrote of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

Islamofascism is as much a creature of Lenin as it is of any Islamic figure. The modern West’s wretched revolutionary philosophies; its menacing arguments for social reconstitution from the ruins of an eradicated old order; its Benthamite notions of society as a scientific construct, remediable by abstract calculations; its tendentious twaddle assigning blame for the ills of the Third World exclusively to a caricature of European imperialism; all these elements have been fused to a puritanical interpretation of the Muslim faith to yield a great multifaceted monster. Just as we provide the technology to facilitate the instruments of terror, so our decadent intellects have sown the seeds of ideological Islam.

Mr. Novak’s enthusiastic essay (in contrast to this rather bleak essay of mine) suggests that one of the great callings of this war is for the sagacious, morally-confident among us to reach out to those Muslims who reject the fever of Fascism that has seized their faith; to arm and support them where they fight; to encourage and nourish them where they think and write; and to declare firmly that their struggle is our struggle. To do this thing will be so delicate and perilous a challenge that my mind swoons, and I cannot say I am confident about our chances for success. An insidious rot drives to the heart of the Western intellect, enfeebling our powers of discernment and enervating our spirit. This rot attacks the authority of Truth in the order of men and society, and it leaves the very flesh of intellect blackened with gangrene. The hull lurches on, but its limbs increasingly fail to respond to their summons, as they are little more than carrion clinging to a once vital body. The revolt of the intellectuals against authority, the trahison des clercs, cloaked though it always is in the parlance of sublime liberation, is a core element of the Modern Age. In the late nineteenth century Orestes Brownson, an ample New England Catholic, proclaimed defiantly, “We have heard enough of liberty and the rights of man; it is high time to hear something of the duties of men and the rights of authority.” Few heeded his call; and I am struck by how deeply contrarian, even reactionary, his words still sound, even now, with eighty-five years behind us of blood flowing like rivers in the name of liberation. Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, one hundred and twenty-five years earlier, when it consumed even him and set the world afire, should have told us enough: were Man a creature susceptible to the tender prodding of reason and pity. But he is not.

I digress from the issue at hand: that of the Western roots of Islamic terror, which we have hardly even begun to face; because we have hardly even begun to face the restless, intransigent spirit of liberation which reduced the science of politics to homicide, and the guilt of individual men to the guilt of whole classes, peoples, and races. And we have exported this cancerous, inchoate doctrine; not even a doctrine —- a prejudice, a mental impulse. We have exported it: not with shame or foreboding, but with ceremony and self-satisfaction. Dear God, forgive us.

Millet’s book is so bad —- it is to eroticism what a minutely detailed account of bulimic binging and self-induced vomiting would be to gastronomy —- that it is best treated not as a literary, but as a psychological and sociological artifact. Why would anyone have written it? And why would anyone read it (except for review purposes)?

Mr. Daniels observes that it is impossible not to question her veracity in many instances, which observation leads to a concise psychological broadside:

Of course, if much of what is related in the book is not true, she is either a fantasist on an industrial scale, unable to distinguish reality from her imaginings, or a cynically calculating opportunist. If she is a fantasist, her imagination is a deeply impoverished one, an impoverishment that gives to the book its repetitiveness. In a sense, it is quite an achievement to have made so short a book about sex so utterly tedious and unreadable.

He then turns to the perplexing questions of 1) why the miserable thing has sold so briskly (400,000 copies in France) and 2) why its critical reception has been so preponderantly positive. To the former to remarks, “The book’s main appeal is to prurience, a prurience that has been given the nil obstat by literary intellectuals who affect to find virtues in a work that contains innumerable atrocious sentences” and prose abominations; in other words, it is highbrow pornography. To the latter question Mr. Daniels devotes more space, and here his scornful intelligence flashes like a swordsman’s blade.

The fear that this book has exercised over many reviewers is that of appearing prudish or unfamiliar with human degradation and the seamy side of life, and thus of being naïve and unworthy of attention. To express distaste for the exhibitionism of the life it describes, or fantasizes about, or cynically exploits for commercial purposes, is to hold fast to certain (rather minimal) beliefs about how life should be lived and humans should conduct themselves. This in turn requires a belief that truth is more important than one’s status in the eyes of the other members of one’s particular guild. And those who refuse ever to nail their colors to the mast are destined always to discover a few years later that, to their chagrin, the whole ship has sunk.

I am reminded of Chesterton’s more mirthful, but similarly flashing wit: “Defending any of the cardinal virtues now has all the exhilaration of a vice.”

For Whittaker Chambers, of course, was among the greatest of the ex-Communists; and his is an almost unspeakable story of redemption. Out of despair, he had become a militant for the cause of godlessness; out of love, he had come to the Cross, and become a Church Militant. Many felt the momentary exhilaration of tasting the inebriant of Revolution, then recoiled on account of some instinctual prudence; few fell so deeply under its spell as Chambers; and almost no one returned from that depth, repudiated its blackness, and then stood for light. He was a witness against the approaching Dark Age augured by the terrible marching discipline of those to proclaimed Man as the measure of all things. “And discipline,” he wrote, “is not only, to this great secular faith, what discipline is to an army. It is also what piety is to a church. To a Communist, a deliberate breach of discipline is an act of blasphemy.” He was also a witness against the ruinous complacency of liberalism; against its sloppiness and groupthink; against its anathematizing malevolence which continues to this day; finally, against its feral, crushing deathwish. “For while Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization."

But he was also, as he affirms, a witness for something. That something was a created order in the universe; and creatures made in the image of the Creator. Image-bearers, possessed of their own limited but ineffaceable reflected creativity; which means a freedom that cannot be taken from them; a freedom emanating from that which infuses a darkened and misused world with hope: in the heart of darkness, the crucified God. Michael Novak has remarked pregnantly that the twentieth century was a century of prison literature; for freedom too much threatens those who would deny it, and all the might of the state, all the violence and torture of Man as God, still could not overturn what Christ won for us.

I am with Mr. Judd in naming Chambers’ magnum opus Witness as one of the greatest literary testaments of the 20th century. “Hero” is one of those words that through carelessness and abuse we have for all intents and purposes destroyed as a meaningful appellation; nevertheless, Chambers was a hero. Like Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and the countless others.

I have here an essay Chambers wrote about St. Benedict around the time of publication of Witness. It speaks of the “three great alienations of the spirit” which abetted mightily the fall of Rome, and which, he suggests, are abetting the fall of our civilization. “They are: the alienation of the spirit of man from traditional authority; his alienation from the idea of traditional order; and a crippling alienation that he feels at the point where civilization has deprived him of the joy of simple productive labor.” Here we have an intimation of the grandeur of Chambers’ haunted historical vision.

These alienations St. Benedict fused into a new surge of the human spirit by directing the frustrations that informed them into the disciplined service of God. At the touch of his mild inspiration, the bones of a new order stirred and clothed themselves with life, drawing to itself much of what was best and most vigorous among the ruins of man and his work in the Dark Ages, and conserving and shaping its energy for that unparalleled outburst of mind and spirit in the Middle Ages. For about the Benedictine monasteries what we, having casually lost the Christian East, now casually call the West, once before regrouped and saved itself.

So bald a summary can do little more than indicate the dimensions of the Benedictine achievement and plead for its constant re-examination. Seldom has the need been greater. For we sense, in the year 1952, that we may stand closer to the year 410 than at any other time in the centuries since. If that statement seems as extreme as any of Salvian’s, three hundred million Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, East Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and all the Christian Balkans, would tell you that it is not —- would tell you if they could lift their voices through the night of the new Dark Ages that have fallen on them. For them the year 410 has already come.

This is the mind of a prophet: let us thank God that is vision was premature, and let us pray that it was not premature by merely a few decades.

When required action does not materialize, delusion often takes its place. It is delusional for this nation, which cannot summon the will even to inspect the baggage in its airplanes, to believe it is capable of remaking the Arab world by reforming its governments, politics, and culture after an imagined conquest by small expeditionary forces equipped with revolutionary weapons that do not yet exist in full.

Mr. Helprin’s melancholic vision, which attempts to pierce the discursive welter of day-to-day media chatter, arraigns the president, his administration and his strategists for the fundamental sin of irresolution in the face of the enemy. And perhaps the principal aspect of this irresolution is manifest in the unwillingness of Mr. Bush to effect a substantive increase in military capacity (this charge is largely a recapitulation of Mr. Helprin’s similarly arresting piece back in April).

We fought for a year to save Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. Why will Saudi Arabia, if it is not an enemy, not allow us the same bases from which we protected it, to protect ourselves? What relationship with them, exactly, do we wish to preserve? They are used to buying whatever they need, and over many years they have bought us in many ways. Immediately after Sept. 11, they dropped oil prices. This was more than anti-invasion insurance, it was blood money, and there is only one decent way to return blood money. Ask the widows, widowers, grieving parents, and orphans of Sept. 11. Ask them how grateful they are for the five-month $6 reduction of the price of a barrel of $24 OPEC oil. Ask them if they want to preserve the status quo and stable relations with the country of Osama bin Laden and 15 of his hijackers. And when you have their answer, which you already know, ask the president. Ask him whether he has run a war or built a mountain of paper. Ask why he stopped short after Afghanistan. And ask why, a year after Sept. 11, he is a president more of word than deed.

Much as I admire Mark Helprin, I would like to believe that he is overstating his reproach here; but I find that I cannot bring myself to dismiss it as irretrievable exaggeration. These are serious criticisms, well documented and energetically delivered. They cannot be glibly dismissed.

It has been a long time since this journal felt so despondent about the Democratic Party. The United States is today engaged in perhaps the most important foreign policy debate in a generation. In response to a reverberating catastrophe and a terrifying threat, the administration of George W. Bush has proposed a radical new doctrine to govern America's role in the world, one that commits the United States to war in Iraq and perhaps beyond. Foreign leaders warn that by assuming the right to attack sovereign states on the basis of a potential threat, the Bush administration is rewriting the rules of the international system and lifting a taboo that has kept large chunks of the globe at peace. Retired American diplomats and generals worry that war with Iraq could radicalize much of the Muslim world. The highbrow press increasingly writes and talks of little else. And yet with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman, the leaders of the Democratic Party have nothing serious to say.

Those are tough, agonized words coming from committed liberal Democrats. One wonders if they will have any tonic effect.

The modern assumption that conservatives should automatically oppose conservation is a fairly recent development. It dates back to the rise of the conservative think tanks in the late Seventies.

Previously, Republican Presidents had played key roles in helping Americans enjoy our majestic landscape. Abraham Lincoln set aside Yosemite as a public trust. Ulysses S. Grant made Yellowstone the first national park. Teddy Roosevelt glamorized conservation. Dwight Eisenhower built the interstate highway system that made it feasible for average families to visit the national parks. Richard Nixon signed into law the Endangered Species Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The new intellectual economy that emerged in the later Seventies —- with corporate interests funding conservative think tanks that in turn subsidized the brightest Manhattan and Beltway intellectuals —- brought many advantages to the Republican Party. One unfortunate side effect, however, was that it brought to dominance pundits who not only were beholden to industry, but who lacked the average American's love of his nation's beauty.

Alright. But liberal environmentalism —- utopian, militant, disdainful of tradition or habit or compromise —- has produced and cultivated its own pathologies, which call out for thoughtful, substantive opposition.

Underlying liberal environmentalism is the assumption that the world would be paradise if every single person died tomorrow. Obviously, nobody actually believes that. What environmentalists feel deep down is that the world would be paradise if everybody died … except, of course, for them and their friends. In reality, environmentalism is essentially a form of status competition in which environmentalists demonstrate their moral superiority to the mass of humanity.

Unfortunately, the GOP’s current stance of pure negativism tempered by bouts of me-tooism can't effectively attack the status-seeking motivation behind modern environmentalism.

Mr. Sailer has ideas —- a whole panoply of fascinating ones, several of which I highlight here:

• End the Forest Service’s long crusade to slash the number of visitors to America's most spectacular natural setting, Yosemite Valley. Documentaries have shown forest rangers lamenting that all those tawdry tourists were interfering with their personal opportunities to commune with nature in solitude. This is liberal elitism at its most noxious.

  Instead, the GOP should offer to increase the camping capacity of Yosemite National Park —- by making habitable again the second most beautiful valley in California, Yosemite Valley’s once lovely little sister Hetch Hetchy Valley. The city of San Francisco drowned this valley in 1913 by building a dam across its outlet, breaking John Muir's heart.

  The idea, floated in 1988 by Reagan Administration Secretary of the Interior Dan Hodel, of pulling down the dam and restoring the valley for camping still makes sense. A study projected that visitors would increase from 40,000 annually to 1,000,000.

  Granted, this would force the San Francisco Bay Area to find other sources of drinking water. But the Bush Administration wouldn’t exactly be losing a lot of Republican votes in San Francisco anyway. The political calculus is simple: If you force the environmental elitists of San Francisco to pay for their crime against America’s landscape, you can give Hetch Hetchy back to the American people as a whole. Is this a losing proposition for Republicans? [...]

• Change the Forest Service’s puritanical prejudice that backpacking is the only truly moral way to get outdoors. Merely 2.4% of the population engage in it for at least five days a year. And those enthusiasts are overwhelmingly young white upper middle class males. In reality, Americans are becoming more like Europeans, who demand a certain degree of comfort. The number of backpackers in the Sierras, for example, is down sharply compared to 25 years ago. Rather than considering this a problem, the Forest Service is congratulating itself on clearing the riff-raff out of the mountains so the chosen few can contemplate nature in seclusion.

  In contrast, in the Alps you can wander for a week through the high country carrying just your clothes in your backpack. You make reservations to sleep each night at permanent “high camps,” sleeping on cots in cabins or waterproof tents permanently pitched on wooden platforms, eating meals cooked by the staff. The Swiss Alps are full of hotels, pensions, youth hostels, mountain huts, cog railroads, and aerial tramways. For most people over the age of 22, this beats humping 60-pound packs and sleeping on the ground.

  In the backcountry of Yosemite National Park, there is a similar network of five such camps. They are so popular that a lottery for precious reservations is held every fall. My aunt and uncle tried for many years to win the lottery, but eventually gave up. Despite this evidence that the public wants these modest but not Spartan accommodations, the federal government has refused to allow the system to expand to the rest of the Sierras. Apparently it considers the idea too decadently European. [...]

• The interstate highway system needs to be upgraded to German autobahn standards so that within a couple of decades Americans in the vast “red zone” on that famous 2000 electoral map can drive at German-style speeds across our land. I ought to be able to drive my grandchildren across that vast, flat expanse between Chicago and Denver in under ten hours.

  Likewise, as numerous country songs have pointed out, a small town is a much more tolerable place to live if every now and then you can watch it disappearing in your rear view mirror, preferably at speeds upward of 100 miles per hour. Life in South Dakota would be far more enjoyable if you were only a five-hour drive from both Chicago and the Grand Tetons.

  Today’s cars are getting close to being able to do that. My 200 horsepower sedan, which cost barely over $20,000, can certainly cruise at 100 mph. But the safety features aren’t designed for that velocity. I’d need better tires, more airbags, a somewhat wider track and so forth to make German-style speeds reasonable for a cautious family man like myself. Perhaps electronic auto-piloting will be able to play a role. For the right to drive over 100 mph, I’d be willing to pay more for safety features and put up with a special high-speed drivers’ training course and annual safety inspections. While the death rate in Germany in 1970 was substantially higher per mile driven than in the U.S., the Germans have managed to close 97% of the gap, even as their speeds have increased.

  Today’s American roads are in shameful shape. I recall driving 95 mph in a rattletrap Fiat on a Brussels freeway, a feat made possible only by Belgium’s wonderfully smooth roads. American roads fall apart quickly because American politicians like handing out more road rebuilding contracts to their close personal friends, those generous folks in the road-building industry.

  Interstate highways would have to be redesigned, with three lanes to accommodate cars going 70, 90, and 110+. They’d also need more sweeping curves and broader shoulders. Obviously, American autobahns are more practical in eastern Wyoming than in Vermont, much less in downtown LA. Politically, that ought to be fine with the GOP. One of the purposes of the project would be to prevent the depopulation of the Republican Great Plains and Midwest.

Say what you will about those ideas, they would undoubtedly infuse the environmental debate in this country with new life and seriousness; as well as finally afford the Republican Party some affirmative and concrete material to work with.

There is a new biography of Burnham out, and it is prompting a renewed and well-deserved interest in the man. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, in a recent review, laments that no one under the age of sixty has even heard of him. Well I am under sixty, and I have heard of him; indeed, I think his Suicide of the West constitutes perhaps the single most perceptive, comprehensive, and assiduous critique of liberalism ever expounded. The thing is clinical in its precision, bereft of bitterness or even partisanship; Burnham is like the physician delivering bad news:

The ideology of modern liberalism must be understood as itself one of the expressions of the Western contraction and decline; a kind of epiphenomenon or haze accompanying the march of history; a swan song, a spiritual solace of the same order as the murmuring of a mother to a child who is gravely ill.

Liberalism is “the ideology of Western suicide”; it developed as a sort of narcotic to dull the pain of our decline and fall as a civilization. As such, it cannot really be reasoned with, any more than one can talk a man out of a fever. It perdures, enervating the will, cowering before those more convicted in their purpose, erecting great towering edifices of distraction and equivocation. If Burnham’s detached doom and gloom seems on occasion overwrought, his penetrating examination of ideology is amply demonstrated in the relentlessness of the anti-American Left, under the auspices of which, I think it is fair to say, any grievance against the West, no matter how tenuous its logic and no matter how violent and regressive its proposed remedy, is perceived as in some way legitimate if it issues from the repressed and downtrodden.

Despite some obvious defects in his vision, there is great profit to be mined from the elegant and probing body of Burnham’s work. He deserves better than to be disdained and forgotten, though that is often the lot of a prophet.

It is not for non-Muslims to say what Muslims should think. A social mass as large and old as Islam has its own resources, its own internal compasses and its own needs. Muslims will do what they must, and what they can. But non-Muslims will observe what Muslims think. It’s a free country.

This is a discerning and balanced statement. It calls the multiculturalist’s bluff: If we must be tolerant of Islam’s apparent lack of moderates who are free to speak their mind, then we must also be tolerant of free people who elect to speak their mind on Islam. But very few of those stricken by the fever of ideology are willing to extend tolerance to the latter; and therein lies the irrevocable intellectual bankruptcy of multiculturalism.

It is heartening, then, to read an article like this one, which appeared recently in Time: “An Apology From an Arab.” Ali Salem, an Egyptian playwright, concludes his agonized essay with this exactly analysis:

Beneath their claims is a sadder truth: these extremists are pathologically jealous. They feel like dwarfs, which is why they search for towers and all those who tower mightily. We must admit that we failed to teach these people that life is worth living. These extremists exist now, and will exist forever, so the question before us must be, How can we defend both our lives and theirs? We in the Arab world love freedom and want the chance at a decent life. We are not different from you, as it sometimes seems. We may be just temporarily backward. Working together, our governments must decide how, with what culture and by what actions, they will combat the influence of those who hate life.

He is out there, this mystical unicorn known as the Arab Moderate; but his spirit across the Arab nations is almost uniformly crushed under the jackboot of tyranny —- which tyranny has often been abetted by our own Realpolitick calculations over the decades. One hesitates to repose into the facile and ponderous arraignment of realist foreign policy that usually follows the admission of such abetment. Irving Kristol, that great assayer of ideas, proffers a lucid grounding for my hesitance:

There are a great many people who appear to think that a great power is only the magnification of a small power, and that the principles governing the actions of the latter are simply transferable —- perhaps with some modification —- to the former. In fact, there is a qualitative difference between the two conditions, and the difference can be summed up as follows: A great power is “imperial” because what it does not do is just a significant, and just as consequential, as what it does. Which is to say, a great power does not have the range of freedom of action —- derived from freedom of inaction —- that a small power possesses. It is entangled in a web of responsibilities from which there is no hope of escape; and its policymakers are doomed to a strenuous and unquiet life, with no prospect of ultimate resolution, no hope for an unproblematic existence, no promise of final contentment.

Nevertheless, we cannot abjure all responsibility for the squalor of the Middle East; for our footprints are there, usually outlined in petroleum. And this constitutes perhaps the strongest moral case for robustness in the region: We have an opportunity here, which happens to conflate with our cold, Realpolitick interest, to initiate the break up of the blackened crust of tyranny and oppression in the Arab world; and to release the unicorn from the yoke of bondage and fanaticism.

Without a doubt the most frequently used descriptive word over the last 48 hours has been “tragedy.” It should not be. “Tragic” implies a critical degree of senselessness, randomness, and a lack of human control. If an earthquake had struck New York City, thereby bringing down the World Trade Center, we could reasonably call it a tragedy. But we cannot afford to be imprecise and flippant with words; America has spent far too many years refusing to call things by their right name. Our flippancy has made us profoundly vulnerable. If they can strike the Pentagon and destroy the World Trade Center using only knives, what target is not open to them? And what weapon?

What happened Tuesday was a deliberate, exquisitely-planned, skillfully-coordinated massacre of American civilians designed to demoralize our nation. Calling it a “tragedy” lessens the depravity of the act, and lends it an element of respect that it patently does not deserve.

As we mourn the dead and bow our heads in honor and admiration for those heroes who hour after hour risk their lives to assist the wounded, it is also proper to reflect on the awesome task the lies naked before us: Illustrated on September 11, 2001 in the most graphic way in a generation was the central human conflict between civilization and barbarism. There are those in the world who hate us with a fervor that is beyond comprehension —- hate us because we represent a noble civilization and because we do not feel shame in doing so. Once again America must rise from the blood and tears to fight for that civilization. And fight we will, and our enemies will tremble.

God bless America
My home sweet home

[If Saddam Hussein] fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction.

Hmmmm. Here's some more:

Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave the lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports. For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM. In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and chief organizer of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more. Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks. Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth . . .

Now listen to this: What did it admit? It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability--notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And might I say, UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production

Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door. And our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it . . .

We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.

Back then, some members of Congress advocated passage of a resolution which exhorted “the president to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” The co-sponsors of that bill included one Tom Daschle, as well as John Kerry, Patrick Leahy and Christopher Dodd: all Democrats, all among those who these days are busy “asking questions” of the administration, which is a euphemism for opposing potential military action against Iraq, without actually opposing it —- the temporizing is necessary because 1) opposing it forthrightly may provoke grave political consequences, this being an election year, and 2) the arguments in favor of action were already compelling, even resounding, before September 11, as Mr. Clinton lucidly expounds.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair has shown his mettle. And for that he will always have the gratitude and admiration of this American, natural opponent though I am of his politics. His case against Saddam is even more resounding than Mr. Clinton's; and his sincerity, his moral clarity, is a weapon beyond measure in the struggle for the hearts and minds of our reluctant and oft-scorned friends in Europe. How the British Left must despise him for championing that godawful America and its warmonging president! What a pillorying he must be receiving at their hands! John O'Sullivan says Mr. Blair has crossed his own Rubicon with this tremendous decision, and who am I to dispute him? Let us all raise a glass to our friends across the Atlantic; and let us thank God they are led by a man who loves America.

The fact is, we are at a moment as epochal as the Reformation itself —- a Reformation moment not only for Catholics but for the entire Christian world. Christianity as a whole is both growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see. For obvious reasons, news reports today are filled with material about the influence of a resurgent and sometimes angry Islam. But in its variety and vitality, in its global reach, in its association with the world’s fastest-growing societies, in its shifting centers of gravity, in the way its values and practices vary from place to place —- in these and other ways it is Christianity that will leave the deepest mark on the twenty-first century.

Mr. Jenkins lays out a series of facts and calculations which, even for one like myself who was vaguely aware of these things, are frankly staggering:

• “In 1900 Africa had just 10 million Christians out of a continental population of 107 million —- about nine percent. Today the Christian total stands at 360 million out of 784 million, or 46 percent.”

• “Africa had about 16 million Catholics in the early 1950s; it has 120 million today and is expected to have 228 million by 2025. The World Christian Encyclopedia suggests that by 2025 almost three quarters of all Catholics will be found in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

• “Of the 18 million Catholic baptisms recorded in 1998, eight million took place in Central and South America, three million in Africa, and just under three million in Asia . . . The annual baptism total for the Philippines is higher than the totals for Italy, France, Spain and Poland combined. The number of Filipino Catholics could grow to 90 million by 2025, and perhaps 130 million by 2050.”

Coupled with these sheer numbers is the large and thrilling fact of the organic scriptural orthodoxy of the Christians of the South Hemisphere, who are designated by one scholar the Third Church. They have shown very little patience with, even at times outright contempt for the modernist innovations of the liberal Christians of Europe and America. Perhaps the most famous manifestation of this dynamic was the 1998 Lambeth World Conference of the Anglican Communion, where the traditionalist bishops of Africa and Asia confounded their Western liberal coevals by forcing through with their numerical superiority a resolution declaring bluntly, as Mr. Jenkins puts it, “the impossibility of reconciling homosexual conduct with Christian ministry.” This development was the occasion for great agitation among the progressive churchmen of the West, as it quite plainly turned political correctness on its head. Secure in their faith, illuminated by adherence to an authentic biblical orthodoxy, utterly immune to the whims and fashions of Western intellectuals: the lineaments of the Third Church are emphatically conservative, traditional, orthodox, even reactionary by Western standards. The modernists and liberals of Europe and America, though they dream of pushing progressive innovation farther along the path to —- though they do not see it —- dissolution, have rent the very heart of their churches, and precipitated a vast capitulation to the decadence of modernity; and in so doing they have dispossessed themselves of the magnetic sublimity of their faith, and divested themselves of that ineradicable command that they be “fishers of men.” By contrast the Southern Christians, with their allergy rooted in history to Western egotism, newly received into the faith and charged with a fervor similar to that which impelled the early Evangelists: in them we perceive the essence of the true messenger, who will not presume to tamper with the Message.

I think it was Hillaire Belloc, an English Catholic convert, who said, “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.” It appears that he was quite wrong; that rather the Faith lives up to its name, which is catholic, or universal. I have recorded here before the disconsolate and oppressive irony that at the exact moment when Western man turns with longing, even desperation, to religion, the Christian churches have, by and large, secularized themselves. What I had not yet well examined is that the pulsating light of Christian belief has shifted south. And it seems logical, almost predictable, that as it was the tremendous power of Christ incorporating men which stimulated the West’s creative surge from the darkness of Rome’s fall to the extraordinary material prosperity and success of modernity, so it is that the decline of Western man is coincident with his loss of faith in the One who said, “I am the Light of the world.” Mr. Jenkins concludes,

As the media have striven to in recent years to present Islam in a more sympathetic light, they have tended to suggest that Islam, not Christianity, is the rising faith of Africa and Asia, the authentic or default religion of the world’s huddled masses. But Christianity is not only surviving in the global South, it is enjoying a radical revival, a return to scriptural roots. We are living in revolutionary times.

But we aren’t participating in them. By any reasonable assessment of numbers, the most significant transformation of Christianity in the world today is not the liberal Reformation that is so much desired in the North. It is the Counter-Reformation coming from the global South.

What were those pulverizing words? “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Update: Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz pens what may prove to be the definitive case against Iraq, including a systematic register of Saddam's unceasing violations of international law, diplomatic agreements, personal arrangements, and UN Resolutions.

Classical sovereignty is predicated upon the monopoly of legitimate violence within a society. A state must possess this, or it is no longer truly a sovereign state. The state alone has the right to use the instruments of physical coercion and force —- and if the individual uses it, for example, in self-defense, then he or she does so with the understanding that the state may even review the actions to see if they are indeed instances of legitimate self-defense.

Nuclear weapons make hash of this, by providing smaller powers, even non-state actors, the ability to inflict damage to the balance of power beyond that which it can sustain. There is no monopoly of violence where such entities as al Qaeda can acquire the weapons capable of destroying a smaller state, and crippling most others.

Neo-sovereignty requires a radical departure from the normal concept of sovereignty —- it would, in a sense, constitute a higher species of sovereignty, in which one nation acted to preserve a monopoly of mass-destruction weapons on the behalf of those nations that already have these weapons. It would defend itself —- and the world —- by defending the collective monopoly of such power, simply because someone has to do it, and it can only be us.

The main principle that neo-sovereignty simultaneously modifies and preserves is the right of unlimited self-determination by a nation state or by a people or by a sect. But this is not because this concept is being rejected out of hand —- far from it. Rather it is because the advent of mass destruction technologies simply shattered the old concept of self-determination, in the same way that the consequence of pollution requires a radical readjustment of property rights, and a new and dialectically higher concept must be put in its place. And this is what neo-sovereignty achieves.

But there is a major obstacle to its achievement, and it is not likely to be surmounted absent rather cunning Machiavellian means. Put simply: the world will not consent to the dominance of a world power; look merely to the hostility engendered by American power as it is. And only a particularly delusional individual could even conceive of the United States of today marshalling the material force, let alone the political will, to forcibly realize this goal.

The only way for the world to pass through the crisis of world-wide nuclear proliferation —- a scenario that should give every human being pause —- is by the de facto establishment of the neo-sovereignty of the USA by means of carefully calculated interventions in one carefully delimited domain —- namely, the possession of weapons of mass destruction. There may, of course, be many other goods that we would like to see actualized throughout the world —- greater economic prosperity in third world countries, greater freedom of opportunity for all human beings, irrespective of race, gender, creed, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category, in all parts of the planet. These, too, are worthy goals —- but they are not capable of being pursued, let alone actualized, by the USA. But the goal of eliminating any further proliferations of weapons of mass destruction is something that can be brought about through selective and limited actions by the USA, provided the focus is completely centered on the limited principle of neo-sovereignty. And this is something all liberals must understand —- it is only through achieving the goal of stopping the nuclear proliferation that any of the other worthy goals can be achieved. This is first in the lexical ordering of future goals, as John Rawls might put it. Nuclear proliferation must end if mankind can go forward to achieve all the other goods on the liberal list of values.

The next great challenge to the organizational genius of mankind, the principle of neo-sovereignty, is every bit as necessary a step in man's ascent as the consolidation of the Roman Empire, or the advent of Christianity, or the turning back of the Arab Conquest, or the creation of the American Republic; and if it fails to happen, man will face a long dark descent back down several rungs on the ladder of civilization —- just how far down is anyone's guess.

I will say it once again: We have no choice except to ascend the ladder. The threat of nuclear proliferation will not allow us merely to stay still.

Readers may recall that I cited Mr. Harris not long ago for his enterprising work to develop a thesis to describe spectacle of militant, suicidal Islam: the “fantasy ideology.” This new essay also reflects a certain sublimity of mind; a kind of hard-nosed but broad-minded innovation of thought and analysis which recalls the great Cold War strategist James Burnham. Well worth the read: persuasive, arresting; rigorous in approach, unsentimental in argument; prescient, perhaps, in its ominous conclusions.

David Warren does fine work as a journalist, and is full of intriguing ideas and informed conjecture. He has reported, for example, that the military build-up everyone expects to presage the invasion is already largely complete; and that American special forces are already maneuvering in Iraq. Now he gives us this about the awful complications that weapons of mass destruction already present to U.S. action:

At the risk of frightening some readers, it should also be noted that the unpublicized U.S. build-up in the region has been carefully scattered. As I now understand, while the advantage of not putting “all the eggs in one basket” is self-explanatory, there is an especially urgent reason for this. At any moment, before or after the first formal U.S. strike, Saddam is likely to try to hit any U.S. base he can reach with biological or chemical weapons. He cannot be left in a position where a single “lucky strike” could knock out a substantial part of the U.S. force arrayed against him.

By saying this, I point directly to the problem the Bush administration has, in preparing the world for what is to come. They cannot be entirely candid about the enemy's potential strengths, without giving arguments to the “peace constituency”. And yet it is precisely because of the hideous and growing capabilities of Saddam and other regional psychopaths, that the U.S. has no choice but to act —- once again, sooner not later.

In effect, both sides in the debate are wrong —- the people who think Iraq will be a cakewalk, and therefore ask, “What are we waiting for?”; and the people who think, we mustn't attack because it might unleash forces larger than we can contain. The truth, as I understand it, is opposite both propositions: it won't necessarily be a cakewalk, but the U.S. must attack before its enemies are in a position to wreak even greater havoc. The longer he waits, the bigger the final conflagration, and Mr. Bush knows it.

Stanley Kurtz wrote a penetrating piece last week, making a crucial point along these same lines:

Saddam may not yet have a nuclear weapon, or the means to launch his chemical and biological weapons against United States territory. But he clearly does have the capacity to use his weapons of mass destruction against invading American troops. This possibility is well understood by our military, and considerable effort is being expended by our planners to protect against this possibility . . .

What has not been recognized, in other words, is the extent to which Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction has already changed the power equation in the Middle East —- to the point where the American military itself is reluctant to take on Iraq. In fact, even if America's allies in the region give us the basing to accommodate a Gulf War style build up of a vast invading force (and in truth, we can no longer count on such basing), a slow massing of forces may no longer be a secure way to proceed —- simply because our forces would be vulnerable to chemical and biological attack. And that is the real reason, I suspect, why the Pentagon hawks are so intent on moving in quickly, with as small a force as possible. A quick strike by a small force greatly reduces our vulnerability to WMD attack . . .

So the future has arrived. At this very moment, we are in a test to see whether the acquisition of even a modest stockpile of chemical and biological weapons will suffice to deter the United States from attack. If the answer is yes, then in the long run, we face even more global chaos than we do from a popular explosion in the Arab world following an attack on Iraq . . .

So in a sense, Saddam has already won a real victory. Because of his weapons of mass destruction, we have probably been forced to take a key military option —- a large and gradually built up invasion force —- entirely off the table . . .

If we can't take action in Iraq, and keep sufficient troops on hand to deal with the consequences, we shall shortly enter a deeply dangerous new era in which proliferating weapons of mass destruction essentially neutralize America's military dominance, freeing up rogue regimes to act with impunity throughout the globe. More than we know, this may already be happening.

This is a bleak and bitter truth to swallow, its significance resistant to overstatement; and the significance consists most emphatically in the horror of a world where justice is thwarted and paralyzed by the utter callousness of the ambition of tyrants. Such a world augurs a retreat into unspeakable barbarism.

The Soviets thus deliberately exposed soldiers and civilians to unchecked radiation —- in part because the apparatchiks running the show could not be bothered with precautions, but primarily because they were curious as to the effects of prolonged exposure on human beings. They were not concerned to treat the consequent maladies; they merely wanted to record them —- in secret. Kazakh doctors were not allowed to make a diagnosis of radiation sickness. They were instructed to attribute the fourfold increase in diseases to the poor Kazakh diet.

I've often thought it interesting that one of the more facile replies to the charge that Marxism applied produced hell on earth was that Marxism was never faithfully applied. In fact, it was applied with rather astonishing rigor with respect to the ten points elucidated in The Communist Manifesto, and, sure enough, it produced hell on earth.

It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.

Reflection and choice. This could be designated The American Question, for it is the quintessence of American political philosophy: the question of self-government. Enshrined it is also, in the thunderous first words of our own Constitution, to the defense of which Publius lent his energetic pen: We, the People. The remarkable but too infrequently remarked political philosopher Willmoore Kendall would have emended it, with all the pregnancy of the term, to read, “We, the virtuous people.” But that is a digression. The American Question can be stated thusly: Is a large and diverse republic of self-governing people an enduring proposition? I would contend that 225 years on, the answer is still not obvious.

Large numbers of American citizens, for a myriad of reasons including sheer demographics, various economic pressures, and the enervation of ideology have been effectively driven from any meaningful political power. Even greater numbers have simply opted out of the political power secured for them by blood and steel; the general alienation experienced by many from their political system is acute. Meanwhile practically no one any longer doubts the peril which darkens the horizon of an imperial judiciary, arrogating to it and drawing within its orbit the authority properly accorded to we, the people. The Left finally caught on to this peril rather recently (though one suspects that many within its provinces have apprehended it at least implicitly for quite a while) with a messy election commencing in confusion and concluding in bitter defeat; the Right first descried it (also owning in part to that underestimated thinker Mr. Kendall) in the Supreme Court decisions outlawing school prayer in the 1960s, and then seized on it with great lucidity, vigor, and abandon in a First Things symposium some years ago denouncing the “judicial usurpation of politics” on the question of abortion. While the Left still recoils in consternation from the logic and implications of that awful topic, no longer does it flay the symposiasts for their anxiety over the naked power of the courts. By now, in 2002, it would be a rather difficult endeavor to identify an influential political observer who does not at least acknowledge the potential of the courts to blunder, polarize, emasculate and finally even tyrannize. And even those friends of First Things on the Right who recorded their alarm and fierce disagreement with the character of the symposium also concede openly that on many occasions the Supreme Court has become a “lawless institution.” We have near unanimity on the conceivable danger of judicial usurpation, if still ferocious discord on how to approach the problem; one need only look to the rancor and volatility of the struggles over judicial appointments for confirmation of this. Those who speak in hushed voices of oligarchy and false democracy are not afflicted by so ineffaceable a delusion as we might think; though when they take to the streets to preen their insensate vulgarity, they seem to know not that they lend force and truculence to precisely the trend they decry: namely, the trend of ineluctable transference of political, social and economic clout from people to elite. First Things called it, with limpid assurance, even impetuosity, “The End of Democracy.”

The miscellaneous prigs and progressives of the Left seem genuinely unaware of the profoundly elitist nature of so many of their ideas; and the ascendance of these ideas in those realms most sensitive to and dominated by the elite —- I think immediately of the pedagogic, the statist or governmental, and the legal realms —- has been of a piece with the anfractuous welter of leftist ideology. I adduce but two examples out of many. Unregulated mass immigration is an idea, and a concomitant policy, imbibed almost without question by the Left; and, with a bit more diffidence and deliberation, by the business-friendly Right. It is also a hugely unpopular idea; most especially among those (in the Southwestern United States, mainly) most directly affected by its consequences. Secondly, there is probably no single component of public life which generates more exactly and reliably the drama of elite versus people than the drama of the multiculturalist ideology. Wherever and whenever the policies of this pernicious illiberal thing are submitted to a moment of democratic accountability, they are resoundingly defeated; only through coercion and manipulation and dissimulation —- in short, only against the principle of self-government —- are its ideas sustained. Even the Hispanic voters of left-wing California, for example, voted down bilingual education in public schools, sensibly discerning that such a policy would very simply result in illiteracy in two languages.

A hard-headed examination, therefore, will tell us that today’s Left is at base an antidemocratic one, blanching at the tastes and prerogatives of a free people. But things are not so obviously cleave along these lines, for there is a similar dynamic behind the trepidation of the Right in exploiting the vulnerabilities of its political opponents, on, say, immigration and multiculturalism, to restate my examples. That trepidation consists in the fact that on so many points the Right is itself linked to an elitist institution: the business corporation. Corporations, and the business class more generally, desire above all else stability in the political realm, even if the position of repose is ultimately inimical to the order which engenders the very stability they depend on. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the greatest dissident against totalitarian tyranny of a century of dissidents, often fulminated with pulverizing eloquence against the “alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists”; against the soulless avarice which drives a businessman, in Lenin’s grim phrase, to sell the hangman the rope for his own hanging. William F. Buckley, Jr. once characterized it this way:

The intellectual inferiority of the defenders of capitalism is less critical a factor in contemporary circumstances than the moral inferiority of capitalists.

Also, I think it too rarely remarked by conservatives how much the business corporation has come to mirror the state in form and in function; that it comprises a limited but potent concentration of power; and that with it the descent, in albeit diminished magnitude, of all the bureaucratic syndromes that so consume the state is steady and sure. The corporation, notwithstanding its very considerable virtues, is fundamentally a centralizing force; and its influence an ultimately mixed one. Burdened by an organic political alliance with this institution, the Right is often left off defending a kind of corporate proto-statism when what it really aims at defending is the admirable basic decency of the free enterprise system, which is just another way of saying the economic system actualizing the principle of self-government. And even those conservatives resistant to this criticism of business would have to acknowledge the often tight and cozy relationship between corporations and the state.

Everywhere self-government is in retreat, assailed by collectivist forces and harried by creeping nihilism which deprives its traditions and institutions of vitality. The Citizen, the basic unit of self-government, once buttressed by these traditions, is being transformed once more into the Subject, deracinated from his moral and spiritual bearings, bereft of all the thick and unspoken, often unperceived, ballast which steadies him in this tumultuous world. Where once tradition and richness formed the panoply of tough and supple defenses for the individual against the world, now we see those defenses failing, with only the state to replace them, or the corporation, which either apes the state or falls before it. The Subject replaces the Citizen, even as his eyes are clouded and his weapons of resistance and counterstrike dulled by the bounty of economic plentitude and the intoxicating narcotics of modern mass entertainment. I do not say that the rout or even the slow dissolution ending in defeat of self-government is imminent, for there are hopeful signs lurking about in unpredictable places, and always the ways of the Lord are mysterious; but as I am in a sour mood, I must confess to sympathy with the words of Salvianus as the Fall of Rome neared: “The Roman Empire is luxurious but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughs.” The American Question remains an open one.