Stardate 20030727.1801

(Captain's log): I receive a lot of mail which contains intelligent discussion of objections to points I make on this site. Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to answer it all, and so I have to make snap judgments on that. I received a message a couple of days ago from the email address "osamabinladeniswinning.com" and nearly ignored it simply because I found that URL to be obnoxious. But even though the author disagreed with me, she didn't seem to be totally antagonistic (and didn't seem to be trying to bait me), so I responded. Her second letter inspires me to write.

In the following, her comments are in red and mine are in blue. She began by quoting a section of this post:

"In the long run, the only way to eliminate the danger is to eliminate the root cause, which is Arab frustration at Arab failure caused by Arab religious/cultural/political pathologies. Only when the Arab/Muslim world has been reformed, and the people there see real opportunity and make real accomplishments, will they cease to feel frustration and resentment and cease to support extremists who wish to direct their resentment against us."

Was Puritanism a pathology?

I believe it was. I view any equivalent use of coercion to enforce near-uniformity of behavior on a population as a pathological situation. If people are free, there will be a wide variety of choices made.

That was a somewhat simplistic response. It's impossible to make categorical judgments about that kind of complex historical event, and the only real answer in a case like that is "well, sort of".

The Puritans ended up creating a colony in North America due to religious persecution. They were members of a small Christian sect which was subject to various legal and social restrictions in the UK, where the Church of England was the state religion. It didn't approach the level of the Inquisition, but they ultimately decided that they wanted something better. Spending a few years in the more tolerant Netherlands didn't ultimately satisfy them, so they threw the dice, put their faith in God, and migrated to the New World. (And got lost, and ended up in Massachusetts instead of further to the south.)

But the Puritans didn't really believe in religious freedom, except in the sense that they wanted the freedom to practice their own religion. In the colony they established, there was still a "state religion" but now it was theirs because they were in control. And they persecuted those who didn't follow their own religious doctrine, which caused some people to leave and form their own colony elsewhere.

Nonetheless, they helped establish what eventually became Massachusetts. And by the time of the constitutional convention in 1787, their presence and that of other sects (such as the rival Quakers in Pennsylvania) made it so that there was no way that the nascent United States could, or even wanted to, choose some specific sect as a national religion. Indirectly they contributed to the fundamental idea of separation of church and state which is part of the First Amendment.

So like nearly any historical event, there were good sides and bad sides to Puritanism. But the term "puritanism" is generally used to refer to a specific aspect of their culture, which involved a kind of asceticism, an anti-hedonism. They got this from Calvinism; it more or less derived from a belief that we aren't here on Earth to have fun, but rather to carry out God's plan. (Calvinism is a very puzzling doctrine, and even though I've studied it I don't totally follow the logic behind it.) The Puritans believed it was OK to be happy and to enjoy things, but doing something solely because it was fun was considered sinful behavior, or at least wasn't considered virtuous. One was supposed to derive pleasure from serving God, and not seek pleasure just because. You would get your reward later in heaven – unless, that is, you were one of those who were predestined to go to Hell, and your eventual destination in Heaven or Hell had nothing whatever to do with how you'd lived your life.

Hedonism taken to extremes isn't a good thing, but in general I consider this kind of philosophic anti-hedonism, which is generally referred to as "puritanism", to be pathological.

Was the Reformation a necessry precondition for the Enlightenment?

It isn't easy to answer that because I have a rather broader idea of what makes up the Enlightenment than many do. From my point of view, the Enlightenment is an ongoing process whose seeds were created 2500 years ago, which finally took root in the 12th century but which made little progress for centuries, and ultimately began to flourish primarily due to a technological advance.

In pre-Christian Greece, during the era of the great philosophers, there was a great deal of exploration and debate about such subjects as the position of humans in the universe and the relationship between them and their governments, and just what governments should be and what they should do. This was part of a more general exploration by the Greeks which also included the foundation of mathematics, early exploration of logic, and the beginning of what we now think of as science.

Some of what the Greeks came up with was extremely valuable, and some of it was deeply flawed. Greek books were extremely popular in Rome, but during the Dark Ages most of the classic texts were lost in Europe. Fortunately for all of us, they were retained elsewhere in the Byzantine empire. Though the western Roman empire collapsed in about the 5th century, Byzantium kept going until it was conquered by the Arabs. The Arabs, in turn, preserved many of the classical Greek books, and as their empire spread they tended to have libraries in their cities.

One area they conquered and held but eventually lost was known to them as Andalusia. We call it "southern Spain", and it was reconquered by Christians near the end of the 11th century. Once the infidel Moors had been defeated and Christianity had again taken control, they discovered that they'd captured vast numbers of manuscripts of works thought lost forever. Over the next hundred years or so, scholars from the rest of Europe worked there to create Latin translations of the manuscripts they'd found.

In as much as literacy at the time was rare and nearly everyone who was literate was part of the Church, most of this was actually done by priests and monks, though it turns out that the local Jews were involved, too. The priests and monks didn't know how to read or understand Arabic, but could learn the local language (an early relative of Spanish). The Jews had been tolerated (somewhat) by the Moors, and some of them could speak and read Arabic. So though I'm not sure if this was voluntary, forced or hired, Jews worked with the priests by reading the Arabic books, translating them into proto-Spanish out loud, and then the priests translated that into Latin for transcription.

A lot of this ended up being used in universities which were established in Spain during the next couple of centuries, and for quite a while, if you wanted the best education you could find in Christian Europe, that was where you went. But those attending those universities began to study Greek logic and Greek science, as well as Greek philosophy (and, I might mention, Roman works and books written by the great Arabic philosophers and scientists) and began to ask questions that the church didn't at all like. Things like whether logic also applied to God, and whether it was possible to use the kind of examination processes that the Greeks had studied to figure out things about God. Things like whether there were actually logical limits on God's powers. Things like whether the Bible was actually literally true.

Stuff like that.

That was one of several things which ultimately led to the Spanish Inquisition, and Monty Python notwithstanding, a good time was not had by all during the Inquisition. But those ideas were out in Europe, and though they were discouraged or actively suppressed, they could not be eliminated. They didn't spread easily, but never really vanished.

What most consider The Enlightenment began after the development of movable type printing. Most people today don't realize how profoundly that ended up affecting European culture. In fact, the Reformation would not have succeeded without it. Movable type printing represented a technological crossover because for the first time in history, it was easier to produce and distribute written material than to find and burn it. Wide use of the printing press made it impossible to prevent spread of "dangerous ideas".

Luther nailed his 95 theses on a church door in 1517. If he'd done the same thing in 1417, nothing would have become of it. The local priest would have torn it down, Luther would have been arrested, few others would have heard of it, and no movement would have been started. But in 1517, Luther's 95 theses were also printed and distributed all over Europe, and that began a political and religious (and ultimately a military) struggle which over the course of the next hundred years or so ended up breaking the hold of the Catholic Church over most of northern Europe. In some places, most notably the Netherlands, you began to see establishment of quite tolerant societies, where there was far less effort by authorities to enforce uniform orthodox belief or behavior, and far more of what we now think of as individual liberty and toleration of free thought and inquiry.

I think of the Reformation as being part of the Enlightenment rather than being a precursor to it, or perhaps as being both cause and effect. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that both the Reformation and Enlightenment were actually set off by the printing press, but the Reformation enabled the Enlightenment to pick up speed. I think the printing press would have enabled the Enlightenment to advance even without the Reformation, but not as rapidly.

Part of why Luther's points reverberated in Europe was because of the philosophical ideas which had been circulating due to study of the Greek classics, though that is by no means the only reason. Sometimes great changes can also depend on absurdly trivial things, and the Reformation also was helped immensely by one man who wanted a divorce and couldn't get one from Rome. (Which mattered because he was the King of England.)

Still, if the Enlightenment helped the Reformation happen, the process of the Enlightenment was certainly able to blossom and spread in some of the areas where the Catholic Church no longer held sway. But that isn't really all there is to it. For example, the Greek texts continued to be important and influential, and the one man in Europe most responsible for spreading them broadly was a very wealthy printer in Catholic Venice. He created books which taught his customers to speak and read Greek, and then reprinted every classical Greek text he could find in the original Greek. Those books were immensely popular and that's how he became so wealthy, but he did it in a Catholic area. So any idea that Protestant Europe bloomed intellectually and Catholic Europe totally stagnated is not really correct.

Regardless, the intellectual and political and moral revolution we call The Enlightenment took on unstoppable momentum thereafter, and eventually began to influence European politics. Eventually, a major government was established based on the concepts espoused by some of the philosophers in that movement, here in the North American continent after a successful revolt against the King of England.

Like all major movements of this kind, there were branches and divisions who didn't necessarily agree with one another. The French Revolution was also strongly influenced by Enlightenment concepts, but not by the same ones that had influenced the Americans, and eventually any semblance of commitment to Enlightenment ideals was swept away when Napoleon became Emperor.

Nonetheless, the basic ideas behind liberal democracy are founded in Enlightenment ideals, and they have continued to influence world politics. However, there are other competing systems, both ancient and modern, and classic liberalism does not dominate the planet.

The Enlightenment continues to this very day. I don't think of it as being over. There were wars as part of the Reformation, and there have been wars as part of the Enlightenment. The American Civil War is another complicated political event which cannot easily be described as being caused by any single reason, but certainly the issue of slavery directly and indirectly played a major role in it, and abolition of slavery was consistent with the strain of the Enlightenment which had inspired the American experiment.

The basic principles involved have to do with the basic belief in the dignity of the individual, and the natural right of people to do what they want. Obviously there are all kinds of pernicious results of one indulges that totally – after all, if one guy wants to shoot another, that doesn't mean we should let him. But the basic idea established by the Enlightenment, as realized in the American experiment, was that governments are created by men and should serve those men, and that the primary function of government is to preserve and protect the freedom of those men as much as possible. This differed radically from the competing theory, which was that power should be vested in a chosen few either because of their holiness, or dynastic descent, or military prowess, and that the masses had no rights and were essentially the property of their rulers.

For the last 300 years, many wars have been fought between nations and forces on opposite sides of this basic question. And that struggle continues to this very day, and the war we're currently in is the latest manifestation of this struggle. About a week after the attacks in New York and Washington, I wrote about this exact thing here.

Continuing with my reader's last letter:

...my simple point is that I tend to believe Islamic fundamentalism is popular precisely because it promises a wholly Muslim solution to Muslim problems, one that does not require outside help, and that the power of that promise should not be overlooked.

It depends on the problem you're trying to solve, I guess. All I can say is that I agree that the Islamic fundamentalists are claiming they can solve the problem, but the best evidence is that they can't and won't. Everywhere they've actually managed to take power they've made the situation worse.

I'm not particularly impressed by the issue of whether any given kind of reform is "wholly Muslim". What I'm interested in is whether it will actually solve the problem, and for me the primary problem is them trying to kill us. And another aspect of Islamic fundamentalism is that as its power has increased, the peril to us has also increased.

To a good multiculturalist, a native reform is automatically better than one where the local culture is polluted by foreign ideas. I don't credit that, though. I'm results oriented, and what I know is that for the last twenty years we have more or less kept out of it and let Islamic extremism spread and become more powerful, and the result has been rising hostility towards us and an increase in the lethality of their attacks. So since my narrow goal in all of this is to make them stop killing us, I can't accept the idea of letting that fundamentalist reform continue.

But it's also important to make clear that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is not equivalent to the Christian Reformation and Enlightenment, because the goal of the Islamic fundamentalist movement is diametrically opposite to those I value from the Enlightenment.

That is what became clear in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan. Once they gained temporal power, they used it to force everyone to live exactly as the Taliban thought they should. There was less toleration for diversity and free thought there than nearly anywhere else on the planet. And that's what you see elsewhere, too. Invariable, there is a nearly perfect inverse correlation between the degree to which Islamic fundamentalism has attained power and control in an area and the amount of freedom and diversity permitted there.

One principle of the enlightenment is that a nation will become commercially successful and diplomatically powerful as a function of the degree to which it frees its citizens. Some hate this conclusion and dispute it mightily, but the evidence for it is extremely strong based on a study of world history over the last 200 years. Free men work harder and accomplish more.

The goal of the Islamists has been revealed to eliminate freedom and diversity, and that means that the areas where they take control will fail competitively.

Would driving the U.S. out of Iraq constitute an accomplishment?

For whom? I don't think it's going to happen, by the way.

For the Arab/Muslim world, as you put it. I don't mean necessarily to argue (at least, not right here and right now) that we could or will be pushed out of Iraq. Merely to suggest that there's another way of looking at the situation --- that a triumphant rebellion or revolution against the occupying authority might have as salutory an effect on Muslim self-image as being gradually coaxed into deomcracy. More, perhaps.

I suppose it could be thought of as an accomplishment, but it would not lead to others beyond that, and in the long run would not lead to a decline in the anger, resentment and hostility being directed towards us which puts us in danger. Thus it would not be an accomplishment for my purposes, since my goal in this is to make them stop trying to kill us.

If we're kicked out of Iraq, it won't lead to the kind of improvement in self-image she tries to pretend. Rather, the area would collapse into civil war, with warlords fighting one another, some of which would be proxies for neighboring countries. It ultimately would not be seen as a source of pride except by those few who managed to lead the winning side and become the new autocrats. The mass of Iraq would go back to misery and political and religious repression, and the attacks against us would continue.

So perhaps it might be viewed as some sort of nebulous multicultural victory, but it wouldn't remove the danger to us. And that is really what I'm interested in.

Let's be clear that the fundamental strategy behind this war isn't totally unprecedented, but its application to the specific situation among the Arabs and Muslims is certainly fraught with uncertainty. It is not at all clear that we'll succeed at this. However, I believe we have no choice but to try, because if we do not then eventually someone will start using nukes and a hell of a lot more people will die.

I am sufficiently convinced of the Enlightenment ideals which inspired the American branch of the movement that I do actually think that we can succeed, and that creation of a liberal democracy in Iraq actually will make the people there more happy and more successful. I do not think that the fact that these ideas will have been imposed on them is a significant problem.

I don't think it's a problem ideologically, since I do not accept the multicultural axiom that cross-cultural pollution is inherently bad. I also don't think it's a practical problem, in the sense that the Arabs will somehow reject these ideas solely because they are foreign.

The evidence to the contrary is too strong. Part of why the extremists hate us is exactly that our ideas have been filtering into their nations and have been embraced by their young people. Their young people want to wear fancy clothes and hang out at the mall and date whoever they want and choose their own husbands and wives. They want to go to night clubs and dance; they want to listen to loud music. This embrace of our culture by their young people is one of the big reasons that the extremists hate us, because we're seducing their young people away.

You can also observe it in the unrest in Iran now. There is a revolution brewing against the theocrats. The students want Iran converted into a democracy. They want freedom and the right to live as they want, and say what they feel like. In once sense these ideas were delivered to them by us, but in a different sense the basic yearning to be left alone is part of us all. There's every reason to believe that the ideals of freedom and democracy are broadly popular there, and that the theocrats are extremely unpopular. No one can predict the future, of course, but for my purposes the mere fact of the broad support amongst Muslim Iranians for Western Enlightenment ideals strongly supports the idea that there won't be an automatic and universal rejection of them elsewhere in the Muslim world.

For that matter, the Kurds also had set up a nascent democratic system in their part of Iraq after 1991.

So there's no reason to credit the idea that the Arabs collectively will recoil at anything that smells even faintly western, solely because it smells western. Nor is there any particular reason to believe that the basic idea of a representative government which is charged with defending the civil liberties of its citizens is an idea the majority will hate.

I think this idea of cultural purity and of an absolute dedication to preserving the old ways and preventing cross-cultural pollution is something that western leftists are projecting, rather than something the majority of people elsewhere actually think.

Last year I wrote a series of articles where I tried to justify the idea that in any competitive system, eventually there will always be concentration and shakeout. The traditional failed system in that region was already being shook out, and part of why there's been violent backlash against us is that the few extremists there who want to preserve the old ways don't see any way to stop the majority from adopting our ways except by removing us so that we no longer exist as a source of seductive modern memes.

Had the situation been left alone to develop naturally, they'd have come around to our way eventually anyhow. But we can no longer afford to be patient to let that process happen on its own, because their reactionaries would continue to try to kill us while they were slowly losing at home. We must now work to speed that transition, because it is the least negative way of removing the peril.