This week’s New York Times Sunday magazine packs an interesting one-two punch. In the opinion slot, David Rieff argued a new facet of an old premise–that President Bush’s approach to liberating the world is not necessarily seen that way on the receiving end. Rieff said what many people have been thinking for some time–that the fundamentalist Islamic critique of Western Civilization is essentially anti-modernist. But he points out that this makes it a tougher nut to crack in competing paradigms than the previous gold-standard for clashing ideologies– Capitalism versus Communism. Communism, he noted, shared some basic modernist values like science and secularism. Indeed, you could make the argument that Leninism was a more pure form of modernism than democratic capitalism in its strident rejection of religion and psychology and other gassy emanations of the individual.
It’s an old adage that in war we begin to look like our enemies, and I found it more than a little interesting that in the feature well of the same issue, Daniel Smith delineates the Bush administration’s war against science–the true cross of modernity–or shall we say its global struggle against uncomfortable facts like evolution and global warming.
Simple-minded Americans have come to believe that the war on terrorism is in fact a thinly veiled, old-fashioned war of faith–Christianity against Islam, my god against your god. (Actually, as people of The Book, this is more accurately a “my prophet against your prophet” internecine squabble. Yeah right, and the West Bank is just a slight difference of exegetical opinion.) The more the present administration insists on conforming reality to its ideology, the more it looks no better than the forces of anti-modernity it seems to have such a hard time dealing with. Given the monopoly party’s winning success in convincing most Americans against their own best interests of half-truths and hateful moralities, I wonder why they haven’t been so successful abroad. Perhaps the struggle should be seen less as modernity versus anti-modernity but as a purer form of selfish individualism versus virulent communitarianism. So yes, maybe similar to the old capitlism versus communism monolith– but minus the science on both sides, and thus a truly frightening clash of faith founded not on reason but on passion.
If we wanted to be true to our one abiding national faith, we should be dropping Barbie dolls and Nikes on them rather than bombs. But this is hardly a time for spreading conspicuous consumerism. Or is it? I heard somewhere that shopping is the new self-sacrifice, and I’ve been salivating to do my part–here’s the new J. Crew collection for men–now if someone somewhere would facilitate my self-sacrifice by, you know, giving me some walking-around money…
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