Roger Kimball, on political correctness, good intentions, and moral accountability:

In The Social Contract, Rousseau warned that “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable … of changing human nature, … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.” Robespierre & Co. thought themselves just the chaps for the job. The fact that they measured the extent of their success by the frequency that the guillotines around Paris operated highlights the connection between the imperatives of political correctness and tyranny—between what Robespierre candidly described as “virtue and its emanation, terror.”

That is the conjunction that should give us pause, especially when we contemplate the good intentions of the politically correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise the traditional notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices we face are to some extent choices among evils—such proverbial wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility.

Will Smith is (unjustly) involved.

One of the dangerous (and false) assumptions underlying the "progressive" project is the notion that there is no human nature, and that human beings are almost infinitely malleable and mutable. All that is needed is to pass the proper laws, and to punish those who refuse to bend to the dictates of the superior morality. Such notions lie at the heart of most of the human catastrophes of the last couple centuries, from Robespierre, to Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. And of course, it is at the heart of the war in which we're now engaged, with the new totalitarians who would, if they could, bend us to their extreme Islamic will.

[Update a few minutes later]

Seven pillars of terrorism?

I don't think so, and neither do most of the commenters. This is just the old "poverty causes terrorism" myth gussied up a bit. The problems with the Arab and Muslim world go far beyond that, as noted. It doesn't explain why Hindus don't do these things.

I would respectfully disagree with your assessment Rand. I do believe there is an inherent disparity that leads people in the Middle East and elsewhere to follow these crazy Imams. The solution is exactly what the republican/neo-con movement is trying to accomplish in Iraq. A democratic government whose natural resource monies are distributed to its people is the solution. It invests people in its government’s future. It quiets the disgruntled by leveling the playing field in the private/public sector. What needs to be overcome is the mentality in these countries that nothing changes without the use of force. It’s a mentality that can be compared to that of the Basque or IRA terrorisms. Only responsible government can repair the problems there. And the primary obstacle is those failed governments.

Hindus have, in fact, done some nasty things. Indeed, just about every major world religion has, and recently -- except in the West, where all major conflicts since 1648 have been either orthogonal to the dominant religion or expressly directed against it. Gee, what could there be about Western civilization that's different? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

There are at least two key differences:

1. The West pioneered private-sector peaceful religion in the first century AD, forgot about the concept for many, many centuries, and eventually returned to that principle.

2. The West (primarily the Anglosphere) pioneered rule of law and significant checks and balances on political power.

Authoritarian regimes are nasty and brutish, thus nationalized churches are nasty and brutish just like their masters. (By contrast, nationalized churches in representative governments are, to quote Mr. Adams, mostly harmless - the rough equivalent of declawed cats.) Biblical Christianity was founded as a humanitarian religion, and liberation from the State liberated it from powers that forced it to behave as something else.

I've said for years that, if I could go back in time and kill one person, I would kill not Hitler, but Rousseau.

If you look at these 4 modern Western conflicts: The Holocaust, The Troubles in N. Ireland, Cyprus, Croats vs Serbs, I think you'll say that while there were religious differences between the two sides, religion is simply a marker for ethnicity, and that these conflicts were really about nationalism or ethnic conflict.
This explanation might also explain some (although not all) modern anti-religious violence in the West on a smaller scale -- church burnings might be about racism, rather than religious ideology, for example.

I just wonder to what extent this explanation is also true of the non-Western religious conflicts you are thinking about as you read this thread. How much violence that seems to be about religion is really about religous ideology, and how much of it is really about something else?

Western examples to consider: The KKK in Western Canada apparently (I don't know much about it) goes after Catholics because there aren't enough blacks to go after. Abortion clinics get bombed by certain religous groups in the USA, but what category does this fall into?

Finally: what if I said "Terrorism is caused by (perceived) oppression, and in any large enough oppressed group, you'll find terrorists." Under the Czars, there was plenty of terrorism, and the terrorism came not from the impoverished peasants, but from the sons of the intellectuals. The counter-argument: I always found it interesting how little terrorism existed in Eastern Europe under communism, in contrast to the terrorism that existed under the Nazis....

Sorry, but I should have added that I don't know: Aside from the big upgrisings (is Hungary in 1956, etc), did people try to overthrow the Soviets using terrorism as a tactic? Maybe I'm just uninformed, or maybe the news was efficiently enough suppressed that we are all uninformed.

Just to state this clearly, so that you can tell me why I'm wrong: Terrorism isn't caused by Islam; terrorism is caused by perceived oppression.

Aside from the big upgrisings (is Hungary in 1956, etc), did people try to overthrow the Soviets using terrorism as a tactic?

I don't know why you say "aside from the big uprisings," since the Hungarian and Czech revolts didn't use terrorism as a tactic. The answer is no, because the oppressed knew that it would be pointless, given how brutally they would be suppressed. The only place where it might have occurred, at least with any success, was Afghanistan. (Hint: what other feature did Afghanistan have...?)

Terrorism isn't caused by Islam; terrorism is caused by perceived oppression.

Nope. You've obviously read nothing by bin Laden. It (or at least the current form of it that we're fighting) is caused by Wahhabi Islam. None of the 911 bombers were oppressed in any way, except by their own religious fanaticism. They were middle-class, and well educated, at least by Arab standards.

My point isn't that the terrorists themselves are personally oppressed, but that they (think they) represent an oppressed people. People who are not impoverished will take up arms (and use terrorist tactics) on behalf of their oppressed homeland.

The middle-class well educated 9/11 terrorists sound similar to in socio-economic status to the classic Czarist-era Russian terrorists to me.

The ETA might be a good test case. The Basque people, in my opinion, are not oppressed, but the ETA thinks they are. A testable hypothesis: the ETA is full of middle class well-educated non-oppressed guys who thought they were killing innocent people on behalf of their oppressed homeland.

,em>My point isn't that the terrorists themselves are personally oppressed, but that they (think they) represent an oppressed people.

Nope, still nonsense. The only way in which they think their "people" oppressed is in their inability to oppress others by imposing Sharia law on them, and reestablish the Caliphate. Again, you've obviously never read Osama's writings.

Why is it so important to you to hang on to this myth?

>Why is it so important to you to hang on to this myth?

I want to explain the undeniable existance of non-Islamic terrorism such as the ETA.

By the way, I'm not hanging on to the myth. The myth is that poverty causes terrorism, right? I don't believe that at all.

I'm postulating (without firm conviction) that the perception that a people or homeland is being oppressed, the relatively wealthy and self-actualized among them will take up arms. If they are outgunned, they'll consider using terrorist tactics. But there must be something else going on too -- there is the choice of attacking civilian targets to cause fear instead of military targets that must be explained. I don't think Islam is the explanation (because there are non-Islamic terrorists). Sometimes I wonder whether terrorism can be explained by looking to Bomber Harris (no relation to this blog's Jim Harris, I assume!) Harris didn't want to cause fear per se, as I understand it - he just had a cold-blooded strategy....

Should be "when a people or homeland is perceived to be oppressed...."

OK, I wasn't clear enough the first time.

The problem is not explaining Islamic terrorism (or any other kind).

The problem is explaining the complete absence of large-scale religious warfare in the West for the past three and a half centuries. Certainly a huge contrast to the several centuries (if not millennia) preceding.

What if we didn't just get lucky for 350 years in a row?

Is it, perhaps, just barely possible that the rest of the world would do well to emulate us in some way?

Could it be that notions of cultural relativism and moral equivalence are, after all, arrant nonsense?

Jay, you're saying that by separating religion from centers of power and influence, warfare in the West shifted to fighting over what became the new centers of power - national sovereignty, ethnic identity, natural resources. Right? The West managed to kill more people than any other civilization or group of civilizations in history. I heartily endorse the separation of church and state, and I'm hardly a self-hating Westerner, but in light of the Holocaust, don't you think a little humility is in order?

And do you really think much non-Western religious warfare is over religious ideology? I know the participants say it is, but look at their actions (for example, Sunni-on-Sunni violence is pretty common among people claiming to be fighting a Jihad against the West.) But please don't take the comment as an attack of any kind -- I really appreciated your posted comments. It has made me take a new look at the 30 years war - I find it hard to believe that it was really over religious ideology either.

Nuts - when I listed reasons people in the West have fought, I forgot to list ideologies such Communism. Given that the bad guys didn't stick to their (nefarious) principles, and reverted to thuggishness and kleptocracy, I don't know if that matters.

I think the answers are:

1. What Alan said -- in particular, the Anglosphere has done much better in this area than the West as a whole;

2. Most large Western revolutions/wars since the late eighteenth century have had a substantial anticlerical component;

3. North American conflicts have been the main exception to (2);

4. WWI was not anticlerical as such but, in Eastern Europe, segued into an exceedingly anticlerical conflict that killed twice as many people from 1918-22; and

5. WWII was largely fought by antireligious, intensely nationalistic regimes (90% of the casualties occurred in Eastern Europe or China).

I would also say that the West wins the body count title only if it somehow includes Asia. The Mongol conquests and the Taiping Rebellion were the bloodiest pre-20th-century conflicts in history; the Japanese killed more people than the Germans in WWII; and Mao killed at least as many people as Stalin, mostly by famine.

There were areas in which the West excelled -- the Allies killed 10x more civilians than the Axis by strategic bombing in WWII. But the West was a much safer place during the past hundred-plus years than the rest of the world.

In general, the sooner the rest of the world emulates Anglospheric institutions and values, the better off it will be.

I shouldn't have gotten into body count comparisons. When people talk about the superiority of the West, I think of the Holocaust, and I get emotional. The Holocaust alone was bad enough without going into body count comparisons with brutalities elswhere.

I see your comment as a retreat from extolling "the West" to extolling the Anglosphere, and particularly the Anglosphere of the last 100 years (thus excluding the treatment of various native groups). It is very hard to disagree with you, although the Allies' bombing strategies in WWII might at least be examined as to whether they really exemplified Anglospheric values (and of course whether there were really any reasonable alternatives.) I bring up Bomber Harris, etc because I don't think it matters why people are killed unjustly (religion vs something else) so much as that their deaths are unjust. I do think the continued progress toward the dream of truly precision bombing is in line with Western (and not just Anglospheric) values. Anyway, thank you for the interesting observations.

Abominable said:

I shouldn't have gotten into body count comparisons. When people talk about the superiority of the West, I think of the Holocaust, and I get emotional. The Holocaust alone was bad enough without going into body count comparisons with brutalities elswhere.

Germany's Hitler killed 6 million Jews (and 6 million other people) while China's Mao killed over 65 million people. The West is the only civilization to have guilt over its past atrocities.

As for the mention of ETA, the people in most of the West's retarded political class don't realize that terrorism is simply a tactic. The ETA uses this tactic because it thinks this tactic will achieve Basque independence. The Islamists use this tactic because they think it's going to establish a global Sharia government (they will be sorely dissappointed in the long run, the Muslim World is just as vulnerable to catastrophic attack as the Western World).

I will allow Abominable's conciliatory tone to draw me out a bit. My observations (and perhaps those of any particular individual) reveal at least as much about me (or any particular individual offering them) as they do about the actual historical situation. One of my peculiarities is that I do find body counts useful, and if I ran a news organization -- and not coincidentally, I don't -- my editorial preference would be to rank the importance of stories according to what's killing us, and define "us" as broadly as possible. By this logic, the events of the past few years in the Congo would have gotten about a hundred times as much press/radio/video coverage as the events of the past few years in southwest Asia. Or, alternatively, there could be lots of coverage guided by things like the WHO's top 10 causes of death (note the numbers for, eg, "perinatal conditions" or "diarrhoeal diseases" in low-income countries, which don't even make the list for high-income countries). For a more positive spin, stories could be ranked by number of lives saved, which would bring the southwest-Asia beat back into prominence quite nicely.

To nudge this back toward the topic at hand, the risk of getting killed by either human or nonhuman agency is dramatically lower in the West in general and the Anglosphere in particular. Touting the Anglosphere is a retreat only insofar as the Anglosphere is a subset of the West, arguably its most successful one. I believe that the cure for what ails much of the world is to be found in its highest concentration in the attitudes and institutions of those countries that are either 1) Britain itself or 2) former British colonies -- not because their people are smarter, but because their systems are relatively open and empirical.

Your first paragraph was thought provoking. Great stuff. I'll check out your blog.

For your second paragraph: my first reaction was to think of all the world's current hotspots that were once ruled by the British or were under British influence and wonder once again whether the British left these areas better or worse. India & Pakistan, the Middle East, Kenya & much of East Africa, and Burma all come to mind. The positive British influence in some of these places is clear, but still, it is bothersome that things went so badly in so many of these places, and not always before the British left (such as the concentration camps the British set up in Kenya). And although it is outside the time frame you were talking about, I never did understand the Opium Wars -- what were they thinking?!

My second reaction was a quibble: the chances of dying in the Anglosphere are higher than in some non-Anglocentric but admittedly quite Western places such as Scandinavia and Switzerland. Japan has us beat as well, although perhaps you'll want to call Japan Western (or Group of 7ish). Again, this is only a quibble, and I think you've made your points quite well.

Arcturus has been on hiatus for a while, so about all I can recommend is that you read through at least some of the posts listed under "Important Stuff" in the left sidebar. Some are more political than others.