From Jihad Watch:
Islam: The Religion of Sauron
In my last column I suggested that even as we groan and strain in the fight against an aggressive, intolerant religious ideology, we must not forget the virtues that distinguish us from our enemies: grounded openness, principled tolerance, the flexibility and fair-mindedness that helped advance science, art, and even religion in the West. It's important to remember these from time to time, to hector ourselves on the subject, to avoid becoming what we hate. As a wise old friend of mine summed it up, after reading that column: We must fight the temptation to try to use The Ring against Sauron.
In part because Allah as Islam conceives him indeed seems more like Sauron--obsessed with order and power, devoid of love--than the God of Abraham, Tolkien seems exactly the right author in this context; I am happy to see that his trilogy is increasingly being treated as the epochal work of literature that it is. Indeed, I think his works will be read and treasured when most other 20th century authors in English have dwindled to the status of mere curiosities. (James Joyce, once de rigeur for educated readers, is now mostly ignored outside of graduate schools. In 200 years will anyone be reading him at all?) As Tom Shippey points out in the best Tolkien study I've read (unlike most critics, Shippey knows the Nordic tongues and myths that inspired the author), Tolkien didn't intend his works as "fantasy" entertainments or even modern novels. An Oxford scholar of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien was troubled by England's lack of a vital national myth. The Arthurian romance, he groused, was a Celtic story overlaid by French inventions. The Anglo-Saxon ethos, which Tolkien held (with Hume, and Thomas Jefferson, among many others) was the source of Western liberty, was nowhere adequately expressed. So Tolkien decided to express it, and craft what he hoped would form the new English national mythos. He combined the findings of his scholarship with the moral and psychological insights that began when he was fighting in the trenches of World War I (where three of his closest friends died alongside him). It seems to me that Tolkien succeeded, in works that are nevertheless profoundly modern, amounting (as Shippey observes) to extended reflections on the meaning of human mortality, and the moral limits of technology and power.
The Ring we must reject is ideology, the "secondary reality" (cf. Eric Voegelin) created by pseudo-philosophy and ersatz religion, that rests on unquestioned premises. Ideology is not political philosophy that reflects on how man should be governed; instead it is a technology of power, of power over the minds of men. And this is precisely what we object to in the religion concocted by Muhammad. Unlike every other historic faith before it, Islam seems to have been created with political purposes in mind, designed to appeal to bellicose and directionless young men and give them a powerful motive to obey orders, kill, and die.
Every ideology is an alloy of base materials such as moral and intellectual sloth, forged into a weapon of collective pride and wrath. Marx's "ring" had the power to purge disgruntled workers of their patriotism and faith, and remake them as jihadists for an earthly paradise; more importantly, his ideology could take troubled intellectuals who'd lost (thanks in part to misreading Darwin) their ancestral religions and give them a new sense of purpose, a gnostic certitude that their worldview debunked and discredited all others, and showed them the very engine and direction of all human history. Indeed, by adhering to this world-altering faith, they became the new high priesthood of the religion of the future, the Cult of Man. On a cruder plane, Hitler distilled from pseudo-science, romanticism, and wounded national vanity his own ideological "ring," which he used to street-fight the Marxists for the allegiance of the German mob.
Not every ideology is as comprehensive in its distortions of the truth, or makes the same totalizing claims to every level of man's soul. There are doctrinaire libertarians, for instance, who follow Murray Rothbard's narcissist logic to its absurd conclusion--that parents have every right to abandon an infant to starve. (Yes, he really said that.) If they truly take such premises to heart, it will make them bad parents and selfish friends, but it is unlikely to turn them violent. However, their political decisions will systematically reflect the refusal of every kind of non-contractual obligation, such as patriotism or faith--and they will be reluctant to accept the reality that billions of their fellow men do accept such burdens, some of them peacefully, some of them unto jihad.
True-believing neoconservatives who have internalized the assertion that the desire and capacity for American-style liberal democracy are hard-wired into the human brain will likewise have distorted perceptions and draw delusional conclusions about world politics and immigration policy--but it won't make them beat their wives. However, they will be incapable of understanding the men who do, whose religion instructs them to, whose creed is not the side-effect of Western colonialism, or lack of educational opportunities, or even of anti-Zionist envy. It is something of another order altogether.
Indeed, while committed Communists and hard-core Nazis knew enough to take each other with deadly seriousness, it seems as if such shallow ideologies as libertarianism, neoconservatism, and multiculturalism render their adherents deaf, dumb, and blind--incapable of understanding the zealots who have plunged the darkest depths. The vaguely secular progressivists who governed England and France in the 1930s simply lacked the capacity to understand the Nazi menace; they projected onto their German negotiating partners the very rationality and prudence which the deeper ideologies destroy. Likewise, Western anti-anti-Communists consistently underestimated the viral power of Marxism, the dogmatic devotion it commanded. It took recovering Communists like Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers to explain (to those who would listen) the sick, obsessive hold Communism could exert through the human soul, from top to bottom.
It is their work, and the memoirs of ex-Muslims, that we must study to understand the enemy we face, and find ways to defeat it without betraying who we are. And we should read Tolkien for inspiration in the struggle. It doesn't hurt to watch the marvelous film adaptations--in particular this battle scene, which should lift the spirits of every spiritual Anglo-Saxon.
Posted by Roland Shirk on February 6, 2011 12:13 PM
Islam: The Religion of Sauron
In my last column I suggested that even as we groan and strain in the fight against an aggressive, intolerant religious ideology, we must not forget the virtues that distinguish us from our enemies: grounded openness, principled tolerance, the flexibility and fair-mindedness that helped advance science, art, and even religion in the West. It's important to remember these from time to time, to hector ourselves on the subject, to avoid becoming what we hate. As a wise old friend of mine summed it up, after reading that column: We must fight the temptation to try to use The Ring against Sauron.
In part because Allah as Islam conceives him indeed seems more like Sauron--obsessed with order and power, devoid of love--than the God of Abraham, Tolkien seems exactly the right author in this context; I am happy to see that his trilogy is increasingly being treated as the epochal work of literature that it is. Indeed, I think his works will be read and treasured when most other 20th century authors in English have dwindled to the status of mere curiosities. (James Joyce, once de rigeur for educated readers, is now mostly ignored outside of graduate schools. In 200 years will anyone be reading him at all?) As Tom Shippey points out in the best Tolkien study I've read (unlike most critics, Shippey knows the Nordic tongues and myths that inspired the author), Tolkien didn't intend his works as "fantasy" entertainments or even modern novels. An Oxford scholar of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien was troubled by England's lack of a vital national myth. The Arthurian romance, he groused, was a Celtic story overlaid by French inventions. The Anglo-Saxon ethos, which Tolkien held (with Hume, and Thomas Jefferson, among many others) was the source of Western liberty, was nowhere adequately expressed. So Tolkien decided to express it, and craft what he hoped would form the new English national mythos. He combined the findings of his scholarship with the moral and psychological insights that began when he was fighting in the trenches of World War I (where three of his closest friends died alongside him). It seems to me that Tolkien succeeded, in works that are nevertheless profoundly modern, amounting (as Shippey observes) to extended reflections on the meaning of human mortality, and the moral limits of technology and power.
The Ring we must reject is ideology, the "secondary reality" (cf. Eric Voegelin) created by pseudo-philosophy and ersatz religion, that rests on unquestioned premises. Ideology is not political philosophy that reflects on how man should be governed; instead it is a technology of power, of power over the minds of men. And this is precisely what we object to in the religion concocted by Muhammad. Unlike every other historic faith before it, Islam seems to have been created with political purposes in mind, designed to appeal to bellicose and directionless young men and give them a powerful motive to obey orders, kill, and die.
Every ideology is an alloy of base materials such as moral and intellectual sloth, forged into a weapon of collective pride and wrath. Marx's "ring" had the power to purge disgruntled workers of their patriotism and faith, and remake them as jihadists for an earthly paradise; more importantly, his ideology could take troubled intellectuals who'd lost (thanks in part to misreading Darwin) their ancestral religions and give them a new sense of purpose, a gnostic certitude that their worldview debunked and discredited all others, and showed them the very engine and direction of all human history. Indeed, by adhering to this world-altering faith, they became the new high priesthood of the religion of the future, the Cult of Man. On a cruder plane, Hitler distilled from pseudo-science, romanticism, and wounded national vanity his own ideological "ring," which he used to street-fight the Marxists for the allegiance of the German mob.
Not every ideology is as comprehensive in its distortions of the truth, or makes the same totalizing claims to every level of man's soul. There are doctrinaire libertarians, for instance, who follow Murray Rothbard's narcissist logic to its absurd conclusion--that parents have every right to abandon an infant to starve. (Yes, he really said that.) If they truly take such premises to heart, it will make them bad parents and selfish friends, but it is unlikely to turn them violent. However, their political decisions will systematically reflect the refusal of every kind of non-contractual obligation, such as patriotism or faith--and they will be reluctant to accept the reality that billions of their fellow men do accept such burdens, some of them peacefully, some of them unto jihad.
True-believing neoconservatives who have internalized the assertion that the desire and capacity for American-style liberal democracy are hard-wired into the human brain will likewise have distorted perceptions and draw delusional conclusions about world politics and immigration policy--but it won't make them beat their wives. However, they will be incapable of understanding the men who do, whose religion instructs them to, whose creed is not the side-effect of Western colonialism, or lack of educational opportunities, or even of anti-Zionist envy. It is something of another order altogether.
Indeed, while committed Communists and hard-core Nazis knew enough to take each other with deadly seriousness, it seems as if such shallow ideologies as libertarianism, neoconservatism, and multiculturalism render their adherents deaf, dumb, and blind--incapable of understanding the zealots who have plunged the darkest depths. The vaguely secular progressivists who governed England and France in the 1930s simply lacked the capacity to understand the Nazi menace; they projected onto their German negotiating partners the very rationality and prudence which the deeper ideologies destroy. Likewise, Western anti-anti-Communists consistently underestimated the viral power of Marxism, the dogmatic devotion it commanded. It took recovering Communists like Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers to explain (to those who would listen) the sick, obsessive hold Communism could exert through the human soul, from top to bottom.
It is their work, and the memoirs of ex-Muslims, that we must study to understand the enemy we face, and find ways to defeat it without betraying who we are. And we should read Tolkien for inspiration in the struggle. It doesn't hurt to watch the marvelous film adaptations--in particular this battle scene, which should lift the spirits of every spiritual Anglo-Saxon.
Posted by Roland Shirk on February 6, 2011 12:13 PM
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