Monday, August 01, 2005
The key to the success of the west
Two insights of Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigly had a lasting impact on student Bill Clinton, says the former President in his memoirs.
Firstly, that the key to the greatness - and renewal capacity - of western civilisation lay in a unique set of religious and philosophical convictions, that:
- man is basically good;
- there is truth, but no finite mortal has it;
- we can only get closer to the truth by working together;
- through faith and good works we can have a better life in this world and the next.
Quigley called this set of values "future preference", the belief that the future can be better than the past, and each individual has a personal, moral obligation to make it so."
The other insight was that societies have to develop organised instruments to achieve their objectives, but that all such instruments eventually become "institutionalised" - that is, they become vested interests more committed to preserving their own prerogatives than to meeting the needs for which they were created. Once this happens, says the former President, "change can only come through reform or circumvention of the institutions. If these fail, reaction and decline set in."
Can't help but wonder how the writer exercised such circumvention.
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In contrast, perhaps:
...Radical Islam is just the most recent brand of many successive pathologies, not necessarily any more embraced by a billion people than Hitler's Nazism was characteristic of the entire West.
In the 1940s the raging -ism in the Middle East was anti-Semitic secular fascism, copycatting Hitler and Mussolini — who seemed by 1942 ascendant and victorious.
Between the 1950s and 1970s Soviet-style atheistic Baathism and tribal Pan-Arabism were deemed the waves of the future and unstoppable.
By the 1980s Islamism was the new antidote for the old bacillus of failure and inadequacy.
Each time an -ism was defeated, it was only to be followed by another ...
Saddam started out as a pro-Soviet Communist puppet, then fancied himself a fascistic dictator and pan-Arabist nationalist, and ended up building mosques, ...
Arafat was once a left-wing atheistic thug. When the Soviet Union waned, he dropped the boutique socialism, and became a South-American-style caudillo. At the end of his days, he too got religion as ... Hamas threatened to eat away his support.
The common theme is ... the constant pathology of the Middle East ...that lends itself to the next cult to explain away failure and blame the West, which always looms as both whore and Madonna to the Arab Street
(From: Reformation or Civil War?, Victor Hanson)
