The Closing Fist

The Closing Fist

“Whoo!  Look at that firework display.  Amazing!”
— “My God, the whole sky’s on fire.  What do you think it is?”
“Never mind that, sweetheart, just enjoy the moment.  Everything’s for the best.”
— “It seems to be getting closer.”
“That’s crazy talk.  What sort of sense would that ma-”
BOOOOOOOOOM
Extract from Last Words of the Dinosaurs, ‘How Curious, Tyrannosaurus’

The Economist does it again.  ‘Britain’s “Stop the War” movement […] is a curious partnership between supporters of the international Muslim Brotherhood and largely non-believing socialists,’ editorialises the magazine for those who prefer their opinion dressed as self-evident fact.  Helpfully, real facts can then be banished to the status of ‘curiosities’, which pose no challenge to a theory built on respectably received ideas. (24/6/06, p. 29)

It is time to be clear.  Civilisation is under threat, not merely from Islamism, but from a coalition of enemies that elite thought lacks the categories to group together.  They are the five apparently separate digits of a rapidly closing fist.  We need to understand their separate menace and natural connections before their collective weight crashes down upon all our conventional pieties.


The First Two Fingers

The “Stop the War” movement has shown us the first two fingers: the old Socialist Left and the new Islamism.  Mohammed and Marx are a very modern odd couple – unnatural bedfellows, one might say – but only blinkers can hide what both share: progressive ideals.  Islamism is a progressive ideology.  Who can doubt it?  Only those for whom it is an article of faith that all religion is retrograde.  Qutb is explicit: the world is disgustingly corrupt; we need to tear it down and erect an Islamic utopia disinfected from history and precedent.  Socialism may have been atheist in the USSR, but it ended up creating its own state religion of Marxist-Leninism.  Socialists are happy to climb between the sheets with a faith, just not with history.  As for Marx’s dictum about religion and opium, I heard an opinion-former on the radio last week explaining how if we saw this in the medical context of the time, Marx was just saying that religion was a modest painkiller, a sort of Ibruprofen for the poor.  Socialists will steadily accept that five prayers a day are no more threatening than Granny’s daily aspirin for her heart, certainly no threat to the health of a progressive political movement.  Far from it: as others have observed, since the Communists had to invent their own religion without the advantage of God the result was never convincing.  Working with Islamism, Socialists have the chance to co-opt a ready-made, aggressively proselytising force with millions of members who are convinced by the binding reality of Allah’s proscriptions and commands.

Those who recognise the threat of Islamism have been happy to throw the boo-word Islamofascist at its followers.  This catches the totalitarian mentality of the movement, but misses its anti-national, supra-racial nature.  A far truer insult, but one that unfortunately fails to convey as much odium or euphony, is Islamo-collectivist.  The Islamist state will take a fixed portion of your income and distribute it for you and call it ‘charity’.  The goodness of one will be held to depend upon the behaviour of many and freedom will be curtailed not by public norms but fearful laws with bloody punishments.  At the same time, universal human dignity will be replaced by hierarchies of value: man and woman; Muslim and Dhimmi.  The nomenklatura and the secret police will have returned in flowing new robes.

Islamism gains from Socialism a means to explain its goals in terms that appeal to those outside the faith.  Socialism gains from Islamism a transfusion that can save it from final collapse.  Worn down over a century by the indignity of evidence, Socialism only clung to life because our intellectuals were too often accessory to its crimes to dig over the bones, as they have with Fascism.  Having made it into the new millennium, and tasted new blood, it is clicking its heels together again.  As it does so, Islamism cracks its knuckles and prepares for government.  When Islamist bombs in Madrid put a Socialist government into power, or when Islamists and Socialists shout “Not in my name!” from the same platform it is not a curiosity; it is a natural convergence of political sympathies.


Two More Fingers

The two fingers of progressive dogma are crossed, neither quite believing what the other says, yet stronger together and happy to point in the same direction.  They are aided by two separate doctrines, one progressive, one reactionary, that are working to reject the foundations of the world we have, its wealth and human happiness.  These two movements may be characterised as Anti-Humanists (progressive) and Anti-Economists (reactionary).  Anti-Humanism is the banner of the animal rights and eco-rights groups, who are willing to commit terrorist acts on behalf of Mother Gaia and small fluffy creatures everywhere.  Anti-Economists choose to disbelieve that capitalism and free markets really work or that globalisation will actually help relieve the desperate poverty blighting Africa and elsewhere.

Anti-Humanism is terribly well-meaning.  It presents itself as extending the circle of concern from humans to, as its followers would put it, ‘non-human animals’ and the environment which we and Brother Rat ought to share fairly.  In the words of a PETA spokesperson, “a rat is a dog is a pig is a boy”.  Four legs good, two legs equal.  Yet for those who cannot see the arrant inhumanity behind their relentless logic, the argument should be spelt out.  Anti-Humanism rests on the rejection of peculiar human value.  It works not by adding guinea pigs into our scheme of things but rejecting the traditional scheme altogether.  First they come for the ugly babies with club feet and hare lips.  Then they dig up your gran for the sake of the guinea pigs.

Peter Singer, high priest of this movement, recently laid out his position with shameless clarity.  Writing in Foreign Policy magazine of his hopes for the future, Singer was frank: ‘By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct’(Sept/Oct 2005, p. 40).  Anti-Humanism rejects the inalienable value of a human life that we call ‘sanctity of life’ and replaces it with ‘quality of life,’ irrespective of whose life that is.  At the back of this revolution in our ethical code is a chilly utilitarian calculus.  Once quality trumps sanctity, quantity rules over all.  Five happy pigs are worth more than the misery of one Socrates.  Better water Gaia with a little blood than see her magnificence stripped bare.  It is a natural step from believing in ‘the quality of life’ to waging a violent terrorist campaign: if a human life has no special value, and many lives are worth more than one, why not fire-bomb a few executives to liberate a shedful of chickens?

I should be clear, Peter Singer does not support the militants of the movement.  He argues that a respectable philosopher cannot be held responsible for the violent fringe of his movement.  I tend to think that his sincerity is irrelevant.  His reduction of human value to a number in a utilitarian equation makes it easy for people to start doing sums whose answers he might not like, but which are a consequence of the arithmetic he introduced.

These are not, in any case, fringe groups.  The Socialist government of Spain elected by Al Qaeda are going to give human rights to chimps.  The FBI admits that animal rights and eco-rights groups present the number one domestic terror threat in the US today.  They managed to disrupt the New York Stock Exchange where even Islamist terror had so far failed.  In the UK they are waging pitiless campaigns, and humans are suffering and dying for the delays in research they cause.  After the Buncefield explosions, I was talking to a (non-militant) eco-enthusiast.  He casually observed that even if it wasn’t a terror attack, he knew plenty of Earth-Firsters who would have considered it an appropriate action to take.  It will only be a matter of time before the arson and intimidation spread into terror spectaculars.  Once you have concluded that humans are nothing special, it is axiomatic that you must aim for the ruin of their pride.

Anti-Economists are more familiar: we see them in demonstrations whenever the WTO meets.  Yet familiarity should not blind us to their danger.  These are people who see the problem and want to move in exactly the wrong direction to solve it.  Listening to world music and wearing hand-knitted jackets from Nepal, they imagine that they can preserve their access to amusing native folkways by hampering international trade.  Rather, they succeed in keeping their fellow human beings poor to preserve their own sense of moral superiority.  Turning the Global South into a theme park for the display of their broad minds and bleeding hearts, they never notice that the people there might prefer to be treated as people rather than the equivalent of actors in Mickey and Goofy suits.

Anti-Economists make matters worse even as they draw attention to the problem, undermining the moral standing of the West and then blaming us for our faults.  Worse still, in turning from rational debate, they lead a growing rejection of scientific advance, the glory of Western civilisation.  They are also gaining influence, especially among the Christian churches.  If the Church of England used to be the Tory Party at prayer, it now goes on its knees before the Anti-Economists.

Progressive Anti-Humanists and reactionary Anti-Economists seem unrelated.  Yet the progression of Anti-Humanism leads toward a world in which not only do we not experiment on animals, but we do not eat or interact with them in any way.  No steaks, no hunting, no pets, no leather.  Beans and soy milk all round.  It is a call to advance by retreating into primitivism.  At the same time, its prioritisation of a mythical ‘balance of nature’ over a world tailored to our wishes tends to reject capitalist economic activity in favour of torpor.  At these points, it intersects with the Anti-Economists, who worship poor, primitive lifestyles (blaming their civilisation for the poverty of such lives, they nevertheless insist that the poverty be left as it is) and reject the fruits of capitalism.  Anti-Economists love to visit with the mud-hutters.  They hope to spread such ‘wise simplicity’ as far as they can, both by ending the creation of wealth and talking up asceticism.  Both movements seek to impoverish our lives.  They are beating a path back to ninth century servitude while talking up any economic ideology that rejects capitalism.


The Thumb of the Fist

Lying across the other threats is the intellectual sickness weakening the West almost to death: Relativism.  This doctrine is neither progressive nor reactionary, but simply catatonic.  All cultures are equally valid.  There are no real virtues, only systems of values and (yawn) if you want (yawn) you can choose what you like (zzz).

Relativism is the fifth column in the war for civilisation: the bookworm eating the library from within.  Those who follow the way of non-judgement cannot stand up for anything except not standing up for anything.  Appalled at such anarchic principles and the moral chaos that is its natural consequence, people will reach for alternative ideologies.  Take John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban.  Raised as an ultra-liberal relativist, he found his spiritual home trying to kill his countrymen in Afghanistan.  The refusal to indoctrinate produces intellectual orphans, denied their identity and driven to find certainty elsewhere.  The four fingers of the closing fist are waiting to grab them.  First they doubt.  Then they question.  Then they convert.  Those who resist the temptation are too weak to fight back.


The Closing Fist

The fist is closing.  Anti-Humanists and Anti-Economists are burning off the best of the West: its ability to enrich its members and its sense of their inalienable individual value.  As these riches go up in smoke, our civilisation does indeed begin to seem bankrupt.  Neither cause can do more than destroy, but the hybrid ideology coalescing from Socialist nostalgia and resurgent Islamism is ready to restore order and solve everything via collective enslavement.  Meanwhile the cult of Relativism primes more and more souls for the call of these dangerous faiths, while weakening our capacity to repel their charges.

Five separate challenges are curling together to make a fist.  They will deliver a blow that shakes the foundations of liberty.  They are linked by a rejection of key Western values: individuality; reason; truth.  They offer instead moral titillation as an ethical strategy.  Followers of each of these challenges are suffused by a warm and righteous glow.  They believe they must be doing right because it makes them feel good.  Unfortunately, such sub-Randian rationalisation is just a sophisticated form of selfishness.  I give that beggar some money and feel just swell.  He spends it on drugs and dies of an overdose, but who cares?  I’ve already moved on.  Real virtue involves sacrifice and hard choices, not exercises from the handbook of self-esteem.  Calling all choices equally valid sounds fine right up until the moment when your lifestyle kills you, as it did Foucault.  Or someone else, as with Sidique Khan and his mates.

What can the West do?  Recognising the problem would be an excellent beginning.  Relativism has been king of the castle for decades.  Now Anti-Humanism is creeping into the general conversation.  Most attempts to discuss animal rights terror begin with a grovelling acceptance of the terrorists’ arguments before trying to refute the conclusion of violence.  A general disgust of Man and his depredations is a common theme in art and dinner party conversation.  Similarly, sending money from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor countries is Gordon Brown’s idea of how to make himself seem more cuddly.  The super-rich campaign against the systems that made them so.  Meanwhile Communism is looked back on not with revulsion, but a grudging sense that those Russkis had their hearts in the right place, and Islamism positions itself as the last bastion of moral integrity: a hands-off policing strategy, plus all the Jew-baiting you can stomach.  Seeing the collection of ideologies that are gathering against us not as a curiosity but a fact worth investigating is to reconnect the debate to reality.  Asserting the peculiar value of every human life, the existence of truth and the power of reason will do for the second round.  Ultimately, we must be prepared to champion freedom against collectivising answers that will seem so plausible and inevitable when citizens who have been taught the wickedness of self-reliance can no longer control their own actions.  Wordsworth wrote,

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.—In everything we are sprung
Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

We need to rediscover such confidence, and reject the calls to slavery now clamouring over our heads.  The fist is closing, and the blow will fall.