A REAL ISLAM POLICY FOR A REAL AMERICA
Here is the speech, edited and polished, that I gave at the Preserving Western Civilization conference in February.
A REAL ISLAM POLICY FOR A REAL AMERICA by Lawrence Auster
Preserving Western Civilization Conference
Baltimore, Maryland
February 8, 2009
To deal with the crisis facing our civilization, we must be both realistic and imaginative. The realism part consists in recognizing how bad our situation is. The entire Western world is at present under the grip of the modern liberal ideology that targets every normal and familiar aspect of human life, and our entire historical way of being as a society.
The key to this liberal ideology is the belief in tolerance or non-discrimination as the ruling principle of society, the principle to which all other principles must yield. We see this belief at work in every area of modern life. The principle of non-discrimination must, if followed consistently, destroy every human society and institution. A society that cannot discriminate between itself and other societies will go out of existence, just as an elm tree that cannot discriminate between itself and a linden tree must go out of existence. To be, we must be able to say that we are us, which means that we are different from others. If we are not allowed to distinguish between ourselves and Muslims, if we must open ourselves to everyone and everything in the world that is different from us, and if the more different and threatening the Other is, the more we must open ourselves to it, then we go out of existence.
This liberal principle of destruction is utterly simple and radically extreme. Yet very, very few people, even self-described hard-line conservatives, are aware of this principle and the hold it has over our society. Instead of opposing non-discrimination, they oppose multiculturalism and political correctness.
But let’s say that we got rid of multiculturalism and political correctness. Would that end Muslim immigration? No. Multiculturalism is not the source of Muslim immigration. The source of it is our belief that we must not discriminate against other people on the basis of their culture, their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion. This is the idea of the 1965 Immigration Act, which was the idea of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all of humanity: all discrimination is wrong, period. No one in today’s society, including conservatives, feels comfortable identifying this utterly simple idea, because that would mean opposing it.
To see how powerful the belief in non-discrimination is, consider this: Prior to World War II, would any Western country have considered admitting significant numbers of Muslim immigrants? Of course not; it would have been out of the question. The West had a concrete identity. It saw itself as white and in large part as Christian, and there was still active in the Western mind the knowledge that Islam was our historic adversary, as it has been for a thousand years, and radically alien. But today, the very notion of stopping Muslim immigration is out of the question, it can’t even be thought.
What would have been inconceivable 70 or 80 years ago is unquestionable today. A society that 70 years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting large numbers of Muslims, today doesn’t dream of reducing, let alone stopping, the immigration of Muslims. Even the most impassioned anti-Islamic Cassandras never question—indeed they never even mention—the immigration of Muslims, or say it should be reduced or stopped.
You don’t need to know any more than what I’ve just said. The rule of non-discrimination, in all its destructive potentialities, is shown in this amazing fact, that the writers and activists who constantly cry that Islam is a mortal danger to our society will not say that we ought to stop or even reduce Muslim immigration.
Such is the liberal belief which says that the most morally wrong thing is for people to have a critical view of a foreign group, to want to exclude that group or keep it out.
The dilemma suggests the solution. What is now unthinkable, must become thinkable; what is now unsayable, must become sayable; and ultimately it must replace non-discrimination as the ruling belief in society. I know that this sounds crazy, utterly impossible. But fifty or a hundred years ago it would have seemed crazy, utterly impossible, that today’s liberalism with its suicidal ideology would have replaced the traditional attitudes that were then prevalent. If society could change that radically in one direction, toward suicidal liberalism, it can change back again. It’s not impossible.
To understand how this unnatural and anti-human liberal belief came into existence and gained such power over us, we need to understand the natural and human order that the liberal belief is attacking.
I would like to quote the Book of Ecclesiasticus:
In much knowledge the Lord hath divided [men], and made their ways diverse. Some of them hath he blessed and exalted, and some of them hath he sanctified, and set near himself: but some of them hath he cursed and brought low, and turned out of their places. (Ecclesiasticus, 33)Every beast loveth his like and every man loveth his neighbor. All flesh consorteth according to kind, and a man will cleave to his like. (Ecclesiasticus, 13.15.)
This passage beautifully expresses the true order of the world in which we live, the world in which men have always lived, but which modern liberalism denies and demonizes. That world can be explained in terms of two dimensions, which I call the vertical axis and the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is the relationship between ourselves and that which is above us and below us, that which is better and worse, that which is more true and less true, the relation between God and man. The horizontal axis is the relationship between entities on the same level, between different people in the same society, or between different societies or different cultures.
On the horizontal axis, the question is: how similar are things to each other? How different are they from each other? How well do they get along? On the vertical axis, the question is, what are the standards by which we live? What is good behavior, what is bad behavior? To what extent are we following the good, to what extent are we falling short of it or turning away from it?
I would add that one doesn’t need to be a Christian or a religious believer to know that this hierarchical order of the world exists. There are many aspects of the order of being that can be grasped through natural reason alone.
What I’m saying here is nothing fancy or metaphysical, it’s something that all people know by common sense. We live within these two dimensions—the better and the worse, the more like and the less like—in everything we do.
That is, we did live within them, until modern liberalism came along and said that it’s wrong to discriminate between higher and lower, it’s wrong to discriminate between better and worse, it’s wrong to discriminate between like and unlike.
Modern liberalism says that there cannot be a truth or a standard higher than ourselves by which our actions are judged, because that would make some people better in relation to that standard than other people.
In the same way, modern liberalism says that it is evil to believe that some people are more unlike us than others, because that would also be a violation of the liberal principle that all people are equally like us.
The equality principle of modern liberalism says that unassimilable immigrants must be permitted to flood our society, changing its very nature. It prohibits normal authority such as the authority of parents and teachers over children. It banished the very idea of a morality that men ought to follow. And even God is banished if he’s a God who has any claims on us.
This is the ubiquitous yet unacknowledged horror of modern liberalism, that it takes the ordinary, differentiated nature of the world, which all human beings have always recognized, and makes it impossible for people to discuss it, because under liberalism anyone who notes these distinctions and says that they matter has done an evil thing and must be banished from society, or at least be barred from a mainstream career.
This liberalism is the most radical and destructive ideology that has ever been, and yet it is not questioned. Communism and big government liberalism were challenged and fought in the past. But the ideology of non-discrimination, which came about after World War II, has never been resisted—it has never even been identified, even though it is everywhere. What is needed, if the West is to survive, is a pro-Western civilization movement that criticizes, resists, and reverses this totalistic liberal belief system that controls our world.
I said at the beginning that we had to be realistic about the Islam problem. That meant understanding the forces that at present make it impossible for us as a society to discuss Islam honestly, let alone to do anything about it.
Realistically, from where we are now, a solution to the Islam problem is so far away it’s as though it were on another planet, another world, where liberalism has lost its stranglehold, allowing non-liberal things to be said and done.
Now it’s not only by conservative resistance that liberalism might be stopped. Liberalism may collapse of its own contradictions and irrationality. Liberals may slowly move to more realistic understandings. A recent example was a column by Ralph Peters in which he said that the entire nation of Afghanistan, all Afghans, are radically incompatible with ourselves. Given that Peters in his basic outlook is a vehement liberal, constantly waging war against bigotry and condemning the whole continent of Europe as incipient Nazis, that was a amazing thing for him to say. If that kind of understanding of the real differences between Muslims and ourselves expands, then even without liberals explicitly renouncing liberalism, they may perhaps move far enough away from liberalism to allow America to begin to adopt sensible policies with regard to Islam.
And other things may happen, acts of God, disasters, economic depressions, or unprecedented terrorist attacks, that may shock society out of its liberal attitudes.
But we don’t know that any of those things will happen, and we cannot count on their happening or on their having the effects we may hope for. Our task as Western patriots is to argue against modern liberalism, showing its falsity and destructiveness, showing that modern liberalism is wrong not just in its excesses, but in its fundamentals, because it is incompatible with our continued existence as a society.
And in that process, all of the attitudes which modern liberalism enforces—the suppression of discussion about Islam, the suppression of discussion about immigration, the suppression of discussion about race differences and their significance—will be weakened, because each of those prohibitions is based on the idea that discrimination is the greatest sin.
Now that we have acknowledged the currently existing reality, and the tremendous change of thought that would be required to change it, let us take the imaginative and hopeful leap to a different reality, a reality in which society might actually do something about Islam rather than surrender to slow extinction at its hands.
What would be a real Islam policy for a real America? If there were a non-liberal president of the United States, and if he had enough support in the media and the Congress to get his program through, what would he do, and how would he propose it?
So now, as I begin to speak as that imaginary president might speak, let us imagine that we have leaped from our present planet of liberalism, where a solution is impossible, to the planet of reality. It may seem infinitely remote, but it is no farther away than a change in thought.