Conflict of Civilisations

          I have trouble buying in to the idea that the Islam versus the West thing is even news, let alone a crisis. I mean, the two approaches to life have been rubbing up against each other, usually at least somewhat uncomfortably, for more than a thousand years. All that hysteria about civilisational conflict bringing it all down on everybody everywhere seems to me to be so much barking at the moon – a grandiose missing-of-the-point by many and a cynical sleight-of-hand diversion by those with an eye for coming out on top. Neither Islam nor the West are going to go away or, in your lifetime, rule the world.

          A much more important conflict, it seems to me, is the ongoing battle between the Enlightenment and such anti-Enlightenment world views as theocratic medievalism, tribalism, and plutocratic globalism.

          Now, that’s a bunch of fancy words, isn’t it?

          Which is part of the point, right there.

          The Enlightenment philosophical orientation found its niche amongst clusters of thinkers in the Islamic world from the 8th through 12th centuries, before conquests and war lords crushed it, and later flourished amongst a small and conflicted, but influential, elite in Europe and North America in the 18th century, before plutocratic groups co-opted it to a large extent.

          Although its political clout is mainly symbolic, the source of a motherlode of empty rhetoric and downright hypocrisy, the Enlightenment orientation has remained robust amongst a minority of the world’s politically active population.

          So, in both Islam and the West people devoted to stuff like human rights and civil rights and meaningful democracy and freedom of expression and parochially neutral, secular civil authority continue to struggle, with varying degrees of success, with people devoted to obedience to traditional authoritarian power structures, sectarianism, cultural dominance, and parochial theocratic influence or control over civil authority, a struggle for the allegiance of the politically inactive majority.

          Disclaimer: the following is an elitist perspective.

          It seems to me that people need at least a certain level of intelligence to understand and embrace fully the Enlightenment way of thinking and acting. The global divide, basically, is between the brainboxes and the nitwits, with those in the grey areas between these extremes leaning one way or another, as the pressures within their cultural and personal environments move them.

          Human stuff being the way it is, exceptions to this rule abound in practice, such as psychopathic, narcissistic brainboxes who amorally employ lip-service to Enlightenment values in order to humbug their way toward wealth and power, and dimwits who from experience can no longer be fooled into thinking that shit is really shoe polish.

          So, redouble your efforts to expand the reach of enlightened secular humanism as a major weapon in the battle against jihadists and white supremacists and their ilk in the Islamic world and the West – and just about everywhere else. Just remember, however, that most people everywhere aren’t going to get it, at least not in the way you mean it.