Saturday, July 15, 2006
MARX AND MUHAMMED
Lately I've been feeling the need to clarify things to myself -- to try to restate as clearly as I can ideas that I've been developing for quite some time. One of these is the parallels and distinctions between two of the greatest challenges that the Western Enlightenment has faced: Marxism and Islam. Although the former began later in time, the nature of the challenge seems to be clearer to more people. Both Marxism and Islam present claims to possess complete world-views that are distinct from and superior to that of the liberal Enlightenment. Both developed into potent geopolitcal forces that resulted in the need for protracted struggle.
But there is a set of extremely significant distinctions between these two threats to the liberal world. These distinctions arise from the philosophical foundations of the two challenges. Marxism is a set of assertions about the world and how people should arrange their lives and relationships with each other based on a materialst philosophy that, at least in theory, accepted the rational scientific method as the final arbiter of truth or falsehood. Marxism made predictions about the material world and, most importantly, promised specific material results in the material world to a broad group of people (the proletariat).
Islam could not be more different. It rejects science as the arbiter of truth and makes no very specific promises to improve the material conditions of life for its adherents. Instead, it projects the reward for submission to Islam in an imaginary afterlife. The truth of this assertion cannot be inspected or tested for accuracy. After 60 years of communism in the Soviet Union, Russians could make a determination that Marxism wasn't delivering on its promises. But when the reward for adherence to an all-consuming world-view is placed beyond the ability to test or question, real conditions in the world cannot be used as a yardstick to check whether one is being sold a bill of goods.
This difference makes the nature of the protracted struggles faced by the West against these two fundamental challenges very different. In many ways, there was a basic premise inherent in the policy of containment taken against the communist world: Wait long enough and the truth of the superiority of liberal societies will become apparent to the world. But a policy of containment against Islamic imperialism cannot hope for such eventual success. Since Islam does not make any ambitious proposal to improve the lot of its followers in the real world, but only in an imaginary afterlife, no amount of waiting can undermine its claim to truth.
UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers; thanks for stopping by. Please take a moment to check out the rest of my blog.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:39 AM
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