I am right now listening to Michael Medved interview Bruce S. Thornton, a colleague of Victor Davis Hanson, and author of The Wages of Appeasement. Here is a Front Page interview with Thornton. Excerpt:
MT: Could you talk a bit about one of the recurring themes among the three historical examples you write about in the book: a crippling failure of imagination “to see beyond the pretexts and professed aims of the adversary and recognize his true goals, no matter how bizarre or alien to our own way of thinking”?
BT: We in the West assume our ideals and goods are universal. They are, but only potentially: there are many alternatives to our way of living and governing ourselves, most obviously Islam and its totalizing social-political-economic order, sharia law. Suffering from this myopia, we fail to see those alternatives or take them seriously, usually dismissing them as compensations for material or political goods such as prosperity or democracy.
Worse yet, our enemies are aware of this weakness, and are adept at telling us what we want to hear, and using our own ideals as masks for their own agendas. Just look at the misinterpretations of the protestors in Egypt and the Muslim Brothers, not just from liberals but from many conservatives, who have been duped by the use of vague terms like “freedom” or “democracy.”
An important factor in this bad habit is our own inability to take religion seriously. Since religion is mainly a private affair, a lifestyle choice and source of private therapeutic solace, we can’t imagine that there are people so passionate about spiritual aims that they will murder and die in the pursuit of those aims.
I would add to these excellent points the observation that the failure to take religion seriously is one of the worst mistakes of the New Atheists. Being both atheists and leftists, they cannot take religion seriously. (By contrast, most conservative atheists, though atheists, appreciate the value and importance of religion in human life.) The New Atheists do not appreciate how deep reach the roots of religion into the human psyche. And so, like the benighted John Lennon, they "imagine no religion" as if their imagining picks out a real possibility. They fancy that a change in material conditions will cause religion to evaporate. Pure Marxist folly, I say. Man does not live by bread alone. He wants more, whether or not there is anything more. He wants meaning and purpose, whether there is meaning and purpose. He is a metaphysical animal whether he likes it or not, a fact to which every mosque, temple, church and shrine testifies.
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