Villainous Company

During the riots in Paris, I did a lot of thinking about tolerance:

Over and over we are told we must be tolerant. We must try to "understand" the root causes of black anger, jihadi anger, or whatever anger-du-jure is currently in vogue.

To conflate tolerance of destructive or criminal behavior with tolerance of differing skin colors, religions, or cultures is absurd in the extreme. It also, in the end, undermines the goal it seeks to uphold: tolerance of those who are different from us by linking unacceptable behavior to race, religion, ideology, or ethnicity.

Our often-quixotic quest for 'diversity' and 'tolerance' is rapidly producing a society that has precious little use for either virtue. Willful blindness is not tolerance any more than diversity of skin color without intellectual diversity represents true willingness to explore differences in how people live and think. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks believed that without a well-developed notion of civic virtue, no society could long survive. In the intervening centuries, the notion of what constitutes the civil society has continued to evolve, for the most part moving from a notion of collective duty or virtue to one where only the individual's rights are recognized. Sadly, the idea that an individual has any duty to society seems to have fallen into disfavor.

One of the most disturbing byproducts of the tolerance movement has been the emphasis on multicultural studies. Rather than teaching the kind of universal ideas that serve to unite cultures, we narrow our children's minds to a world defined by race, gender, and ethnicity, encouraging them to believe we are defined by what divides us rather than what binds us as a nation. The problematic aspect with "identity politics" is that it falsely conflates identity with race or gender, leading young people to think that when society fails to tolerate their unacceptable behavior it has attacked them and by extension, their race, creed, gender, or ethnicity.

Paradoxically, this type of cultural determanism can only help to underscore racial prejudice. How can students, regardless of how many times they are told Islam is the 'religion of Peace', fail to notice that violent Islamists are in fact anything but peaceful? If they are taught that we are all products of our culture, will this make them more prejudiced, or less? And how can we hope to encourage moderate Muslims to stand up and be counted when we ourselves encourage a tribalistic view of human nature in our own public school curricula?

In a world full of competing interest and identity groups where individualism is prized above all, how long can our freedoms last?

True tolerance does not mean that we become blind to the differences between us, or that we gloss over them with speech codes that forbid us to voice unpleasant or upsetting ideas. Tolerance does not even mean that we don't judge others in our hearts. A society cannot compel private opinion, nor should it seek to. All that is required for tolerance in a civil society is reasonable conformance of outward behavior to the rule of law and social custom.

So with all this tolerance floating about in American society, why are we all so divided and angry? I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reminded us that our values do not come free of charge. It is one thing to argue ideas in the abstract, and quite another when men are fighting and dying in lands far away. I think that when men like Flemming Rose have the courage to make a stand for the ideas we just like to mouth on July 4th, it is an uncomfortable reminder that great ideas arouse opposition: that our false tolerance and the ideals which allow us to practice it are in deadly conflict with each other. Why did he do such an irresponsible and outlandish - such a profoundly intolerant - thing?

The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people's beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

Conveniently ducking the disturbing question of what made this largely peaceful, if occasionally angry and very unpleasant, debate possible, Frances Fukuyama dismisses his argument:

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

So now even democracy, that glorious dream that once animated us, is no longer worth the candle. Fukuyama lays out his argument carefully - very carefully. His bets are thoroughly hedged. Over and over again our progress in Iraq is referred to as a "perceived failure": this way, whether we eventually win or lose, he cannot truthfully be said to have been proven wrong, can he? We are told neocon overoptimism about Iraq sprang from the end of the Cold War, as though somehow a sinister group of men studiously looked at a decades long, ruinously expensive conflict and failed to notice it took that Berlin Wall more than three weeks to fall. A veritable cakewalk: no wonder we were so blithe, going in!

How on earth, he asks, did such men come by the preposterous notion that terrorism was linked to a lack of freedom? Nevermind that several recent studies, one from the prestigious (and hardly conservative) JF Kennedy School of Government have concluded exactly that. Fukuyama inexplicably discounts the messy aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, claiming this convinced the neocons that the transition to democracy in Iraq would be "easy and painless" (ironically a claim belied by several Presidential speeches made before the war).

He is equally dismissive of the idea (supported by a growing number of polls) that a majority of Arabs now want democracy and see it as something that can work in their culture:

What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

Fukuyama's "give them McDonald's and Costco, and only then ask of them democracy" is a profoundly cynical take on global politics. This sort of "those backwards yobs don't understand the meaning of freedom" argument flies in the face of the bravery shown by thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who have braved terrorist violence repeatedly to go to the polls. Strikingly, Fukuyama's entire assessment of our "perceived failure" in Iraq seems to come down to simply this: it took longer and cost more than originally anticipated.

Interestingly, he doesn't argue that we haven't managed to hold peaceful elections, or to overthrow two brutal regimes. He fails to argue that Iraq or Afghanistan aren't better off, or that their people don't want democracy. To do so would fly in the face of the available evidence.

Instead, he argues that we were overambitious in trying to spread our ideals to others, and in many ways I find this the most interesting argument of all in light of the recent turbulence in Paris, Denmark, and all around the world in response to the Danish cartoons. What these events have clearly shown is that a large enough segment of the Muslim population is truly believes they have the right to force the rest of the world to kneel to their view of things, and they are willing to use violence to enforce that interpretation.

The question then becomes: just how far is the Western world willing to extend "tolerance"? Will we continue to falsely conflate tolerance of unacceptable behavior with tolerance towards Islam? Will we, out of fear, tolerate the intolerable, and in so doing surrender our freedoms?

As much as I found Fukuyama's invocation of the Cold War unconvincing, it reminded me of another instance in which the Cold War was compared to the current conflict. In his recent history of the Cold War, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis made the interesting observation that most nations, when threatened, tend to contract into isolationism. But the United States has since the time of John Quincy Adams, perhaps due to some innate sense of imperviousness from attack, expanded when threatened.

Gaddis quotes numerous examples to demonstrate that, contrary to the shocked depictions of modern pundits, the notorious three pillars of the Bush adminstration's Iraq policy: unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony are not only not unprecedented but are well-grounded in American history and tradition.

More than ever, America seems to be a nation divided against itself. And more than even, it would seem that Western values: ironically, the very same values that allow us to bicker and argue so freely with each other - are under attack. The question is, how will we respond? How do you fight the idea that some men are entitled to suppress your right to think and say what you please by violent action? That if a minority of men don't want democracy, they are entitled to strap bombs to young men and send them off to terrorize innocent civilians? You fight that idea with another idea: the one that Western civilization was founded upon. The idea that all men are entitled to freedom, no matter what race, creed, or color they may be.

The question is, have we become so mired in multiculturalism that we no longer believe in that transcendant truth? Is this no longer a principle we will stand as one to defend? Have we become so spoiled as a nation that we can no longer see the value in our national motto: E Pluribus Unum? That we see in it, not a promise of greatness, but a stifling uniformity?

Will we, as Al Gore did in 1994, willingly mistranslate it now, making it, "Out of one, many"? If so, I fear the old maxim, "divide and conquer" will once again be proven all too true. Great nations, like great men and women, must stand for something and that stand rarely comes without cost.