The Secular Conscience

Yesterday, I posted the first question I posed to philosopher Austin Dacey author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. My second question was deliberatlely provocative.

TRISTERO: Your second main theme is that liberals have refused to, or been reluctant to, make public appeals to conscience on many of the great issues of the day – abortion, stem cell research – which you argue are deeply moral issues. In general, I couldn’t agree more. Our blog along with the liberal blogosphere is an attempt to address issues in all their dimensions and we often write principally from a moral point of view.

In an example to which you devote much space, you regard as shameful what you perceive as liberal indifference to, or even acceptance of, what you call the “antithesis” of a liberal, secular society, namely radical Islamism. You state that “the mainstream left wing remains more fixated on embarrassing local conservative parties than on protecting women and religious minorities in the Islamic world.” While I would agree that many liberals, indeed many Americans, need to better understand Islamism and Islam, and – as always – liberals need to denounce any human rights abuses wherever they occur – it simply is not the case that liberals have been indifferent to the dangers of radical Islamism. You will be hard-pressed to find a liberal with a good word to say about Wahabbism, bin Laden, or the political leaders of Iran. A refusal to buy into the overwrought demonization of the Bush administration does not equal support for Ahmadinejad or a lack of support for the secular students in Tehran.

One problem with liberals speaking out more often is that prominent moderate Muslims and dissenters, eg, Hirsi Ali, have allied themselves with the very architects of the Bush/Iraq catastrophe, who we view as morally and intellectually bankrupt and discredited. Given that liberal accommodation with American neoconservatives simply will not happen, what do you propose liberals do to woo Hirsi Ali and others out of the neocon orbit and into ours?

(By the way, lIberals have not embarassed the neocons. They have brought shame to themselves. They advocate and pursue a fundamentally absurd and utterly catastrophic foreign policy. It has already led to dreadful horrors perpetrated on all sides and to a net rise in extreme Islamist influence. That the movement conservatives and neocons denounced liberals who opposed them as traitors, anti-semites, and terrorists – I can give you links if you like – pales in comparison to the slaughter and misery they’ve caused in the Middle East, but has not endeared them to us. )

DACEY: [Tristero], if we liberals feel that our values call on us to do nothing more than _to refrain from endorsing bin Laden_, then we have fallen into a moral gutter. I could, of course, name lots of liberals with nice things to say about sharia law (Rowan Williams and Noah Feldman for example). To say nothing of the liberal cottage industry churning out assertions that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam. As though Mawdudi, al-Banna, and Qutb had been oppressed– preemptively–by Bush policies, where in truth they were revolting against the very idea of the secular, open society.

But the worst and deadliest liberal sins here are sins of omission. Last year it was my privilege to be involved in the Secular Islam Summit, a gathering of Muslim and Muslim-born dissidents and reformers. The event was reported–remarkably fairly–by Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and other Arabic-language outlets. Who showed from the national U.S. press? The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, U.S. World & News Report, and the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck. Where were the liberal opinion-makers? The Washington Post waited two weeks and then ran a piece parroting the Council on American Islamic Relations, which had been smearing the participants and denouncing the meeting as “anti-Muslim” and “illegitimate” before it had even begun.

Just look back at the reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the so-called liberal press. Instead of being welcomed as a natural ally in the defense of women’s rights and freedom of expression, she was called an “Enlightenment fundamentalist.” The question liberals should be asking themselves is, why was it the American Enterprise Institute, and not the Soros Foundation or the National Organization for Women, who first extended a hand to Ayaan when she fled Europe?

How can liberals woo Ayaan and other dissidents and apostates? How about refusing to see the world through the ideological prism of Bush-versus-us politics? How in the world does it help the neoconservatives if people feel free to tell jokes about Islam? How does it further the Bush agenda if the 19-year-old Iranian Mehdi Kazemi is saved from deportation from Europe to Iran, where he will surely face execution for being gay? If liberals won’t join in the battle of ideas, others will.

As the prologue to my question implies, I don’t agree with Dacey’s answer. Rather than post my own long response, I’d rather read yours. But I will say this.

To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, an effective confrontation and alternative to bin Ladenism can never be Bushism or neo-conservatism. Nor do I think any liberal finds it morally, intellectually, or tactically acceptable to forge political relationships with the men and women who dreamed up and advocated the disaster of the Bush/Iraq war.

Austin Dacey is right that sometimes superordinate goals should trump more parochial concerns. But there are limits, no matter how critical the goal. In this case , the differences between liberals and neocons are not parochial but fundamental. They cannot be bridged. Rather neoconservatism can, should, and eventually will be returned to the margins of American political discourse. It is then, and only then, that the very serious problems posed by radical Islamism will be addressed by the United States in a serious fashion.