Spengler: +Rowan a "monster"

If you're not reading the comboxes, you miss stuff like this remark left on the last Appeasing Archbishop thread. The author is Spengler, the Asia Times Online columnist (whose most recent body of work can be read here):

Dr. Williams nowhere mentions in his speech the endemic threat of violence against non-compliant Muslims, starting with honor killings, something you have written about recently. Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali warned Jan. 7 that "no-go" zones were emerging throughout Britain which are dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. The British authorities can't protect Muslims who wish to exercise their rights as Englishmen in conflict with Muslim community standards as it is. Not surprisingly, Nazir-Ali is one of Williams' most embittered critics.

The use of violence to compel Muslims to obey community standards rather than British law that it is impossible to imagine that a country vicar would be unaware, let alone the Archbishop of Canterbury. That makes Dr. Williams, in my judgment, a monster of satanic hypocrisy, loyal neither to his own church nor to British freedom.

In effect, the British state (and some other European states already has agreed to share its monopoly of violence with Muslim leaders, and Williams' effort to rationalize this through an abstract discursus on religion and law is the foulest thing I have heard a major Christian leader say in my lifetime.

The thing I was getting at in my previous post on this matter is that our Enlightenment conception of the state doesn't account for a religion as alien to Western culture as Islam. In the US, I think it safe to say that none of the Founders, when they established the state's constitutional neutrality on sects, didn't have it in their minds that one day, Islam would be on these shores. The point is, it is always going to be difficult in a secular democracy to negotiate a balance between the state and liberty, both communal and individual. I generally come down on the side of religious liberty over state coercion, which is why I would make an exception for Catholic Charities in Boston, allowing them to ignore Massachusetts laws on gay civil rights with regard to adoptions. I think the benefit to one party does not outweigh the harm to the other party, and to the interests of society. Others would draw the line somewhere else, obviously. What I want to highlight, though, is that we choose where to draw the line in law based on what has elsewhere been described as our collective "metaphysical dream" -- that is, our fundamental conception of reality. It is much easier for Western nations to grant room for movement for Christian and Jewish sects, because post-Enlightenment secular values evolved from the Judeo-Christian metaphysical dream. Islam, though, derives from a very different metaphysical dream, one that in my view the West cannot assimilate or accomodate, unless Islam were to become far less Islamic.

So, the West is now left with a way of thinking that leaves it philosophically weak in terms of generation opposition to the Islamic challenge within its own borders. Frank Beckwith, also in the comboxes, understands this:

Every generation must live with the framework of assumptions they've inherited, the understanding of human nature that is taken for granted, and the idea of freedom and truth passed on to them. The reason why cultures exist is because none of us is fully informed, our judgments are always partial, and we typically define "harm" so narrowly that we convince ourselves that what we want is identical to the Good.

Maggie Gallagher is right: politics and law, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If the questions of who and what we are are the nature of the good life are answered with wildly different and contrary ways, there is no civilization left. There is simply a modus vivendi or a tyranny. This is why the promise of tolerance--on matters of fundamental truths--can never, ever be sustained.

[snip]

Poor Rowan Williams. He thinks that by allowing oppression and torture between consenting adults that he will be spared. But little does he know that when he places in the law a principle that allows others to freely diminish their own humanity, he diminishes his own humanity by default. For if my dignity is contingent upon my will, then I am not intrinsically valuable. I have become a master at the cost of becoming a slave. The Enlightenment is complete. Feel better now.

But to a believing Muslim, sharia does not diminish one's humanity, but rather helps fulfill it. You see the problem. Oil. Water. I do believe I'm beginning to understand what the prominent British journalist meant when he told me two years ago that we would live to see real religious war in the UK this century. He was as cool as a cucumber, but seemed resigned to this unhappy prophecy.

Incidentally, Ruth Gledhill of the Times of London reports that someone in British public life has finally agreed with +Rowan on sharia. Alas, it's Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Muslim organization. Lie down with dogs, Cantuar, and wake up with fleas.