Crunchy Con: June 2007 Archives

I had lunch today with a three Christians, one from Europe, one from the Middle East, one from Southeast Asia. Here is a summary of our conversation:

The Middle Easterner: We are being terribly persecuted. Our people are being killed and deprived of their rights in every way. Many of us are emigrating to escape. The government does not protect us. Everyday life is martyrdom. Our biggest challenge, aside from survival, is how to love those who kill and persecute us. We don't understand why Christians in the West, and the Western media, doesn't tell our story.

The Southeast Asian: Christianity is formally permitted, but our people and our clergy face constant persecution, and we are so relatively small in number that there's very little we can do except endure.

The European: Our churches are virtually empty. We are tolerated because we are irrelevant. Christianity is seen as a hobby, but that's it. We look around at all our magnificent churches, and see that the faith survived all kinds of immense hardships and challenges over the centuries, but Christians made it. Now, in our time, Christians are completely free to worship as they like, and everyone has all their material needs taken care of, but there is a real question of whether we are going to make it. Wealth and freedom is doing to Christianity in Europe what centuries of suffering and privation and persecution did not.

And there's me, the American, feeling rather ashamed of myself. Perhaps I should have told these people about the war on Christmas in my country. [That's sarcasm, please note.]

Yesterday I saw the Hagia Sophia church for the first time. I think it's hard for any Christian to go into that massive former church and not be nearly overwhelmed by melancholy. I thought about how for nearly a thousand years, Christians prayed and sang and celebrated the Eucharist there, and must have thought it would last forever. Then, in 1453, it ended, with the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Hagia Sophia became a mosque -- and then, under the Turkish Republic in 1935, it was turned into a museum. I'm sure Muslims must feel the same sense of melancholy visiting the cathedral (formerly a mosque) at Cordoba, in Spain. In fact, any sensitive human being seeing the ruins of a once-great civilization cannot fail to be struck by the impermanence of everything human.

We also visited Dolmabahsce Palace, a 19th-century pile built by an Ottoman sultan in the European style. It's shockingly luxurious, and even Eurotrashy. The guide said the sultan wanted badly to be European. He also said that despite the luxury of the palace, the Ottoman Empire was badly decaying at this point in its history. The Ottomans didn't know it, but they were in their last days. Had things gone differently for them, though, we might see this palace today as an expression of a confident culture able to absorb other influences. Today, it looks like a desperate bid to keep up appearances, and even an example of cultural self-loathing.

Over at the Dallas Morning News blog, I'm contending with a colleague over the question of cultural change and immigration. He's a big supporter of the immigration bill, and paints many immigration skeptics as merely fearful of the change that will be brought by Hispanic immigrants. My point, as you will no doubt have guessed, is that it is not at all unreasonable to fear change. Americans are so wedded to the myth of progress, which entails a belief that change is always good, that we moralistically assume that those who wish to resist change surely have discreditable motives (irrational fear, bigotry, etc). This is how the Progressive ideology works, especially in the media (and by "progressive" here, I don't mean only leftists; G.W. Bush is a progressive in this sense).

Dr. Husain Haqqani of Boston University was here the other day, and gave a lecture that dwelled in part on the susceptibility of the Muslim world to rumor-mongering and conspiracy theory. He spoke at one point about how the Ottomans banned the printing press from their realm after it was invented in Europe. They called it "un-Islamic." Thus did they unwittingly condemn Islam to fall far behind the West in terms of technological and economic development -- a catastrophe that the Islamic world is still suffering terribly from. In retrospect, it would appear that the Ottomans made a terrible decision. But credit them this: they understood how revolutionary that technology would be if they welcomed it into their own culture. They made a decision that was defensible in terms of maintaining cultural stability, and certainly understandable.

Don't take me to say that I approve of the decision to ban the printing press! What I'm trying to say, though, is that we today often fail to appreciate what people, and peoples, lose through the process of modernization, which today includes globalization. I told Dr. Haqqani at dinner that I thought that unless the West truly came to terms with the psychological and cultural trauma of modernity on the Islamic world, we would never really understand why they're so afraid of it, and we'd never be able to answer their objections, and help them come to terms with it. He agreed, and said that Westerners have to imagine what the rampant Western materialistic culture celebrating sex and money looks like to a pious Muslim. He thinks, "Is that what will happen to us if we modernize?" and quite understandably fears it.

I mean, look: if you are a Cherokee warrior sitting atop your horse in the 19th century, watching wagon trains of European settlers rolling into your territory, how useful would it be to have your anxiety over what the coming of these immigrants might mean for your culture dismissed as bigoted paranoia? We can answer that question because we know what happened next. We can also come up with historical examples of new immigrants reinvigorating an ossified and decaying culture, or making a vibrant one even more so. Then again, we can only know that these instances worked out well, or didn't, in retrospect. As Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be lived forward, and understood backwards." The experience of history should tell us to tread carefully when it comes to accepting cultural change. There are perils to rejecting it imprudently, and to accepting it imprudently. In the context of American culture, though, we are far more tempted to err on the progressivist side.

Going to Dan Larison's site to check out his take on the debate, I find that he's posted another solid riposte to Jonah Goldberg's latest criticism of crunchy conservatism. Here's his second one, and here is his first. I've decided not to reply to Jonah, simply because I don't see the point of having to explain yet again that my endorsing the sentiment "It takes a village to raise a child" doesn't mean I endorse government child care, but rather credit the recognition that parents need to have the support of a morally sane and healthy community to support them in their mission to raise morally sane and healthy children. We've been over this before, again and again. But I appreciate that Dan does yeoman's work for the cause. If you're interested in this ongoing debate, you couldn't do better than to read Dan's words on the matter.

This week, Kurdish terrorists killed eight Turkish policemen on Turkish soil. The Turks are furious over this sort of thing. There's a column in today's Turkish Daily News (the column isn't yet posted to the newspaper's website), in which the columnist gives full voice to a sentiment I keep hearing here: the Turks are sick and tired of these terror attacks, which they believe are orchestrated from Kurdish terror bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan -- and of Washington's dilly-dallying over Kurdistan. They are reading signs from Washington that in the matter of the Kurds, the Turks are more sinner than sinned against. It really is hard to understand why Washington is playing such a dangerous game with such an important ally. Turkish patience is running out -- and it certainly seems from here like the recent deployment of Turkish tanks on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan is no empty threat.

In a shocking show of insensitivity to Turkish voters, the Republican candidates held their debate while Turkey slept. So I didn't get a chance to watch it. Oh, the humanity. So: Who won, who lost, who surprised, who disappointed?

Hello from Istanbul. A few minutes ago I met in the hallway of the hotel a foreign-born Muslim woman who is not part of the conference, but with whom I struck up a conversation. Turns out her husband, also a...

Reading Ross's blog just now, I see that Jonah G. says that Bush's failings come because Bush was too crunchy-con for his own good, so who am I to complain? (See here for the link to Jonah's post, and Ross's...

We just ended our opening session at my conference in Istanbul. Because of security reasons, I've been asked not to give too many details at this point, but I can speak generally about what was said. We had briefing us...

The U.S. military says the surge isn't working. Apparently we've got nobody we can depend on in the Iraqi forces to help us. Excerpt:When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would...

Greetings from Istanbul. Guy I met on the plane over and I are talking about Turkish politics. He says his brother is in intelligence, and was just telling him that there's an awful lot of buzz in intel circles now...

As regular readers might remember, I will be leaving on a business trip for Istanbul this weekend, and intend to spend next week blogging from there as I'm able. I was reading the other night Orhan Pamuk's memoir of growing...

A Chestertonian offers a powerful memory of experiencing the old Mass in the 1950s. Excerpt:It’s not easy for me to separate these things, and I’m not sure I want to. They are the way things are in my imagination, and...

So I'm sitting up with Matthew, the 7-year-old insomniac, at 4 a.m. this morning, searching for anything worth watching on TV. Nothing but televangelists, telenovelas and infomercials. But I did find a World War II documentary on A&E. In fact,...

"I really hope this debate doesn't get down to name-calling, and finger-pointing." -- George W. Bush, on live TV just now, on the immigration bill."[W]e’re going to tell the bigots to shut up.” -- GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, an immigration...

I saw part of Diane Sawyer's interview this morning with Sarah Cooksey -- that is, Mrs. Andrew "TB Andy" Speaker. What a self-centered, boo-hooing twit. From the ABC website:Cooksey and Speaker's May wedding on the Greek island of Santorini was...

Did you read the other day about the gay hotel in Australia that has won the legal right to exclude straights and women? I have no problem with that. If the owners want to serve an exclusively gay male clientele,...

Powerful Peggy Noonan column today, calling on conservatives to throw the president overboard. Actually, she says he's thrown us overboard, so let's act like it. Excerpt:For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered...

Go ahead, ask me how excited I am by Matthew's insomnia....