Stephen Roney's Blog, page 27

Was Manifest Destiny Really Such a Bad Idea?

Report has leaked that, at their recent meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Justin Trudeau argued that Trump must not impose his proposed 25% tariff on Canada, “because it would wreck Canada’s economy.” To which Trump reputedly responded, “if the Canadian economy can’t survive without ripping the US off for $100 million a year (or whatever the figure was), maybe you should just become the 51st state. You could be governor. 
And everyone is taking this as a joke.
Is it?
And is it a bad idea?
Let’s consider it from Trump’s point of view. People, including me. have been assuming that his threat of 25% tariffs was just a gambit to open negotiations. But Trump has also said he wanted to finance the government with tariffs rather than income taxes. So the high tariffs fit in with his plan. Why would he sacrifice it for Canada’s sake? America first!
Trump is also concerned with legacy. He has already floated the idea of buying Greenland. High tariffs could indeed force Canada to plead for union. Trump would have more than doubled the land mass of the US, outdoing Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana purchase, and surely earning him a place on Mount Rushmore.
(Much easier to do, by the way, with modern AI and 3-D modelling. They are already being used to carve stone decorations for building exteriors. Not the major undertaking it was for the president already there.)
Annexing Canada makes huge sense for America’s national security. It secures vast strategic resources and control of the Arctic, more urgent with global warming. Canada is incapable of securing the Arctic for itself. By joining forces, on the other hand, America becomes stronger and better able to defend our joint interests.
Canada has, after all, been a useless military ally in recent years, underspending on its defense and relying on the US taxpayer to defend it. Why should the US put up with this?
The argument against annexation is that Canada is politically more left-leaning than the US; so giving 40 million Canadians the franchise would be bad for Trump’s Republican Party. But this might not deter Trump personally, since he is not running again. Moreover, Trump has shown an ability to alter the electoral map, and appeal to new coalitions of voters. He has won over most of the working class; of the rust belt; he has drawn Hispanics--all formerly considered bedrock leftist constituencies. He seems to me to already be in progress of winning over Canadians. “Maple MAGA” is becoming a thing. Why not? The Republican party is being remade in Trump’s image. Trump’s agenda has really never been either clearly traditionally left or right.
One might worry that there would be much unrest among the local population if the Americans took over. It would have to be voluntary. But the tariffs could do a lot to convince Canucks of the need.
Why, given all this, would Trump back down on his tariffs? As a personal favour to Justin Trudeau?
Where's that laughing emoticon when I need it?
Now let’s look at it from the point of view of Canadians. Why not? What is the argument for Canada remaining independent? After all, the two countries share the same language (but for Quebec), the same culture, the same geography, the same history. Nova Scotians have at least as much in common with the people of Maine as they do with those of Quebec; or as Maine does with Louisiana. It has often been observed that British Columbians have more in common with, and more common interests with, the people of Washington or Alaska than with Newfoundlanders. Anywhere else on the globe we would probably be one country. 
The sole reason Canada became independent was loyalty to the British crown and the British connection. The British connection evaporated for all practical purposes in 1932 or so. Since then, there is only the sentimental attachment to the Royal Family. 
How much is that worth?
Canadians, if they joined the US, would not lose self-government. That is the beauty of the federal system. Canadians can continue to tend to their own Canadian affairs within the wider union. Rather, joining the US gives greater assurance of self-government. As we have seen recently, Canadian governments can go rogue and trample human rights. The Americans have a longer and culturally stronger tradition of democracy; with union, in such cases, the feds could step in. Just as Eisenhower sent in the national guard to desegregate Arkansas back in the day. Moreover, with greater ease of movement, Canadians could more easily escape a repressive local or regional government. One could always easily move to Florida, say, or some other given state whose policies suit you better. You can do this now to a more limited extent within Canada, but the choices are far fewer. Historically, Americans have always found it easier to move about than Canadians have.
Joining the US gives a greater measure of self-government in another sense too. It is a reality that who is in power in the US, and what policies they pursue, matters vitally to Canadians; arguably more than their own government. This is true for the entire Western world, but to Canada more than anyone. Nevertheless, as things stand, Canadians have no vote on who is in power in Washington, or what policies they pursue. We would surely be better off with representation.
And what are we paying for independence? Canadians have almost always made less than Americans on average, and everything costs more. Opportunities are much fewer for those hoping to rise to the top of their profession or business, without full access to the vastly larger US consumer and job market. We are paying a huge premium merely for a sentimental attachment to the British monarchy.
And if Trump imposes a 25% tariff across the board, that premium becomes dramatically greater. We already seem skidding into Third World status under current government policies; this would cast the die.
Let's see: Canadians, how about better pay, more opportunities, lower taxes, cheaper food and housing, and easy escapes from winters in Florida?
Canada is surely too large to be admitted as one state. Granted, the population is about the same as California, the biggest current state. But with its land area, Canada could soon have a much larger population. Besides, you really must recognize the distinctiveness of Quebec.
Ten states might be too generous. Five makes the most sense: BC, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces.
The assimilation of Canada might start a trend: for many of the same arguments apply for the rest of the English-speaking world. Once, it might have made sense to have separate governments, because of distances and poor communications. Today, everyone in Australia knows everything that is going on in Canada, instantly, and everyone in the US knows and cares about everything that is going on in Britain. Separation is increasingly artificial and undesirable.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

What We Lose by Losing Our Christian Faith

 

Jesus exorcises the Gerasene/Gadarene demoniac

The latest column by my left-wing friend Xerxes was unremarkable. But I found some of the reader comments on a previous column most interesting, and concerning. They illustrate the current prejudice against ethical monotheism.

“It's easier to hate a monolithic category of people (‘Christians’) than to admit that many people in the category actually believe in much of the same liberties and freedoms these anti-religious folk do.”

That is an attempt to play nice with Christianity, but it is pretty off base. Our concepts of human rights and personal freedoms come from Christianity. Christians necessarily believe in them more than non-Christians. John Locke based his philosophy of human rights on the Bible and the story of creation in Genesis; the Declaration of Independence argues that our rights come from God. Human rights and human dignity are based on the concept of free will as the divine spark in mankind.

The decay in belief in Christianity is the great threat to our liberties. 

Note how well human rights were observed in Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or Nazi Germany; all anti-Christian regimes.

On paganism—condemning missionary activity in the Americas as cultural imperialism:

“All the people whom they encountered, who had a different belief system, were deemed to be pagan.  The word pagan is a word that is used to demean, belittle, and negate the value of the other.  By labelling these people as ‘pagan’ it enabled the colonizers to abuse, enslave, and slaughter these newly encountered humans.  By calling them pagan it took away their humanity.”  

 To which Xerxes responds: “I apologize. ‘Pagan’ was a shorthand way of saying ‘other,’ and I should have been more careful.”

“Pagan” is a critically meaningful term. Christians do not refer to Muslims or Jews as pagans; nor do Muslims refedr to Christians or Jews as kaffirs, the equivalent Arabic term. “Pagan” refers to the older, more primitive shamanic practices which have been supplanted by the great universalist religions.

And polytheism/shamanism is as unlike religious faith as darkness is to light, magic is to science, or madness is to sanity. Asians, still familiar with both, will immediately insist that shamanism is not a religion; Buddhism or Christianity are.

Paganism not only allows, but endorses and requires, such practices as human sacrifice, infanticide, self-mutilation, and slavery. The pagan gods are not morally good; they are at best indifferent to mankind, and usually hostile. Recall the myth of Prometheus, the concept of hubris, and the many rapes of Zeus.

In India, where there is residual paganism (although devotional Vaishnavism is now dominant, and an ethical monotheism) the British had to suppress human sacrifice by sects like the Thuggi, suttee (the immolation of widows), and the caste system. These are things that would be unthinkable under ethical monotheism; but considered a necessary religious observance by pagans.

This is why the ancient Hebrews felt they needed to exterminate the Canaanites, and forbid even dining with them. This is why the Quran says you are supposed to kill a kaffir on sight. Paganism is fundamentally immoral.

And this is why paganism quickly evaporates wherever one of the ethical monotheisms makes contact. The pagan gods are demons; monotheisms exorcise them. So people flock quickly to the new faith; it is their refuge from demons. This is why Christianity, under active repression, spread rapidly to take over the Roman Empire, and then Europe beyond. It was their reputation for successful exorcisms. This is clearly documented in the ancient manuscripts; and in the New Testament. The order of exorcists was larger in the early church than the priesthood. This was indeed Jesus’s commission to the apostles: to go about casting out demons. Which were common, clearly, in the largely pagan society of ancient Palestine. Especially in non-Jewish areas, such as among the Gerasenes.

For the same reason, Christianity spread rapidly in the Americas, with little opposition, once it arrived. It protected against the demons of the night. In South India, Saint Francis Xavier was able to personally baptize 50,000 people in ten years, despite the requirement to first be properly catechized. Today across Africa, exorcisms are common, and Christianity is sweeping the continent.

Unfortunately, with the waning of Christian commitments in North America and Europe, the demons are returning. So we are seeing a rising tide of mental illness, addictions, infanticide, child mutilation, self-mutilation, pedophilia, and suicides. 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last….

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Interest Groups

 

I keep hearing left-wing commentators lamenting that women, or blacks, or the working class, are foolish to vote for Trump, because they are “voting against their interests.” Anna Kasparian, recently gone independent, laments during an interview that “neither party any longer represents my interests.”

This is not how a good person talks.

A good person, and a responsible citizen, does not vote for their self-interest. They vote for what they believe is best for the country as a whole. They vote for the policies that they believe are just.

It is a striking testament to our depravity that this keeps passing without comment.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The MAGA Dance

 

I see on X a post by someone mocking Trump supporters in Staten Island for dancing to the tune of “YMCA.” 

“You see how stupid Trump supporters are? They don’t realize they’re dancing to a gay song!”

Nice self-own. Why does he think Trump supporters would have any objection to dancing to a “gay song”? He thinks there is something wrong with being gay.

Trump and many of his supporters oppose transgender ideology. But any educated person knows there is no relation between being gay and being “trans”; and no common interest. In fact, their interests conflict. JD Vance has pointed out that “normal gays” are as disturbed by the trans agenda of sex change, child transitioning, and men in women’s spaces as anyone else. There is a common argument that it is often gay kids who are put through the puberty blockers and sex change surgeries—instead of allowing them to be gay.

The commentator also does not realize—and pundits recently all seem to make the same mistake—that the Staen Island crowd is not actually dancing to “YMCA.” They are dancing to that tune; but it became the Trump anthem because in 2020, gay musician Ricky Rebel put out a viral version with new lyrics. “YMCA” was replaced with “MAGA.” 

Young man
Walk away from the hate
We're all human
And we don't segregate
Just like women
Help make America great
We are all
In this
Together
Our colours
Are red, white and blue
And they stand for
Every wo-one of you
And together
Here's what we're gonna do
We're gonna make
America great
Everybody sing
M a g a
M a g a-ay

It is this that the crowds are dancing to. Some in the Staten Island video were actually signing the letters M-A-G-A on the chorus.

The left is kept in the game by “low-information” voters, who never stray beyond the legacy media for their views. This is an echo chamber, allowing them to grow so sure of themselves that they do not even check their assumptions with so much as an online search.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

AI and I

 

Image of cat and fiddle, with cow jumping over moon, by Dall-E

I’m a bit of a techie. I was developing educational software for the Ontario Ministry of Education back in the early eighties, and taught desktop publishing at George Brown College. I’ve only recently let that side of me take a rest. So I’m naturally fascinated by AI. 

The reality is that it is coming at the speed of a freight train on the main line whether we want it or not. We need to figure out what this means. 

It is going to make a lot of things cheaper. It is a dirty secret that AI can already diagnose illnesses more accurately, let alone more quickly, than an MD. So much for the doctor shortage. So much for the spiralling costs of Medicare. The vast majority of legal work can be replaced by AI: most of it is drawing up contracts and looking up cases in the law books. Perfect for computerization. Accounting too should be easy for AI to take over. So the most expensive things in the economy may soon be available to everyone for pennies.

Just yesterday, for the first time, I used AI to prepare my monthly student assessments. Saved a lot of time, and with only a little tweaking, it was perfectly accurate and acceptable. I’ve started to use AI instead of Google for online search, and this is again much more efficient.

Elon Musk and other high tech honchos predict that soon, with AI, there will be essentially no need for anyone to work, and we will nevertheless have a high standard of living. There will be little need for money. So that’s all good.

There are certainly also dangers from AI. 

First off, if AI can take over all the white collar jobs, and robots can take over all the blue collar jobs, things may be cheaper, but there seems to be no way left for us to generate any income.

My fantasy has been that, with AI taking over all the soulless occupations, we will be freed for purely creative work, for the arts.

But in its latest iterations, AI can produce quite competent art, and poetry, and stories, and videos. So is there any market left for humans even here?

I argue elsewhere that the human element here remains conceptually irreplaceable; just as a robot girlfriend would never be a legitimate alternative.

Whoever programs AI can also program it with their own political biases; can program it for totalitarian purposes, or in their own favour. In theory, we can always pull the plug; but if done well, especially over time, this could become impossible to detect. A matrix.

This is why it is important that it become and remain open source.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Still, Why Poetry?

 

Emily Dickenson

I have argued that we need poetry to restore meaning to our lives; to address and evoke truth, good, and beauty.

Still, poetry is hard. Why can’t truths just be spoken as simple declarative sentences?

Firstly, we can really only speak declaratively about material things. Anything beyond that requires metaphor. For example, the word “spirit” actually means breath or wind. “Psyche” actually means butterfly. “Anger” means pain. We have difficulty understanding abstract concepts, spiritual experiences, or emotions, because of this; because we have no way to objectively verify that we mean the same thing by the words we use.

This, without poetry, shuts us off from all the meaning of life, and all meaningful communication with others.

Poetry and the arts, but especially poetry, is necessary to express anything really important clearly. 

There is a second reason why we cannot speak plainly. Some people are invested in lies. They have something to hide. Truth terrifies them.

Jesus says in the New Testament, explaining why he speaks in parables instead of saying thing directly:

“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”

People who are purely materialist and bestial in their concerns will crucify you.

Therefore one speaks in parables.

Emily Dickinson:

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” 

The Buddha gives a somewhat similar warning in the Fire Sermon. 

Your house is on fire. Your children are in the house. You cannot simply shout that the house is on fire. They will panic. They will not know what to do. Instead, you lure them out with toys.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Countering Population Collapse

 

Almost without missing a beat, the world has gone from a supposed emergency of overpopulation to an emergency of population decline. Nobody seems to have stopped to point out that all the experts were wrong. Calamitous population decline projections are the justification for all the mass migration. But even if it is a good idea, it is not a long-term solution. Populations are due to collapse everywhere: we will run out of immigrants in the rich countries.

Governments like that of France and Hungary are trying to reverse the trend with cash payments and tax breaks for women who have children. This is expensive, and not likely to be enough.

The underlying problem, I believe, is feminism. The entire idea of feminism was that women were to abandon their traditional role as mothers and go out and make money instead. This was always a matter of robbing the future for the present. It was always going to hurt us a generation or two down the line, as child-bearing and child-raising was devalued.

But what non-draconian practical measures could be taken now?

First, the current immigration policies are insane. Most of those flooding in, legally or illegally, are young men. We do not need men if we are to keep our population up: men do not bear children. We need young women.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,

It's President Kennedy callin' me up.

He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"

I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,

Anita Ekberg,

Sophia Loren."

Country'll grow.

Second, instead of demanding equal pay for equal work, we need to encourage extra pay for sole breadwinners with children. This was the old system: it was why men were paid more than women. It made it possible for mothers to stay home and have babies. It was also more profitable for the employer: a sole breadwinner is more stable, less likely to leave for another job, and can devote more time and energy to his work.

We might also do something about the need for and high cost of post-secondary education. This is intuitively a big incentive not to have children: they are too expensive. Trump has proposed a national on-line free university with degrees certified by the federal government. This may help. We could do the same in Canada.

On the other hand, free post-secondary education has done nothing to prevent birth rates from plummeting in Germany or Scandinavia. 

We must do something about no-fault divorce and child support. The current system is a major disincentive for men to marry and have children. Do so, and they have put a financial noose around their necks. Any woman can pull out at any time, and take all the children, half his income and assets with no responsibilities on her part.

It is perhaps to prevent such situations that, in Islam, a wife cannot divorce a husband; only the husband can initiate a divorce.

We might cap child support, and give whoever makes the larger income in the marriage, sole discretion whether to pay it, or take custody of the children. Otherwise we have slavery.

Unless both parties consent, we should require proof of abuse, adultery, or abandonment in order to get a divorce. Without this, marriage is a uniquely unenforceable contract. Either party can leave the moment it is to their advantage to do so. This is not an atmosphere in which it is safe to raise children.

A no-brainer: abortion should be illegal.

We must also go back to respecting the family as a self-governing unit. We have also overburdened parents by not allowing them to discipline their children—for example, anti-spanking laws—while at the same time holding them legally responsible for the actions of their children. Parents have lost custody for not agreeing to having their child transition to a different sex. Schools ask kids to spy on their parents; and reserve the right not to advise parents of what their children do at school. A woman was recently arrested for allowing her ten-year-old to walk to the store alone. 

This is a tough one: I know only too well that families can be abusive.

But there is a solution to this, which does not discourage adults from having children. Bring back the orphanages. Bring back the residential schools. End child labour laws. End minimum wage laws. Open the monasteries and convents. All of these were paths for children to escape from abusive families; and for adults, too, who wanted to escape parenthood. They have been systematically closed off. We need to open them again. This would dramatically lower the risk of bearing children.

Are orphanages or residential schools cruel? Is child labour for low pay cruel? What if we compare them to the alternative: an abusive family, never being born, or resorting to crime or child prostitution? 

No doubt many children suffered in orphanages and residential schools: but when one trained economist did a comparative study, he actually found that life outcomes for kids raised in orphanages in the US were actually better on just about all measures than for the general population.

Of course, doing all this will require about a 180 degree pivot in our thinking. We are always too slow to change our course. But then, look how quickly we pivoted from alarm at overpopulation to alarm at underpopulation. Look how quickly we pivoted from mass immigration being beyond criticism to alarm at mass immigration. Or from alarm at global cooling to alarm at global warming. 

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Why Poetry?

 

John Keats.
Up into the 1960s, poetry sold better than prose fiction in Canada. Now nobody buys poetry books. What happened?

To be fair, all the other arts are also moribund. Yes, a kind of prose fiction and a kind of movie and a kind of pop music sells, but it is all entertainment, not art.

Meantime, we have seen spiraling rates of depression, homelessness, drug use, suicide.

These two trends are related.

Poetry, and the other arts, bring meaning. Man needs meaning. He does not live by bread alone. Poetry takes the brute events of life and makes them meaningful. 

Beauty is the perception of meaning.

By beauty, I do not mean mere prettiness. I mean what can produce the aesthetic experience, the OMG moment.

True beauty requires the sublime. It must convey some deep truth. 

It must also be in line with moral goodness; it must be just.

The three transcendentals are the irreducible source of all value: truth, goodness or justice, and beauty. This is what poetry, and art, expresses; and leads the reader to, like a torch held high, like a lighthouse on a hill.

The existence of each transcendental implies the other two. You can’t ever have just one. Beauty requires truth; truth is always beautiful. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth: that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Similarly, an injustice or evil act cannot be beautiful. 

This is what life is for. We are created to seek the transcendentals, and to create art.

In recent generations, we no longer produce or appreciate poetry because we have given up the search for truth. Worse: we are in full flight from truth. Modernism was a cry of despair, that we had lost access to truth and beauty somehow; all the old verities were gone. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” We kept waiting for Godot, and he did not come.

Postmodernism is something else: it is a declaration that there is no truth, no beauty, and anyone asserting such a thing should be condemned and hounded out of polite company.

This view is the death of art. It is giving up on meaning.

And suicide, drug addiction, depression, mental illness, and a war of all against all are the inevitable consequence. If there is no meaning, everyone just grabs what they want for the moment.

This is why I write: to try to shine a beacon through this wasteland of relativism and despair. To set off a flare.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Democracy Has Come

 

Leonard Cohen died November 7, 2016, the day before Donald Trump was first elected. Cohen’s son Adam says his father predicted Trump would win. Everyone thought Clinton would. Why did he think so?

Like any great poet, Cohen was a prophet. He saw deeply into the zeitgeist; he could see which way things were heading. In 1992, he put out an explicitly prophetic album, “The Future.” In in he traced two possible paths: a dark one: “I’ve seen the future, baby. It is murder”; and a hopeful one: “Democracy is coming—to the USA.” It was, clearly, a warning.

It does seem America and the world has been going down the dark path traced in “The Future”:

Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order
Give me crack and anal sex…

This sounds like the obsession with power relationships and self-indulgence that underlies woke culture.

Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder

That hardly needs comment, does it?

On the other hand, surely Trump’s election was and is the second path, the path of light. Cohen saw that the US was, as of 1992, not truly democratic. That new truer democracy is the “populism” Trump and Elon Musk’s X represents.

It's coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet

This predicts a return from multicultural idolatries to traditional American culture. Make America great again!

It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.

The holy places—sounds like a predicted religious revival. The more so since he also says it comes “From the staggering account/In the Sermon on the Mount.” In “The Future,” he laments, “Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima!” 

And this stanza also sounds like a rejection of feminism and sexual politics, the great example of the woke power dynamics.

He also says true democracy is coming from “the ashes of the gay.” This might mean gay martyrdom. Or it might mean gay politics become a spent force.

Democracy is, Cohen says, coming to America first partly because of America’s cultural dominance, partly because the US system is flexible. It has “the machinery for change.” And partly because “It’s here the family’s broken.” This sounds like a need to return to “family values.”

I wonder if Cohen died in peace, seeing clearly that the US and the world was going to choose the better path after all.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Truth about Religious Extremism

 

Religious extremist

Friend Xerxes has just put out a column based on an old headline: “Half of Canadians consider religion damaging.”

He agrees. Religion is a source of harm; religious certainty is a bad thing.

So how did almost half of us arrive at such a novel and wrongheaded idea?

I trace it to 9/11 in particular, and to a lesser degree the troubles in Northern Ireland. As he notes, accusing Buddhism or Judaism or Quakerism of being harmful seems ridiculous. But surely Islam, with the terrorism? And then, we cannot cite only Islam, we’d be accused of racism; so we think as well of the Irish troubles, and generalize, and say “religion.”

The misperception is exacerbated by the press constantly pushing the notion that Islamist  terrorists are “extremists”: the problem is supposedly that they believe their religion too fervently. They are too sure of things.

But if a too-devout belief in Islam is the problem, why was the Muslim world not generating terror until relatively recently? Why were Muslim states relatively sanguine under European/Christian rule, French, English, and Italian, during the 19th and early 20th centuries? Why were significant Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, and Parsi minorities able to live in peace and harmony in Muslim-dominated areas for centuries, until just recently? The Muslim Brotherhood was formed only in 1928; Al Qaeda in 1988; ISIS in 2006. Even the Palestinian resistance to Israel was not Islam-based until recently: the PLO was Marxist; the more radical PFLP was led by a Christian. Is it plausible that the Muslim world has recently become more certain of their faith? What dynamic would have caused this?

It is obviously the opposite: increasing globalization and increasing secularism in the dominant West has caused Muslims to doubt, to lose certainty. This has caused the growing violence.

When one looks at the background of actual Muslim terrorists, one discovers they do not come from a religious background. Childhood friends or older acquaintances always remark that they were never devout, nor from a religious family; they were recently “radicalized.” They are commonly Westernized, often educated in the West. Bin Ladin himself was an engineer. Al Qaeda ran houses of prostitution for their fighters.

Living and teaching in the Arabian Gulf, I found I could count on goodwill from any student or fellow faculty member with a full beard; this showed they were a committed Muslim. Any hostility to the foreigner or non-Muslim or Westerner that there was came from the clean-shaven secularized locals.

People similarly overlook, when considering the Irish Troubles, that Sinn Fein and the IRA were Marxist organizations, hostile to and generally condemned by the Catholic Church. The association with religion may have seemed clearer on the Protestant side; but anyone can declare himself a Protestant minister and form his own denomination, stealing the prestige of religion for his political agenda. 

This is a simple trick, used by Jim Jones, purely a Marxist, for his “People’s Temple,” or by Fred Phelps for his “Westboro Baptist Church.”

Islam has the same problem, as, like Protestantism, it lacks a recognized central authority. Any fraud can declare himself an Imam.

Nor, historically, can religion explain the longstanding tensions in Ireland. The English were just as determined to colonize Ireland and suppress its culture before the English Reformation. Religious difference was never more than an excuse.

What does religious extremism actually produce?

Those most committed to their religion, most convinced they know the truth with certainty, become friars and monks. Catholic, Orthodox, Hindu or Buddhist. Not a lot of violence coming from that cloister. Among Protestants, the most devout would be the Amish and the Mennonites. Not a lot of blood in the streets. Also, in their way, the Salvation Army.

It is only when you have doubts about your world view that you feel threatened by the mere existence of opposing views. Only then are you likely to resort to violence to impose your views. Relativism, not conviction, is the problem.

The poets, who see most deeply into the zeitgeist, rightly saw this at the outset the 20th century. Many of them lamented the rise of relativism and the decline of religious conviction. Kipling wrote: 

For heathen heart that puts her trust
  In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
  And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard;
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord

In 1897, he saw the growing reliance on scientism instead of religion inevitably leading to dark places. His prediction came true in 1914, and in 1917, and in 1939, and in China, Cambodia, Korea, and too many other places since.

Yeats wrote, in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Who is the falconer, the centre, but God? What is the ceremony of innocence, but conventional religion with its rituals?

And the harm is not limited only to violence. I blame relativism, the notion that there is no ultimate meaning to life, for the growing epidemic of drug use, suicide, depression, and mental illness. 

The media and the clerisy have done humanity untold harm with their propaganda campaign against “religious extremism.” Religious extremism is just what the world most desperately needs.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.