• The Enlightenment Armed: secularism by the sword

    I confess that I have been remiss in what I set out to do at the start of this blog, which was to make a strong point about the difference between the continental and the Anglo-American Enlightenment-Liberal systems.  The need for this came up in a recent exchange with Ed Clint.

    Apparently in my previous post I seemed to imply that I thought Clint advocated passivity against the Jihad, or would have done so toward the Nazi empire.  I meant to imply no such thing, just in case anyone else gets the wrong picture.  What I meant to say is that simply passivity, on the behalf of liberal Muslims, is just not good enough.

    However, in the exchange something else came up, namely the following quote:

    Moreover, the keys to peace don’t seem to lie in judicious use of bombs or rhetorical attacks on an ideology. Western Europe, Japan, and even the US haven’t secularized to the degree they have through ideological conquest or use of force. There have been no humanist armies invading the map, no atheist missionaries and orators battling to secure millions of converts.

    In discussing this, I may run the risk of sounding, as before, as dismissing him as a starry-eyed pacifist.  I have no such intention; I just think that his world view is far more optimistic, trusting in a higher stock of human decency and rationality, in short more American than mine.

    The second sentence is simply wrong.  Up until quite recently, Western Europe was ruled by various forms of autocratic clerical fascism.  Those did not simply fade away; they were destroyed by extreme military force.  If we cast our memories back further, secularism reached France in the aftermath of the Revolution, and in Germany was forced onto a country by Frederick the Great.

    This collapses completely when we get to Japan.  Japan ceased to be a theocracy – headed by a living God – because the United States waged a brutal war that killed tens of millions and ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian cities (which admittedly did house some military installations).  The secularisation at gunpoint of Japan was a matter of conscious choice.  Here is Gen. Douglas MacArthur:

    Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments.

    What about the United States then?  The United States is unique.  It was the result of world-historical circumstances that cannot be repeated; its founders were all men of the Enlightenment who were able to found the first, and only, truly secular republic on earth.  However, they were able to do this, while even men of vision like old Fritz failed in Europe, because of one, nasty little secret: smallpox.

    White settlers were better armed and had better science when they reached India and Africa, and they are still the minority in both places and were also thrown out as the rulers.  The United States similarly had large numbers of native peoples, but these had a fatal weakness.  They were unable to withstand diseases the settlers brought with them, and which the settlers often consciously used as weapons.

    Between 90-95% of the native Americans were wiped out by the plague, and what was left were tribes so broken that they could be driven off or eradicated with ease.  This is important: the US founders were capable of building a society from scratch because they faced a now empty land.  They did not have to learn how to overthrow existing clerical rulers, or to drive off civilisational predators.  However, in its founding it made one evil compromise, and permitted slavery to take root.  Slavery might have been ended by the stroke of a pen, then and there.  Yet, once it was installed, no amount of rhetoric or pen-work helped; it could only be torn out at the price of total war.

    To face these facts is not to like them.  I don’t like them at all, or what they imply.  I certainly didn’t ask that total ethnocide be the necessary precondition for the world’s only Enlightenment republic, or that Enlightenment must have its warriors as well as its writers.  But the world isn’t always what we want it to be.

    Category: Uncategorized

    Article by: The Prussian