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“Defeat The Modernity”

Yglesias points to this Romney nonsense and makes some good points.  Part of the presentation is hilarious (and disturbing in its ignorance), as he describes the goals of “terror groups” with “common enemies and common goals.”  One of these common goals is: Eliminate Israel and defeat the Modernity. Is the Modernity related to the Singularity?  Is […]

Yglesias points to this Romney nonsense and makes some good points.  Part of the presentation is hilarious (and disturbing in its ignorance), as he describes the goals of “terror groups” with “common enemies and common goals.”  One of these common goals is:

Eliminate Israel and defeat the Modernity.

Is the Modernity related to the Singularity?  Is it the name of a band?  If you take away the definite article, the statement is reduced to absurdity (and its connection with hostility to Israel is bizarre anyway, as if the two “goals” were intimately related), because then it becomes “defeat modernity,” which is to say literally, “they want to defeat the present time.”  But they live in the present time, so they would also be defeating themselves, which seems unproductive. 

Clearly, “the Modernity” doesn’t mean anything.  Yes, taken abstractly, “modernity” (not capitalised) entails a number of habits and attitudes, and many of the habits of Western modernity are quite alien to the habits of Islamic modernity (obviously) and modern Muslims of a certain stripe are especially put out by Western modernity and the works of modern Westerners.  To say that they want to “defeat the Modernity” is like saying that this was the goal of the Ottomans or the Self-Strengthening Movement or any of the anti-Western forces in the rest of the world that sought to appropriate certain elements of modern understanding and technique for their own purposes. 

This is all worth getting into a little bit, because as much as anti-modern reactionaries such as I will talk about the evils of modernity, taken in the abstract, there is no one modernity and I think reactionaries understand this perhaps better than some.  When some of us refer generically to “modernity,” we are referring very specifically to the effects of certain philosophical and political ideas within Western civilisation over the past 300-500 years.  Modernity really does mean something else in other parts of the world.  

There are modern mentalities significantly different from medieval ones, and there are postmodern mentalities different from the modern.  Despite much heavy breathing about jihadi “medievalism,” Salafist jihadis are not interested in the reality of the world of medieval Islam, because so much of this period is filled with periods of anarchy, defeat and religious change that they would not want to return to in any case.  Not entirely unlike the most radical Reformers, the only thing worth returning to is the pristine, original period at the very beginning.  Everything after that is decline and corruption.  Once religion has been part of history for too long, the thinking has seemed to be, it is sullied by its contact with people and their efforts to reproduce and interpret the religion.  Such people are interested in an imaginary reconstruction of what pure Islam must have been like, while at the same time relying on all of the traditional foundations that, according to their own criticism, would have to be the product of later, degenerate ages if they admitted the reality of historical change and evolution of doctrine.  This is the perfect expression of a modern mind and a typical characteristic of “mass man”: the one who does not understand the system in which he lives, does not know how it came about, wants to overthrow this or that part of it and yet believes at the same time that he is entitled to the continued flow of benefits from the very structures he wants to destroy. 

Yglesias makes sense when he says:

Nor does asserting that Islamism writ large represents an attempt to “defeat the Modernity” seem like an especially cool, calm effort to face reality. Indeed, if we were faced with a genuinely anti-modern movement — an Islamic version of the Amish, say — we presumably wouldn’t need to have any quarrel with people like that or anything in particular to fear from them.

Quite right.  Islamic fundamentalism is, like all fundamentalisms of the last four or five hundred years, actually quite modern in its repudiation of inherited institutions, customs and the accretions of time.  Romney’s description of the “conservative view” of the conflict we are in seems as if it is the half-digested musings of someone (or his staff) who doesn’t actually know anything about these things but has learned the proper buzzwords.  One of the favourite words of many on the right these days is modernity, which they apparently embrace in all its folly and which is supposed to be the thing we are fighting to defend against “medieval” outsiders.  The absurdity of putatively traditionalist people lauding the virtues of modernity, which is right up there with conservatives calling themselves classical liberals on the list of things that annoy me greatly, should be clear to all.

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