Going wobbly on Modernity and the West

There is a divide within our own little blogging community that mirrors a larger divide in that meta-entity that we like to call the "West" over our responses to the provocations of those who would represent Islam to the West. Peter Burnet sums up one side of the argument like this:

Congratulations Skipper/Harry, you have successfully used all that formidable brainpower to completely dehumanize the "other". It's a great 20th century tradition that keeps life from becoming too subtle or boring. No need to trouble ourselves with difficult strategic and intercultural issues anymore, or to judge and question ourselves. Tyrannical regimes and the people they tyrannize are now one and the same and equally guilty. And they are bad Muslims to boot, so let's just roll!

Harry's response:

Not dehumanize, humanize.

If what you call bad Muslims and I call good Muslims stopped patronizing the aggressive imams, stopped bowing at the Saudi-financed mosques, stopped giving a nod and a wink to the Muslims peddlng the Secret Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, things would settle down quickly enough.
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Besides, as Skipper says so often, is is not ought. Whether the infidels ought to lash out and heap up hecatombs of Muslims once (some) Muslims have succeeded in their drive to inflict insufferable pain on the infidels or not is irrelevant. They will.

To Harry's point, I don't think it dehumanizes the Islamic societies in Africa and Asia to point out that a large portion of them have sided with their culture in an existential battle against the Great Satan of the West. They have made a very human choice in the clash of civilizations. I'd say that recognizing their opposition as such, and recognizing their declared status with respect to us as our enemy is to accord them the dignity of recognizing their choice as creatures of free will. To somehow deny them this existential act of self definition, of moral commitment is in itself a form of dehumanization.

This question is further developed in a long and rambling essay by Michael Vlahos in the American Conservative titled "The Fall of Modernity: Has the American narrative authored its own undoing?":

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality. This is a well-established condition of successful societies, a condition that inevitably grows more worrisome with time and continuing success. In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.
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Does it matter whether we pursue grand drama for wholly narcissistic reasons, as long as we win? What if we don’t? Failure might lead to the collapse of friendly tyrannies like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia or even to economic crisis and an expansion of the war. Longstanding alliances could come apart. But even then our military power, our vast economy, and the strength of the American people would still be intact. Strategic recovery should still be possible. The old narrative might be in tatters, but that might turn out to be a good thing because we could then build a more modest national story.

Such recovery is foreclosed, however, in a script of civilization and its enemies. Not only did American leaders go for the existential War of History instead of dealing with reality, they chose the worst possible dramatic vehicle for restaging the national passion play. For what we are experiencing is no war of civilizations. It is not even a war.
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First, the American war narrative rejects modernity’s future constituents: its message is that we are foreclosing on them. We do this knowing that American modernity cannot long survive repossessing its promise of a universal vision for humankind.

Second, American modernity loses authority because our war promotes alternative and resistant communities. Demonizing them elevates them, and their new stature creates competing alternatives to modernity.

Third, the American war narrative shows modernity helpless in its own defense. Military failure becomes a literal stripping of our world authority, actually pushing the global future away from us.

Here Vlahos makes the same mistake I believe that Peter does, that we've declared the whole swath of the Islamic "resistance community" irredeemable and have set ourselves the task of destroying them. I think, rather, that we're in a struggle to redeem them by destroying the forces that keep them mired in the anti-modern past.

Vlahos is doubly wrong to say that we lose authority by exercising authority. It's the other way around. The real authority of the American/Western project is the irresistible lure of modernity. The mullahs aren't reacting against unveiled women cavorting in the streets of New York City, but to unveiled women in the streets of Teheran and Islamabad and Cairo. To take no side in their war against modernity does not enhance our authority, but betrays it.

Thirdly, Vlahos is out to lunch in suggesting that we are failing militarily, and that that is undermining the whole modernity project. Which side hides in caves?

“The Promise of American Life” flung out to the world was to be a future of universal human redemption and transcendence. Americans might argue bitterly over how to achieve this, but before the war there was no argument over the desirability of the goal.

Now two-thirds of humanity is moving away from us and from our vision of one world. While sleek Tom Friedman rhapsodizes new Silicon Valleys like Bangalore, in Planet of Slums Mike Davis writes, “Half of Bangalore’s population lacks piped water, much less cappuccino, and there are more ragpickers and street children (90,000) than software geeks (about 60,000). In an archipelago of 10 slums, researchers found only 19 latrines for 102,000 residents.”3

Universal integration is no longer the human prospect but a black split between “us” and a “surplus humanity.” Globalization has become the privilege of those lucky few billions in the formal labor market. But what about the other half on their way to becoming the other two-thirds? What happens to our universal redemptive narrative in a world where modernity ends forever at 40 percent of humanity?

This is outright rubbish. If it were so then we wouldn't be fighting the war in Iraq as we are, cultivating allies among the local population and trying to separate them from the lure of tribal warlords and Al-Quaeda recruiters. Which side is building schools and which side is mining them with explosives? If we were truly at war with the surplus 40%, then our task would be a lot easier. We could fight our battles from the strategic war rooms of the Pentagon and wouldn't be putting Guardsmen at risk in Baghdad.

This story has remarkable implications for alternative communities. Our Islamofascist branding makes every movement of Muslim resistance an attack on us. Yet most resistance instead speaks to local yearnings. By seeing an enemy of civilization in every Muslim non-state actor, we unthinkingly widen the struggle. Alternative communities are indelible in the “evil” world landscape painted by the global war on terrorism—the ongoing metamorphosis of the global other into the Mordor of our imagination.

Then there are meta-communities of piety. Modernity’s greatest failure is spiritual—neon-lit in Europe, where old piety has crashed and burned. But among the global other scorched by modernity’s “creative destruction,” it is not that people have abandoned piety but that it has abandoned them. In globalization’s mixing bowl, the meditative power of old ethos has been lost. Yet American modernity offers nothing to take its place: just ask an Afghani or an Iraqi.

If piety means stoning a 14 year old girl to death, then it's not something that this world should suffer to exist. But I think that Vlahos once again has things backward. American modernity offers a very attractive alternative to this piety. People are rejecting the old piety for modernity, and that is the crux of the struggle. Vlahos has accomplished quite a dubious distinction in coining a euphemism for terrorists more despicable than "freedom fighter": "community of resistance".

A great nation continues to marshal its collective power, but it will face a changed world. There will still be grand nations like China, India, and others. The United States survives, in material terms greater than ever. But its war narrative has helped to birth a changed world and to cast off its claim to the universal. There will also be a weltering of new human combinations and re-combinations.

The subsiding of modernity may be liberating. Freed from the world center, we might find a safer place to survey an evolving humanity. No longer the object of all attack, we might productively rethink our national purpose. Old modernity’s institutions and practices will be folded into, and thus partly lost within, a new world-cultural mix. This may not be our preferred outcome. But losing our claim to the universal opens the way to new realities. We might take comfort that American modernity will be a part of them.

We might take comfort too in being history’s greatest midwife to change, if also to our own undoing.

I can't imagine a more cowardly stance than Vlahos' expectant wish to let modernity fade away for lack of will to fight for it, nor a more delusional one. Does he seriously think that the abdication of American will in foreign affairs will make the world safer? Does he think it will benefit those pious "resistance communities" to have the yolk of America's restricting power suddenly lifted? He may be right that it will benefit the pious. We'll see the outbreak of many a pious religious war among the left-out 40%, which will no doubt spread to many of the 60%.

Can an attitude that is so recklessly dismissive of one of the greatest accomplishments of civilization, modernity, be called conservative? How is it that we have gotten so wobbly about our values in the face of nihilistic obscurantism?

Update: Here is a link to a very illuminating podcast interview of Dr. David Kilcullen, the Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to Gen. Petraeus by Austin Bay. Kilcullen makes reference to Vlahos' idea of competing civilizational narratives and demonstrates with examples how it is used by Al Quaeda to infiltrate communities in Iraq and how the coalition forces counterinsurgency effort is using competing narratives as a way to negate Al Quaeda's influence with those communities. The picture that Kilcullen paints of Al Quaeda's operations in Iraq should put paid to Vlahos' depiction of insurgent activity there as some kind rustic, hoary, authentic movement to piety in reaction to the empty cultural baggage of modernity.