While Europe Slept Freedom, and More

FREE WHILE EUROPE SLEPT PDF Bruce Bawer | 262 pages | 01 Jan 2008 | Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc) | 9780767920056 | English | New York, United States While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer I n the great cathedrals in Europe, a few people—usually elderly women—can be found at worship. Everybody else is a tourist, cameras hanging around their necks, meandering through. I was recently in Scotland, While Europe Slept I read a newspaper story commenting on three hundred deserted churches dotting the Scottish countryside, asking if they should be destroyed or turned into bars and cafes. Europe herself, in her proposed constitution, refuses to acknowledge the heritage of Judaism and Christianity—although Greece and Rome and the Enlightenment are acknowledged. Europe cannot remember who she is unless she remembers that she is the child not only of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and the Enlightenment but also of Judaism and Christianity—the child, therefore, of Catholicism and the Reformation. If Europe abandons her religious heritage, the idea of While Europe Slept dies. What does it portend? If a culture forgets what it is, as I While Europe Slept Europe has done, it falls first into an agnostic shrugging of the shoulders, unable to say exactly what it is and believes, and from there it will inevitably fall into nihilism. Detached from its religious foundations, Europe will not remain agnostic. Difference tells us nothing in and of itself. Some ways of life and ways of being in the world are brutal, stupid, and ugly. Some a human rights-oriented culture cannot tolerate. A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission in order to make claims of value and to institutionalize them in social and While Europe Slept forms. This a While Europe Slept Europe cannot do. Multiculturalism is then, in practice, a series of monoculturalisms that do not engage one another at all; rather, the cultural particulate most enamored of gaining and While Europe Slept power has an enormous advantage: One day, it proclaims, we will bury you. For that Europe, the window to transcendence is slammed shut. Human values alone pertain. But these human values are shriveled by a prior loss of the conviction that there is much to defend about the human person, and they are seen as so many subjectivist construals without any defensible, objective content. Unsurprisingly, what comes to prevail is a form of reduced utilitarianism that rationalizes nihilism. The territory as one's own property is the self itself, or While Europe Slept understanding of the self shorn of any encumbrances of the past, any shackles of old defunct moralities. The question of what the self is, and whether it has any transcendent meaning, is answered with a shrug. The late John Paul II saw the result of the belief that we are While Europe Slept of ourselves, wholly self-possessing. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Should no one attach value to us and we be too bereft or wounded to attach it to ourselves, we become dispensable. The final triumph of this notion will be a world in which the powerful have their way simply because they can and because the ethical and moral barriers to taking what they want have all been lost. The final fate of the disabled in a liberal society will not be a happy one. Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so While Europe Slept arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic While Europe Slept human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose or would have chosen to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred While Europe Slept be definitively put to rest by It is a softer nihilism than the past's, but it is nihilism all the same. In an interview for a British magazine during the summer ofSinger said that if While Europe Slept faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save While Europe Slept animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child's death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value. This is the entirely consistent result of the view that human life no longer possesses an While Europe Slept dignity, that we are only meat walking around, and we can be turned easily into means to the ends of others, just as we may turn others into means to our ends. It is the old master-slave scenario come to life, even as we congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment. Ironically, while While Europe Slept has become a champion of human rights and democracy as the political form that supports human dignity most fully and bids to be the political form within which human flourishing is most likely to take place, much secular reason has increasingly manifested itself as secularism. And secularism—a While Europe Slept cultural ideology that mocks religion as superstition and celebrates technological rationalism as the only proper and intelligent way to think and to be in the world—has developed into nihilism, into a world in which we can no longer make judgments of value and truth in defense of human dignity and flourishing. The Jerusalem side While Europe Slept the European heritage tells us that all are equally children of God—the disabled, the ugly, the bad-smelling, the boring, the lonely—all require our care and concern. As the anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer insisted, even the most wretched life is worth living before God. Without God, without some transcendent principle, While Europe Slept wretched life is not worth living at all. And others have the power to decide whose life is wretched based on utilitarian criteria. The utilitarian ethic would annihilate the Christian ethic in the name of progress and decency and the ending of suffering. For three centuries, Europe was defined in and through a complex dialectic and dialogue between belief and unbelief. This unbelief was not While Europe Slept to secularism. This Europe is a capacious place and a beautiful one. Not all opinions are created equal. Not all views deserve respect. W hat happens when, unlike Camus, Europe loses—abandons or forgets—one side of the dialectic? She winds up with a monologue, and the unbelief side becomes exaggerated and distorted into an ideology of secularism fueled by subjectivism, with the results we have seen. She comes to believe as did Camus' German friend. Thinking of human beings as consumer subjects—as does the European Union, an econometric, highly bureaucratized, and legalistic construction—is not a sufficiently robust conception to commit people civically over time. One of the glories of Western pluralist democracies has been their capacity to forge unity out of diverse mixes of peoples—diverse in nearly every way in which people can differ. The United States has done this remarkably well, allowing immigrant communities to hold on to cultural aspects of their identities as long as these could be expressed in ways consistent with the constitutive norms, rules, and practices of democratic civil society itself. What happens when, having lost the belief side of its historical dialectic, Europe loses a sense of self-confidence about her enculturating and civic mission? The first thing that happens is that it ceases to engage in the determined making of citizens. Ethnic communities are excluded from the broader streams of life under the rubric of an allegedly benign multiculturalism, While Europe Slept they fester in resentment and isolation. Little is done to absorb and enculturate the newer waves of immigrants who have no experience of democracy and bring with them an officially sanctioned hatred of Western culture. In Great Britain before the attacks of July 7,radical imams used the cover While Europe Slept religious liberty to recruit death-dealing militants who openly preached virulent anti-Semitism, scorn of democracy, the replacement of the civic law by Shari'a law, and contempt for anything Western. A deadly deal was struck, apparently, that Britain would leave them alone if they left Britain alone and did their bad stuff elsewhere. Clearly, relations with unassimilated minorities do not work like that. Britain shrugged its shoulders, but the hatred spilled into the streets, the subways, the buses. France's Muslim majority lives in an angry subculture scornful of France and Europe, high in criminality and intolerance, often engaged in some circles in practices that openly defy constitutive principles of human liberty and freedom, such as arranged marriages for girls as young as eleven and honor killings and assaults. An antidemocratic, illiberal zone exists within the wider democratic body. Then the French government decides it must do something, and it takes a determined stand—against the head scarf! Resentment grows. In the Netherlands, the notion of pillorization got perverted to mean cultural isolation for the immigrant Muslim population. Unsurprisingly, it was in Europe that the killers of September 11 became radicalized, picking up on, perhaps, the ideology While Europe Slept anti-Americanism preached enthusiastically by French elites and the anti-Semitic strain on the left.

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