277. It's Not the Religion, It's How It's Taken

OK, both our religions, Christianity and Islam, urge violence here and there in their ancient scriptures.  There's no difference between Christians and Muslims on that score.  But there is a difference in how those scriptures are taken.  There are more Muslims who want to impose Shariah, a law for an ancient desert people, than there are Christians (or Jews) who want to impose the laws of the Old Testament.

I think we can go on and say the more dangerous (because we're on the edge of prejudice and persecution) thing: that Muslims generally are more willing to obey or approve ancient commands to violence than Christians are.  And pushing to the edge, that that makes them a greater danger to a state.

So we can argue accidental superiority.  History has given Christians a sociological condition that is more favorable to state security than it has given Muslims.  This superiority is functional and temporal (See my Post #77).  It does not allow claims to any other superiority (race, ethnicity, origin, genome, etc.) but in states needing to protect themselves it needs to be recognized.

In preceding posts I suggested that we could avoid prejudice and persecution by keeping our eyes only on security and the laws necessary to it.  But, raising our vision, we saw that for long-term security we needed something more.  I suggested a nationwide mandatory educational program which, in light of the above, would for Muslims help correct the accidents of history that had made them dangerous. 

When we think that way we can't help opposing strong liberal instincts: to avoid invidious comparisons of cultures; to find the merciful and humane in every scripture; to say that that expresses the true nature of the religion; to oppose restrictions on freedom; to resist mandates from the central government, particularly in education; and beyond that to make no moves whatsoever toward a totalitarian state.

Yes, and there before us in my last post is my move: broaden the definition of incitement to violence so we can arrest more people, make every school in the country, every private school, every religious school, even every home school, hold to the curriculum that will best protect the state, and specify the exact courses that will make children grow up our way.

And to what noble end?  I'll put it bluntly: so that our grown-ups won't become fundamentalists.  So that children raised in a religion will say something like this, "Well yes, there's God's law, and yes, it's there in our Scripture, and it's a wonderful guide to life, but shucks, it does go to extremes sometimes.  It's just got to have a few tweaks."

"You want to get that out of fundamentalists?  They're all, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, dead against tweaking.  If they tweaked they wouldn't be fundamentalists.  And you want to make tweaking, religious tweaking, into a virtue."

Not exactly.  I want to make refusal to tweak into a vice.  The Jewish settler on the West Bank who says, "The Law says God gave us this land and I don't care what law, Israeli or International, says otherwise, I'm following a Higher Law," that settler is threatening the peace of the world, and I consider such threatening a vice.  And I consider support of that threatening a complicit vice.  The American fundamentalists who support the settlers for the same reason, that the words are in Holy Scripture, are complicit.  My fundamentalist, tweak-abominating mother was complicit, and the grateful letter she got from Binyamin Netanyahu confirmed it.

"Ah, but refusal to tweak is just what made our ancestors strong.  Their fundamentalist religion strengthened their spines and gave order to their lives.  It helped them survive, out on the prairie, far from the home city, or in a new country, far from the old one."  I know I can hear the same from an Arab fundamentalist.  "It helped us survive, out in the desert.  It gave order to our lives."

I don't deny that.  I'm just saying that there's a flip side, a dangerous side, an even vicious side, to their virtue.   And I don't deny that by softening that vicious side with a liberal education we may be softening the virtuous side, and losing a character valuable to the nation.  I just believe that for our nation's, and maybe the world's, security, all fundamentalism now has to be exposed to the education that will destroy it.

"And you're confident that your liberal education will destroy it?  You'd better be sure about that before you go mandating it in every school.  David Ben-Gurion, you know, thought that in an Enlightened Israel Jewish Orthodoxy would just 'wither away.'"

Yes, my confidence is high because my expectations are low.  I don't expect a Muslim teenager in Britain to come out of school taking the Koran the way an Anglican adult takes the Bible.  You know, with gentlemanly ease.  I just expect him to take it with a little more salt.  From the French mines, from Voltaire.

"And you'll get that in your education for democratic citizenship?"

Yes, out of this curriculum that I'm sure any number of my liberal arts colleagues could quickly provide.  I myself would make Introductory Logic and Speech 1 (making sure it included debates) mandatory.   And heavens, English Composition, the most important one of all.  ("Address the question, avoid prejudgments, cite evidence, anticipate objections, be skeptical, suspect absolute generalizations" — I've quoted it a hundred times.)  Out of my colleagues' arguments we could add more — a political science course, a history course — to the list of required courses.  Taken somewhere along the line.  No degree without them.  I'm willing to say, "No degree in engineering, no degree in any technological field, without them."  That would include students from all Enlightenment-deprived countries.  No going back loaded only with the results of skeptical, scientific thinking.  You've got to learn the Socratic-scientific way.

"And to enforce this?"

No way but the Teutonic, I'm afraid. "Achtung!  Make it so."  From the President, after Congressional approval.

"And what do the president's subordinates then say to school boards, 'No government money unless you comply'?  To colleges, 'No student loans'?  To foreigners, 'No scholarships' or worse, 'No visas'?" 

You're showing how unrealistic my plan is.  But surely our academic realists could come up with something not too far from it, couldn't they?  I know that our Socratic-scientific inheritance is a strong force in them.  I know they're willing to sacrifice a lot for our long-term security.