Sometimes, in the haste to get something very important accomplished, we forget the essentials. I stumbled upon one particular--and very important--instance of this sort one night a few months ago, and it inspired the idea for Causa Belli.
On September 25, 2004, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan were Tim Russert's guest on his other show, The Tim Russert Show (not Meet the Press). The choice of guests was interesting because while both men began their political journeys from different starting points--Hitchens as a soixante huitard Marxist, Sullivan as a Thatcherite--both now appeared to converge in the center, driven there by what they saw as the need to respond to the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism, or, as Hitchens likes to put it, "Islamo-Fascism." Toward the end of the show, Hitchens made a poignant and demanding remark:
"Another thing that's very important to me about this war is that it is in effect a war for secularism. President Bush may believe that God saved him from booze and so on. He's quite entitled to that belief as far as I can see, but he must know, and certainly the people in this administration do understand, that our only real allies are secular--that, in Afghanistan, we must hope for even more secularism. ... I'm for secularism and separation of church and state. Everywhere. I want more of it here, not less, and much more of it there. And it's a perfectly consistent thing. Even if John Ashcroft doesn't realize it, it's objectively--as we used to say in Marxist discussion--true. It's objectively true."
Andrew Sullivan agreed:
"Chris [Hitchens] is a militant atheist. I'm actually a Roman Catholic. But I couldn't agree with him more. I really don't believe that people of faith should be leery of secularism. I think the separation between church and state is the best thing for religion ever. And I feel no qualms at all, as a believing person, in supporting secularism. "
Now, most western political thinkers, as well as political leaders, support the idea of seperation between Church and State. That's not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was the word, "secularism," a word that always carries with it ideological baggage from the left or from the right, wherever it is being used. What did Hitchens mean by "secularism"? Is the cultural identity of the West--and, more specifically, of the United States--"secularist" or "Judeo-Christian" or even, "religious"?
Immediately, I recalled the words that Michael Novak wrote in an essay published in the National Review a month after 9/11:
The present war is not a war between a secular nation and a Muslim nation. Ours is not a secular nation. We are the single-most religious of all the advanced nations, and the third- or fourth-most religious of all nations anywhere on earth.
Our Founding's religion, in case you want to know, is predominantly Christian and Jewish. And a good thing, too!
Both Novak and Hitchens agree about the enemy. Both agree that we ought to use force in order to defeat it. But both have dramatically different conceptions of what it is we are defending, and what ideals we are fighting for. An elephant in the room, if I ever saw one. How much discrepancy is there among American politicians and thinkers? Among Western politicians and thinkers? Does it run on ideological lines? Religious lines? National lines?
I set up this blog to explore the philosophical questions surrounding the War on Terror. Whether we ought to fight, and how we should fight, are matters of just war theory. What we are defending, and what we are fighting for, are trickier matters, and to answer them, you have to deal with cultural questions.
That's why I think that the current brouhaha over the "divided country" that we live in, mired in a "culture war" over "values," has deep implications on the War on Terror. The same goes for the recent debate in Europe over a reference to Christianity in the preamble to the new European Constitution. Both of these conflicts deal with the cultural identity of the West, which right now is highly disputed. But the West is what we are defending. And if we don't know exactly what we are defending, how can we know that it's worth fighting for?
Then there is the question of Iraq. Some would argue that the invasion of Iraq had little or nothing to do with the War on Terror. Consequently, a site devoted to following the debate on the War on Terror should not concern itself with Iraq. But even those that argue this have to agree that the present situation in Iraq, volatile, delicate, and important as it is, has become entangled with the struggle against Al Qaeda, thanks in part to people like Al-Zarqawi. So the debate on Iraq will be presented here, too.
These are the arguments that have been raging in the pages of periodicals, journals, and books in the three years since 9/11. I hope to be able to catalogue and comment on a few of those voices that are taking part in the most important conversation of the 21st century.
On September 25, 2004, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan were Tim Russert's guest on his other show, The Tim Russert Show (not Meet the Press). The choice of guests was interesting because while both men began their political journeys from different starting points--Hitchens as a soixante huitard Marxist, Sullivan as a Thatcherite--both now appeared to converge in the center, driven there by what they saw as the need to respond to the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism, or, as Hitchens likes to put it, "Islamo-Fascism." Toward the end of the show, Hitchens made a poignant and demanding remark:
"Another thing that's very important to me about this war is that it is in effect a war for secularism. President Bush may believe that God saved him from booze and so on. He's quite entitled to that belief as far as I can see, but he must know, and certainly the people in this administration do understand, that our only real allies are secular--that, in Afghanistan, we must hope for even more secularism. ... I'm for secularism and separation of church and state. Everywhere. I want more of it here, not less, and much more of it there. And it's a perfectly consistent thing. Even if John Ashcroft doesn't realize it, it's objectively--as we used to say in Marxist discussion--true. It's objectively true."
Andrew Sullivan agreed:
"Chris [Hitchens] is a militant atheist. I'm actually a Roman Catholic. But I couldn't agree with him more. I really don't believe that people of faith should be leery of secularism. I think the separation between church and state is the best thing for religion ever. And I feel no qualms at all, as a believing person, in supporting secularism. "
Now, most western political thinkers, as well as political leaders, support the idea of seperation between Church and State. That's not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was the word, "secularism," a word that always carries with it ideological baggage from the left or from the right, wherever it is being used. What did Hitchens mean by "secularism"? Is the cultural identity of the West--and, more specifically, of the United States--"secularist" or "Judeo-Christian" or even, "religious"?
Immediately, I recalled the words that Michael Novak wrote in an essay published in the National Review a month after 9/11:
The present war is not a war between a secular nation and a Muslim nation. Ours is not a secular nation. We are the single-most religious of all the advanced nations, and the third- or fourth-most religious of all nations anywhere on earth.
Our Founding's religion, in case you want to know, is predominantly Christian and Jewish. And a good thing, too!
Both Novak and Hitchens agree about the enemy. Both agree that we ought to use force in order to defeat it. But both have dramatically different conceptions of what it is we are defending, and what ideals we are fighting for. An elephant in the room, if I ever saw one. How much discrepancy is there among American politicians and thinkers? Among Western politicians and thinkers? Does it run on ideological lines? Religious lines? National lines?
I set up this blog to explore the philosophical questions surrounding the War on Terror. Whether we ought to fight, and how we should fight, are matters of just war theory. What we are defending, and what we are fighting for, are trickier matters, and to answer them, you have to deal with cultural questions.
That's why I think that the current brouhaha over the "divided country" that we live in, mired in a "culture war" over "values," has deep implications on the War on Terror. The same goes for the recent debate in Europe over a reference to Christianity in the preamble to the new European Constitution. Both of these conflicts deal with the cultural identity of the West, which right now is highly disputed. But the West is what we are defending. And if we don't know exactly what we are defending, how can we know that it's worth fighting for?
Then there is the question of Iraq. Some would argue that the invasion of Iraq had little or nothing to do with the War on Terror. Consequently, a site devoted to following the debate on the War on Terror should not concern itself with Iraq. But even those that argue this have to agree that the present situation in Iraq, volatile, delicate, and important as it is, has become entangled with the struggle against Al Qaeda, thanks in part to people like Al-Zarqawi. So the debate on Iraq will be presented here, too.
These are the arguments that have been raging in the pages of periodicals, journals, and books in the three years since 9/11. I hope to be able to catalogue and comment on a few of those voices that are taking part in the most important conversation of the 21st century.