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11/29/2005:

"The Challenge and the Fear of Becoming Enlightened"

Since Sept. 11, we've been living under a "clash of civilizations" doctrine that can be summed up this way: Over there, dogma, orthodoxy, Islam; over here, democracy, pluralism, Constitution. Over there, dark continents, dark ages, terrorism; over here, enlightened West, enlightenment, freedom.

The doctrine has been used to justify two wars (so far) and a wholesale shift in the way the United States deploys its aims abroad and projects them at home. The doctrine draws its power from the language of freedom -- the language of enlightenment -- both in the way we've gone about defining ourselves as a culture and in the way we've gone about defending our right to fight the war on terror on our terms, but on other people's turfs.

The doctrine is fatally flawed, and its consequences are lethal, both to American principles at home and to American interests abroad. There's no connection between the language we're using in defining ourselves and the reality being imposed at home and abroad. The language itself has become the mask of its very opposite. If you want absolutes, if you want black and white, if you want orthodoxy, look no further than the way American culture politically and legally has been evolving in the past several years.

That's not to say that those orthodoxies don't exist in the Muslim world. They do in spades. But the enlightenment ideal is not under attack from outside our culture. It is under attack from within it, in a context that increasingly fears pluralism, scorns dissent and erodes democracy. The very ideas of rational, critical thinking, of progress by way of challenging assumptions, is being replaced by a faith-based approach in policy-making and a fundamentalist approach in legal thinking (what some people call originalism) that is diametrically opposed to the ideals of enlightenment. If a battle for freedom is being waged, it is being waged on the wrong front.
commondreams.org

Like I've said, this situation is the inevitable consequence of hundreds of years of white supremacist patriarchal discourse that flies in the face of reality.