WHY THE WEST IS IRRESISTIBLE
It’s easy to laugh at the news that the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant ( ISIL) is so short of money that it has stopped giving its fighters free energy drinks and Snickers bars. Har, har, har. But it’s also profoundly important.
It’s important tactically because it shows the success of targeting the oil they’ve been selling, the Iraqi government salaries they’ve been “taxing” in areas they hold and even their physical stockpiles of money, often through air strikes our government abets while piously refusing to pull the actual trigger.
It also shows that the caliphate has not abolished human nature or the laws of economics through sanctimonious savagery. On the contrary, ISIL is also now demanding that electric and water bills, as well as taxes in areas it holds in Syria be paid in hated U. S. dollars, not the confetti currency it pompously launched in November 2014 to “emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system.”
This bitter, theologically obtuse concession to fiscal reality underlines the same insurmountable contradiction within Islamism generally as the free energy drinks, Snickers bars and jihadi Twitter accounts. These radical movements hate the West, not because of our policies or even our consumerism, but because our vertiginously dynamic creativity and cultural turmoil, the wellspring of our prosperity and power, is irresistible psychologically and practically.
For the better part of two centuries, vigorous, sometimes vicious, pushback against Western influence has ended in disaster, in places such as Moscow, Caracas and Teheran. There’s a surprisingly vicious circle involved in having to open your own society to fight off other open societies. Traditional regimes and societies feared, resented and envied the Western military power that began showing up with bewilderingly irresistible force during the Renaissance and became inescapable globally by the 19th century. But military prowess was only the sharp, shiny tip of a long, hard spear.
Conquest is nothing new and not especially scary unless you personally get dragged from your burning hut and slaughtered or enslaved. For millennia, rulers have come and gone, armies have surged back and forth, and traditional rhythms of life have carried on for the survivors.
Not this time. Military defeat by the West brought a way of life, not only alien, but far more disruptive than, say, being forced to wor- ship new gods. Open societies are based, in Sir Henry Maine’s famous phrase, on status not contract, and that approach brings upheaval without compare.
The West did not always live up to its own ideals, of course. Our open societies closed paths to talent through barriers based on race, religion, ancestry and gender. But they were anomalies that attracted, and then yielded to, criticism over the centuries. In traditional societies, the distinctions of caste, sex and religion that ISIL seeks brutally to restore were ideals not anomalies. And paradoxically, that is precisely why the West was irresistible.
It rapidly became clear to assorted shoguns, sheikhs and shamans that to fight the West, one must adopt its weapons and tac- tics. Next, they figured out it took Western methods of production to create Western- style armies. But then came the horrifying, cosmic realization that Western methods of production and tactical flexibility in combat themselves depended on the very social fluidity and embrace of innovation that made the West an existential threat in the first place.
In short, to fight off Western culture, one had first to embrace it, defeating the whole purpose of fighting it. Plus, choosing your own path in life struck a lot of young people as so cool, once the initial shock wore off, that they could never really shake it off, even those who turned back to traditional ways while clutching iPhones.
It’s not just ISIL and the jihadis bedevilled by this ghastly paradox. It afflicted tyrannical secular antiWestern nationalists of a previous generation with equal force. Remember Saddam Hussein, dragged dirty and dishevelled from his hidey- hole amid Mars Bar wrappers.
Theodore von Laue, a thoughtful scholar of the disruptive challenges modernity posed to Russia, culminating in the horrors of Bolshevism, dubbed the process The World Revolution of Westernization. And he argued convincingly that the West could not resolve this dilemma for non-Western societies except by leaving the rest of the world alone. But we can’t because fundamentally it’s our example rather than our armies that is subversively irresistible.
You can’t keep ‘em on the farm once they’ve seen Paris. In the long run, it’s a hopeful prospect, despite the legitimate drawbacks of modernity. But in the short run, they may try to blow it up. Hence the tragicomic paradox of ISIL fighters quaffing free energy drinks, demanding U. S. dollars and posting hideous videos online to restore the allegedly tranquil, orderly world that existed before the West showed up.
Their quest is doomed before it starts. But we must stay resolute until its internal logic unravels as dramatically as ISIL’s finances seem to be.
TO FIGHT OFF WESTERN CULTURE, ONE HAD FIRST TO EMBRACE IT, DEFEATING THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF FIGHTING IT.