WHAT PARIS CAN TEACH US
It tells us we must end terrorism, help the needy, live fully and freely
I was in Paris last Friday. I had flown in that morning, given a talk at Sciences Po, and then spent the afternoon working with a colleague. Later, I met the friend with whom I was staying and another visiting colleague for dinner.
Ours was a normal night in Paris — friends meeting to share good food and wine, to discuss politics, to unwind. We took a taxi home, dropping my colleague at a metro station, where he would take a train back to a hotel near the airport. His train would stop at the Stade de France around the time of the bombing, but he continued on to Charles de Gaulle, unaware. I too went to bed unknowing the chaos — the barbarism — let out just a few kilometres north.
I was awoken by a text message from another colleague, one who has lived in Paris, whose connections to the city are deep and wide. I spent the rest of the night reading the news, following Twitter, sending messages home, feeling guilt over the worry I was causing for my wife, my son, and parents.
I went to bed eventually, waking mid-morning. My hosts — a Canadian and an Australian living and working in Paris — had gone out to their market and returned. The city was quiet, perhaps in shock, certainly sad if a city can be sad.
I saw all the same things when we ventured out later that day, and I saw them again on a long walk Sunday morning before heading to the airport and returning home. But what one sees — what I saw — was still a city incomparable in beauty, in sophistication, in self-assurance. Nothing in the days since — including the bombing of Raqqa — has changed this judgment.
None of this is to say France is perfect. It has a largely unsustainable economy. It faces the same demographic squeeze as every other Western country, though more acutely than the average. It still suffers greatly from a lack of integration and inclusivity. These are largely problems of their own making, and it makes them deeply vulnerable to homegrown radicalization. But as Citizen editor Andrew Potter noted just after the attacks, it is synonymous with civilization.
I feel lucky that I was in Paris. Not only lucky that the restaurant we chose was one of the thousands spared, and not only lucky that I had not that night chosen to go to a concert, something free people do every night. I feel lucky because I saw first-hand the response of how free and confident people respond to terrorism.
We face an opponent — an enemy — that is sophisticated, in at least some sense. They are sufficiently effective at maintaining control over a geography, at extracting taxes, and at holding a comparative advantage in the use of violence. They have the outlines of a state.
They are masters at persuasion, especially among those on the margin of societies. To be sure, they will use every call to shut our doors to Muslims and every attack on a Muslim resident in the West to make the case that the West is not open to Muslims while their proto-state is. We should not give them this advantage.
We ought not to underestimate their abilities. But we should not overestimate them, either. We are not dealing merely with a territorial dispute or a simple fight over access to oil. This is not a simple war of one state against another. Such fights allow for negotiation and settlement, because each side places some value on the future.
Instead, we are dealing with a fundamentally religious outfit. Theirs is an an ideology of fools who believe that they can hasten the next world through war in this one. What they will invite instead is more misery, more suffering, and more death.
We are the lucky ones, and our fortune brings three obligations:
To end the Islamic State, and to help as many of those fleeing it as possible, and to live fully and freely in the only world we have.
We are dealing with a fundamentally religious outfit. Theirs is an an ideology of fools who believe that they can hasten the next world through war in this one. — Peter Loewen