Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review Online that most Western Europeans and our own blue-state liberal elites are traitors to the Enlightenment because of their easy capitulation to the Bronze Age “foaming at the mouth” barbarians who wish to kill us or subjugate us under an extremist Caliphate. While acknowledging the weakness of the Enlightenment—it’s confidence that reason and science alone would answer all of life’s mysteries and that religion was mere superstition—he says that it also provided “a blueprint for a humane and ordered society.” But now, in the face of the fanaticism of the extremist Muslims so many in the West are willing to capitulate in appeasement.
Fortunately, not all is lost because there are those who stand ready to defend.
Since 2000 it has been the habit of blue-state politicians to rebuke the yokels of America, in part by showing us a supposedly more humane Western future unfolding in Europe. ... And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.
Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.
“Men of the West, stand firm!”
“Somehow Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.”
Embracing provocation for provocation’s sake only ends up with Lefty nuts who think converting to Islam is a great way to stick it to the bourgeois and Europe’s evil Christian past. Hanson embraces that very dynamic which enervates.
“the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.”
Pre-enlightenment Christians were far more militant and brave against Islam than Enlightenment weaklings, like Gibbon and Voltaire, who often preferred Islam to Christianity.
Hanson is getting downright tiresome.