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It seems to me that A.C. Grayling agrees with so much of my analysis of the confrontation between Islamism and the West that I need not pause over the details. Like everyone who discusses the matter, I am bound to use shorthand expressions like “the West” rather than spelling out the long history that spread Christianity, Roman law, territorial jurisdiction, and free trade around the world, to the immense irritation of those who live by other precepts. The West is not a geographical but a socio-cultural concept and refers to the civilization that we have inherited and of which we are a part. There are Muslims living within the historical territories of that civilization, but Islam is not a part of the West, any more than atheism and pornography are part of Islam, widespread though they are in the former Ottoman Empire.
It seems to me that A.C. Grayling agrees with so much of my analysis of the confrontation between Islamism and the West that I need not pause over the details. Like everyone who discusses the matter, I am bound to use shorthand expressions like “the West” rather than spelling out the long history that spread Christianity, Roman law, territorial jurisdiction, and free trade around the world, to the immense irritation of those who live by other precepts. The West is not a geographical but a socio-cultural concept and refers to the civilization that we have inherited and of which we are a part. There are Muslims living within the historical territories of that civilization, but Islam is not a part of the West, any more than atheism and pornography are part of Islam, widespread though they are in the former Ottoman Empire.
The main burden of my article was to point to the things worth defending in the West, and I emphasized forgiveness and irony not in order to suggest that these are effective responses to terrorism—of course they are not, and I agree with Grayling that terrorism has to be confronted, not appeased. My purpose was to show that there is a moral heart to our communities, one that they have inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious and moral thinking, and one to which we can all attach ourselves, even if we are not Jews or Christians. Forgiveness and neighbor love (agape), rather than submission, form the heart of the Western bequest to us. We don’t always live by those things. But we can value them, identify with them, and make them our cause. This is important, because you don’t defend a way of life if you don’t believe it to be something more than merely convenient or pleasant. You defend it if you believe it to have moral value in itself, and also to be bound up with your own identity as a social being. It is their failure to define that identity that makes liberals of Grayling’s kind such poor spokesmen for our civilization. I wanted to take the first steps in defining what we stand for, fearing that otherwise, we might soon cease to stand for anything.
Roger Scruton is a writer, philosopher, and public commentator. He is currently a professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia.
