The Golden Gate

The more I read of Josh Trevino, the more I like him.

Over at Politics from Left to Right, which features left-leaning Chris Nolan as well, Trevino takes on the whole “Multiculturalism/Clash of Civilizations” conversation with gusto, and makes some very good, fundamental points in his dialogue with Nolan.

Here are just a couple:

Nolan’s objections to the clash of civilizations thesis are as follows:

* We cannot afford to set “one set of social or cultural mores….above another.”

This is self-refuting: the very act of the assertion sets the social and cultural mores of tolerance — or multiculturalism, as you prefer — above all else. This is an act wholly impossible to avoid. If you find that things have intrinsic moral characteristics by virtue of their being — for example, if you sense that a man blowing up a bus in the name of his faith is somehow in all contexts a moral wrong — then you are setting a particular social or cultural more above others (in this case, that holding that there are contexts wherein bus-bombing is quite acceptable). If culture and its trappings were no more than an accretion of aesthetic or pragmatic preferences (curry rather than barbecue, pagodas rather than Gothic, llamas rather than yaks), then we might safely consign it to some manner of rough equality, and hence fundamental irrelevance. Because culture carries with it the baggage of history, ideas and practices, we do so only as an act of willful ignorance.

* The modern phenomenon of Islamist terror is mostly a circumstantial reflection of technology and historical particulars.

Nolan overstates the effect of technology and the “connected, always-on digital age” of which she is a fan. It is indisputable that Islamist terror makes full use of the tools of the modern age, from aircraft to the internet. Many draw the lesson from this that the moral quality of the terror is therefore something new, and that the means of fighting it are new as well. Both assumptions are wrong. The folly of the “new” warfare finds its expression in the deathly maw of Iraq. What makes modern Islamist terror so unique is not its modern veneer but its barbarous ferocity: suicides, beheadings, the wanton slaughter of noncombatants, and public gloating over the same not commonly seen in the West since the Thirty Years’ War. Its cardinal quality is how profoundly primitive it is. Modernity abets its fury, but does not define its being. Having just closed out a century in which Rwandans massacred a million of their own in one hundred days with muscle power and machetes, we cannot afford to forget the overriding force that is the human will to annihilation.

Trevino is great. I discovered him during his commentaries on the whole “Live8″ benefit last month, and was really inspired and moved by his reports from a Scottish airport during the initial aftermath of the 7/7 London terror attacks.

So, go check out Josh Trevino right now. You’ll be glad you did.