THE IDEAL OF PERFECTION IN FAITH AND
POLITICS
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
The
quest for the ideal is a human predisposition that shapes every
social movement, political program and religious communion.
As we survey a world mired in war and social upheaval, we note
seminal and competing conceptions of the ideal in human affairs.
The socialist ideal of human perfectibility has failed everywhere
it has been tried, and is currently failing wherever we look.
The Islamic ideal of a humanity acceptable to Allah has resulted
in oceans of bloodshed, insoluble antagonisms and political
dysfunction on a global scale. The Judeo-Christian ideal in
its various forms, religious and secular, while quixotic in
its progress, has enjoyed considerable success in providing
for human happiness and prosperity.
Is
there a single factor that distinguishes the philosophies that
enable human flourishing from those that inevitably produce
mass misery and political disarray? To simplify in the interests
of clarity, we can say that acceptance of human limitation is
key to the avoidance of totalitarianism. A consideration of
the ideals that underlie Socialism and Islam, in comparison
with those of the two Abrahamic faiths and Western classical
Liberalism, which today goes by the name of Conservatism, may
serve to make the case.
In
Judaism, the ideal of perfection falls beyond the grasp of fallible
man. The Jewish ideal is not so much represented as intimated
by a series of commandments that are mainly negative in character,
as if to recognize the impetuous tendency to transgression and
the limits of human perfectibility. The ideal is embodied not
in particular individuals (many of whom are deeply flawed) but
diffused through a veritable cast of characters -- patriarchs
(Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), prophets (Elijah, Jeremiah, Isaiah),
and leaders (Moses, Joshua, David). Further, unlike the principal
faiths and collectivist movements, Judaism does not seek to
proselytize but to witness and survive.
For
Christians, the ideal of perfection exists in Heaven and is
incarnated in Jesus, whose example can be approximated but never
literally incorporated. The imitatio Christi can be
practiced but never fully consummated. It is nonetheless a remedial
and temperate discipline. As St. Augustine taught, the City
of God and the City of Man are two distinct entities. Thomas
à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ preached
a retreat from the world into contemplation, and Saint Francis
of Assisi devoted himself to poverty and good works, as recorded
in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis. In this sense,
humility -- though not always in evidence -- is inherent in
the Christian approach to an ideal fulfillment. Furthermore,
the idea of conquest and forcible constraint has been refined
out of historical Christianity in the way it has never been
banished, for example, from Islamic doctrine and usage.
Conservative
political thought comes in many different shades but shares
with Judaism and Christianity a default position regarding the
application of the ideal in customary practice. In other words,
what it regards as an ideal -- “piecemeal social engineering”
in Karl Popper’s phrase from The Open Society and
Its Enemies, or trial-and-error gradualism in improving
society -- cannot by definition be imposed by force. Freedom
of debate and assembly, equality before the law, and a democratic
franchise based on popular representation are functions of an
ideal that exists in the moral and political imagination, is
carried by frail and errant human beings, and is always in process.
On
the other hand, for communists and socialists, the ideal exists
in the future and its material facsimile can eventually be wrested
through violence and radical forms of legislation into an imminent
present. In effect, Communism and its variants are predicated
on the assumption that human nature can be modified, trained
and ultimately transformed; that is, it is based on a fantasy
that cannot come to terms with the unbridgeable gap between
the ideal and the real. Leftist politics valorizes an ideal
-- equality of outcome regardless of input, redistribution of
wealth, levelling of social and personal distinctions, communal
ownership of resources, infallible guidance of a managerial
elite -- that does not exist in the realm of human possibility,
and the attempt to realize and impose it is always doomed to
failure and the unleashing of monstrous perversions.
For
Islam, by contrast, the ideal of human behaviour and political
organization is understood already to exist in the world --
it is Islam itself. It too must be imposed, leading equally
with the Communist-Socialist axis to macabre deformations of
social and political life. But the distinctions are critical.
The Islamic ideal -- which no longer abides exclusively in the
sphere of the divine, nor in a partly unattainable skein of
rules and proscriptions, nor in the halting process of beneficial
social development, nor in a future to be born by C-section
-- came into the world, actually and concretely, with Muhammad,
the “perfect man,” whom every genuine Muslim must
seek to emulate, in effect to become. The Salafist return to
origins in its quest to revive a pristine communion and consolidate
it in the present is not merely a puritanical variant of Islam,
as Muslim revisionists propose, but the very crux of Islamic
perfectionism. The blueprint for the perfect life as it existed
in the past needs only to be recognized. It is in effect already
here and perennially achievable, needing only to be disclosed
and ready to be followed at any time.
The
bedrock ideals of Socialism and Islam are distorted and indeed
grotesque programs for human development. The Leftist mentality
is intrinsically self-contradictory. “Man is born free,”
claimed Rousseau, the father of modern Socialism and Marx’s
precursor, “and everywhere he is in chains” -- raising
the insoluble paradox of how it is that men born free set about
forging chains in which to imprison their fellows. The entire
project sinks into nonsense at its very origins and can only
be established by deception and violence. As the saying beloved
by communists and socialists goes (ironically coined by a French
royalist, Vendée leader François de Charette),
you have to break eggs to make an omelette. The trouble is,
the eggshells that shard the omelette render it inedible. As
Milovan Djilas noted in The Unperfect Society, the
end does not justify the means when the means violate the purpose
of the end.
In
the present era, Islam represents the immediate menace to our
way of life as the West finds itself increasingly under the
blade of the Islamic scimitar, from the “lone wolf”
machete to the Iranian arc of fire. There is no doubt that we
have a serious and perhaps intractable problem with Islam, and
anyone who denies it is living in a fool’s paradise. As
Winston Churchill wrote in The River War, the dilemma
we confront is that Islam represents a “retrograde force”
in the world, appealing to those darker aspects of human nature
which Western jurisprudence, political thought, and liberal
values have tended, albeit with partial success, to amend and
reform.
Socialism
lives in the present-future and Islam in the present-past. Enlightened
Western thought lives in neither. It recognizes that man is
a morally defective and politically flawed creature, for whom
progress moves by fits and starts and is always subject to limitations
of character and possibility. The classic Western ideal is asymptotic,
always in flux, constitutively elusive, never completely realizable,
in order to prevent tyrannical asphyxia and cultural ossification,
as well as the insufferable conceit of self-declared benefactors.
It is never fixed or dispositive, as in the Socialist and Islamic
conceptions of human betterment. We might say that it is in
the present 'but not of it,' constantly moving toward another,
better present at which it will never arrive. In other words,
the past is to be remembered but not reproduced, while the future
is not an ultimately realizable end-point -- the glaring error
of lapsed conservative Francis Fukayama in The End of History
and the Last Man. The temporal dimension in which the Judeo-Christian
ideal resides is a succession of ever-changing presents, knowing
that an eschatological terminal is not within the human ken.
The
cadastral address of the Socialist ideal, as we’ve noted,
is located in the indefinite future, but it squats in the here
and now so that it seems substantial and refuses to be evicted.
It merely creates tenement states, renting time until the day
history is abolished and the devil’s pleasure palace is
erected in perpetuam. The Islamic ideal resides permanently
among us, fully formed, repressive and immutable, working in
tandem with aspects of the Socialist model. Indeed, Socialism
prepares the way for Islam, as in Sweden, Norway, France, the
U.K., and increasingly in Germany and Canada -- before Islam
in any of its national expressions is strong enough to turn
and destroy it root and branch, as happened in Iran after Ayatollah
Khomeini’s successful revolution. For, once dominant,
Islam is by nature unable to coexist with any other social,
political or religious organization.
The
Socialist agenda and the Islamic worldview, forms of the topiary
art applied to human beings, represent similar ideals of both
minute and overarching social control which cannot be disarmed
or interpreted out of existence. They must be resisted with
every means at our disposal. If we continue to misconceive such
totalitarian systems, whose present manifestations are respectively
oriented toward a reified future and a reified past, they will
inevitably undermine the proximate ideals of the essential Judeo-Christian
West and its vulnerable Conservative heritage. The core Judeo-Christian
principle of humility and uncertainty in facing both the divine
and the future is now under greater threat than ever.
