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August 11, 2006

Essay Worth Reading on Muslims in Britain

Eteraz has an essay worth reading on his blog. (hat tip: The Glittering Eye) In it, he addresses the reasons as he perceives them for the radicalization of (some? many?) Muslims in Britain.

One thing that he addresses is the Romanticism of the nihilist imams that are radicalizing the young Muslim men. Yet more evidence for my contention that the most evil philosophy ever promulgated was Rousseau's version of the Enlightenment. (It has been the root for Marxism, Communism, Fascism, Naziism and apparently has featured heavily in Islamism.) The core point of Rousseau is that man can be perfected, if we just come up with the right system, and get rid of the unperfectable ones. It is a philosophy that is a recipe for mass murder, and has resulted in mass murder several times. When will we get a countervailing philosophy that effectively argues against Romanticism in all its variants?

Posted by jeff at August 11, 2006 5:43 PM

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Comments

Isn't this a takeoff of basic Christian judgment theology? I.e., After the resurrection, men are judged for their souls and those who cannot be saved are cast out.

You could even link Jack Welch's Rank-and-Yank programs back to similar philosophies.

Posted by: queuno at August 15, 2006 9:44 PM

Could be, I suppose. I am more inclined to think, though, that it arises from the spirit of scientific discovery at the time Rousseau was writing. There was a raft of new discoveries, each of which explained very large and previously insoluble problems. Newton's laws of motion and theory of gravity, for example, made it appear as if the Universe could be understood as simple macro-level clockwork. It would be hundreds of years before we understood that he was only right in a certain realm, and that the very small and the very large didn't work that way.

But for Rousseau, I believe he saw this sudden ordering, apparently to be complete in a remarkably short span of time, given the pace of progress, as proof that perfection, in a mathematical sense, was obtainable for the Universe, and if for the Universe, then why not for man?

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 15, 2006 9:53 PM