Roger Scruton on terrorism and political correctness. . - Reviews - book review

Contemporary Review, April, 2003 by Joaquina Pires-O'Brien

The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Termrist Threat. Roger Scruton. Continuum. [pounds sterling]12.99. 187 pages. ISBN 0-8264-6496-3.

The West and the Rest is about the two types of civilisation that still coexist in the world today. In this book, aimed at the general public, Roger Scruton dissects the various elements that define Western Civilisation and distinguish it from the rest. The most important is its secularised legal system, which guarantees a good level of freedom and scrutiny in exchange for citizenship. The difference between the West and the rest, writes Prof. Scruton, is that Western societies are governed by the secular rule of politics while the rest are ruled by the power of religion. The existing difference, he explains, comes from the fact that religion, being static, and politics being dynamic, societies bound by religion are based on the demand of unquestioning submission while those bound by politics are based on participation and consent-based lawmaking. Here the East-West conflict is analysed firstly through the existing historical differences between East and West and secondly through the decadence of traditional Western society caused by the corroding effect that comes from within itself.

The East-West conflict is not new; it only became noticeable because of globalisation. Roger Scruton shows that there are references to the East--West conflict even in the Bible and in Greek tragedy. Among the examples cited is Aeschylus' Oresteia, in which a succession of religious murders lead to the terrifying persecution of Orestes by the 'furies'. Although the gods demanded punishment for the murders committed, they could not solve the dilemmas that resulted. These were solved only when judgement was handed to Athenae, a personification of the city. Aeschylus message was that only through politics can peace be secured, that is, through the justice which the city-state offers rather than through the vengeance of the gods.

Although Western Civilisation was largely defined by Christianity, it was also shaped by Roman law and in time by the separation between the Church and the state. Also, from the Enlightenment onwards, citizenship of a nation-state gradually replaced religion as the major element of social binding in the West. The fact that the world is presently formed by nation-states has not ended the East--West conflict as many nation-states exist in name only, as their societies remain bounded by religion-based tribal alliances rather than by politics.

The long-term causes of the East--West conflict can explain only certain aspects of the hatred towards the West and the surge of anti-Western terrorism. To Prof. Scruton, what made the West a target of international terrorism is the decay of the 'social contract' which forms the pillars of Western Civilisation, due to the sabotage of political correctness and of pernicious ideologies such as Marxism, Relativism and Nihilism. This social contract, according to the author, is that described by the British political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588--1679), and articulated by the American philosopher, John Rawl (1921). To these two, the social contract is made up of all obligations to the state which are freely chosen by its citizens. The two core elements of this social contract are its secular law and territorial jurisdiction and the presumption that it should be enduring. The latter means that this social contract presumed that the future generations as well the dead would be included in it, an extrapolation o f which being the duty to safe-keep both the social and the natural environment for future generations.

Pointing out that the prototype of the modern Western nation-state shows that it consists of a single political structure, Prof. Scruton goes on to say that the British are only deceiving themselves by wanting to uphold the traditional Western values and trying to become a multicultural society. The compelling examples he uses is the defiance of certain British-based immigrant groups, such as the al-Muhajiroun (Emigres or Exiles), whose spokesman has 'recently warned that no British Muslim has any obligation to British law when it conflicts with the law of Allah'. Another example is Abu Hamza-al-Masri, the mullah who until recently preached on Fridays in Finsbury Park, London, whom the Yemeni government has blamed for masterminding the bombing of the British Embassy in that country.

The corruption of Western values from within is to blame for the exacerbation of the East--West conflict and the surge of anti-Western terrorism. Prof. Scruton challenges some of the faulty reasoning which has infected academia specifically the constructivism theory created by Terry Eggletown, the British theorist of literary criticism, according to which all distinctions are 'cultural' and therefore 'constructed' and 'ideological', in the Marxian sense, meaning that they are simply manufactures by the ruling classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power.