The national conversation on war has turned acrimonious, and contributors at National Review are at it again, depreciating liberal reform in an attempt to tighten up their arguments against the left. Beware: opposition to the so-called "theology of freedom" — the axiom stating liberty's universality — is relativistic and deterministic at its base, and simply an expedient.
If Arab Muslims, goes the line of reasoning, a) have managed this long without democracy, b) must they, then, have done it partly out of a preference for order over freedom, and c) furthermore, if state media over there broadcasts public apologia for whatever inhumanity has carried on in the odd police state, can't this be d) evidence of a culture impermeable to Western assertions of dignity and individuality? Conclusion: leave them to their savagism.
First, one can draw a parallel between governance in predominantly Muslim areas of the world and those in the Christian world half a millennium ago. Thrust aside romanticism, and medieval Europe was ruled by gangsters — incapable of the volume and precision of the Near Eastern brand of barbarity only because it was the metal age. The church of Jesus Christ was once subordinate to totalism and its abominations; Islam is lifted for the dissimulation of another violent criminality, but it is thus today. The Bosphorus is a kind of temporal chasm a naturalist might delineate as he stumbles across an immaculate aboriginal tribe.
Second, inheritance is not inherence. People born into a society can, in movements, be separated from it. Claims that "Muslims are this way" conflate Near Eastern societies with the people in them. "Culture matters," finishes editor Rich Lowry, "and that's something Bush is very reluctant to acknowledge." But culture, Mr. Lowry, only matters while it is left intact. Where are the Teutonic, Latin, samurai cultures that led to martial radicalism in the industrial age? Gone, effaced, by the occupations and exhortations of democratists.