Daniel
Greenfield article: We Are Those Who Stand for the Day
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Posted: 02 Nov 2012 01:46 PM PDT
We face two conflicts in the present day and against the present
day. Both conflicts are being fought against ideologies dislocated in time,
longing urgently for the past and the future.
Islamism is a reactionary ideology preaching a perfect world to
be gained by stepping back to the 7th Century origins of its
founding and seeks to recreate it by enslaving women and non-Muslims, making
Mohammed’s false treaties with Christians and Jews, this time no longer in
Arabia, but around the world, and then subjugating them to usher in an age of
perfect peace.
Progressivism looks for its utopias not in the splendors of the
past, but in the wonders of the future, its fanaticism fueled by the wonders
of the emerging technologies of the late 19th and early 20th
Centuries fused with the delusion that these material technologies could be
matched by social technologies of equal depth and effectiveness, bringing
forth both a technocratic utopia of physical technology and social
technology.
Utopianism is a matter of faith and perspective. One man’s
utopia is another man’s nightmare. And like many matters of faith, those who
cannot be convinced must often be compelled.
The Utopianist is dislocated, feels born out of his proper age
and fervently at odds with the tenor of the time.
For the Muslim, this is a matter of pure culture, for Islamic
civilizations were left behind in the great rush of forward momentum
experienced by Western civilization within the past centuries. The modern
world is a Western creature and though it boasts many comforts and
achievements, the Muslims who inhabit it can never feel fully at home in it.
Unable to dream of a great future, they dream instead of a wonderful past that
will sweep away the alien complexities that they could rarely learn to live
without, and replace it with the purity of the desert and the simplicity of
the sword.
For the Westerner, the dislocation is also cultural, it is the
clash between the mechanical accomplishments of the civilization that he
lives in and the decay of the spiritual and aesthetic values of its culture.
The artist and the sculptor despaired of matching the engineer in the last
century. The cleric feels a trembling in his bones when he sees the visions
spun by theoretical physicists. Rather than exceeding themselves, the bearers
of the cultural traditions of the West have often chosen to diminish
themselves, fleeing into ugliness and unbelief, defacing and distorting the
traditions they bear, rather than rising to face the challenge of their
civilization’s material accomplishments and subsuming their fears of
inadequacy in the expansion of their heritage’s possibilities.
The sensitive soul of the middle class child bemoans the industrial
revolution without realizing that the only reason that there is a middle
class and that he isn’t toiling in the fields and she isn’t at the mercy of
any passing knight is the very materialistic technological revolution that
the sensitive soul bemoans. For centuries, the dislocated Westerner has
physically or philosophically attempted to retreat to a pastoral Eden, to the
garden and the field tended by the Noble Savage, erecting complex theories to
promote a new simplicity.
The dislocated Westerner finds in the form of the Noble Savage,
a fellow dissatisfied soul rebelling against the constraints of civilization,
and discovers too late the cost of savagery and the alternative to the new
world of freedom that Newton’s Apple and the slide rule, and its rude
children, the factory and the company have made. The Muslim is the latest in
a long line of noble savages, fellow travelers on the road to a terrible
Utopia that only one of them shall ever see.
Trying to synthesize a cocktail of the spiritual simplicity of
the imagined past and the social technologies of the future, the dislocated
Western invariably creates totalitarian horrors, monstrous bureaucracies and
secret police forces who guard the efficacy of his philosophies, so that
rather than escaping the factory, the life of men toiling in his utopias
become the factory, slaving over flawed mechanisms of ideas, living as cogs
in a broken machine that grinds up men and feeds their bodies to its own
fallacies.
In this too the Muslim is his equal, resolving the contradiction
between the comforts of the present and the purity of the past through an
endless war whose irresolvable nature allows him to stand for the past while
enjoying the comforts of the present.
The past was never pure and neither are those who long for it.
It was always as flawed and marked by its mistakes as the present. And the
future is no more pure than the present, it only appears pure because like a
blank page, it is as yet unmarked by the disappointments and the crimes that
have become a part of every era of existing history. Time cannot be rolled
forward or backward at any pace but other than its own, its crimes and
mistakes cannot be erased, only added to. The only better world that we can
make is the one that we are making every day, not by tearing the world apart
to form a new world, but by the laborious task of building up and holding up
the world of the present day against its pressures and stresses.
In this task we are confronted by terrible forces, striving to
tear apart our world, our civilization and our way of life, for the utopias
of the past and the future, and against them we stand, the ordinary men and
women of the present, not the children of the dawn or the night, but the
happy offspring of the day who do not look to the sunrise or the sunset, but
embrace the possibilities of the present.
We are the true moderates for we stand at the middle ground of
the present day, respectful of the past and optimistic of the future, but
refusing to sacrifice all we have in a mad dash for making another world.
The utopian is a fanatic, who at every opportunity informs us
that he would rather die than go on living in this world, who makes a fetish
of his revolutionary martyrdom, making his unreason into his crowning virtue.
Like a stubborn child, he believes that his destructiveness and
self-destructiveness will convince us to submit, when in actuality it
convinces us only of the necessity to resist. He hoards his unhappiness and
resists the world by making plans of how the world should be so as to make us
as unhappy as him.
As the world trembles and civilization appears to be slipping
away, as the sun darkens and the clouds throw back its sullen glare, the
utopianists of both breeds and creeds have descended to bring on their terrible
past or equally terrible future, tearing apart nations and civilizations,
destroying knowledge and learning, killing in great number and deluding in
equal number, for the fulfillment of their fanatical cause.
And against all this, stand we, the men and women of the day who
refuse to cede our lives, our liberties and our nations to their mad dreams
and madder schemes. We refuse to be subjugated, oppressed and terrorized. We
refuse to accept their creeds, their tortured logics and their terror networks
as proof of their inevitability. And above all else, we refuse to concede
that their battle is won and the day is done. We refuse to concede our pasts
to those who scheme for the future and our future to those who scream for the
past.
Our ground is the earth under our feet, the hard soil of the
present day and its harder won accomplishments extracted by sweat and toil,
by genius and tremendous accomplishment from the obdurate obstacles that have
stood in the way of our forefathers and foremothers, of those who have
labored for all the achievements of the present.
Theorists theorize of the titanic conflicts that sweep the world
and fill volumes with their categorizing of class wars and racial wars, of
conflicts cutting across and through various lines and forms, and yet the
most elemental conflict is the one between those who want to keep the world
as it is and those who are driven to change and destroy it.
This fanatical impulse for which they will die and kill is not
driven by necessity, for who in truth has prevented the Muslim from going
into the desert to hoard his wives like his camels and to stone one another
to death over trivial offenses.
The Muslim who truly wishes to live this way need travel only as
far as the nearest Bedouin village, convert his capital into commodities and
beg for admittance. But the most devout of the terrorists never even consider
this option. It is not so much that they wish to live in a cave, as they wish
to force us to live in caves. Like all murderous utopianists, they only
imagine that they are builders, when they are actually destroyers. What truly
drives them is not a wish to live in the 7th Century way but the
power to foreclose any other alternative in a theological feudalism that will
destroy all other ways of living, while allowing them to live comfortably in
villas, while they preach the destruction of the world.
And the Western sensitive soul can go back to the land any time
he chooses. There are no shortage of plots of land looking for cultivators
and if the Amish can go back to the horse and plow, there is no reason that
he could not do likewise. And if it is the future he seeks, there is no
stopping him from setting up any social system backed by any philosophy he
chooses, so long as it does not involve the active abuse of small children.
But such experimenters inevitably burn out and go back to their plans for
forcing us to live in a way that they themselves have no desire to.
We have taken nothing from them, as they incessantly claim, but
they plot, struggle and strive to take everything from us, not least of all
things, the right to maintain our stand in the present, rather than be driven
into the dark nightmares of their pasts and futures.
Now is the twilight of our era, we stand at the uncertain point
between night and day, between the life of our world and its death. While
those around us struggle to bring about a perfect world, chanting their
slogans and sitting on their committees, blowing up their bombs and screaming
in their cities, we fight to hold on to the present. We stand against the
fall of night and maintain the day.
We are ordinary people and our mission is a simple one. We are
the preservers of the present. Our task is to stand against the destroyers,
the dislocated in mind and body, drawing up their plans for mutant
civilizations, their distorted visions of the past and future set in
ideological dogmas, for the plain and simple things of the present. While
they seek to take away our nations, our beliefs and our children away from
us, we fight to preserve them and to keep our world with us.
We have no grand schemes or manifestos, no glorious visions of
caliphates and socialist republics, our vision is of our homes and our
stores, our families and our friends, the communities that we have built and
the small things that we have done every day of our lives for the sake of all
these things. These small things, the little uncounted freedoms and the
self-chosen responsibilities are our manifestos, they are our battle cries
and they are what we fight for. They are our world and we hold them now in
the light of day against the destroyers who would bring against us the fall
of night.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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