Sharia versus the Rule of Reason
The entire existence of modern Western Civilization, including all of our material prosperity, is based upon a mental framework. That framework is that the universe has laws that more or less describe its workings, that these laws operate in logical and rational ways, and that an important number of these laws are knowable by man, often by means of mathematics and related fields. From Newton to Einstein and from Edison to Ford, this mental construct has powered science and invention and prosperity. For this world to work, reason must trump coercion, free inquiry must trump submission.
This Western way is not the only way to organize the world, and it is not an inevitable way to organize the world. Many wars were waged, many people died, many lives were broken for this worldview to thrive. As a result, over the last few hundred years, Europe created communities of thought in which many disputes could be addressed by reason and logic rather then the sword. Such an outcome was by no means inevitable.
In a remarkable Weekly Standard piece, Lee Harris put Pope Benedict XVI’s recent discussion of reason and faith into the context of the history of Western philosophy. (We also discussed some of these issues previously.) Harris traces the rocky path by which Christianity and philosophy/science came to a reasonably peaceful co-existence, and perhaps most importantly for the issues of our day, the pre-conditions that made peace possible:
Ratzinger is not repudiating the critical examination of reason that was initiated by Kant. Instead, he is urging us to examine the cultural and historical conditions that made the emergence of modern reason possible. Modern reason required a preexisting community of reasonable men before it could emerge in the West; modern reason, therefore, could not create the cultural and historical condition that made its own existence possible. But in this case, modern reason must ask itself: What created the communities of reasonable men that eventually made modern reason possible?
This was the question taken up by one of Kant’s most illustrious and brilliant students, Johann Herder. Herder began by accepting Kant and the Enlightenment, but he went on to ask the Kantian question: What were the necessary conditions of the European Enlightenment? What kind of culture was necessary in order to produce a critical thinker like Immanuel Kant himself? When Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, methodically demolished all the traditional proofs for the existence of God, why wasn’t he torn limb from limb in the streets of Königsburg by outraged believers, instead of being hailed as one of the greatest philosophers of all time?
Herder’s answer was that in Europe, and in Europe alone, human beings had achieved what Herder called “cultures of reason.” In his grand and pioneering survey of world history and world cultures, Herder had been struck by the fact that in the vast majority of human societies, reason played little or no role. Men were governed either by a blind adherence to tradition or by brute force. Only among the ancient Greeks did the ideal of reason emerge to which Manuel II Paleologus appeals in his dialogue with the learned Persian.
A culture of reason is one in which the ideal of the dialogue has become the foundation of the entire community. In a culture of reason, everyone has agreed to regard violence as an illegitimate method of changing other people’s minds. The only legitimate method of effecting such change is to speak well and to reason properly. Furthermore, a culture of reason is one that privileges the spirit of Greek philosophic inquiry: It encourages men to think for themselves.
For Herder, modern scientific reason was the product of European cultures of reason, but these rare cultures of reason were themselves the outcome of a well-nigh miraculous convergence of traditions to which Ratzinger has called our attention as constituting the foundation of Europe: the world-historical encounter between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry, “with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage.” Thus, for Herder, modern scientific and critical reason, if it looks scientifically and critically at itself, will be forced to recognize that it could never have come into existence had it not been for the “providential,” or perhaps merely serendipitous, convergence of these three great traditions. Modern reason is a cultural phenomenon like any other: It did not drop down one fine day out of the clouds. It involved no special creation. Rather, it evolved uniquely out of the fusion of cultural traditions known as Christendom.
Jihad or forced conversion by the sword, or indeed, any compulsory irrational belief is incompatible with the modern Western world. Moreover, jihad-thinking is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of a society that operates by reason, which is the bedrock that the modern world rests on. This is one way of thinking about the fundamental crisis of Islam in the modern world. As for Socrates, as Harris said: “Socrates would have protested against the very thought of a God who was delighted by forced conversions, or who was pleased when his worshipers proudly boasted that they were his slaves.” There can be no slavery in thought, no submission, except to reason itself.