Better Than Them
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.com
We are better than them. When all the other
arguments for why we can't fight back have been
exhausted this is the one that remains in the
background presenting our moral exceptionalism
as the reason we shouldn't fight to protect
ourselves.
"Fight back? But then we'd be no better than
them?" If we waterboard then we are no better
than the headchoppers and mutilators. If we
profile then we are no better than the genocidal
jihadists. If we treat our friendly Pakistani
and Saudi visitors the way they would have been
treated a century ago-- then we would be guilty
of being un-American.
But is that really the difference between us,
that we treat everyone equally even when they
are cutting our throats, and the moment we
deviate from the standards of the Trial Lawyers
Association then we're no better than the
Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Does our exceptionalism
derive from our laws, in which case if we
compromise our laws then we given up the only
worthwhile thing about us and there is nothing
more to fight for-- or are our laws the means by
which we protect our individual and national
exceptionalism?
We are better than they are, is the argument put
forward so often by those who do not truly
believe that we are, and even when they do they
don't understand why we are. The Bill of Rights
did not spring full-grown out of a barbaric
culture, nor did any of the same judicial
rulings and quotes so often used by advocates of
the 10 percent defense plan.
We are not better than they are because we
guarantee civil rights to our enemies-- we are
better than they are because of Michelangelo,
the microchip and universal education. We are
better than they are because of Shakespeare, the
space shuttle and the World Trade Center. We are
better for all the reasons around us, the
accomplishments, the achievements, the knowledge
we have gained and the society we have built.
Our laws were crafted to protect these
achievements, the exceptionalism of the
individual from the government, and that of the
nation from internal and external enemies. The
laws have no individual life apart from the
culture of the nation that created them and
maintains them. It would be possible to
transpose the United States Constitution to
Indonesia, Libya or Pakistan and it wouldn’t
last a single day there. No mere document can
safeguard rights and freedoms that a culture
does not value, and no culture that does not
value them is deserving of their protection if
such protection has the cumulative effect of
destroying those same rights and freedoms.
Freedom isn't just defended on the battlefield,
by the time things get that bad then the damage
will be hard to contain. We defend it every day
by defending the culture that makes it possible.
Against external enemies there is the war of
armed conflict, economic competition and
geographic positioning. Against the internal
enemy there is the culture war, the war of ideas
and institutions.
Who we are is seen in the connections that
define our culture and those connections tell us
who we are. Rewire the human brain so that its
connections are no longer streamlined and
identity breaks down into fragments of things
that no longer make sense. The same is true of a
culture, lose the connections and you end up
celebrating holidays you don't understand and
fighting for things that feel intuitively right,
but no longer seem to fit into the new order of
things. It is the task of the culture warriors
to rebuild those connections so that the culture
understands itself.
Connections don't just store information, they
define priorities by reminding us which thing is
dependent on the other. They remind us that
governments sre instituted to keep laws and laws
are implemented to keep the people. Governments
serve the law, but the law serves the people.
And the people are not some random mass, they
are not defined by passports and identity cards
or place of birth-- the people are the keepers
of the flame of their culture. This need not be
a matter of birth, immigrants can be among the
greatest heroes and natives among the greatest
traitors. But no one who is committed to the
destruction of the culture, in concrete or
abstract terms, in the immediate present or the
indefinite future, can enjoy the protection of
legal codes that exist to protect the freedom of
the individual within the integrity of a free
culture.
The more sophisticated a culture becomes the
less it is concerned with survival. Bubbles grow
in its centers of government and learning within
which philosophies and ideas seem more real than
reality. Opposing philosophies struggle to
lobotomize the culture with revisionist
histories and social philosophies that place
their own ideal at the center of all human
striving. But ideas are sterile without a
culture to carry them forward. Kill the culture
and the ideas become orphans that me adopted in
an altered form by some other culture-- if they
are lucky.
Tolerance and civil rights are worthless unless
the countries and cultures where they are
expressed are also defended. Any form of
tolerance which leads to its own destruction is
not only poisonous to a host culture, but is
also literarily self-destructive. All healthy
entities whether biological, organizational or
intellectual contain the means for their own
continuance and self-perpetuation. Any entity
which does not is poisonous and must be treated
as such, and to defend any idea or code above
the survival of the culture that carries it is a
homicidal act.
When conflict comes, two questions are asked. Is
the threat real and is our culture worth
fighting for. The latter question is most often
asked by elites against whose bubble ideals no
real culture can ever measure up to, and by
outsiders who have the least invested in the
survival of the culture.
"If we do this how are we any better than they
are?" is the question of the bubble elite whose
abstract ideals exist apart from flesh and blood
people, who do not measure their ideals by the
culture, but measure the culture by their
ideals, and always find it wanting, who think
that the culture with its millions of people and
centuries of history exist to shepherd their
ideals and die for them-- and ought to be
grateful for the privilege of dying so that no
Muslim is ever profiled at an airport.
The bubble elites distrust nationalism and
patriotism because they center not around ideas,
but the people's sense of solidarity. The only
exceptionalism that they will accept is the
exceptionalism of ideals, and if the nation does
not represent its ideals then it does not
deserve to live.
In the face of such reasoning it is important to
remember that we are not better than our enemies
because we represent ideals, but because we
create ideals along with skyscrapers, paintings,
high powered microscopes, novels, better
mousetraps, systems of philosophy, muscle cars,
musical styles, theorems, charities and
sandwiches. We are makers and shapers, movers
and thinkers, seers and doers. We reach for the
stars and find ways to keep premature babies
alive. We are imperfect, dynamic and changing--
and the world would be a much poorer place
without us in it.
Whatever we do to protect ourselves against
outside enemies in thrall to a hostile ideology,
regardless of where they were born is fully
justified by our accomplishments, our past, our
present and our future-- and even if all these
things were not present by our right to
individual, national and cultural survival.
It is not by becoming pacifists that we will be
better than them, but by fighting for what we
have and who we are. And if we do not stand up
for our countries, our peoples and our cultures
then we will not inherit the moral high ground,
but the low killing pits of the victims of the
thousand year spree of terror. There is no moral
high ground to be gained in refusing to struggle
to your utmost for the things that you hold
dear, only through the struggle to protect our
individual and national exceptionalism, can we
gain the high ground and justify the assertion
that we are better than them.