Essays in Idleness

When a Muslim loses his cultural moorings, he becomes a murderous psycho. When a Christian loses his cultural moorings, he becomes a suicidal putz. I think this helps explain a few things in the news.

Actually, it is a bit of an overstatement. In reality, most of either religion, in the course of losing their moorings and the use of their minds, become merely sad cases. And that makes a third, “silent majority” post-religious group: the spiritually numbed Consumers, of whatever has been well-advertised. It includes, too, mentally vagrant former Jews, Buddhists, Animists, &c. They may count for zero as “involved” human individuals, but are easily manipulated in the mass; so long as the manipulation does not require of them any serious beliefs, constructive will, or character.

I suppose, on this chart, some hardened Atheists should be acknowledged. But they, too, are to be distinguished between the real ones — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and so forth — and the great horde of gentle “agnostics,” whom we may file with the Consumers. Disoriented Muslims have anyway replaced the hardened Atheists in our Western annals of “cool.”

It is for this reason I’m inclined, albeit in an ironical way, to flatter the Islamic terrorists. They have, even by the teachings of Islam, gone rather beyond their remit. But at some level, a man must be sincerely wilful, to slaughter his fellows while crying, Allahu Akhbar! … Or even to storm the “German-looking” women in the Cologne railway station.

And note, if he blow himself up, it is expressly to the end of blowing up others. It isn’t “suicide” in the received sense, which Islam fulsomely condemns. It is rather more impersonal. As T.G. Masaryk pointed out (well before Durkheim), “Suicide is the ultimate subjective act; murder is the ultimate objective act.” If these be the terms, I would have to count a suicide bombing as “objective.”

Nor, one might argue, is it rape or sexual assault, in the old sense — what the young “refugee” lads are doing in Cologne, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Rotterdam, Bradford, Glasgow, Marseilles, Turin, and so forth, as far under the media radar as our liberal media can keep it. (But through the Internet grapevine, I think I must have seen reports from every West European city, by now.) The assailants have in common that they are all technically Muslim, and that the attacks are almost invariably performed by feral groups: something between five and thirty assailants per female target. Yet I’d be the first to declare that they are not strict, traditionalist Muslims, but “post-religious” come off the Shariah hinge — not yet quite so far as the suicide bombers, yet on the same side of the doorway.

This is proving something exceptionally hard to police. It is a melding together of psychopathy with consumerism. No member of the bang-gang acts on his own impulse. As if answering an advertisement, each simply “buys in.”

It is “post-Islam” in a peculiarly democratic, Westernized form. It is like our old hippie phenomenon, but with a new conception of “free love.”