Does Ted Cruz Have Bad Breath?

You'd expect that liberals would be foaming at the mouth at Ted Cruz's announcement last week that we was going to run for President of the United States, and you wouldn't be disappointed.

But why are so many conservatives badmouthing him? They seem to be suggesting that Ted Cruz doesn't have a hope of winning the nomination. And even if he did, he wouldn't have a hope of winning the election. Here's George Will disputing Cruz's electoral math:

By disdaining “the mushy middle,” Cruz evidently assumes that the electorate’s middle — lightly partisan and only mildly ideological — is too minuscule to matter.

The point is Pennsylvania.

Cruz, and all other Republican aspirants, must be measured against Pennsylvania. It is one of the 18 states that have voted Democratic in six consecutive elections and that, with the District of Columbia, total 242 electoral votes, and Pennsylvania was redder in 2012 than in 2008. Which Republican is most apt to flip Pennsylvania by accumulating large majorities in Philadelphia’s suburbs?

Then there's the hit on Cruz in the Senate. He's a mad bomber. Nobody likes him. Cruz can't work with other people.

Why is everyone ganging up on Cruz?

Look, everyone understands that the 2016 election will be won in the "five states that have been competitive since 1992 — Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia." You think Ted Cruz hasn't thought of that? You think he doesn't have a plan for winning those states? You think that Ted Cruz doesn't have a plan for winning the "mushy middle?"

Here's a thought about the "mushy middle." I'll bet that millions of them are really ticked off right about the impact of Obamacare. If you are a "mushy middle" you probably already had health insurance, and now you find out that premiums are going up, deductibles are going up, and you want someone to fight for you to bring sanity to health care.

Who's the one guy that stood up and fought back against Obamacare? Oh yeah, I know. Ted Cruz's filibuster against Obamacare in 2013 was a purely symbolic act; his quixotic speech wasn't going to go anywhere.

But if you are a mushy middle American, you might get the impression that Ted Cruz cares about people like you and is prepared to take a risk and stand up and fight for you.

Here's another thing. In his announcement speech, Ted Cruz did the usual born-in-a-log-cabin thing. In his case, he told the story of his father battling Batista in Cuba and then struggling his way up in America. Oh, and his mother was the first in her family to go to college and became a programmer in the 1950s.

You know what I call that? I call that appealing to the mushy middle.

So is Ted Cruz too extreme? Is he too abrasive? Is he too young and inexperienced? Who knows? All I know about Ted Cruz is what I read in the newspaper. Which means that I know nothing about Ted Cruz except what someone wants me to know.

But here is what I suspect. I suspect that Ted Cruz has a strategic mind.

Let's Bring It On. I'd say that any of the leading Republican candidates -- I am thinking Cruz, Walker, Rubio (sorry, no more Bushes for me) -- would be better than the corrupt and undistinguished Hillary Clinton. I say, let the best man win, the one that can appeal to the ordinary responsible individual American in the mushy middle.

When Does the Fight for Justice Become In-Justice?

If you are a liberal you have the comfortable knowledge that you are the good guy and you know that you are opposed in your fight for justice by the racists, sexists, and homophobes of the world. To say nothing of the classists.

Conservatives not so much, because we know that we can get into trouble for being conservative. Just read what it was like for SF writer Sarah Hoyt tiptoeing through the liberal tulips and editors at SF conventions.

Let's say that the liberals, the angels of light, get the political power they need to implement their program to fight injustice and punish the oppressors on all fronts. Then what? At what point does the fight against injustice become frank oppression as the new rulers hunt out and punish anyone that disagrees with their rage for justice?

We can agree, I suppose, that the last, final form of justice is still waiting to be found.

The problem is that in any society there are likely to be dueling agendas, competing conceptions of justice. There certainly are competing ideas of justice in the United States. So which conception do we choose? Does it come down to who has a majority in the Congress on in the Supreme Court?

But then it's not a matter of justice, it's a matter of political or judicial power.

There is, of course, an answer to this problem. It is the idea of limited government, and the separation of church and state.

The point of limited government is that not all questions of justice should be dealt with by legislation and judges. Some things, we may be pardoned for suggesting, are merely indignities, and should not be dealt with by legislatures. In other words, some things, objectionable as they may be, do not need to be settled by force. And let us be clear: when you resort to the legal system, you are invoking force and compulsion; you are saying that if the judge agrees with you and renders a verdict at trial, you want the judge to force the government's will on your legal opponent.

The separation of church and state is a bit different. Here we are saying that the formulation of rights and norms, of transcendental truths and meanings of life, should be separate from the government, which is the agent of force. Bluntly put, when we get the government into rights and norms and meanings of life, we are legislating somebody's morality. In most cases, that would be the ruling class's morality.

That's easy to say. In practice, of course, everything the government does that deviates from its core function of rewarding its supporters amounts to the legislation of morality.

And whenever the government legislates a morality that you disagree with, you experience that legislation as injustice directed against you.

In our present society we have the additional problem that our liberal friends don't think they are legislating morality when they legislate their social agenda. They can't be legislating morality because morality comes with religion and liberals are secularists and don't have a religion and don't have a morality. What they have, according to atheist Sam Harris, is "rational ethics." And of course when you implement rational ethics in legislation you aren't legislating morality but reason. Fred Bauer calls this attitude "sectarian secularism."

So now we come to the question of what to do about Christian bakers that don't want to bake for a gay wedding, at least not when they are required to put gay catchphrases on the cake. And what about Muslim bakers?

In the end, the law usually figures out what to do in cases like this. It would probably say that to deny service to a gay couple that just wanted to buy a cake off the shelf is illegal, just as it would be illegal to refuse service to a gay couple at a restaurant. But a Christian baker would have the right to refuse to decorate a cake with slogans that went against her religion.

The real answer to this is live and let live. Some things -- most things -- should not be brought to law. Only egregious, monstrous things should be resolved by government force.

And this is something that we should all practice. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it is the practical thing to do. When you use government power to enforce your will on other people, the other people get really pissed off. If they get pissed off enough they may form a head of rebellion to remove your cruel and unjust rule.

Oh, I know. "Cruel and unjust" doesn't apply to you and me; it just applies to that fellow behind the tree.

It is the beginning of wisdom to know that in every breast beats the heart of a would-be tyrant.

Gays Can Never be "Normal"

One of the lies that liberals tell themselves is that the fundamentalist Christian churches are the very locus of the powerful patriarchy, and therefore must be crushed.

In fact, as liberal James Ault tells in in Spirit and Flesh, a book about a fundamentalist church in New England, the opposite is true. In the church that he studied the men held all the offices but the women had all the power. They operated behind the scenes, and their men did what they were told.

Another thing to keep in mind is that fundamentalists are little people. No elite American would attend a real fundamentalist church; it would be too embarrassing. And as liberals say of African Americans: they can't be racists because they don't have the power.

So when gays decide to humiliate small Christian shopkeepers by siccing the local Human Rights Commission on them, there is only one thing to say: how about a little compassion, a little tolerance? How about putting yourself in the place of the "other?"

How about practicing what you preach?

Also, it might be a good time to revisit Winston Churchill's dictum: in victory, magnanimity. Gays have won the gay marriage battle. How about declaring victory and going home?

Look, I get the impossible position of the gays. Back in the days of Stonewall they were defiantly radical and counter-cultural. But now they want to be "normal" and accepted as normal. Only problem is, as Erick Erickson writes, that gays can never be normal. Gays can't be normal because they can't get married and have normal children that grow up with a mother and a father. And so on and so on.

A generation ago and more liberals indoctrinated young college women to liberate their sexual selves: women could get laid just like men! Unfortunately the young women believed them, and tried to do it. But most women aren't cut out for the multiple partners game. They fall in love and love forever. The sexual revolution created nothing but heartache.

Now liberals are indoctrinating our youth into believing that gay is just a lifestyle choice -- or that you are born gay, or whatever lends itself to the activist battle of the moment. Unfortunately our young people believe believe them. They will live to regret it, but by then it will be too late.

Of course, that's nothing on the liberal war on Christianity. I regard the Axial Age religions as vital agencies that help people graduate from the life of tribal helplessness as People of the Subordinate Self, and become People of the Responsible Self and responsible individuals. The left and the welfare state are foolish attempts that discourage people from making the momentous leap from victimhood and bondage to responsibility and freedom.

Yes, but the Christians are such bigots!

My take on the almost universal religious condemnation of homosexuality down the ages is that it is probably a social evolutionary thing: social Darwinism, if you like. Society needs to channel young energy towards marriage, work, and making babies, because otherwise the race dies out. Kinda like the late Roman empire where it got to be really difficult to get well-born young men to abandon their lives of dissipation and get married. Kinda like Europe today.

So religion isn't just about getting people to behave right through the cunning trick of divine justice. It also must push the idea of "go forth and multiply." Otherwise oblivion.

Our liberal friends like to suggest that getting married and raising children is a second-class sort of life, one that you resort to if don't have it in you to become a creative artist. And, of course, women are wasted as stay-at-home moms.

But the truth is that multiplication is hard. Ask any school-aged kid. Ask any married couple with two or three kids and one of them a surly teenager. And the most important thing that 90 percent of us will ever do is to put children on the ground and get them properly fledged and out of the nest.

Individual Responsibility: What about the Ancient Nomads?

One of my thoughtful emailers sent me a question about my post on SJW Anita Sarkeesian. He notes my three-stage system of People of the Subordinate Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Creative Self, and writes:

You mention that responsible individualism is "the responsibility to find work, the responsibility to make your own choices, the responsibility to find your own mate, all within the demanding environment of the market economy".  Aren't these the responsibilities of all humans, always?  Surely man has dreamed of universal leisure for his fellow man since time immemorial, and only recently has such fantasy become the basis of entire ideologies.  How then do our modern age responsibilities differ than that of an ancient nomad when boiled down to the basics of the quote above?  

The straight answer to that is: yes, of course, and not just of humans but of every living thing. Of course every human has the responsibility to get on their bike and earn a living. But there's a problem with all social animals, the problem of freeloading. The basic deal in social cooperation is that we all get to eat at the communal table; we all make our contribution, and we all get to enjoy the fruits of our cooperation. The reason that social cooperation works is that the division of labor works: when animals specialize, the individuals benefit and the community benefits.

But what about the slacker? There are several ways to deal with this menace. The first is shaming and possible expulsion. Other people in the community judge your behavior and take action. Then there is hierarchy. The boss tells you what to do, and punishes you if you don't do it. Then there is divine justice. God punishes you for your sins. Finally, there is exchange, which the anthropologists tell us is unique to modern humans, although it didn't really go viral until the rise of the bourgeoisie. People find a way to contribute to society and then get rewarded by the exchange system for their contribution.

On my system, the hunter-gatherers are pre-subordinate selves. They cooperate in a face-to-face society and the slacker gets named and shamed into compliance. We see this today in the ubiquitous community of women at work or in a neighborhood that have no power over each other except the judgements of other women's gossip.

When we get to the agricultural age we get a visibly hierarchical society where people must do their part and where agricultural workers are typically subordinated to a landed warrior class. Once you get this subordination you get the freeloader that does the absolute minimum of work that will avoid sanction. We see this survive today in any corporate or government bureaucracy where you can probably enjoy lifetime tenure and a pension if you keep your nose clean and don't antagonize the bosses. The problem is that it is staggeringly inefficient to have everyone sitting around waiting for the boss to tell them what to do.

The boss system works, after a fashion, in the agricultural age because life on the farm is pretty simple. But in the industrial age, where almost nobody grows their own food or builds their own cottage, the boss system has broken down. Today we all live in the exchange system where each one of us must find out how to contribute to society, and we learn what others value through the exchange system and its prices for ideas, for goods and for labor.

In this modern age, where the yoke of work and of finding work falls directly upon the shoulders of the individual worker, it is not surprising, as my emailer suggests, that people dream of "universal leisure for his fellow man" and conjure up whole ideologies to that dream. It is telling, of course, that all attempts to realize dreams of universal leisure have turned into nightmares. They have all regressed to the old boss system and have simply been unable to deliver even a smidgen of leisure. Instead they have required the most cruel compulsion to deliver even the simplest necessities of modern life.

And so today we get Anita Sarkeesian, once a nice middle-class college girl, who gets seduced by the victim ideology of feminism and the all-explaining power of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Sarkeesian and her fellow religionists demand "safe spaces," freedom from "microagressions" and the power to defenestrate anyone that challenges their dogmas.

For decades liberals have been lecturing us about the horror of that delicate flower, the Victorian wife, that had to be protected from the big bad world of sex and sleaze, and was told to "lie back and think of England." The solution to this patriarchal nightmare, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, was the "independent woman," unafraid of sex, unafraid of the public square and men and career.

What is going on here? It's politics. The whole point of politics is power, and the needs of power change from decade to decade. In the mid 20th century the cry was for the independent woman. Now the cry is for "safe spaces." But it's all politics and political power.

Yes, it's true that every individual has the responsibility to provide for himself and his family. But nomads are socialized into cooperation in a different way than modern city folk. The question is: how do you deal with the freeloader? In nomad society the freeloader got a frown from the other women; the agricultural bondman got a frown from his lord (and from the village women). Today it is a frown from the exchange system (and from the boss at work and the neighborhood women).

The way to stay clear of the modern freeloader police is to be a responsible individual. Then you'll have nothing to fear from the gossiping women, nothing to fear from the boss at work, and nothing to fear from the market system.

But you still have to watch out for the diversity police. There is no escape from them!

Robert Kuttner: On Another Planet

Sometimes it really pays to read the guys on the other side and try to understand how they look at the world. Here's Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect wondering “Why the 99 Percent Keeps Losing.”

You and I understand this perfectly. The 99 percent is losing because liberals. But Kuttner, against all the evidence, thinks Republicans are to blame. And he still can't understand it.

The vast majority of Americans keep falling behind economically because of changes in society's ground rules, while the rich get even richer -- yet this situation doesn't translate into a winning politics.

If anything, the right keeps gaining and the wealthy keep pulling away. How can this possibly be?
Well, he's got seven reasons. And the first one is that Republicans are to blame for the gridlock in Washington, and the experts agree.

Actually, I agree with Kuttner and the experts on this one. We Republicans and conservatives are fundamentally opposed to the continued expansion of the welfare state. We think that it is unjust and wicked. So of course we try to stop the Democrats expanding its injustice any way we can. Wouldn't Democrats do the same?

But the Democrats are hardly blameless, writes Kuttner.

Instead of seizing on the collapse of 2008 as a disgrace for laissez-faire economics, deregulation, Wall Street and the Republican Party, Barack Obama tried to make nice with the GOP, refrained from cleaning out the big banks that caused the mess, and drank the Kool-Aid of budget balance.

Actually, my impression is that the Democrats have been blaming the crash on “laissez-faire economics, deregulation, Wall Street,” not to mention greedy bankers. And as for Obama trying to “make nice with the GOP:” come on, pal. Obama doesn't even know how to make nice with Democrats.

Then Kuttner's all upset about the US Supreme Court and Citizens United. The court majority “has become an opportunistic subsidiary of the Republican Party.” If only! And what about Chief Justice Roberts waving through Obamacare, old chum?

Then there's economic inequality. In the years after World War II,

Shared prosperity was built on government activism promoting opportunity, strong unions providing decent wages even for the less educated, enforcement of other labor laws, debt-free public higher education, well-regulated financial institutions, a genuinely progressive income tax, and a trading system that did not promote outsourcing.

This is a standard Democratic talking point. Back in the Fifties America had good jobs at good wages, and then Ronald Reagan ruined it.

Yes but what about the changes to the economy and “how jobs are structured?” What about education and technology? That's “malarkey,” according to Kuttner. With the right politics, we'd whack corporate executives, grow unions, and windfall profits would be shared.

Yet with all this mess, Millennials aren't in the streets protesting. Maybe we could wake them up with “a one-time write off of all past student debt.” And hey, how about a “genuine mass movement?”
You mean like the Tea Party?

It's easy to dismiss all Kuttner's arguments as self-deceiving claptrap. But let us try to understand the point of view of the “other.”

There is an argument that politics could successfully strong-arm a one-time redistribution of income through labor and social insurance legislation half a century ago.  You could argue that it worked back then because the US bestrode the world economy like a colossus. Government could successfully force the economic system to funnel money to Democratic supporters.

Could it be that the decade of the Glorious Fifties was a special situation, never to be repeated?

Could it be that there is a limit to what politics and organizing and movements and taxes and regulation can accomplish in this world?

Could it be that progressives like Robert Kuttner are just plain wrong about what will help the 99 percent start winning?

On the conservative view you'd expect that when the Fed is printing money and keeping interest rates low, you'd have a stock market boom that would benefit the rich. When the government legislates a complex entitlement like Obamacare that puts huge new burdens on individuals and employers, you'd expect the economy to stumble and wages to crumble. When government mandates minimum wages and lays swingeing taxes on labor, you'd expect employers to be stingy with jobs and you'd expect a flourishing underground economy.

And you'd expect the 99 percent to go right on losing.

Liberals like Robert Kuttner like to sneer at fundamentalists that don't believe in evolution.

But what really matters is the science of whether minimum wages hurt the very people they are supposed to help, whether unions end up destroying the businesses they organize, whether government health care can ever be more than a hole to pour money through.

I just wish that the world would start sneering at liberal fundamentalism on economics.

Anita Sarkeesian: The Road from Individual to Victim

Canadian critic and social justice warrior Anita Sarkeesian is the young lady that stirred up #gamergate. So far so good. But I recently got to view remarks she made at All About Women 2015 at the Sydney Opera House (H/T Susan L. M. Goldberg). In her prepared remarks Sarkeesian described her journey from neo-liberal individualist to feminist victim.

This is fascinating to me because of my three-stage theory of social membership. Simply put, my theory imagines three types of people. There are the People of the Subordinate Self: think workers, peasants, serfs, slaves, bondsmen, underclass. Their creed is collectivism; their place is the village. Then there are People of the Responsible Self: think Jews, Christians, careers, bourgeoisie, markets, business. Their creed is responsible individualism; their place is the city. Finally there are the People of the Creative Self: think artists, writers, revolutionaries, activists. Their creed is expressive individualism; their place is the artist's colony.

Now, it is my notion that you need a religion when you move from one selfhood to another. The Axial Age religions, including Judaism and Christianity, are vehicles that help people on the road from the world of the Subordinate Self to the world of the Responsible Self. Romanticism is the vehicle if you want to graduate from the creed of responsible individualism to the belief system of expressive individualism.

What I had never thought about is what religion you need if you want to go in the opposite direction! Suppose that you were born into a family in the middle class but you don't feel like a responsible individual at all? Suppose you find that you are really a victim, a member of the tribe of the exploited and the oppressed? Perfectly simple. For you there is leftism. Here is Anita Sarkeesian describing her journey.

Like most people who grew up immersed in the neoliberal ideology of the West, I saw the world largely as a series of individuals making their own personal individual choices. And here I was, a young woman making my own personal choices about what to wear, what to buy, what to study and what I wanted to do every day. Within that narrow individualist framework feminism seemed like a relic of the distant past.

 But then she had her Road to Damascus experience.

With the help of some amazing mentors and by reading a lot of feminist writing, especially the words of women of color and queer women from around the world, I learned to see through a sociological lens and understand the world as it really exists, as a series of intersecting social systems. Once you have a systemic and institutional framework, you see how oppression manifests in many subtle ways under the systems of what bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

Well, of course! It all dovetails! But there is a problem.

 Unfortunately many contemporary discourses in and around feminism tend to emphasize a form of hyper individualism (informed by the neoliberal worldview). More and more, I hear variations on this idea that anything that any woman personally chooses to do is a feminist act, this attitude is often referred to as “choice feminism”. Choice feminism posits that each individual woman determines what is empowering for herself, which might sound good on the surface but this concept risks obscuring the bigger picture and larger, fundamental goals of the movement by focusing on individual women and a very narrow, individual notion of “empowerment”. It erases the reality that some choices that women make have an enormous negative impact on other women’s lives.

So, you see, unless you go with Sarkeesian's approved feminism you are helping the patriarchy, and you will be shunned. You see, "Even if an individual woman can make patriarchy work for her, it’s still a losing game for the rest of the women on this planet." And that is bad.

And because of how systems of oppression intersect and compound one another, it’s women of color, indigenous women, women living in the global south, women with disabilities, queer women, and transwomen who bare the brunt of those ramifications.

 The bottom line is this:

In order to be a feminist we have a responsibility beyond ourselves, we have a responsibility to each other, and we have a responsibility to work for the collective liberation of all women.

So it's a fantasy to think of yourself as a responsible self and an individualist. Because, really, we aren't individuals at all, but victims, and what we need to do is to "work for the collective liberation of all women."

Now actually I agree with Anita Sarkeesian. We really are victims. Ever since the first families in Mesopotamia got sucked into alluvial agriculture five thousand years ago humans have found themselves "caged" by the new ways. That's the word that Michael Mann uses in The Sources of Social Power. In other words, once you've abandoned the nomadic ways of the hunter-gatherer and joined a fixed settlement that works the land you are trapped in the new way. For one thing, agriculture supports a lot more people per square mile than nomadism. If you break up agriculture, a ton of people are going to die until the population reduces to a level that can survive on nomadism.

Another thing is that people become less war-like in settled agricultural communities. In nomadic groups all the men are enrolled to fight the border wars against the neighboring groups. In the larger agricultural societies only the warrior class does the fighting, and the borders are much further away. So the death by violence comes down from 500 per 100,000 per year to 50 per 100,000 per year, according the Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

In the transition from agricultural to industrial society you get another step in pacification. The nation state is bigger than the feudal barony, and the army of the feudal host is replaced by a professional bureaucratic army. Violent death rate drops from 50 per 100,000 per year to five or even one per 100,000 per year.

Don't mind me, Anita Sarkeesian, but I'd make a wild guess and say that the level of patriarchal oppression comes down with the transition from nomad to agricultural settlement, and again with the transition from agriculture to industry. These days we aren't governed by a landed warrior class, but by an educated elite class -- people like you, Anita Sarkeesian.

If you want to experience vicariously the good old patriarchy in action, read the Iliad. Those Argives and Danaans thought nothing of sacking cities, killing the men, and taking the women as concubines. Raping and pillage where what men did in those days.

But in America, in 1896, a young Norwegian immigrant woman, Helga Estby, walked across the continent to try to win a $10,000 prize. Was she raped and pillaged on the way? Wikipedia doesn't say. But I'd guess that she wasn't.

The truth is that responsible individualism is not liberation; it is a heavy yoke of responsibility: the responsibility to find work, the responsibility to make your own choices, the responsibility to find your own mate, all within the demanding environment of the market economy. It's not surprising that immediately after the rise of capitalism a succession of social and political movements started to yearn for the lost Eden of collectivism, and the liberation from the heavy burdens of life and work under capitalism from which there is no escape.

It is telling that in the university in 2015 women are demanding "safe spaces" from people and ideas that they don't want to face. If you ask me, that's a return to the patriarchy, because people in "safe places" need society to protect them from danger. And who do you think are going to be the protectors?

If life as a responsible individual is tough, the truth is that expressive individualism, the life of the artist and the creator, is even harder. All of us can find a place in the world if we give up our lives to a collective. Most of us can find a place in the world as responsible individuals. But only a few can make it as creators of original work.

So it's not surprising that there are many people like Anita Sarkeesian that long for a simpler, less creative, less responsible life. The trouble is that this liberation in collectivism is not liberating at all. Ask anyone that lived in Soviet Russia or Maoist China.

And Anita Sarkeesian is not really a victim. She is an activist, rough and tough and devilish sly, a leader and an influencer. In fact she is a member of the creative class, having hacked out a place for herself in the sun by developing a significant talent for creative publicity.

What Would an Islam Reformation Mean?

I love Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali Muslim turned western atheist. Her books Nomad and Infidel are breathtaking views into the crisis in Islam. Now she's just out with Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now and proposed to reform Islam, and I'll be out there buying myself a copy. Meanwhile we have the reviewers. Writes Brian Stewart:

The argument in Heretic, Hirsi Ali’s fourth book, is straightforward: Islam is in need of a radical transformation. Islam itself, that is — mainstream Islam, not “radical” Islam. This is a thorny proposition: How to reform a religion whose adherents believe its central text was dictated by Allah Himself? But when the behavior of millions is guided by a religion whose sacred texts frequently justify intolerance and cruelty, something must be done.

But what is to be done?

Hirsi Ali proposes five amendments to Islamic doctrine: dethroning Mohammad as an infallible prophet, and scrapping a literalist reading of the Quran; elevating the rewards of human life over those of eternal life (with the ancillary purpose of delegitimizing martyrdom); replacing the most barbarous parts of Sharia with practical man-made legislation; promoting concerted action to stigmatize those tempted to take religious law into their own hands; and, last, repudiating the theological warrant for jihad.

Yes, but how? Hirsi Ali wants us westerners to ally with so-called "Mecca" Muslims, "pious believers who are not inclined to practice violence but remain at odds with the modern world in crucial ways."

But, of course, what we in the west think and do is rather beside the point. The question is rather, how do Muslims deal with the fact of the modern world? And how do they deal with the fact that their heartlands are racked with war and violence?

The fundamental problem in all "reformations" and "enlightenments" and "revolutions" is that religion and politics are human attempts to stabilize a radically unstable world. They attempt to provide a safe place where humans can live out their lives with some pretense of a "normal life."

But what happens when the objective conditions of life change? What happens is that religious leaders and political leaders push back. The religious leaders mobilize against "heresy" and the political leaders mobilize against "rebels." Very often the heretics are idiots and the rebels are pirates; but not always.

The Reformation in Europe was not merely an argument over religion, it was also an argument over politics and the economy, part of the capitalist and individualist revolution, and it was an internal European thing. The rising bourgeoisie of merchants and manufacturers started creating remarkable amounts of wealth and their wealth and their culture started to influence the old feudal order in Europe, leading to centuries of religious and dynastic wars, astonishing increases in prosperity and transformation of the way of life of everyone from kings to paupers.

As the European transformation proceeded, it expanded out across the world, creating an enormous challenge to the two great populations and cultures of the world in India and China. For India and China, the challenge was not just an argument within the culture as in Europe, but a dreadful attack from without. India ended up under British rule for a couple of centuries, and China experienced dreadful convulsions for the long century between 1850 and 1980. After emerging from under the western knout they thought to set up the new India and the new China by embracing socialism, obviously the latest and greatest from the west, but found to their cost that socialism was, in fact, a dreadful reaction, an attempt to return to an economic and social Eden that never was. So now they are going capitalist.

But what about Islam in its heartlands from North Africa to the Hindu Kush? Let's be honest. If it weren't for oil, nobody would give a damn. But because of oil we in the west keep meddling in the Middle East to keep the oil flowing cheap and regular. And the wealth from oil has allowed the Middle Eastern religious and political authorities to resist the existential challenges that the rise of the west has posed to Islam.

What should be done, and how? I turn for inspiration to Marxism, which reckons that the productive forces are the foundation and that culture and politics are the superstructure. On this view, like it or not, global individualist capitalism is the productive force on which the whole world is based. Whatever your religion, whatever your politics, you must figure how to connect it with the reality of the modern Great Enrichment, in which peoples that practice capitalism have increased their income by nearly two orders of magnitude in 200-300 years.

When we look at Muslims in their heartland, or Muslims in their great diaspora to Europe and North America, that is the issue. How do these peoples, tossed into the 21st century, create a new superstructure for their culture that will make it possible for them to live a "normal life" again?