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Forgiveness and Irony
What makes the West strong 
Winter 2009Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith andmorality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnityand nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. Butwhat makes secular government legitimate?That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modernthinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who mustobey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” wherebyeach person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political processthrough which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and dutyof participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities arecomposed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that conferssecurity and freedom in exchange for consent.That is what people want; it does not, however, make them happy. Something is missing from alife based purely on consent and polite accommodation with your neighbors—something of which Muslims retain a powerful image through the words of the Koran. This missing thing goes by many names: sense, meaning, purpose, faith, brotherhood, submission. People need freedom; but they also need the goal for which they can renounce it. That is the thought contained in theword “Islam”: the willing submission, from which there is no return.It goes without saying that the word’s connotations are different for Arabic speakers and for speakers of Turkish, Malay, or Bengali. Turks, who live under a secular law derived from thelegal systems of post-Napoleonic Europe, are seldom disposed to think that, as Muslims, theymust live in a state of continual submission to a divine law that governs all of social and politicallife. The 20 percent of Muslims who are Arabs, however, feel the mesmerizing rhythms of theKoran as an unbrookable current of compulsion and are apt to take “Islam” literally. For them,this particular act of submission may mean renouncing not only freedom but also the very idea of citizenship. It may involve retreating from the open dialogue on which the secular order dependsinto the “shade of the Koran,” as Sayyid Qutb put it, in a disturbing book that has inspired theMuslim Brotherhood ever since. Citizenship is precisely not a form of brotherhood, of the kindthat follows from a shared act of heartfelt submission: it is a relation among strangers, acollective apartness, in which fulfillment and meaning are confined to the private sphere. Tohave created this form of renewable loneliness is the great achievement of Western civilization,and my way of describing it raises the question of whether it is worth defending and, if so, how.My answer is yes, it is worth defending, but only if we recognize the truth that the presentconflict with Islamism makes vivid to us: citizenship is not enough, and it will endure only if associated with meanings to which the rising generation can attach its hopes and its search for identity. There is no doubt that the secular order and the search for meaning coexisted quitehappily when Christianity provided its benign support to both. But (especially in Europe)Christianity has retreated from public life and is now being driven from private life as well. For  people of my generation, it seemed, for a while, as though we could rediscover meaning through
 
culture. The artistic, musical, literary, and philosophical traditions of our civilization bore somany traces of a world-transforming significance that it would be enough—we thought—to passthose things on. Each new generation could then inherit by means of them the spiritual resourcesthat it needed. But we reckoned without two all-important facts: first, the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that without an injection of energy, all order decays; and second,the rise of what I call the “culture of repudiation,” as those appointed to inject that energy have become increasingly fatigued with the task and have eventually jettisoned the cultural baggageunder whose weight they staggered.This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across thespiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sensethat nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in thefreedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. It is hardly surprising that so many Muslims in our cities today regard the civilization surrounding them as doomed, even if it is a civilization thathas granted them something that they may be unable to find where their own religion triumphs,which is a free, tolerant, and secular rule of law. For they were brought up in a world of certainties; around them, they encounter only doubts.If repudiation of its past and its identity is all that Western civilization can offer, it cannotsurvive: it will give way to whatever future civilization can offer hope and consolation to theyoung and fulfill their deep-rooted human need for social membership. Citizenship, as I havedescribed it, does not fulfill that need: and that is why so many Muslims reject it, seeking insteadthat consoling “brotherhood” (
ikhwan
) that has so often been the goal of Islamic revivals. Butcitizenship is an achievement that we cannot forgo if the modern world is to survive: we have built our prosperity on it, our peace and our stability, and—even if it does not provide happiness —it defines us. We cannot renounce it without ceasing to be.What is needed is not to reject citizenship as the foundation of social order but to provide it witha heart. And in seeking that heart, we should turn away from the apologetic multiculturalism thathas had such a ruinous effect on Western self-confidence and return to the gifts that we havereceived from our Judeo-Christian tradition.The first of these gifts is forgiveness. By living in a spirit of forgiveness, we not only uphold thecore value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happinessdoes not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom. It comes fromsacrifice: that is the great message that all the memorable works of our culture convey. Themessage has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but we can hear it once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary act of sacrifice isforgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices resentment and thereby renounces something thathad been dear to his heart.The Koran invokes at every point the mercy, compassion, and justice of God. But the God of theKoran is not a lenient God. In His Koranic manifestation, God forgives sparingly and withobvious reluctance. He is manifestly not amused by human folly and weakness—nor, indeed, isHe amused by anything. The Koran, unlike the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, is a joke-free zone.This brings us to another of our civilization’s gifts to us: irony. There is already a developingstreak of irony in the Hebrew Bible, one that the Talmud amplifies. But a new kind of ironydominates Christ’s judgments and parables, which look on the spectacle of human folly andwryly show us how to live with it. A telling example is Christ’s verdict in the case of the woman
 
taken in adultery: “Let he who is without fault cast the first stone.” In other words: “Come off it;haven’t you wanted to do what she did, and already done it in your hearts?” Some havesuggested that this story is a later insertion—one of many that the early Christians culled fromthe store of inherited wisdom attributed to the Redeemer after his death. Even if that is true,however, it merely confirms the view that the Christian religion has made irony central to itsmessage. It was a troubled, post-Enlightenment Christian, Søren Kierkegaard, who pointed toirony as the virtue that united Socrates and Christ.The late Richard Rorty saw irony as a state of mind intimately connected with the postmodernworldview—a withdrawal from judgment that nevertheless aims at a kind of consensus, a sharedagreement not to judge. The ironic temperament, however, is better understood as a virtue—adisposition aimed at a kind of practical fulfillment and moral success. Venturing a definition of this virtue, I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, includingoneself. However convinced you are of the rightness of your actions and the truth of your views,look on them as the actions and the views of someone else and rephrase them accordingly. Sodefined, irony is quite distinct from sarcasm: it is a mode of acceptance rather than a mode of rejection. It also points both ways: through irony, I learn to accept both the other on whom I turnmy gaze, and also myself, the one who is gazing. Pace Rorty, irony is not free from judgment: itsimply recognizes that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.The West’s democratic inheritance stems, I would argue, from the habit of forgiveness. Toforgive the other is to grant him, in your heart, the freedom to be. It is therefore to acknowledgethe individual as sovereign over his life and free to do both right and wrong. A society that makes permanent room for forgiveness therefore tends automatically in a democratic direction, since itis a society in which the voice of the other is heard in all decisions that affect him. Irony—therecognition and acceptance of otherness—amplifies this democratic tendency and also helpsthwart the mediocrity and conformity that are the downsides of a democratic culture.Forgiveness and irony lie at the heart of our civilization. They are what we have to be most proudof, and our principal means to disarm our enemies. They underlie our conception of citizenshipas founded in consent. And they are expressed in our conception of law as a means to resolveconflicts by discovering the just solution to them. It is not often realized that this conception of law has little in common with Muslim sharia, which is regarded as a system of commands issued by God and not capable of, or in need of, further justification.God’s commandments are important to Christians and Jews, too; but they are not seen assufficient for the good government of human societies. They must be supplemented by another kind of law, responsive to the changing forms of human conflict. The parable of the tributemoney makes this transparently clear (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to Godthe things that are God’s”), as does the papal doctrine of the two swords—the two forms of law,human and divine, on which good government depends. The law enforced by our courts requiresthe parties to “submit” only to the secular jurisdiction. It treats each party as a responsibleindividual, acting freely for himself. This feature of law is particularly vivid in the minds of theEnglish-speaking peoples, whose system of common law consists of freedoms—won by thecitizen from the state—that the state must uphold. Sharia consists of obligations imposed by Godthat the courts must enforce. It is a means to ensure “submission” to the will of God, as revealedin the Koran and the Sunna.How do these thoughts bear on our current situation? In particular, how does this invocation of deep aspects of our Judeo-Christian heritage help us respond to the threat posed by Islamist
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