The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat Hardcover – September 1, 2002

Scruton gives us a piercing concpetual analysis and deconstruction of the major qualities of Western and Islamic mindsets, motivations and goals, from political "liberal New York" to creed based Tehran. Of particular interest is his conclusion, based fully on what he considers the central tenets of the West. A must read and consideration for any citizen concerned about the state of the globe.

According to noted English philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, "the principle target of al-Qa'eda," whose terroristic strike against the United States in 2001 we may take as synechdochal of contemporary Islamist hatred generally, "is neither Western civilisation, nor Christianity, nor global capitalism" (156) ; nor is al-Qa'eda's motivation for striking whatever it was in The West that it meant above all to strike readily to be envisaged as vengeance for anything The West ever did in or to The Middle East but, rather, against that which we, most essentially, are : "the Muslim terrorist target[s] the nation-state [per se] as the true work of Satan" (156). "Al-Qa'eda," whose name means "base," accepts "no territory as home and no human law as authoritative" (128) ; concomitantly, it seeks to overrun our territory and eradicate our home. Insidiously enlarged by globalisation (85) even as its own lifeblood of territorial loyalties recedes (83), The West today presents the "spectacle of a secular society maintained by…laws [man-made rather than divinely proclaimed]" (158) and continuing therewith to achieve, not only the equilibrium that has eluded The Muslim World, but a sort of degenerate yet interminable prosperity. It is this spectacle that provokes in many Muslims what Scruton aptly calls "a seething desire to punish" (83), yet it is not foremost with the origins of Islamist hatred that Scruton is concerned in The West And The Rest but with our own identity, the identity of Western Civilisation, and what sets it apart from every other.

Scruton begins his survey of Western civilisational origins by asserting that our civilisation has its ultimate root in Ancient Athens, where, as the Oresteia of Aeschylus testifies, it was realized that, where the former comes into conflict with the latter, religious law should give way to civil law for the sake of long-term social equilibrium. Between this ultimate root of our civilisation and its present incarnation intervene two further great ancient institutional influences : Roman Law and The Christian Church. Scruton asserts that the first of these is distinctive, above all, in being essentially an instrument of conflict-resolution rather than the codification of its creators' tribal mores or religious imperatives. Roman Law was, correlatively, derived from no holy text but autonomous principles refined over centuries administering the most ethno-religiously disparate provinces (22). In short, Roman Law evolved into and under what Scruton calls its own "universal jurisdiction" (3), and it is the universal jurisdiction of Roman Law that has been most decisive for the development of Western civilisational identity. Nor was Roman Law anywise more influential than in its serving as framework no less than foil to the development of a third and final key influence in Western civilisational identity : The Christian Church.

Always already entrenched subjects of the mighty Roman Empire, the first Christians, though they could be passionately disobedient, hardly dreamed of ruling themselves outright. Jesus himself advised his followers to "[r]ender…to Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (4). But even more decisive was the trail-blazing guidance of a learnèd imperial lawyer, Paul Of Tarsus, who directed The Early Church towards becoming, in dovetail with Rome's universal jurisdiction, an organisation not only headed by citizens but itself (corporately) a citizen. No less hedged in than hedged about by its unique status, The Christian Church transmitted the concatenated legal-conceptual heritage that remains the core of Western Civilisational identity : an ethno-religiously disinterested civil law, precedence for civil law where religious law conflicted, and, for The Church, no fewer responsibilities than rights. Race, creed, language (23), and dynasty (21), which have fueled identity-formation the world over, have all also, Scruton admits, contributed to the formation of territorial loyalties in The Post-Roman West, but what Scruton helps us understand has set The West fundamentally apart is her never-extinguished belief in "political process" (16)--public, reasoned, human consent-seeking--as the righteously ultimate arbiter of collective agreement.

If Christianity's foundational figure might be called impractical in His unremitting transformation of the inner-life, Muhammed, who found himself amidst no such Caesarian Over-World as Jesus did, may be called eminently practical. Muhammed's world-class insight, Scruton explains, was into the utilitarian power of ritual and law rapidly to form a new community (102-3). The word "Islam" itself means "submission [that brings peace]," and it was with the forms of community-building submission rather than with the incubation of complex, inward-directed doctrine on the one hand and legal compromises on the other that Muhammed was, from the first, principly concerned. As a result of its founder's strengths and preoccupations, Islam still enjoys a "form of membership" "unparalleled," as Scruton remarks, in its capacity to satisfy longings for ritually confirmed forms of guiltlessness but which, from a Western perspective, also suffers grave conceptual deficits. That which Scruton finds most crucially lacking in Classic Islamic thought is any concept of that Western touchstone, legal personality (98), by which a church may preside without arrogating to itself all power, and any legal definition of what we call the public sphere (98), wherein political (as opposed to divinely proclaimed) solutions to collective problems might work themselves out. Scruton's word-painting of the Old Muslim City, "built cell on cell, a hive of private spaces" (100), each visited by the "stark, unmediated" presence of the Muslim God (92), nicely sums up both Islam's beauties and, vis-à-vis The West as Scruton has limned it, Islam's limitations.

The West And The Rest is a beautifully written and concise but also, maybe a bit for the worse as well as mostly for the better, a dense book. Only 161 pages long in this edition, it was very challenging to encapsulate in a review of only a few paragraphs. As well as to the frailties of one's own intellect even as it is fired to pursue the lessons of a natural teacher, this challenge was largely owing to Scruton's book having been already, in effect, highly concentrated by its author, who has here put the most salient features of not one but two whole civilisations at our concernful and comparative fingertips. I do wish, however, that Scruton had pursued his survey of the aspects of Western Civilisational Identity in simpler sequence. I think, in particular, of "a far more important legacy of Christianity" (i.e. the extolling of forgiveness--which, it turns out, is far more important than Christianity's more narrowly legal heritage) cropping up associatively on page 36, at which point I wasn't certain how to integrate that advantage of Christianity, well explained in itself though it was, into my overall picture of The Church and its differences from Islam. Another, and more important, cavil I would like to make is with the absence of any spelled-out definition of a couple of key legal-ish terms : "legal personality" and "universal citizen." I did my best, in the above encapsulation of Scruton's argument, to show that I had gathered what they mean (and I grazed internet definitions), but, in this regard, I crave the further explanation I know Sir Roger is so well able to provide.

I thought this book was more recent; reading it, it is a post-9/11 book comparing the philosophies of government in western nations vs. muslim lands. Islam is governed by the "will of Allah," or whatever some power-hungry mullah decides that is. The west is governed by (in theory) the will of the governed and a common agreement and understanding of the law.

That's the theory.

So, Scruton recommends, among other things, a strong emphasis on integrating ethnic minorities into majority cultural norms, the abandonment of multi-cultural priorities which lead to national suicide, and an end to globalization. Because globalization = bad. Also an end to modern architecture, which is a strange subtopic in this book.

Given other arguments made in the book, it would be valid to dram the conclusion from Scruton's writings that another recommendation should be the elimination of welfare benefits and a social safety net for first-generation immigrants. But Scruton declines to be more specific about that.

I am not sure that this book is about the West and the rest that includes China, India, Russia, Brazil. It is more about the West and Islam. This is not surprising since it was written in response to 9/11. For Scruton the West is comprised of territorial states whose democratic features include a seperation of state and church, and an insistence on loyalty to the state. The Islamic world on the other hand is a civilization in which loyalty to one's particular state is secondary to loyalty to Islamic Civilization as a whole. In Islamic civilization there is no loyalty per se to the state, but rather to the global Islamic community. Islam does not seperate church and state but makes them one.
Scruton sees a loss of faith and decline in functionality in the West, and contrasts this with an Islamic world whose loyalty is o Islamic civilization as a whole. He sees the rise of global terror in connection with the growth of Islam in the world.