Counterrevolutionary Meditations

Commenting on the controversy precipitated by the arguments of radio personality Dennis Prager to the effect that recently elected Congressman, and practising Muslim, Keith Ellison, ought not be permitted to swear his oath of office upon a Koran, inasmuch as the Koran and the tradition it represents is utterly alien to the originary sources of Western order, Lawrence Auster writes:

At present we allow Muslims into this society, and of course they have the same rights of free exercise of religion as any other religious group. If a Muslim elected official wants to take his oath on the Koran, there is no legal basis for stopping him. That is why it is ridiculous for Prager, who welcomes all religions and says all religions have equal rights in America, to say that the Koran is forbidden in an oath taking. His position is incoherent.

To figure out what a coherent position would be, we need to go beyond our present circumstances and think about the way things ought to be. Thinking about the way things ought to be is the beginning of politics.

In a traditionalist America it would be understood that Islam is incompatible with our system of government, our Constitution, our entire way of life. This understanding would be enforced by law. There would be no right to practice Islam in America, except under special restricted circumstances defined by law, for example for diplomats, travelers, and so on.

In a traditionalist America, Muslims would not be allowed to immigrate or be naturalized. The Koran would not be allowed any place in our public life. Also, in a traditionalist America with a restored federal Constitution, the individual states would have restored to them their right to have religious establishments if they chose, and to institute restrictions on citizenship, the franchise, and political office based on religious belief, as was true of many states up to the mid 19th century. Obviously, there would not be enough Muslims in such an America for a Muslim Congressman to be elected, but, if there were, he could not use the Koran to take his oath on, because it would be understood that the Koran has no place in the United States and in the several states.

Auster continues by drawing an analogy between the judgment that Islam is alien to our civilization and the judgments rendered in the Mormon cases of the late Nineteenth Century, namely, that polygamy is antithetical to our civilization. Of course, a liberal society can only implement such exclusions and exceptions by acting in a unprincipled manner, ie., contrary to its stated constitutive principles. Nevertheless, liberalism, the ontology of which is nothing more substantial than the whirling, whiling vortex of desires within the centreless individual, cannot fix a limit to the realization of desire, the liberation of passion, through which the individual is; and what follows is that liberalism cannot serve as the organizing principle of a civilization, as it, by its very nature, is inimical to every civilized impulse, which mandates the bridling and mortification of desire and the defense of the particular societal forms that this ordering assumes. To the extent that any particular society endeavours to refashion itself as if to instantiate the nothingness of liberalism, that society negates itself, sometimes as viscerally as in the public assertion of Mohometan allegiances.

No society can survive for long if non-discriminatory tolerance and equality are its ultimate guide.

No, and in the pursuit of a fantasy world of tolerance and harmony, the real world will be lost.