The Axis of Ignorance
The last few weeks, I have found it more and more difficult to contribute to this blog, because the more I think about current event issues, the less I want to think about them. Politics has moved beyond an issue-by-issue streetfight where facts and arguments sway the debate. The events that matter are being propelled by people with blood in their eyes for the main chance – a kind of seismic transformation of America toward (or back to) something very different from what anyone who grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of the 20th century would have been led to expect.
As the totality of this agenda grows increasingly clear, the apparently-complete lack of common ground between the two sides becomes a more and more a distressing problem for anyone with faith in the power of reason to solve human problems. What can you say to people who seem to prefer yawning gaps between wealth and poverty, pollution to clean air and water, constant war to international understanding, and the ignorant certitudes of fundamentalism to reasoned discourse? There’s a certain basic denial of possibilities inherent in contemporary radical conservatism, a stubborn unwillingness to consider remedies that depend on communal consensus or collective action, a basic distrust of anything thoughtful or complex.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this tendency represents a throwback to a far earlier era than many have suggested. Yes, the immediate goal of the conservative movement is the restoration of a pre-New Deal economic order, dominated by unregulated corporations and provincial small town values. But why stop there? All the political and economic developments that irk the Right arise from a more basic source: the intellectual tradition of 17th and 18th century Europe – an era today known as the Enlightenment. During this period, a few visionary philosophers came up with new way to describe the human condition, one which challenged the traditional (and, in their view, arbitrary) authority of the Church and the aristocracy by claiming that truth could be discovered independently through the exercise of observation and deduction, rather than simply belief and intuition. Political and economic theory founded upon experience supplanted received wisdom, and people up and down the social strata began to find the vocabulary to question the authority of hereditary elites.
This shift in philosophy turned the attention of scholars to nature and to human institutions rather than Scripture and metaphysics. This was an intellectual movement known as Humanism (or sometimes Secular Humanism), and the academic curriculum associated with it was (and still is) the Liberal Arts. From this basis arose the pillars of the modern era: science, the free market and constitutional government.
Considering how much these three advances contributed to the improvement of the material conditions of humankind, it’s amazing that the underlying philosophy of liberal humanism that makes them possible remains controversial. Indeed, by the 19th and 20th centuries, the irreversible triumph of the Enlightenment seemed to be ratcheted into place by the march of history, and thoughts of effacing humanist traditions were merely the cracked ravings of shattered autocrats and the retrograde Church.
Secular humanism has advanced so far into Western culture that it has lost consciousness of itself as an intellectual movement. Its proponents have divided into mutually-hostile factions whose differences with each other have taken priority over their common foe. Meanwhile, the Enemy has never lost sight of its true target. They have attached the terms “Liberal” and “Secular Humanist” to the most unpopular manifestations of the ideology in order to bring the entire modern worldview into disrepute, and they now sense their moment to overturn four hundred years of drift away from the certainties of Scripture and Authority, root and branch.
This is not a tendency unique to America or to the West. Modernity’s enemies are everywhere, and are best established in those places where the modern era manifested itself in its less noble incarnations – colonialism, imperialism and militarism. Whether Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, Luddites, ultra-Zionists settlers or unreconstructed monarchists and absolutists, these forces represent a global Axis of Ignorance whose goal is to restore the primacy of traditional forms of authority and banish the pernicious spirit of inquiry that leads to troubling change and innovation.
We have no trouble recognizing this impulse in other cultures and societies, but until now, it has been unthinkable that it could gain ground at the epicenter of the modern world: the United States. Our history, our constitutional government and our prevailing social ideology seemed enough to inoculate us from the possibility of backsliding, to the extent that we could afford to ignore the forces of reaction and even allow them to freely propagate. Even now, the prospect of such a profound philosophic regression is so alien to our engrained progressive worldview that to even suggest it as I’m doing here seems farfetched and paranoid.
Well, it’s not. The Axis of Ignorance is here on our shores and has gained control of our government. So-called “metropolitan conservatives” and advocates of the free market who think they have common cause with the implacable enemies of historical liberalism are gravely mistaken, as they will sooner or later find out. In the meantime, the rest of us have to keep our eye on the ball and not be distracted by shadow battles or issues at the margins. It’s not about taxes, it’s not about Social Security, it’s not even about the basic idea of progressive government in America since 1904. The entire intellectual foundation of human freedom and democracy is under attack, and it needs every hand to rise to its defense. When the issues are that big, it becomes kind of difficult to write about the little stuff.
10:51:36 AM 
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