Demosophia

Den Beste's "Three-Way War" Typology

At the moment Steven Den Beste is wrestling with the Angel of Philosophical Typologies in a number of posts about a "three-way war." Some of what Steven says seems intuitively on the mark, including some of the notions about the radicalization of humanities departments within universities as a kind of "ghetto-ization" (my term obviously) that practitioners of non-empirical disciplines have heaped on themselves. But if he makes a convincing case for a three-way war between philosophical factions, he has only provided definitions for two. Islamism, or Islamo/Fascism seems to be hanging out there without a clear identification either as a sect of Islam or as a fundamentalist backlash. Steven does seem to recognize an affinity between Islamism and his philosophical-idealist (p-idealist) faction, and even acknowledges that the former seems idealistic in the terms he feels important. But it's not quite clear whether we have two or three "factions" at work, or (if there are three) where the boundaries lie between them. It's a provocative typology, with some problems.

Meanwhile a couple of comments by Anticipatory Retaliation to my post about Osama's Wahhabist bona fides seemed to beg some questions, the answers to which might shed some light on the problem. A.R.'s comments focus on the difference between ideologies and religions, but he also talks about the difficulty of "eradicating religions," and opines that it may be somewhat easier to "eradicate" ideologies. And that also raises another important question about ideological sects: Is Islamism a radical sect of Islam or a radical sect of philosophical-idealism? The curve that has been thrown us involves the particular way the Islamists have merged religion and western philosophy. But it's not the first time such a thing has happened, as the history of both pre-modern and modern Spain tells us. (It is, ironically perhaps, the only Western European nation that was ever under Moslem rule.)

Edward Feser, in a recent article in TCS talks about Marxism and Nazism/Fascism as "sects" of the same ideology, so we're apparently all tuning to the same wavelength even though there's still a lot of interference:

The bafflement only grows when one considers that Hitler's movement was not called "National Socialism" for nothing, much as lefties like to ignore the fact. It is true that Hitler was personally far more interested in exterminating the Jews than he was in implementing any economic program; but it is also true that he and the other Nazis regarded capitalism as no less odious a manifestation of the power of "world Jewry" than, in their view, communism was. They hated capitalism for the very same reason they hated communism: its internationalism, its tendency to dilute one's allegiance to Nation and Race; Nazism was, one might say, the original anti-globalization movement. Hence the national in National Socialism: one's comradeship ought, in its conception, to be primarily with fellow members of one's Nation or Race, rather than with an international Class. But the socialism was no less important, and featured centrally in the minds of such prominent Nazis as Ernst Roehm, Gregor Strasser, and Joseph Goebbels. As Stanley G. Payne notes in his magisterial A History of Fascism 1914-1945: "Much was made by Marxist commentators, during the 1930's and for nearly half a century afterward, about the alleged capitalist domination of the German economy under National Socialism, when the truth of the matter was more nearly the opposite." The suggestion, sometimes heard from Leftists even today, that Nazism was an outgrowth of (or at least inherently sympathetic to) capitalism is thus a myth, another lie propagated from Moscow during the war years and faithfully parroted by Communists, their sympathizers, and their spiritual descendents. The truth is that Marxism on the one hand and fascism and National Socialism on the other are rival interpretations of the same basic socialist creed, their differences analogous to the differences between rival sects within the same religion. To the sectarian, such differences are all-important, and anyone who dissents from them is a heretic, worse even than a non-believer; to the outsider, they seem far less significant than what the various sects all have in common.

So there are two competing typologies here, one that would attempt to incorporate apparently secular totalitarian ideologies as "religions," and the other that would need to incorporate fundamentalist religions as "ideologies" (or philosophical schools of thought). And for my money which one makes more sense depends on the context of the problem we're trying to solve. We are not, after all, attempting a comprehensive typology of either religion or philosophy, but are looking at a set of extremely troublesome movements in the 20th and 21st Century that all have one thing in common: a totalitarian outlook.

And eventually Islam will need to ask itself an analogous question: Is Islamism an apostate sect of Islam, or a sect of a false ideology? Or both?

Posted by Demosophist at January 9, 2004 01:10 PM | TrackBack