To counter terrorism and the primitivism of homophobia and misogyny we need a common global morality
More terrorism this week and threats of more transport-related atrocities in the UK. Every politician and pundit have identified the problem of the West’s lack of a narrative to counter-terrorism. The confusion over progressive values is that progressive values involve tolerating too readily regressive values such as anti Semitism or misogyny. In confusion over how to deal with primitive hate values are the so-called progressive left, an alliance of people who are united in hate of what is known as capitalism but which is, in reality, just a debt-funded “free market”. A free market that underpins the Wests freedoms.
The groups who hate this system either hate it because it confers rights to minorities they object to but for whom markets have developed to serve their needs, for example, the gay community. Or conversely, they don’t understand their own ideological confusion that the rights they enjoy, they enjoy because of the free market system they hate. This paradox is particularly marked on the left and partly explains Corbyn’s strange collection of incompatible ideological bedfellows.
This lack of coherence allows a moral fog to descend on the whole issue of individual rights and cultural expectations and confuses our understanding of the causes of the hatred of the West and thus impedes the West’s strategy or narrative for dealing with it. The modern liberal mind can’t square the circle.
Ok, so we will have a go. The West owes its existence like it or not, to capitalism, and in particular the 18th century and the codification of laws that created the legal freedom to contract choose and consent. All necessary for capitalism to work.
Before capitalism, we were bonded to masters. After capitalism, we were in a legal sense free people, the workers in the capitalist machine. The legal freedoms we acquired then and have extended since creating equality in law for minorities. These are missing from many of the world’s cultures today, particularly Islamic ones where gender, caste, tribe or wealth and status institutionalize discrimination. In these cultures, there is too often no right to contract freely to “follow your dreams”. They are pre-capitalist and pre-industrial. You only have to look at the culture of abuse and discrimination in Saudi Arabia to see how the pre-capitalist pre-industrial society works.
So the narrative for the West is to acknowledge the central role capitalism has played in creating our freedoms and whilst capitalism has its faults accept we owe our freedom to it and take pride in that. Even socialists can do this because without the productive energy of capitalism there would be no socialism. The west should then-champion the narrative of contract choice and consent and shame the bigots of whatever cultural hue into seeing themselves as regressive and at best 18th as opposed to the 21st century.
The bigots know that if you destroy the free market or we destroy it with debt, pre-industrial morals of control, coercion, and corruption become coherent. They the terrorists are trying to terrorize us back to their world so once again their values make sense.
