Caldwell be confused?

Christopher Caldwell reviews Ian Buruma’s forthcoming Murder in Amsterdam in the New York Times. It’s all pretty harmless stuff, but then you reach this passage:

Buruma interviews two charismatic reformers: van Gogh’s collaborator Hirsi Ali and the Iranian-born legal scholar Afshin Ellian. Both believe that nothing short of dragging Islam through the wringer of skepticism and ridicule, as Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers did Catholicism, will suffice to disarm potential militants like Bouyeri. But Buruma is skeptical. He suspects that many of those who invoke the Enlightenment are merely defending a conservative order. “Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church,” he writes, “while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”

That is unfair. Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him. We need a much more flexible definition of the word “minority” in a world thus networked. Buruma is quite right, though, to suggest that Hirsi Ali’s praise of the Enlightenment, as a movement that “strips away culture, and leaves only the human individual,” has something in common with the promise of Islamism, which would strip away culture and leave only the individual and God.

Both Buruma and Caldwell see an equivalence between the Enlightenment and Islamism. I mean, it’s almost Buntingesque in its crassness. The idea that the Enlightenment sought to remove culture, leaving the individual alone with his Reason, isn’t that convincing. That it sought to overthrow certain conservative traditions, arbitrary authority, monarchism and clericalism is undeniable. But to suggest everything would begin anew…. The Enlightenment also granted significance to the concepts of liberalism, toleration, universalism, rights, these sorts of things. These aren’t mere appeals to some form of disembodied or unencumbered Reason, but are rather the products of engagement with other humans and the material world. The individual is not simply abandoned to his own devices, bereft of any moral compass, devoid of any values whatsoever. If this was really the case, how would we account for the Enlightenment’s legacy of toleration, universalism and human rights, which are pretty obviously based on some notion of a common human nature and a social collective?

This is precisely what the ‘promise of Islamism’, as described by Caldwell anyway, doesn’t do. The individual here is accountable to nothing but a phantasm of their own making - which, to all intents and purposes, amounts to being accountable only to oneself. The Enlightenment legacy offered individuals the prospect that all ‘that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ The ‘promise of Islamism’ seeks the exact opposite - the preservation of the ‘fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’.

(via Will)