“Ecrasez l’infâme”

Geert Wilders is dangerously ill-informed about the developement of liberal democracy in the West, and while I winced at his description of Islam as a ‘retarded culture’ on Sky News yesterday, I’m also appalled  at his cavalier assertion that “”Our cultures, based on humanism, Judaism and Christianity, are far better than the Islamic culture.” This is to ignore how our modern freedoms were brought about by centuries of bloody struggle against the dead hand of theocracy in Europe.

Unfortunately, Wilders’ confusion is typical of that of many in the west today, who naively assume that because the population of  western liberal democracies are also predominantly Christian, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition helped  the developement of enlightened liberal values. In reality, the link between Christianity and enlightement has usually involved much burning, at least of books and, where the Churches could manage it, of philosophers and village wise women alike.

From the Donation of Constatine to the present, theocracy has always opposed progressive political philosophy. The Churches did preserve learning, but only supported it insofar as they could control it and use it to reinforce their social control. As soon as any radical reformer took any of those ideas and actually dared to apply it to address abuses in the churches or improve the lot of the common man, the Church set out to crush them, and didn’t much care about any innocent bystanders who got in the way. Men like Erasmus or Brahe got along because they kept mostly inside the lines and played ball. But Luther, Calvin, Galileo, Voltaire and others all found themselves on the recieving end of the wrath of Church.

Wilders is lucky to have been raised in the Netherlands, a mostly Protestant nation where the worst problems of Church and State linkages were sorted out during the wars of religion – wars in which large tracts of Europe were devasted in order to protect the political power of the Catholic Church and rulers on her side. Whatever Dutch Protestant tradition he was raised in may be compatible with the UN Charter on Human Rights, but that is by no means common to all Protestant traditions – there are many “good” protestants in the US who still invoke the Old Testament doctrine of an “eye for and eye” to support the retention of the death penalty, or as justification for shooting workers at abortion clinics.

This confusion is pervasive in the West. The US currency still boldly asserts ‘In God We Trust’. Almost every primary school is Ireland is run by the Catholic Church, has Catholic religious statutes or images around the building and sees a significant amount of class time devoted to preparing children for Catholic religious ceremonies. We have no lofty EU consititution because our politicans cannot work out how to write one without addressing their confusion – and ours – about the ‘role Judaeo-Christian’ tradition of burning liberals and their books in our political heritage. Wilders just happens to be the current, media friendly example of it.

It is hard to encourage the development of democracy in the Muslim world, or to encourage Muslims in the west to stick to the western democratic tradition when we so casually assume that it is inextricably linked to Christianity.  It is – the Christians were usually the ones carrying the torches to burn the books. One of those whose books were burnt at the instigation of the church was Volatire, from whom the title quote comes – it means “crush the infamy”, a phase which “refers to abuses of the people by royalty and the clergy that Voltaire saw around him, and the superstition and intolerance that the clergy bred within the people” and you might do well to click over and read the Wikipedia article on him because it also explains that other, misattributed, quote at the heart of the liberal tradition: I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.”  I dislike a lot of what Wilders says, but it is only by dragging those views into the light of debate that we can chase away the darkness of supersititon.