Update: Welcome readers from Mark Steyn and Deborah Gyapong.

This issue – can Western Civilisation be defended? – is aired a lot these days.

A big part of the answer lies in one’s assessment of the value of that civilisation – and its intrinsic strength/resilience.

If you think that something is wrong-headed and decadent, you might be disinclined to defend it even if it has some strengths you quite like – the more so if you think that the forces lined against it are bound to prevail. 

Likewise even if you are the greatest champion of something, you might well not want to die defending it if you think the cause is hopeless. On the other hand, if you think that something is much stronger than it may currently look, you might argue that those clamouring for robust defensive moves are overdoing it and risk discrediting the cause.

Not to mention the argument that the Means and Ends both count – is it possible to defend civilisation using barbaric means (the T-word debate again)?

Hence Left v Conservative.

Left:  Western so-called ‘liberal’ civilisation is decadent, and where it is strong it is strong in bad Bushlike consumerist ways. It is not really worth defending in itself, and in any case is doomed. So better to just give up and join forces with the global masses who are likely to carry the day, many of whom happen to be Islamic. This will create a new less hedonistic order based on state-organised collectivist Cooperation, not destructive Individualism.

Conservative:  Western liberal civilisation is in fact strong because it and only it works in mobilising both human creativity and human restraint. The Islamic masses come from societies and their regimes which have failed on both counts, so offer us little of practical value. But there is now a significant nihilistic challenge to liberalism, which is best countered by abandoning the banal norms of so-called multiculturalism and championing once again core liberal values: tolerance and respect, based on no tolerance and no respect for those who denounce tolerance and respect.

These two core rival positions are spelled out in two long and well-argued pieces on the big-picture themes of Religion, Culture and Liberalism, one by Intellectual Leftist Terry Eagelton, the other by Intellectual Conservative Roger Scruton.

The Eagleton piece gets off to a lively start, as if Eagleton had been miraculously transformed into Mark Steyn:

Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all-and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can.

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

However, he and Mark probably diverge at this point:

If the British or American way of life really were to take on board the critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism made by many devout Muslims, Western civilization would most certainly be altered for the good.

Not much from Eagleton about the argument that the Islamic way of life needs to ‘take on board’ the critique of sexism, intolerance and fanaticism made by many sensible liberals, so that Islamic civilisation might ‘most certainly’ be altered for the good?

Eagleton ends some 4000 words later with yet more swipes at various writers whom he terms in a separate Guardian piece as Liberal Supremacists, and in a curious reductionist way asserts:

The only (sic) affirmation of humanity ultimately (sic) worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin.

Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.

There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

Hot dang! If only we had grasped earlier that these dogmatic doctrinaire people supporting Progress and those smart-ass Islamophobe intellectuals were the real problem!

Roger Scruton by contrast writes in a more elegant and generous way. He too starts well:

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law.

The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

And he ends strongly, again some 4000 words later:

The confrontation that we are involved in is thus not political or economic; it is not the first step toward a negotiation or a calling to account. It is an existential confrontation. The question put to us is: “What right do you have to exist?” By answering, “None whatsoever,” we invite the reply, “That’s what I thought.”

An answer can avert the threat only by facing it down; and that means being absolutely convinced that we do have a right to exist and that we are prepared to concede an equal right to our opponents, though only on condition that the concession is mutual. No other strategy has a remote chance of succeeding.

Al-Qaida may be weak; the whole conspiracy to destroy the West may be little more than a fiction in the brains of the neoconservatives, who themselves may be a fiction in the brains of liberals.

But the threat does not come from a conspiracy or from an organization. It comes from individuals undergoing a traumatic experience that we do not fully understand—the experience of a déraciné Muslim confronting the modern world, and without the benefit of the two gifts of forgiveness and irony. Such a person is an unpredictable by-product of unforeseen and uncomprehended circumstances, and our best efforts to understand his motives have so far suggested no policy that would deter attacks.

What, then, should our stance be in this existential confrontation? I think we should emphasize the very great virtues and achievements that we have built on our legacy of tolerance and show a willingness to criticize and amend all the vices to which it has also given undue space.

We should resurrect Locke’s distinction between liberty and license and make it absolutely clear to our children that liberty is a form of order, not a license for anarchy and self-indulgence. We should cease to mock the things that mattered to our parents and grandparents, and we should be proud of what they achieved. This is not arrogance but a just recognition of our privileges.

We should also drop all the multicultural waffling that has so confused public life in the West and reaffirm the core idea of social membership in the Western tradition, which is the idea of citizenship.

By sending out the message that we believe in what we have, are prepared to share it, but are not prepared to see it destroyed, we do the only thing that we can do to defuse the current conflict. Because forgiveness is at the heart of our culture, this message ought surely to be enough, even if we proclaim it in a spirit of irony.

Magnificently put.

The Eagleton Guardian piece also has this impressively honest explanation of the sort of society Eagleton wants us to have:

The left objects to the liberal case not because it believes in crushing those who differ, or dislikes the idea of a partisan state, but because this case rules out the kind of partisan state that ­socialism requires. It rules out, for example, a state that would not be neutral on whether cooperation or individualism should reign supreme in social and economic life.

Which prompted me to post a comment:

The whole point of cooperation is that it is voluntary and therefore ultimately based on individual choices. If it is not voluntary, it is not cooperation. Cooperation also means negotiating freely between alternatives and freely deciding ways forward. And it is established beyond any doubt that the only way to be effective at that is through liberal-Western market mechanisms, which create patterns of substantive cooperation emerging spontaneously through myriad individual decisions.

How in practice might the Leftist Cooperation State work, other than by either normal liberalism or (ultimately) undemocratic coercion? We are never given even a modestly credible theoretical model for the latter, let alone anything practical which does not end in misery…

* * * * *

So, there it is folks.

The Left want an enfeebled West to Just Give Up and submit to a new Islamisticly-inclined collectivism based on ‘cooperation’ on the state’s terms.

Conservatives say that the West is not feeble, but needs to get back to some core values to keep the forces of extremist, nihilistic Islamisticly-inclined irrationality at bay.

I report. You decide.

These are the two great political and philosophical positions of our time.

Noteworthy that UK, US and European party politics and structures as currently constituted reflect almost none of them in any coherent way?

Is that sustainable?