The best article I read yesterday was the one by Theo Hobson in the Guardian arguing that Muslim alienation is just exposing what is wrong with British culture and the fact that it is too permissive and too disrespectful to value common decency. I think that Theo Hobson's points apply not just to British culture and society, but also to Western Culture in general even though I strongly disagree with them:
The strange fact is that the problem of Muslim alienation is slowly but surely reviving these questions about common culture, public decency. The issue of Muslim integration has provoked liberal commentators into asking whether too much freedom has corrupted us. Perhaps the question of public decency is not just the concern of prudish old ladies after all.
In a recent Guardian article Timothy Garton Ash suggested that one factor in the rise of Muslim alienation is the fact that Britain is "one of the most libertine societies in Europe". […] Instead of dismissing young Muslim puritans as backward, we should ask whether they "might actually be putting their fingers on some things that are wrong with our modern, progressive, liberal, secular society". The point is that we liberals lack the earnestness to voice our objections to the drift of culture: we lack all conviction. We have been raised to believe that freedom of expression is sacred, that taking offence is what Mary Whitehouse does, not with-it young people. We have also been taught that pornography, and the glorification of promiscuity, is fine as long as it has a vaguely feminist agenda. We dare not be taken for sexists, squares or irony-free zones. So we sit tight, and fret in secret about the pornification of the world. And this is where the Muslims come in. We leave it to them to do the earnest objecting, and occasionally, when it feels safe, we murmur that we sort of agree. Maybe they have a point, we say.
I don't like the way Hobson frames the issue as to argue that the choose is between a permissive culture and Muslim Alienation, which is going to cause terrorism and a less permissive and more traditional culture, which is going to reflect the need that some fundamentalists have for a purer culture and society. I prefer the way Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon phrases the issue by pointing how wrong those who argue that permissiveness and pluralism are a threat to the West. The best thing about living in a free society is that it is constantly seeking a balance between liberty, justice and more morality and constantly reevaluation old norms and old traditions. The world will become less dangerous and will avoid a clash of civilizations because precisely the fact of the permissiveness of Western culture. It will be a powerful weapon in the fight against terrorism. It will end the world defeat it by enabling the West to understand the people who threaten its societies and by enabling the people who live in less permissive or totalitarian societies to challenge traditions and to create a culture, which reflects not their past, but their present and their hope for the future. The hope for the world isn't thus westernization or Americanization, but rather cosmopolitism and métissage, which is the mixture of heritages, culture, and races.
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