Against Fanaticism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Not long after I moved to New York City in 2008, I went to an event at the New York Public Library, a debate between Bernard-Henri Levi and Slavoj Žižek, the subject of which was “Violence and the Left in Dark Times.” As if to personify the dangers to intellectual life presented by the intersection of political radicalism and violence, seated together were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had only recently relocated to the United States from the Netherlands, and the novelist Salman Rushdie, who had been living under a death sentence handed down in 1989 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in response to his novel The Satanic Verses. I thought to myself: “That’s where the bomb will go off.”

There was no bomb. Not then. Not yet.

Hirsi Ali these days is a U.S. citizen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the wife of British historian Niall Ferguson, and the mother of charming children. Salman Rushdie, for his part, is in a hospital recovering from knife wounds — stabbed in the liver, likely to lose an eye, arm nerves severed, on a ventilator, for a time unable to speak — inflicted by a California-born Tehran-terror fanboy. If it seems that Hirsi Ali has been luckier, don’t envy her: One of the events precipitating her move to the United States was her being forced to vacate a secret secured house in the Netherlands after neighbors complained that her presence put them at serious risk. She remains on a standing al-Qaeda hit list.

Rushdie is the best-known practitioner of an incredibly vital and unruly stream of English-language literature with roots in India, one that includes the famous Indian writers you probably know but also many treasures who are less known in the United States, such as the late Khushwant Singh (read his Delhi: A Novel) and Raj Kamal Jha, with whom I had the pleasure of working at the Indian Express many years ago. It was while working in Delhi that I got my first hint of the danger in writing: I inadvisedly used the word terrorist in a headline, and was informed, patiently, that we could call them militants or ultras or things of that sort, but that they objected to being called terrorists, and, if they were called that, they were liable to murder one of our workers. “But isn’t that . . . terrorism?” I asked, stupidly. “Yes,” came the answer, “but you don’t drive a truck.” Around the same time, some of my colleagues and I discovered the body of a young man who had been hanged outside a slum near where I lived for getting involved with a girl of a different religion.

When I was growing up, those of us who thought of ourselves as intellectually sophisticated (often there was no evidence for this) took it as given that religion itself was the problem, that religion inspired fanaticism, and that the only kind of humane religion was the sort practiced by people who don’t really believe in it very much — in which case, why not go all the way to a comfortable agnosticism if not all the way to a more militant atheism? We were, of course, wrong about that, as we were about so much. Salman Rushdie was brutally stabbed over a perceived slight to the Prophet Mohammed taken up as convenient political cause by an Iranian fanatic who died not long after handing down the fatwa against the novelist, attacked by a man who had not been born at the time of the original controversy. About the same time, an FBI office in Cincinnati was attacked by a Navy veteran enraged by a perceived slight to Donald Trump, who is being investigated for possible violations of the Espionage Act and other possible crimes.

There is a nexus between a certain kind of intellectually unmoored Christianity and Trump idolatry, but the FBI attack, like the fatwa on Rushdie, was essentially political rather than religious. But that distinction is not entirely airtight: Religions end up having political aspects: At various times, both Islam and Catholicism have been pronounced incompatible with liberal democracy on the grounds that they are political programs as much as they are religions. (Nobody much thinks that about Catholicism anymore, except for a few dotty Catholics.) Political movements take on cultic characters, both those organized around particular personalities (Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Juan Perón, Gamal Abdel Nasser, etc.) and those that are not exclusively personal, such as Marxism or environmentalism. (See “Tales from the Carbon Cult,” National Review, December 2, 2021.) Religious and political fanaticism, religion-analogues such as animal rights, diet and fitness fads, even non-political conspiracy literature (Who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?) all work in the same way in that they offer insider positioning to outsiders (the secret knowledge makes one an initiate) and confer status through membership in a votive community. There is a reason there is so much crossover in conspiracy lunacy: Lyndon LaRouche, for a generation the most notable conspiracy nut in American political life, also cared deeply about the tuning of musical instruments: If you are not familiar with the “conspiracy” regarding A-440Hz tuning, you can go a long way down that rabbit hole and not hit bottom. Look at the political nuts or religious fanatics in your life and see how many of them are heavy into genealogy, another expression of our endless search for personal meaning.

Against fanaticism, we have — what? Literature and music, love, friendship, humor, and, with the help of skilled doctors and our prayers, the continuing work of Salman Rushdie and other geniuses of his kind, who help to steer us away from the brutal and toward the humane, away from the ridiculous toward the reasonable.

As the coal miners’ song asked: Which side are you on?