Having barely warmed his chair at the Oval Office, Donald Trump fired off a series of executive orders, tightening the lid on immigration, identifying some Middle Eastern countries as “suspect” from which he wanted no nationals coming into the United States and making it clear that the fire and brimstone he had threatened against America’s enemies—or those who in the Trumpian scheme of things merited the label “enemy”—were for real! He did more. He de-fanged planned parenthood including access to abortion by clamping down on federal funding. Predictably, women (and many men as well) have taken to the streets in behalf of what, to them, are women’s rights. Those awaiting on the shores of war-ravaged countries for an opportunity to move to the Land of Promise are wailing in despair. But, interestingly, not everyone is hooting!
In fact, it was not Trump who first shut the borders to migrants. Eastern Europe, alarmed by the deluge of humanity that was making its way for Europe, triggered reminiscences of the Cold War era: barbed wire, roadblocks and snarling guard dogs. Angela Merkel, who was unqualified in her hospitality, is in very real danger of losing her job as Germany reels from the truly frightening influx. The warmth from her welcome has since disappeared and she has lately hinted that there are limits to German endurance.
There is much to be said for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. There is much that commends pluralism. But just as the promise of governance by Reason alone captivated the period of the Enlightenment, only to be followed by disenchantment with the imperialism of reason and disclosures of its dark side—the oppression and the repression that the guardians and champions of Reason visited on the “irrational”, so too there is another side to the liberalism that has consigned to impertinence race, ethnicity, belief, and tradition. Ethnicity and traditions are directly related to “ontological security”: the sense of living in a familiar world where one is aware of what others expect and one is sure of what one can legitimately expect from others. In Putin’s Orthodox Russia, for example, the level of ontological security is high: Orthodox Russians have fixed points by which to orientate their lives, know what fellow Russians expect of them, and are secure in their legitimate expectations of others!
To some extent, inroads into culture and tradition will allow for evolution and adaptation. But when all sense of identity is threatened and one is left totally insecure because of the radical unfamiliarity by which pluralism has stripped the landscape of all recognizable signposts, then the temptation is almost irresistible to revive that form of tribalism that keeps “us” in and shuts “them” out! Was not Brexit spun from the very same material? And now, of course, Theresa May is hard put to say how she can keep the UK “in” (trade, scholarly exchange, technology transfer, etc.) after she and her allies had ardently campaigned to be “out”. A justly angered EU has warned her against cherry-picking—and the plan she presented to Westminster was exactly that: A menu of cherry-picking!
So there is more that makes of Trump and Islamic militants kindred spirits than he would ever admit. Militant fundamentalism is the backlash of unbridled pluralism. It is the spirited if not violent movement towards holding to that security that is threatened by the corrosive effects of making of race, religion and ethnicity marginal concerns in the name of tolerance. Similarly, Trump’s notion of a “great America” includes a rediscovery of spiritual roots and a confidence about religious heritage that liberals had all but jettisoned from public life. And just as it should be clear now that you cannot quell Islamic fundamentalism in its militant form by more firepower and by boots stomping on the ground, we should be wise to realize that for many people—both in the East and in the West—some precincts are sacred, and believers will fight tooth and nail to keep sacred space from profanation. So it is that when Paris woke in shock to the heinous Charlie Hebdo massacre, not everyone took up the refrain “Je suis Charlie Hebdo” because many had the good sense to realize that when the magazine caricatured the Prophet revered by so many, the earnestness of its cry for freedom of press and expression was pathetically feeble against the full-throated refrain: “God is great!”
I am not for intolerance, much less for violence, not even in the name of God—especially not in the name of God. But the problem has to be recognized. We cannot make the world insecure for so many with deep faith, we cannot wantonly dismantle the familiar by sacrificing tradition and its values at the altar of liberalism, and we cannot barge into sacred precincts and expect to remain unscathed!
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com