The State Of The World: Thoughts From The Sofa Of Life

Contrary to this Hegelian prognosis of 'standing at the end of history', which has been recently revived by Francis Fukuyama - this late student of Hegel as read through the eyes of Alexandre Kojeve - the present harbors [sic] many ironies, contradictions and perplexities. Ernst Bloch's phrase of 'non-contemporaneous contemporaneities', ... is more appropriate to capture the fractured spirit of our times. (Seyla Benhabib)

These perplexities are brought unhappily into focus by the religious and political background to the refugee crisis. As so often (a by-product of my reading him so much, rather, I suspect, than any unique brilliance on his part) Walter Bagehot got me trucking down this path.

I have just read (in a charge of Archdeacon Manning's) rather a good sentence on ecclesiastical history. 'The world persecuted the church in the beginning; espoused her in the middle ages; is disowning her now.' It must have been an immense gain in the middle ages that all their systematised thought was Christian and spiritual. (Walter Bagehot, 1847)

If Manning's analysis of ecclesiastical history is useful, it has to be remembered that it speaks only to the Judeo-Christian experience, and even then the timing of the phases has been different as between Judaism and Christianity. An application of the three stage test to Islam is intriguing. Which stage (stages?) is Islam in? Might I suggest that the extremists believe themselves at war with the infidel and the apostate and that this is the sole proper response to their persecution by a western 'end of history'. Secular Islam in the West struggles to deal with the simple appeal of this fundamentalism at one extreme and  gaudy faithless societies at another. As for the poor old godless western majority, having disowned faith ourselves we are speared by post-colonial guilt and inbred liberal tolerance. In the eye of the emotional storm pragmatism gets turfed out of the window.  There is no ready evidence of any politician having both the willingness and the intellectual heft to understand the situation, much less respond to it.