Wall Street Journal Europe, 5 November 2001

LONDON—British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush seem to understand that there is a selling job to do. Somehow or other, the virtues of Western values have failed to impress themselves on large chunks of the rest of the world.

Thus we see Mr. Blair traipsing all over the Middle East to meetings with leaders of such nations as Saudi Arabia and Syria. And yet sometimes the toughest job of convincing appears to be at home. In Britain there is a generation of young Muslim men, some of whom have gone to our universities, who have developed loyalty to a version of Islam which despises the West.

The result is a very bizarre spectacle. While some Muslims fight to arrive in Britain, others leave to fight Britain. Nightly, Afghans struggle at peril to their lives to become illegal immigrants via the Chunnel. Daily, sons and grandsons of people from a similar religious and geographical background either leave these shores to join the Taliban or use public forums here to give support to the enemy of their adopted country. And this at a time of war. In other words, their sojourn here has taught them accountancy and civil engineering, but left their emotional loyalties untouched.

How can this be? How could they not have some affection for a country that has given them a technical or professional education either very cheaply or free? How could they despise a country that allows them to pursue their faith, and doesn’t even mind that one of their mosques is named after Saddam Hussein, since the Iraqi dictator helped fund it in the late 1980s? How can they hate a country that allows them to marry off their sisters according to rules that it finds abhorrent? And how can they feel no loyalty for a country that so bends over backward to accommodate their new guests that it sometimes strips itself of its own culture, so as not to offend—as some councils are doing now by removing references to “Christmas” from next month’s holidays?

The answer is that is it is precisely for all those reasons that some young Muslims have lost respect for British society. For people of faith, the liberal values of tolerance can seem dangerously like indifference or complacency. If you see that the erosion of religion, the destruction of family values and the decline of traditional behavior are all now features of Western life, then it’s not difficult to see how you associate this society with moral squalor. If you crave a spiritual life and the society around you offers you none (or in the case of the Church of England, one that increasingly is deeply ashamed of itself) then it’s easy for someone else to come in a fill the void.

Of course, the West is not by any means entirely secular, and many families survive intact despite the high divorce levels. But that isn’t altogether the point. The point is that the Western enterprise is grounded in values that really do make a fair bid to be universal. And yet it seems almost discourteous to champion these values. Not least because of sensitivity toward immigrant “communities,” no one has much wanted to talk up Western values.

This is happening now because Britain is in the hands of a new professional political class that has imported into the upper reaches of the state habits of mind that had heretofore only infected the academic and media worlds.

In the hands of New Labour and its commentators, the “British Constitution”—that previously robust but nebulous beast—is simply derided as stuffy and oppressive. Its institutions are not seen as having a stock of inherited virtue, only the happenstance capacity to be bent to serve current purposes. Burkian representative democracy is dismissed as being sneakily elitist: it needs to be replaced with the more plastic usefulness of the focus group and stage management. Professions are denigrated as trade unions with white shirts (a mistake that, to be honest, was born of Thatcherite thinking). The upper reaches of learning are the subject of Jacobin envy.

The most important feature of this postmodern Britain is the transformation of the Enlightenment’s pluralism into crushing multiculturalism. This decries Western history and culture as elitist and racist, and prefers as more authentic the immigrant and Third World stories. It does not seem to strike the “multiculturalist” postmodernists as odd that they worship cultures that often have little affection for tolerance.

So in modern Britain the traditional, the State and the academy are all put at a discount, and not by a few dissidents, but by teachers, broadcasters and politicians. Deference, courtesy and tolerance are all distrusted, and not by a few marginal figures, but by people who might be thought to lead our culture.

The lesson? That we have to “sell” the Enlightenment to our own homegrown youngsters hard. And that means, really, simply to show it to them, so that the evidence can speak for itself.

Immigrants are often the first to find it odd how little the West understands its own merits, and many grow to become the staunchest defenders of Western values. Others fall victim to the siren song of the fundamentalist terrorist, however. We do indeed have a new fight for civilization on our hands, and it may be that it is among the newcomers that we will find its strongest allies as well as some its most dangerous enemies.