Three recent policy debates in Congress and two recent research reports should give all of us very serious concern. I refer to the debates on the approval of the CAFTA treaty, the energy bill, and the transportation bill, all of which seemingly had desirable, or at least acceptable, outcomes from the Bush administration’s point of view, but with enormous costs in terms of the concessions made to special pleaders of all shapes and stripes in exchange for the votes (at least as many Republican as Democrat) to get them approved. The first research study to which I refer is by the Congressional Budget Office that, according to the Cato Institute, suggests we are moving in the direction of the “Euro-losers”. The report says that, given current trends, the federal government take of our national output will rise from today’s level of 20% to 30% in 2025 and 34% in 2040, which, when added to the 12% state and local government take, means that half of everything produced in this country will be inhaled by government. The other study is by the Heritage Foundation, which has created an “index of dependency” on government. It currently shows that, since 1980 (remember the Reagan Revolution?) our reliance on government has doubled as measured by the five main categories of government programs—housing, health care, retirement, education and farm subsidies. (Incidentally, can you honestly attribute to this growth in government domination any enhancement in the quality of the delivery of the product or service in these policy areas?)

Can anyone doubt that we are headed down the same path of economic self-destruction as Western Europe with these misguided trends? As Heritage economist William Beach notes, “A citizenry that reaches a certain tipping point in dependency on government runs the risk of evolving into a society that demands an ever-expanding government that caters to group self-interests rather than pursuing the public good”. Any rational observer who spent up to a half hour listening to the House or Senate floor debates on any of the policy issues above would agree that we are at or very near that tipping point.

This summer, the folks in Dayton, Tennessee are no doubt at least recognizing, if not celebrating, the eightieth anniversary of the Scopes Trial, sometimes popularly dubbed the “monkey trial”, which, largely because of the mythology that has been built around it by Hollywood and the larger than life personalities who were involved, has become the ultimate historical confrontation between the “evolutionists” and the “creationists”. Most people probably don’t remember that the prosecution won the case, and Mr. Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee law by teaching Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. What is vivid with most people as the mythology of the trial has grown and been embellished is its caricature of the buffoonery of the argument of the case made on behalf of the state by the “creationist” counsel, William Jennings Bryan. And for the past eighty years, the relative positions have been solidified in the public mind and in the culture war—the evolutionists as the progressives, enlightened by the scientific method and unburdened by faith-based biblical creation myths, versus the creationists, retrograde medievalists who would roll back the scientific revolution and infect the teaching of biology with religious mythology.

In fact, in this confrontation, as with much else in our public square today, the two camps are talking past each other, because both arguments have long ago become much more about worldviews than about science, and worldviews, as someone before me has said, are essentially all about how one feels about two things—human origins and human consciousness. Tell me what you believe about how we got here and how human consciousness was developed and I will tell you what you believe about the large majority of the hot button social issues that permeate today’s public debates. How do Americans divide on these questions? The closest proxy for an answer comes from a series of polls conducted by the Gallup organization from 1982-1998, which asked people which of the following statements best describes their point of view: (1) Creationist: believes God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, (2) Theistic Evolutionist: believes that God guided the process of evolution over millions of years, or (3) Darwinist: believes that God played no role in evolution. The poll results remained virtually unchanged over this period, as follows: Creationists – 44%, Theistic Evolutionists – 39%, Darwinist – 10%, Don’t Know/Other – 7%.

Whatever your personal view of human nature or human origins, it is pretty well accepted that Darwin rejected the traditional view that had been dominant in Western thought for many centuries before him, which is that man significantly differs in kind, not in degree, from all other animal life. Since his time, with the enormous advances in the biosciences, it has become popular to note that, at the level of DNA, humans and chimpanzees differ by only 1%. But it is more than just a little obvious that this seemingly small difference accounts for an enormous gulf in the respective potentialities of humans and the other animals. Why? As Mortimer Adler has so clearly explained over the years, it boils down to man’s intellect, which in simplest terms is the exclusively human attribute that allows man an imagination, or as Adler put it, “to understand what certain kinds of objects are like both (a) when the objects, though perceptible by the senses, are not actually perceived, and (b) also when they are not perceptible at all, as with the conceptual constructs we employ in physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever that such concepts are present in animal behavior. Their intelligence is entirely sensory”.

Russell Kirk approaches the question from a slightly different direction: “The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the chaos of many events. It is a strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest”. Obviously, what we have known as Western Civilization would have been impossible without this human capability that Kirk describes.

Many may continue to wonder and debate about the source of this human consciousness, but we’re all still waiting for either evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology to satisfactorily explain it within a strictly materialist worldview.

In October 2001, I wrote the following: “Having thus identified the enemy, we will be flirting with a world war between Islam and the West, which we must not allow to happen………..our ideological enemy is an extreme sect of radical Islam, not the Muslim religion, the leaders of which should loudly condemn the barbarians who perverted their faith. They will have many sympathizers in the mainstream Muslim faith, however, and the leaders of the nation-states populated by those of this faith must understand that it is time for them to step forward and join the community of civilized nations in ending this perversion of their religion once and for all. This will be very difficult, because by so doing they will be exposed to instability in their own regimes, and it will test every skill we and our allies possess to see it through.”

Obviously, the jury is still out, and I continue to believe that responsible Muslims will step forward but, in the wake of the recent bombings in London and Egypt, the pressure has reached a point where we can no longer simply allow hope to continue to overcome experience. I am beginning to hear some faint noises in this direction, but nothing of the volume and weight that will be necessary and nothing from those whose regimes are at risk from the potential backlash. This is where we are and this is what we should demand. The Islamic Reformation has begun, slowly but surely, and it may require 100 years to complete (Christianity’s, at least the violent part, lasted over 200 years), but nothing less than the complete rejection, including the equivalent of excommunication, by mainstream Islam of those who directly or indirectly engage in or support Islamofacism and its terrorist methodology should be acceptable.

In this war, achieving this level of moral clarity has been problematic for the West, particularly in continental Europe. It is difficult to sustain the moral clarity necessary for anti-appeasement when you no longer understand or believe in the core cultural convictions of your heritage. Such is the damage that has been wrought by a couple of generations of the moral hollowing effect of relativism and multi-culturalism.

Kathleen Parker has written a provocative essay headlined, “If Islam is not the problem, then what, pray tell, is?”, in which she identifies massive global denial in our unwillingness to frame the terror issue the way we should: demanding answers of Islam. Zero tolerance should be the policy here, according to Parker, and I agree. We Americans rightly pride ourselves in our tolerance, which is a cornerstone of our creed, and which is why we have difficulty with condemning another creed. But our Constitution is not a suicide pact, and we should demand that moderate Muslims, including those in Europe, clean up their own perverse elements by eliminating, not simply condemning, the bad actors, cleaning out the mosques, and destroying all known Islamist cells, or we should do it for them. Enough is enough.