Robert Reilly’s new book The Closing of the Muslim Mind rehashes the Muslim turn away from Greek philosophy with al-Ghazali, and argues that doctrinal irrationality is the source of all the problems in the Muslim world. There is of course something to this argument, and al-Ghazali’s importance (and destructive influence) hardly can be underestimated — but Reilly’s account is problematic. I discuss it in a new review essay this morning at Asia Times Online.

To make sense of what a religion teaches and what the faithful actually believe, we must both understand theology objectively – as a statement about God and the world – as well as existentially, that is, as the faith community lives its religion in ordinary life. There is a deep identity between al-Ghazali’s rejection of rationality and the deterioration of Muslim life, but it is not as simple or direct as Reilly appears to think.

The doctrines taught by religious authorities may or may not penetrate into the life of that religion’s adherents. The Catholic Church teaches that all Christians are reborn into the People of God, and that this new spiritual allegiance takes precedence over their gentile origin. Nonetheless, the Christians of Europe slaughtered each other during the 20th century while the Church watched helplessly. Muslims well might retort that whatever their deficiencies, they never created a comparable disaster. Christian civilization survived the world wars and the expansion of communism only because America defeated first Nazism and then communism. Yet American Christianity does not quite fit the Hellenistic model that Reilly offers as the alternative to Islam.

Although Catholicism has become the largest American Christian denomination, in part due to Hispanic immigration, America’s religious character remains Protestant, scriptural and enthusiastic rather than Catholic and philosophical. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is beside the point. The point is that a charismatic Biblical literalist in rural America has a great deal in common with an American Catholic like Robert Reilly, but neither has much in common with Muslims.

A rationalist (by which Reilly means a Thomistic and Aristotelian) approach to theology is not what distinguishes Massachusetts from Mecca. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by radical Protestants who poured contempt on “Popish Authors (Jesuites especially)” who “strain their wits to defend their Pagan Master Aristotle”, in the words of the Puritan leader Increase Mather (1639-1723). American evangelicals, the most devout segment of the Christian population, tend to be fideist rather than philosophical.

What is it that unites Catholic Thomists and evangelical fideists (as well as observant Jews), but divides all of them from Muslims? It is the Biblical belief that God loves his creatures. Heavenly bodies are not deities, but rather lamps and clocks for human benefit. That is a dogmatic assertion on the strength of Biblical revelation, not a logical conclusion. A loving God, in the Biblical view, places man in a world that he can comprehend, which is to say that God establishes order in the universe out of love for humankind. We live in the best of all possible worlds (that is, a comprehensible one), Leibniz argued, because a good God would not maroon us in the second-best version. This implies that if God were not good, the world might not be as hospitable to humans as it is. This is unimaginable to Christians or Jews, but not to Muslims, who think that Allah can make any sort of world he wants, or indeed a different world from one day to the next.

The doctrinal assertion that God loves his creatures cannot be defended on rational grounds, which means that it is wrong to argue that Christians or Jews are more rational than Muslims, objectively speaking. But that is not the whole story.

Whether it is demonstrable or not, the Judeo-Christian notion of divine love is what makes possible the rational ordering of human existence. Whether al-Ghazali was a bad philosopher compared to Aquinas is beside the point: Muslim life is irrational because it is founded on the arbitrary exercise of will, whereas Judeo-Christian civilization is at least capable of rationality because of concept of divine love is expressed in the covenant between God and man. Existential rationality, the rationality of ordinary life, proceeds from the Biblical concept of covenant.

I posted this piece earlier today at the Asia Times “Inner Workings” blog. Normally I don’t double post, but this is a cool piece of analysis. Pardon me for repeating myself. 

In the crudest version of the dividend discount model, the stock price P is a function of earnings and the discount rate, such that P = E/r. That this is an inadequate model goes without saying, but it is not entirely misleading for comparative statistics in a short time horizon. 

Below I present a simple analysis indicating that the shrinking equity risk premium is due largely to disinflation or prospective deflation. 

The S&P 500 has fallen by a bit over 12% from its April peak. But the 10-year Treasury yield, the usual proxy for the discount rate in the equation, has fallen much father, from 3.85% to 2.57%. Plugging this into the model, the equation tells us that expected earnings have fallen by 42% between April and August. 

Of course, I don’t take that number at face value, but it seems intuitively clear that with the implosion of Treasury yields, stocks have become more attractive. The fact that stocks have fallen so far despite the decreasing attraction of alternative investments suggests that earnings expectations have fallen a good deal farther than the S&P index. 

Something else is happening, though, to the relative attractiveness of stocks and bonds. This explains one of the reasons not to take the dividend discount model at face value. In the chart below, the blue line is the difference between the corporate Baa yield and the dividend yield on the S&P 500. The red line is the annual inflation rate over the preceding five years. 

More than half of the change in the stock-bond relationship can be explained by inflation. I have kicked the econometric tires on this relationship, and it holds up under close scrutiny. 

Inflation is bad both for stocks and bonds, but it is much worse for bonds, because even though inflation introduces inefficiencies into the economy, corporate earnings have a chance to keep up with inflation and fixed interest payments do not. If we actually move into deflation, as in the 1930s, we observe periods in which the dividend yield on equities exceeds the yield on bonds (which makes sense; why buy physical assets when they are likely to be cheaper next year?). 

If we enter into a period of deflation, or extremely low inflation, the huge advantage of stocks over bonds may disappear; companies may have to pay a dividend yield comparable to their bond yield in order to keep equity investors in the game. And that would portend a prolonged period of low equity valuations. 

In short, two things changed between April and August: lower earnings expectations, and the fear of deflation. There simply is no way to parse the data closely enough to quantify which of these two effects was more important for the stock market. The point is that neither of them are good, and neither point to a particularly rosy outlook for stocks going forward. 

Today’s Google News leads with a new poll showing that 18% of Americans think that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Only 34% of Americans think he is a Christian, down from 48% a year ago. And 43% gave the correct answer: they don’t know what he is.

The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said of a colleague’s work, “It isn’t even wrong,” and one might say about Obama that he isn’t even a Muslim. The fact that he was registered as a Muslim at an Indonesian school by his Muslim stepfather does not make him a Muslim; he attended a notionally Christian church pastored by Jeremiah Wright, whose “black liberation” theology teaches that blacks are the chosen people.

Whether Wright is a Christian, of course, is a question to be answered by Christian theologians and not by this Jewish journalist. But a nasty streak of ethnic idolatry is hard to miss in the published views of Wright’s mentor James Cone.

All that is beside the point. That Obama has a deep personal sympathy for Islam is beyond doubt. The President takes every opportunity to emphasize it. But he is not a Muslim, only the thrice-abandoned child and step-child of Muslims and an anthropologist mother who deeply sympathized with the struggle of Muslims to resist globalization. He has a deep antipathy to the American view of things, insisting that “American exceptionalism” is no different than “Greek exceptionalism.” He belongs neither to the United States, nor to the Muslim world; he is a gifted outsider with a talent for persuasion who profiled Americans the way anthropologist profile primitive tribes, and in a variant of the old adventure-movie script, made himself our king.

Ultimately he belongs nowhere. He is not even a Muslim.

The recent publication of transcripts of Martin Heidegger’s 1934 Freiburg seminars on Being, the People and the State simply adds to the confusion over the philosopher’s relationship to Nazism. Michael Wyschogrod reviewed Emanuel Faye’s widely-read book on Heidegger in the March 2010 issue of First Things (sorry, subscription required), noting that despite Heidegger’s open association with the Nazi regime, he refrained from anti-Semitic statements in his published remarks. It won’t do, Wyschogrod argued, to equate Heidegger with the likes of Nazi official philosopher Alfred Rosenberg; he was a Nazi scoundrel, but a complex one. It is a tragedy for anyone to be a Nazi, and a double tragedy for a great philosopher to be a Nazi.

Heidegger, in Wyschogrod’s view, learned a great deal from Kierkegaard, but “betrayed Kierkegaard’s program” by substituting the non-theistic concept of Being for God.

Emanuel Faye had claimed that the 1934 seminars hinted at exterminations to come. But there is no evidence of this in the transcripts:

The significantly smaller circle of addressees was one reason why the seminar remained almost occult. The incomprehensibility of the first six sessions in particular, flummoxing many a note-scribbling student, did the rest. Heidegger’s plan was to examine the mutual intricacies of the three concepts evoked in the title. He would regularly reach for a piece of chalk to illustrate his point. The simple chalk was a “being at hand” whose “what-ness” is not determined by its visible white-ness but by its invisible chalk-ness. It follows that there is an essential difference between being and beings, an “abyss, immense and dangerous but indispensable for the one who asks.”

Truly abysmal were the seventh to tenth sessions in February 1934 dealing with the being of the people, and thus also of the state then in power. According to Heidegger, every people felt the “drive to the state“, which is why it loved the state as “its way of being a people”. As such, the state order is borne by the “free, pure will to allegiance and leadership and therefore to struggle and loyalty”. People and state, beings and being, can therefore no more be separated than the people and their Führer. “The will of the Führer first and foremost makes followers of the others”, and “the Führer-state as we have it is the consummation of historical development: the realisation of the people in the Führer.”

In her analysis of the seminar, Marion Heinz very rightly points to the “Hegelian-like figure of the union of essence and objectivity”. For Heidegger, being alone lends legitimacy to the Führer and the Führer-state. For Heinz such “collective decisionism” is embarrassingly lofty. Similarly, Heinz sees Nietzsche and his Übermensch as partly responsible for Heidegger’s brute “flight to the factual”. Nevertheless she takes objection to Emmanuel Faye’s polemics, maintaining that Heidegger’s arguments are “entirely the result of his own approach as a thinker”, and that there can be no question of his merely following or intellectually elevating the Nazi party programme.

Zaborowksi shows that for all its many unappetizing turns, Heidegger’s arguments are neither racist nor anti-Semitic. Faye’s thesis that Heidegger was paving a philosophical legitimisation for the “extermination of the Jews” in the East is untenable. Heidegger never mentions Jews or extermination. According to the notes, he refers to the “Semitic nomads” whose “specific knowledge” has engendered in them a different relationship with the nature of their land than “a Slavic people”, say, or the German people. The conclusion that Slavs or Semites should therefore be expelled or exterminated is Faye’s invention. In Zaborowksi’s analysis, “Heidegger was much more interested in the difference between the sedentary and nomadic ways of life.”

Poor Queen Jezebel, the misunderstood Phoenician feminist who fought for pluralism and Middle East peace against the narrow  nationalists of her time. Or so writes Janet Howe Gaines of the University of New Mexico  in the Biblical Archaeology Review, linked to this morning by Jewish Ideas Daily.

…the Torah shows the Israelites to be an ethnocentric, xenophobic people. In biblical narratives, foreigners are sometimes unwelcome, and prejudice against intermarriage is seen since the day Abraham sought a woman from his own people to marry his son Isaac (Genesis 24:4). In contrast to the familiar gods and goddesses that Jezebel is accustomed to petitioning, Israel is home to a state religion featuring a lone, masculine deity. Perhaps Jezebel optimistically believes that she can encourage religious tolerance and give legitimacy to the worship habits of those Baalites who already reside in Israel. Perhaps Jezebel sees herself as an ambassador who could help unite the two lands and bring about cultural pluralism, regional peace and economic prosperity.

So intolerant, these Jews. If only the ancient Hebrews had shown a bit of understanding for the cult of Baal and Astarte, we might have child sacrifice and Temple prostitution today, instead of shabby substitutes like abortion-on-demand and hooking up.

A degree of resignation over the gay marriage issue is evident from the conservative camp, marked by Matthew Lee Anderson’s exchange with Ross Douthat over how supporters of traditional marriage should respond. It seems likely that our side will lose, but in my view we should fight tooth and nail such that our defeat–if, God forbid, it comes to that–will be a bitter and indelible memory. The memory part is important, for we will win eventually. If gay marriage succeeds, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.

People who don’t want traditional marriage, who consider a fetus a career inconvenience or children a drag on entertainment options, tend to have small families, or none at all. People of faith tend to have lots of children. A number of analysts have noticed this, including the popular writer Phillip Longman who wrote in 2004, “This much is sure: The uneducated have far more children than the educated, and the religiously minded generally have bigger families than do secularists. In the United States, for example, fully 47% of people who attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as opposed to only 27% of those who seldom attend church.”

We see this in the microcosm of the Jewish community, where an Orthodox majority seems likely in two generations. The Modern Orthodox have three or four children, the ultra-Orthodox seven or eight, while liberal and secular Jews have one or two, and half of those intermarry. The diversity of American Christianity makes it harder to find numbers, but the principle is the same, as Longman indicated.

Life will triumph so long as enough people believe in life. I have little fear for America, although Europe may be lost.

One minor quibble with Douthat: He seems to think that divorce is just as bad as gay marriage.

The goal should be a world where the struggle to defend marriage is understood primarily as a struggle against divorce and out-of-wedlock births and premarital promiscuity, and not just a world where the law offers a particular distinction to Newt Gingrich’s third marriage that it doesn’t afford Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi. And if all that social conservatives can ever hope to accomplish is to keep homosexual couples from getting marriage licenses, then there’s a case to be made for living with the public redefinition of the institution, taking the older ideal private, and trying to rebuild a thicker culture of marriage from the ground up.

I agree with Ross that no-default divorce laws hurt family life and that divorce should be discouraged. If the core of the Western view of these matters derives from the Bible, though, it must be noted that there is no Biblical proscription against divorce. On the contrary, the Bible (which Catholics as well as Jews considered to be revealed truth) contains detailed laws of divorce. By contrast, the Bible everywhere considers homosexuality an abomination. Divorce may be a bad thing, and Christian denominations may forbid their members to divorce. But it should not be put on the same level as gay marriage.

This bears on a broader issue: Most people practiced religion in the past under the communal constraint of traditional society. Eastern European rabbis tended to discourage Jewish emigration to America a century ago because they knew that most Jews would give up observance once they got here. By the same token, mass attendance and birth rates have plunged in Quebec and other Catholic countries after the intrusion of modernity.

Orthodox Jews comprise just 10% of the notionally-Jewish population in the US; there are some members of Conservative synagogues who are observant, but it is hard to know how many. I don’t know what proportion of American Catholics may be considered orthodox by rigorous Catholic standards, but it must be a minority.  A quarter of Americans consider themselves evangelical Christians.

People of traditional faith may or may not be a minority in America, but even if we are, we are self-regenerating and growing. The culture of death consumes itself. We will win, first of all because we will be the majority before long.

Here’s an elaboration of an earlier post in the form of a new Spengler essay. It also answers the question, “Where are the war brides?”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LH17Ak01.html

I’ve known David Malpass for more than twenty years. He was a comrade-in-arms in the supply-side wing of the Republican party as an official at the Reagan Treasury Department, and later a colleague at Bear, Stearns (he was chief economist while I was fixed-income strategist).  He’s one of a handful of people in politics who really understands what the Reagan administration accomplished, because he helped make it happen.

Now he’s running for Senate in the Republican primary in New York.  Needless to say, he has my support. I append below a note I just received from his campaign. I want to call his work to your attention, and hope you’ll take the time to follow his efforts.

My old business partner and mentor in supply-side economics, the late Jude Wanniski, used to say that the electorate is like a diamond: it looks cloudy, but if you cut it just right, all becomes clear. Think of “wedge” issues as a diamond-cutter’s chisel. Americans are tolerant people and slow to get roused (or even interested) in most foreign policy issues, but the passions ignited by the Ground Zero Mosque issue tell us that a great gap has opened between the machinations of the elites and the sentiments of the public.

The latest CNN poll shows a 70%/29% margin of opposition to the proposed monument to Muslim triumphalism. “Mosque” is the wrong term; it is not a house of worship to accommodate local Muslims and tourists but a statement of Muslim presence.

Nonetheless, President Obama continues to fawn over Muslims in a creepilyk obsequious fashion:

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

August 11, 2010

Statement by the President on the Occasion of Ramadan

On behalf of the American people, Michelle and I want to extend our best wishes to Muslims in America and around the world. Ramadan Kareem.

Ramadan is a time when Muslims around the world reflect upon the wisdom and guidance that comes with faith, and the responsibility that human beings have to one another, and to God.  This is a time when families gather, friends host iftars, and meals are shared.  But Ramadan is also a time of intense devotion and reflection – a time when Muslims fast during the day and pray during the night; when Muslims provide support to others to advance opportunity and prosperity for people everywhere.  For all of us must remember that the world we want to build – and the changes that we want to make – must begin in our own hearts, and our own communities.

These rituals remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings .   Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality.  And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country. And today, I want to extend my best wishes to the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world – and your families and friends – as you welcome the beginning of Ramadan.

I look forward to hosting an Iftar dinner celebrating Ramadan here at the White House later this week, and wish you a blessed month.

May God’s peace be upon you.

It has not been the practice of American presidents to go about making judgments on religion; if George W. Bush had made precisely the same remarks about Christianity it would have caused scandal.

Americans don’t know why they don’t like Islam, but they can detect a radical difference in outlook between a religion that emphasizes collective identity and obedience, and their own civic religion founded on the Jewish and Christian belief in the sanctity of the individual. For all the relativizing tilt of the news media, they have seen enough of Muslim anger at America to realize that most Muslims don’t really like us. The Stan Greenberg polling organizations show 57% of Americans pro-Israel and only 7% pro-Palestinian.

Nor should we discount the information gleaned by well over a million Americans who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Where are the war brides? Fraternization with the locals after World War II helped cement the bond between America and Europe; most Americans perceive the locals at somewhere between homicidal and hostile. How many American soldiers have come home with an impression that squares with the President’s Ramadan greeting?

The mainstream of the Democratic Party is restive. Andrew Cuomo’s gubernatorial running-mate, John Duffy, echoed New York Governor David Patterson’s call for the Ground Zero Islamic Center to find another location farther from the site.

All this is excellent and shows that the American people have not lost their healthy common sense. What Angelo Codevilla calls “the country party” has drawn a line in the sand next to Ground Zero. Let the liberal elites tremble in their ivory towers.

A Google search turns up 75,000 hits for the search term “Michelle Antoinette.” That’s sub-viral, but still noteworthy. At the Huffington Post, one pundit denounces New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman for a “hit piece on First Lady Michelle Obama,” referring to the “modern-day Marie Antoinette” moniker for Mrs. Obama in an August 4 column by Andrea Tantaros.

Mrs. Obama’s sense of timing was poor, and the Marbella trip was a political mistake, but what one makes of these things always is a matter of context. The context is that Obama’s foreign and domestic policies both have blown up in his face. The economy looks terrible, as I said it would all along, with over a fifth of the workforce un- or underemployment, and a fifth of houses worth less than their mortgages. And after a year of trying to bash Israel into a peace deal with the Palestinians, Obama only has succeeded in strengthening Hamas and Hizbollah at the expense of both Israel and the Palestinian authority–in part because of his mishandling of Turkey’s overreaching Islamist prime minister Tayyip Erdogan. And that’s not counting the disaster that is Afghanistan, and the disaster that Iraq is about to become.

The Democratic Party is toast in the mid-term elections. And the center of the Democratic Party is having a bad case of buyer’s remorse about their standard-bearer. Marty Peretz, the “Spine” columnist at the New Republic, famously dubbed the President a “narcissist” last year. Narcissists do not do well in a corner.  As I pointed out in response,

Peretz is on the right track, but he has not gotten to the heart of the matter yet… If Obama has a personality disorder—and I believe he does—it doesn’t quite fit the clinical description of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Narcissists do not empathize easily, but all the evidence suggests that Obama exudes empathy. That is why so many clever people—Peretz for example—convinced themselves he was on their side.

A narcissist would have written his own autobiography; Obama turned tapes and documents over to the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, now a professor of education in Chicago, and let Ayers write Dreams of My Father for him. Long rumored, this is confirmed by celebrity journalist Christopher Anderson in his new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage….

The problem may not be NPD, but something related. The standard psychiatric reference manual, the fourth edition of the  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) “divides personality disorders into three clusters based on symptom similarities,” in the Wikipedia summary. “This clustering categorizes the narcissistic personality disorder as a cluster B personality disorder, those personality disorders having in common an excessive sense of self importance. Also in that cluster are the borderline personality disorder, the histrionic personality disorder and the antisocial personality disorder.”

Antisocial personality disorder, to quote DSM-IV, was “previously known as both psychopathic and Sociopathic personality disorder.  Like most personality disorders, there are many factors that may contribute to the development of symptoms.  Because the symptoms are long lasting, the idea that symptoms begin to emerge in childhood or at least adolescence is well accepted.  The negative consequences of such symptoms, however, may not show themselves until adulthood.”

Sociopaths and narcissists, in short, belong to the same cluster of personality disorders arising from “an excessive sense of self importance,” but there is a key difference: narcissists are so preoccupied with themselves that they cannot empathize; sociopaths willfully “disregard the rights of others,” according to DSM-IV. Typical is “a history of deceitfulness where the individual attempts to con people or use trickery for personal profit.” For the sociopath, the thrill lies in the deception and the sense of power it brings.

This is a question, not an answer: no man can look into another man’s soul. But we are dealing with a man who was abandoned by three parents–dad, stepdad, and mom–to be raised by his grandparents. Neglected children, if they are clever, become adept at manipulating those around them, while at the same time searching for surrogates for the parents who dumped them. In a Feb. 26, 2008 “Spengler” essay, I conjectured that Barack Obama was deeply dependent on Michelle.  Obama the candidate brought to mind Tyrone Power’s carnival mentalist in the 1947 noire film “Nightmare Alley.” Power’s character ended up as the geek.

How much failure can Obama tolerate? Until now he spent his entire life climbing the ladder of power without being called to account. The Republicans are too gentlemanly to probe; not so his fellow Democrats. If DSM-IV does in fact provide insights into Obama’s character, the way to find out is to go after the strong woman in his life. That is why the ridicule of the First Lady may have broader significance.

The American political system has a brutal but thorough way of uncovering the character of a leader. Sometimes character flaws stay hidden until stress forces them out, in the case of Richard Nixon, for example. The hounds are nipping at Obama’s heels; in fact, they have sunk their teeth into Michelle’s.