by Danny Burmawi, Ideological Defense Institute
How does a political movement that claims to champion women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and secularism end up defending an ideology that rejects all of them? The answer is philosophy. The left and Islam make strange bedfellows, but they share a common enemy, and in the logic of the left, that is enough.
To understand the alliance, you have to understand the fundamental disagreement about what drives human behavior.
The Western liberal tradition, and capitalism as its economic expression, rests on the premise that ideas shape the world. This is what philosophers call idealism. A society’s values, beliefs, and convictions determine what kind of civilization it builds. Freedom produces prosperity. Dignity produces justice. A culture that glorifies conquest produces tyranny. A culture that prizes individual responsibility produces order.
From this perspective, Islamic violence is exactly what it appears to be: the product of a specific set of ideas. Ideas about divine obligation, about the duty to subjugate unbelievers, about the virtue of martyrdom.
Marxism begins from the opposite premise. For Marx and every tradition that flows from him, socialism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, ideas are not the cause of reality but its reflection. Material conditions come first: who owns what, who exploits whom, who holds power over whom. Everything else, morality, religion, law, culture, is built on top of this economic foundation, and serves to justify it. The ruling class produces the ruling ideas, in Marx’s famous formulation. Ideas are instruments of power, not independent forces.
As a result, if material conditions produce ideas rather than the reverse, then people do not kill because of what they believe. They kill because of their circumstances. Theology is not a cause; it is a symptom, a rationalization of underlying grievance. When someone commits violence in the name of a religious doctrine, the materialist does not ask “what does this doctrine say?” He asks “what economic or political condition made this person feel desperate enough to act?”