The Terrifying Bridge Between Modernity and the Muslim World

I once worked in an office that was being renovated, and I worked closely with the office building’s Muslim handyman who had immigrated to Canada from Arabia. We got on well because he had an excellent work ethic and an admirable sense of honor that I imagined traced back to Islam’s Bedouin roots.

After all, there’s honor in a desert culture because the desert is a mortal enemy to living things, which is bound to afflict survivors with a mystical appreciation of the stakes in life. A desert is like an intrusion of outer space into the terrestrial paradise, taunting us with the universe’s average lethality.

But why was it easy for a secular Jew like me to befriend a Muslim in the workplace? Of course, we didn’t discuss religion or politics at work, and there are exceptions to every rule. But the rule in question is an imposing one: the antipathy between the Western monoculture and the Muslim world.

Indeed, the clash between the progressive, secular civilizations and the predominantly Muslim cultures in the Middle East and Northern Africa has been appalling ever since the Western powers leaped ahead economically, technologically, and culturally, and since they defeated the Ottoman Empire and carved up the Middle East in WWI.

Secular societies divide religion from politics and adopt scientific knowledge and the animal drivers of human nature, such as greed and selfishness, to fuel economic growth. Muslim countries are steeped in Bedouin desert culture, the Quran, and medieval interpretations of their religion, which don’t separate religion from the state.

Westerners scoff at what they regard as the Muslim world’s deeply naïve view of Islam. It’s as though Muslims in the Middle East have been caught in a time warp, so they’re unable to learn new things and grow with the rest of humanity. This isn’t just an abstract evaluation either, since the consequences of rampant Muslim fundamentalism are poverty, tyranny, and human rights abuses throughout the Muslim world.

Western powers have tried to manage the backward nature of those societies by engineering coups and installing puppet secular rulers to keep the oil supplies flowing and to modernize the Islamic cultures.

For their part, most Muslims in those regions resent so-called modern progress, deeming it comically sinful. Democracy and capitalism allow vices to flourish, and secularists infantilize themselves with a consumer culture that knows no wise balance, but threatens the biosphere and fails to acknowledge that the source of reality is great enough to humble anyone. Far from demonstrating enlightened humility, the so-called advanced countries are steeped in hubris and folly. The obscene rise of Trumpism makes the sinfulness of Western secularism transparent.

Secularists and moderate Muslims look for a bridge between the Western monoculture and medieval Islamism, a way for each to respect and come to terms with the other.

There is such a bridge, but it’s seldom acknowledged. The bridge is cosmic horror.

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The Romantic artists and thinkers, existential philosophers, and Lovecraftian writers of weird tales rejected the utilitarian, reductionist side of naturalism that emerged with the Industrial Revolution. These secular counter-revolutionaries emphasized the mystical aspect of nature and the smallness of human concerns. Far from being just a standing reserve, as Martin Heidegger called it, as in a bounty of raw materials for us to exploit, nature is a cosmic monstrosity that mocks and thwarts our vanity.

Secular humanists aim to use the revolutions of science and liberalism (capitalism, democracy, and freedom of the arts) to progress at nature’s expense. But science itself reveals the inhuman extent of the cosmos. Nature includes black holes that swallow spacetime, and a quantum underpinning that makes nonsense of our intuitive conception of physicality and local, mechanistic causality. Evolution operates on a deep timescale that dwarfs our mundane, human-centered standards of change.

In short, the Western outlook implies dark pantheism, a grotesque scientific understanding of nature that motivates what we call secular progress. We’re preoccupied with social advances only because we’re implicitly horrified by nature’s wildness, amorality, and alien (inhuman) dimensions.

The so-called First World, consisting of the societies that have “modernized” or adopted the revolutions of science and liberalism, has been coping with proto-Lovecraftian insights into our existential condition since the end of the eighteenth century.

Now, what does this have to do with Islam?

Well, Western monotheism implies cosmic horror, too. I’ve argued this elsewhere, and you could go through the history of the three major monotheistic religions to see how they deal with Judaism’s implicit satire on polytheism. The problem for theists generally is that polytheism is the only obviously coherent form of theism, so it’s the only genuine theistic contender in the history of ideas. When you personify ultimate causes or sources of metaphysical productivity and order, you naturally apply our self-conceptions and homely intuitions about social propriety, resulting in the idea of a society of deities.

What the Jewish prophets did by proclaiming mystical monotheism was to build a religion on countercultural outrage on behalf of all oppressed peoples in the ancient world. Polytheism was deemed idolatrous and vain because the morality that emerged from the Axial Age (the middle of the first millennium BCE in India, China, Greece, and the Middle East) demanded less farcical and overt rationalizations of imperial injustice.

Might made right in kingdoms and empires throughout the ancient world, and the Jewish prophets echoed the ascetic, countercultural criticisms from Buddhist monks and Greek philosophers, in proclaiming that true divinity couldn’t be a mere reflection of human vices and political compromises. The divine power that created the Earth and the “heavens” had to transcend our parochial intuitions and habits. Hence, not just polytheism but theism itself, with its vain personifications, had to be wrongheaded.

Consequently, Jews ended up criticizing even the vestigial personal aspect of their Supreme Being. The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes repudiate the necessarily tyrannical inhumanity of any solitary, king-like deity. Thus, insofar as monotheism retains its theistic metaphors and dogmas, a monotheistic religion will entail cosmic horror that’s akin to HP Lovecraft’s tales of Cthulhu and the other hideous gods that he took to represent nature’s inhuman scale.

Christians missed or revolted against that Jewish lesson, and cast God as a loving being, using the Hellenistic image of a dying and rising saviour to moralize epic standards of heroism. The Christian God wasn’t an epic figure who slays monsters and glories in bloodshed and war, but a saintly, oppressed, wise man and healer who means to rescue humanity from our dire fate.

For Christians, God is love, or at least that’s this religion’s superficial, exoteric level of creedal meaning. Look a little deeper at the Christian theology of salvation, including the doctrine of hellfire, the absurdity of original sin, and the incoherence of the Incarnation and Trinity doctrines, and the proto-Lovecraftian horror that’s implicit in Jewish monotheism shines through even Christianity’s virtual polytheism.

In any case, Islam is supposed to be a return to the strictness of Jewish monotheism, except that Muslims mean to out-Judaize Jews in that respect. Alas, most Muslims miss the satirical point of Jewish monotheism because of the vast historical differences between the two groups. Jews developed their prophetic outlook from the standpoint of the conquered, whereas early Muslims found themselves as conquerors (much as Christians became conquerors as they inherited the Roman Empire in the fourth century).

So whereas Jews understood that monotheism ought to be anti-theological since the point was to satirize genuine, straightforward theism, namely polytheism, Muslims took monotheism literally. Instead of reverting to secular humanism with most modern Jews, Muslims emphatically retained the theistic aspect of their faith. Thus, Islam entails cosmic horror.

Indeed, Allah is a terrifying tyrant, a great being before whom we’re supposed to “submit” with every breath we take, word we utter, and deed we carry out. The Quran revels in threats of divine punishment for disobedience and demands absolute fealty from believers.

This kingly image of Allah is an appalling myth that shocks Muslims into an edifying trance. Muslims learn to be humble because they haunt themselves with their strict monotheistic religion. Incessantly, they read their Quran or virtual Necronomicon, absorbing the lesson that the Supreme Being is a nightmare before whom we all must grovel, abasing ourselves in prayer and ascetic surrender.

Here, then, is the cultural bridge between modernity and Islam. Here is what these civilizations share: a deep sense of cosmic horror. The two civilizations characterize the horror differently, one with scientific objectification and philosophical rumination, and the other with theology and political applications (dehumanizing, oppressive theocratic dictatorships).

Still, these two worlds ought to converse based on this shared understanding. They ought to reflect on this meeting of minds, this common fear that leads us all to desperate, rarely noble responses.