When The Geocentric Model Of The Universe Comes In Contact With An Islamic Civil War

I've recently discovered French academic Pierre Manent. Now usually, French intellectuals don't stir the heart so much as cause you to gain callouses on your forehead as you beat your head against your desk in exasperation with them. Pierre is a different breed of chat. He's got some insights into European culture that are the best crystallization of what I've been feeling, but haven't been able to express. Here's the article and here's the payoff paragraph for me.

The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way. … We had supposedly entered into the final stage of democracy where human rights would reign, ever more rights ever more rigorously observed. We had left behind the age of nations as well as that of religions, and we would henceforth be free individuals moving frictionless over the surface of the planet. … And now we see that religious affiliations and other collective attachments not only survive but return with a particular intensity. Everyone can see and feel this, but how can it be expressed when the only authorized language is that of individual rights? We have become supremely incapable of seeing what is right before our eyes. Meanwhile the ruling class, which is not a political but an ideological class, one that commands not what must be done but what must be said, goes on indefinitely about “values,” the “values of the republic,” the “values of democracy,” the “values of Europe.” This class has been largely discredited in the eyes of citizens, but it occupies all the positions of institutional responsibility, especially in the media, and nowhere does one find groups or individuals who give the impression of understanding what is happening or of being able to stand up to it. We have no more confidence in those who lead us than in ourselves.

In effect, the post-modern, secular culture lacks the mental framework and perhaps even the language to accurately describe what's going on in Europe. Here's the Google map of Islamic attacks I referenced in a recent post.

This is the map of a world at war, but a culture that can only describe the world in terms of individual rights and sees generalizations by race, nation or creed as heresy is not going to be able to make sense of it. Like the Geocentric astronomers claiming that the other planets had crazy orbits in order to maintain their theory in the face of increasing evidence of the Heliocentric model, our elites have to come up with ever more ridiculous explanations for what is a global civil war within Islam that is spilling out into the rest of the world.