| An MP from the rightwing Swiss People's party (SVP), the country's strongest, Mr Schlüer has launched a crusade to keep his country culturally Christian. "Unlike other religions," he argues, "Islam is not only a religion. It's an ideology aiming to create a different legal system. That's sharia. That's a big problem and in a proper democracy it has to be tackled. If the politicians don't, the people will." Switzerland's direct democracy rules require referendums if there is enough public support. Mr Schlüer has launched a petition demanding a new clause in the Swiss constitution stating: "The building of minarets in Switzerland is forbidden." He already has 40,000 signatures. If, as expected, he reaches 100,000 by this time next year a referendum is automatically triggered. "We've got nothing against prayer rooms or mosques for the Muslims," he insists. "But a minaret is different. It's got nothing to do with religion. It's a symbol of political power." |
Either Farmer Ulrich really has a mind like a scrapyard, or the city slickers from the Guardian are setting him up unfairly. At any rate, Geschichte must be bunk for anybody who supposes that religionism and imported legality have never been in cahoots this side of the Dardanelles.
Before the other Ulrich, Herr. Dr. Zwingli I mean, got to work on the unreformed church, was Helvetian Christianity an "ideology," then? Not to just make fun, Mr. Bones, perhaps what happened to the Old Euros in Century IX/XVI might seriously be presented as a de-ideologization as well as a de-idolatization? [1] The philological chain is there, at least if heathens like Plato are to be accounted relevant to Farmer Ulrich's version of Western Sieve. Ideas certainly began by being more or less "pictures," and so obviously did idols. True, there was a gap of a couple of millennia before some Parisian city slicker invented or discovered Ideology®, and the strictly visual side of the "idea" matter had got rather seriously lost sight of. M. Destutt de Tracy, or whichever one of Messrs. les doctrinaires it was, presumably did not think of the brave new invention/discovery as being anything like, say, "a system for thinking in pictures." Since his time, even as the fiends of the East were borrowing the new "ideology" product for their own ends, arming themselves to assail Farmer Ulrich and the boors of Wangen with it in due time, the word fell above all into the hands of Dr. Marx, and all connection with the pictorial and the picturesque evaporated (not to pander to visuality by saying "vanished"). Few things are more certain in this alien and bewildered world than that there won't be any illustrations in a book of ideology, except possibly some rather irrelevant portraits or photographs of the Great Minds discussed in all that daunting wilderness of little tiny print. And then along came Pop. Cult., which undoubtedly did set up systems for thinking in pictures, notably comic books and cinema and television.
The next link in Farmer Ulrich's inexorable chain of doom is that icky faith-crazed ideologies "aim to create a legal system," which is admirably counterhistorical and anachronistic, at least for anybody who sees the point of Holmes, J., when he preached that "The life of the law has not been logic, but experience." [1] The montani semper liberi have always been rather behind the jurisprudential times, however, and indeed, that's what the proverbial tag about the likes of Farmer Ulrich basically meant in the first place.
Religionism to Ideology®, Ideology® to legalism . . . what's next? "Proper democracy," it looks like, or rather, some brand of improper antidemocracy. Certainly one can easily find a variety of such wares hawked by various Muslims and neo-Muslims, not to mention that assorted other Muslims (and even a few neo-Muslims, perhaps) swear that Dame Sharia and Lady Democracy are the best of friends, and even that they have always been so. Farmer Ulrich needs to cartoonize a little at this juncture, I fear, and pretend (or ignorantly affirm) that all the bad guys are simply for Dame Sharia the same way that he and the boors of Wangen profess themselves knights of Lady Democracy. And unfortunately there are many extra-Wangen notions of "proper democracy," including yours and mine, Mr. Bones. "Switzerland's direct democracy rules require referendums if there is enough public support" may do for the local yokels, or even for Darkest Schwarzeneggerland, but do we consider plebescitarianism proper democracy, sir? [2]
But I've saved the best for last, Mr. Bones, because from the "proper democracy" of Wangen we must leap audaciously to the Minaret Menace: "It's got nothing to do with religion. It's a symbol of political power."
Indeed. You'll recall, of course, how all the heathen Ishmaelites of yore used to emblazon their banners with minarets.[2] Or anyway with that crescent (or decresecent?) scimitaroid effigy that minarets are sometimes topped off with. Perhaps that really was a symbol of political power in its way. Unfortunately the icing does not seem to be what Farmer Ulrich and his constituent boors dislike about minarets, what they fear and dread is rather the cake itself, that "six-metre-high" cake under the icing. (The late Dr. Freud could have amused himself with Herr von Schlüer and the Wangenenses, I strongly suspect, taking the symbolism involved to be other than strictly political.) [3]
Still, we have resolved to try to take Farmer Ulrich seriously, and perhaps we can keep a straight face even here and point out, in the path of Miss Rand of Petersburg, that there really may be something to it, after all. Who has the biggest and best political symbols of all? Why obviously Lord Mammon! -- just take a look, judge from Manhattan or Shanghai or Kuwait rather than from Alpine hamlets! And surely that is the only sane way to judge, is it not, sir? Q.E.D. [4]
(One recalls that Swiss cheese is full of holes.)
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[1] Mr. Justice Holmes will have heard of Ideology®, no doubt, because that product was discovered/invented more than a generation before his own day. His "logic" is not the same as anybody's "ideology," least of all Farmer Ulrich's, but it is a much better term for what the more zealous Old Euro picture-thinkers have always distrusted. On the other hand, "experience" is nearly as opaquely nonvisual in modern usage as both "logic" and "ideology."
To connect the dots directly between Holmes and Schlüer would almost certainly distort the position of the latter in the direction of Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mr. Nozick of Harvard, making the crux of what Farmer Ulrich dislikes about "ideology" being that it is systematic and pretends to direct the mind to necessary conclusions, as indeed it is and does. But these deplorable tendencies towards Zwang on the part of Logic and Ideology® are connected with iconoclasm proper only by a rather extrended trail of dots. To continue the catena and bring in the Zwang of Gesetz requires more intermediate dots still.
Making out that what Farmer Ulrich really dislikes about his private cartoon of Islam is that it would really put an end to the libertas montana once and for all would be great fun, but scarcely defensible in depth.
[2] If one did want to laugh at Farmer Ulrich as a shameless despiser of all law and system, that sort of "direct democracy" would come in very handy. But let's not, Bones, because, among other things, it would complicate any attempts on our part to rebut hostile neo-Muslim cartoons of "democracy." The more intransigent faith-debased will remain shocked at the idea that mere MAN should dare presume to make law, but let us continue all the same to insist as against both neo-Muslims and the militant extremist GOP that mere mortals are capable of making genuine LAW, as opposed to venting whim and spleen at ad hoc referendums. Farmer Ulrich is, hopefully, not tota Helvetia. How often the latter slips from democracy proper to an improper populism we do not happen to know, but one does get the general impression that Switzerland is not notably more ochlocratic than the rest of Old Europe.
[3] Speaking of banners, , sir:
| In the lands where Christians were, F. E. Smith, In the little lands laid bare, Smith, O Smith! Where the Turkish bands are busy And the Tory name is blessed Since they hailed the Cross of Dizzy On the banners from the West! |
[4] To discuss whether the former Orthodox Freudianity was iconoclast or iconodule would take us absurdly far afield, Mr. Bones, but we treasure up the topic to discuss on some future rainy day.
[5] Switzerland was thought by the late Graham Greene, and doubtless by others, to be especially devoted to the Cult of Mammon, and yet it does not especially abound in (artificial) skyscrapers, so far as I know. Carthage was notoriously mammononophil, Mr. Bones, and also located on the coast. Do you suppose its architecture ran towards minarets and the Cathedral of Beauvais and Pyramids and World Trade Centers and the like?
Still, reservations about this deterministic view may well be advisable. Farmer Ulrich's rules are not to be scrapped at once just because seeming counterexamples come to mind.
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