Review: "The Second Plane," by Martin Amis
Martin Amis (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Online USA)
And what bracing rubble these pieces can be. They roil from anger (at Islamists) to resentment (toward God) to contempt (for “haters of reason”) to reprisals (“that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden”) to stupidity (a whole column whining about the abbreviations of “September 11”) to provocation in the face of smug convention: “Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief — unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.”
It’s what you’d expect from Amis: high-voltage prose designed to shock or at least shove the conscience over what outrages him most. Since Sept. 11, it’s been the “de-Enlightenment” of Islamists who seem to have nothing better to do than to launch their cult of “apocalyptic hurt,” victimhood and death at the West in the form of suicide bombers.
The Second Plane intends a direct hit.
Comments
“Islamism is ‘the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis,’ it is ‘an ideology superimposed upon a religion—illusion upon illusion.’”
That strikes me as being quite powerful and true. But isn’t it equally true about most of what passes for Christianity, at least in the USA? And isn’t our own society’s profound (albeit more outsourced) violence also deeply exploitive of this fascist Christianity? Does Amis see that?
I wonder if neo-fascism isn’t that last option/refuge of religion everywhere. Don’t you either have to acknowledge science and reason and quit religion, or redouble the religious commitments, which are fundamentally irrational and hence proto-fascist?
Yet another reason we’re in for a doozy of a century…
Michael, I think Amis does see that to an extent, at least as far as all religious systems are concerned. As cited in the penultimate paragraph of the review, he writes: “All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so implacably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone.”
Well, I know he’s buddy of Hitchens, who’s jettisoned all rational analysis of our side of this thing, but also denounces religion, and rightly so. But I’m not at all convinced that these guys have really even tried to confront our side of this religio-fascist thing. If that’s true, then a book like this loses a great deal of its energy. “Westernism” remains one of the great propaganda achievements of our age, in many directions. To the extent Amis trades in it, he’s as bad as the folks he’s (mostly rightly) nailing (and/or as bad as his own haircut).