Lowry: We should be grateful for what ISIS hates

  • Sunday, November 29, 2015 9:12pm
  • Opinion

The Paris attacks have occasioned a wide-ranging debate about what they mean and how to respond, involving Islam and its role, military strategy and, oddly enough, how Muslims in New Jersey reacted to Sept. 11 (thanks, Donald Trump). It’s all very interesting and, for the most part, quite important.

At bottom, though, the import of the Paris attacks is not complicated: ISIS terrorists are enemies of our civilization.

In Paris, they chose their target well. They assaulted a city that dates back thousands of years and has been a leading Western capital going back to the Capetians, a site of soaring endeavor (Notre Dame) and extraordinary learning (University of Paris) since the 12th century, a place representing geological layers of Western civilization, and its glories and conflicts and follies.

Paris has seen its share of sectarian hatred (the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre), violent upheavals (too many to count), and authoritarians (Napoleon Bonaparte, most notably) but it is synonymous with an appreciation for the finest things wrought by human talent and discernment. You don’t have to be fond of France’s centralizing political culture or its statist economics (I’m not) to recognize its achievements or honored place in the West.

To simplify crudely, the Western story began in the 5th century B.C. on an Athenian hillside where people sat and voted on public questions and, over the course of millennia — and with multiple, often clashing sources, from the Romans to the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment — produced our current liberal dispensation.

The West respects the rule of law, which protects the individual from the caprice and degradations of the powerful. It divides church and state. It governs by the consent of the governed. It honors the dignity — and the conscience and the rights — of the individual. It celebrates reason, discovery and creativity, and gives a wide berth to commerce and entrepreneurial energy.

Obviously, this hasn’t always been true, and the road to the adoption of these norms has been winding and bloody, sometimes spectacularly so, in great clashes within and among Western powers. These qualities are never perfectly realized and always are under both internal and external threat.

But they have created the conditions for stupendous human flourishing. It is represented in staggering artistic and literary expression, in awe-inspiring scientific, technological and medical advances, and in mind-boggling levels of economic development that mean the average Westerner lives like a sultan compared to the average person throughout most of history.

If we are inclined to take any of this for granted, we should have a renewed sense of its wonder and fragility when it is under attack from barbarism. ISIS embodies a theocratic totalitarianism that seeks to subject the human spirit to its perverted dictates. It kills, in part, as an advertisement for its own vileness and brutality. It gleefully vandalizes ancient cultural treasures, and considers Paris “the capital of prostitution and obscenity.”

To borrow from Orwell, the ISIS picture of the future is whipping the non-conforming women of Raqqa — forever.

We are different, although we aren’t ourselves responsible for that. The West is our windfall. None of us were at Runnymede in 1215 or Philadelphia in 1787. None of us knocked a chip off the block of marble that became Michelangelo’s David or contributed a brush stroke to a Rembrandt. None of us invented the steam engine or the iPhone. None of us discovered penicillin or the polio vaccine. None of us fought at Poitiers, and very few of us at Normandy.

If you are not thankful and humbled by all of this, you are an ingrate. Your freedom and material comfort depend on generations of sacrifice and effort before you. It is your privilege to enjoy all that our enemies — if they had the power — would wantonly destroy. If nothing else, Paris should be a reminder of that. What they hate, we should hold all the dearer.

More in Opinion

Deena Bishop, commissioner of the Department of Education and Early Development, discusses the status of school districts’ finances during a press conference with Gov. Mike Dunleavy at the Alaska State Capitol on Thursday, April 17, 2025. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Empire)
Opinion: The fight to improve public education has just begun

We owe our children more than what the system is currently offering

President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a joint news conference in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018. (Doug Mills/The New York Times file photo)
Opinion: Mistaking flattery for respect

Flattery played a role in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

(Juneau Empire file photo)
Opinion: Life is harder when you outlive your support group

Long-time friends are more important than ever to help us cope, to remind us we are not alone and that others feel the same way.

Deven Mitchell is the executive director and chief executive officer of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. (Photo courtesy of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.)
Opinion: The key to a stronger fund: Diversification

Diversification is a means of stabilizing returns and mitigating risk.

A silver salmon is weighed at Three Bears in Kenai, Alaska. Evelyn McCoy, customer service PIC at Three Bears, looks on. (Photo by Jeff Helminiak/Peninsula Clarion)
Opinion: Will coho salmon be the next to disappear in the Kenai River?

Did we not learn anything from the disappearance of the kings from the Kenai River?

Jonathan Flora is a lifelong commercial fisherman and dockworker from Homer, Alaska.
Point of View: Not fishing for favors — Alaskans need basic health care access

We ask our elected officials to oppose this bill that puts our health and livelihoods in danger.

Alex Koplin. (courtesy photo)
Opinion: Public schools do much more than just teach the three Rs

Isn’t it worth spending the money to provide a quality education for each student that enters our schools?

Gov. Mike Dunleavy speaks to reporters at the Alaska State Capitol on Thursday, April 17, 2025. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Empire file photo)
Letter to the Editor: Law enforcement officers helped ensure smooth, secure energy conference

Their visible commitment to public safety allowed attendees to focus fully on collaboration, learning, and the important conversations shaping our path forward.

Laurie Craig / Juneau Empire file photo
The present-day KTOO public broadcasting building, built in 1959 for the U.S. Army’s Alaska Communications System Signal Corps, is located on filled tidelands near Juneau’s subport. Today vehicles on Egan Drive pass by the concrete structure with satellite dishes on the roof that receive signals from NPR, PBS and other sources.
My Turn: Stand for the community radio, not culture war optics

Alaskans are different and we pride ourselves on that. If my vehicle… Continue reading

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) delivers his annual speech to the Alaska Legislature on Thursday, March 20, 2025. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Empire file photo)
Opinion: Sullivan, Trump and the rule of lawlessness

In September 2023, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan established his own Alaska Federal… Continue reading

UAA Provost Denise Runge photographed outside the Administration and Humanities Building at the University of Alaskas Anchorage. (courtesy photo)
Opinion: UAA’s College of Health — Empowering Alaska’s future, one nurse at a time

At the University of Alaska Anchorage, we understand the health of our… Continue reading

U.S. Rep. Nick Begich III, R-Alaska, address a joint session of the Alaska Legislature on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire file photo)
Opinion: A noncongressman for Alaska?

It’s right to ask whether Nick Begich is a noncongressman for Alaska.… Continue reading