“Sentimental humanitarianism also assumes that all religions are more-or-less the same and, given the right conditions, will vacillate their way towards something as innocuous as today’s Church of England. But as a wise recently retired pope once wrote, a major failure of imagination since the 1960s has been the disinclination to concede that there are “sick and distorted forms of religion.”

I always thought it would be difficult to imagine a period in which the West would be more adrift than the 1970s. Being a child at the time, I was spared consciousness of most of that miserable decade. Thus far, however, the second decade of the 2000s seems likely to give the 10 years that spawned Watergate, stagflation, the Carter presidency, the Oil Crisis, Idi Amin, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Jim Jones, Pol Pot, the Red Brigades, and the Iranian Revolution (to name just a few of the star attractions) a serious run for its money as a byword for Western decline.

One everyday sign of this malaise is the fact that much of the West remains, as in the seventies, mired in what’s now called the Long Slump. And persistently unhealthy economies are usually symptomatic of an unwillingness to acknowledge deeper problems. Examples are most Western governments’ reluctance to accept that it’s game-over for the regulatory and welfare state as-we-knew-it, or to do something about the growing cancer of crony-capitalism.

Sometimes, however, an event occurs that highlights the more fundamental crises that bedevil a civilization. The rise of a movement as diabolical as ISIS, for instance, has surely underscored the bankruptcy of what might be called the sentimental humanitarian outlook that dominates so many contemporary shapers of the West’s cultural consensus.

Sentimental humanitarianism has several features. One is the mind-set that reduces evil to structural causes. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” proclaimed Rousseau in his Du contrat social. From this, many concluded that evil would disappearif the right people were put in charge to change the structures.

Sentimental humanitarianism also assumes that all religions are more-or-less the same and, given the right conditions, will vacillate their way towards something as innocuous as today’s Church of England. But as a wise recently retired pope once wrote, a major failure of imagination since the 1960s has been the disinclination to concede that there are “sick and distorted forms of religion.”

Despite its claims to take the mind seriously, sentimental humanitarianism is also rather “uncomfortable” (to use classic sentimental humanitarian language) with any substantive understanding of reason. It tends to reduce most debates to exchanges of feelings. You know you’re dealing with a sentimental humanitarian whenever someone responds to arguments with expressions such as “Well, I just feel…” or “You can’t say that,” or (the ultimate trump-card) “That’s hurtful.”

Outfits like ISIS — and Boko Haram, Nazism, and Communism — don’t, however, fit the sentimental humanitarian narrative. For such groups illustrate that not all of evil emanates from poor education, unjust structures, or the current fashionable explanation for all the world’s ills: inequality. In the end, the sick choice to behead someone — or kidnap people’s daughters, or incarcerate enemies-of-the-revolution in a Gulag, or herd Jews into gas chambers — is a free choice to do evil that can’t be explained away by the fact that others are wealthier than you.

The same groups also underline another truth that makes sentimental humanitarians uneasy: that some people and movements aren’t in fact amenable to “dialogue.” ISIS’s creed is submission: nothing more, nothing less. There’s nothing to discuss with ISIS except the terms of your surrender or degree of dhimmitude.

A third and even more controversial truth that upsets the sentimental humanitarian account of the world’s ills is that not all cultures are equally amenable to the values and institutions that promote freedom, dignity, and other goods intrinsic to human nature. At many universities these days, making such a claim is likely to mean you’ll be shipped off for diversity-sensitivity training. That, however, doesn’t make it any less true.

Consider, for example, the words of the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul whose flock has been murdered, robbed, raped, and scattered by ISIS. Speaking about the perpetrators to a Western audience, Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona said, “Your values are not their values.” “Your liberal and democratic principles,” he added, “are worth nothing here.” In the face of such blunt remarks, your average sentimental humanitarian has little to say.

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