Kudos to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, whose “New Grand Strategy” (American Interest, December) tells us what sensibly ought to be.  The stooges inhabiting Foggy Bottom will never look up from their feed troughs to show half the intelligence of your master diplomat.  I wish him Godspeed on his new ventures, and wish that Obama had the sense and courage to defy his masters and adopt that column’s strategy—and the strategist—as his own.

Fr. Hugh Barbour’s inquiry into the “theological case for the Crusades” (“Sola Scriptura,” Views), with its anchor on indulgences, has some merit, but there was much more to the initial impetus to the crusading movement than that.  Indeed, as the theological essence became more dominant in the later “Crusades,” they became more like religious “statements” and increasingly less successful militarily.

The only Crusade that was in any true measure a success was the first, while the rhetoric of Urban II was more a trigger setting in motion a militant wave that had been building for generations.  As Father Hugh noted, the Norman conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily, and the burgeoning Reconquista, preceded the crusading effort directed into the Middle East.

Just one factor illustrating that the Crusades had less a theological than a political and economic basis is the role played by the Normans of Italy.  The Normans and Urban II were political antagonists throughout the latter’s pontificate.  They sought lands and power, often at the expense of the papacy.  For the First Crusade, the core of the army was provided by Normans, who sought and took major holdings associated with the Christian kingdom that the Crusade established.  Major contingents were organized and led by Bohemond and Tancred, both of whom were members of the De Hauteville clan that had conquered the Italian South and humbled the armies of the Pope.  Bohemond established himself as prince of Antioch.  Tancred became lord of a major segment of the new kingdom ruled from Jerusalem.  For them and others who grabbed parcels of the conquest for themselves, the theology of it all was an excuse rather than a reason for venturing into the ripe plum that was the Middle East.

Today, Europe is the plum.  The militant wave is from the East.  The rationale of the Crusades, led by the likes of Normans bent on conquest, is dead.  The Muslims are on the march.  Europe is weak theologically and spiritually, and is militarily spineless.  The so-called War on Terror is gutted by multiculturalism, secularism, and globalist fantasies that take the heart out of any meaningful, lasting response.  Finally, the idea of a bunch of freebooters (such as the Crusaders who responded to Urban) setting off to conquer and establish, on their own, a nation of sorts hacked out of the Middle East would be opposed by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States with no less dedication than that of the Muslims.  Those who must be obeyed would have it so.

—William J. Bonville
Grants Pass, OR

Father Hugh Replies:

It is always important to consider the title of a piece of writing, which, in Chronicles at least, determines the most general light by which the article under it should be interpreted.  My article, as the title indicates, was precisely on the theological case for the Crusades and was intended to shed light on the contrast between contemporary theological styles and those of the Middle Ages and to suggest in the title and at the very end of the article the contrast between both of these and the Reformation tradition.  It may well be that the Reformation tradition provides the link to explain best how we arrived at our present inability to offer a coherent response to the religiously motivated enemies of our civilization.  Here is where I might have expected the attentive reader to be moved to write a letter!  That there were other factors at work in the Crusades common to all political and military movements of any time and place cannot be doubted.  My purpose was to discuss what was most specific to the Crusades—that is, their specifically Catholic and medieval theological motivation—not to assert that this motivation was the exclusive or even the predominant motivation of the crusaders themselves.  One thing a Catholic assessment of history never assumes is universally pure motives from members of a fallen race!

 

On Darwinian Chaos

Fr. Michael P. Orsi’s review of John G. West’s Darwin Day in America (“Man on Holiday,” Reviews, December) is compelling, as far as it goes.  However, neither he nor apparently West refers to a powerful theoretical argument against Darwinian evolution: the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  In very simplified language, this law states that it is impossible for practical purposes to produce order/organization by means of random processes (Darwin’s natural selection).  A much better but perhaps still not sufficient approach is through chaotic processes.  Chaos is not equivalent to randomness.  Indeed, chaotic processes also embody high degrees of “spontaneous ordering” through “feedback”—or, to use the technical term, “non-linearity.”  It is my strong belief that chaos plays a major role in evolution, but by its very nature the evolutionary history is impossible to unravel.  Hence we will never have a satisfactory theory of the “descent of Man.”  Very small instabilities, as microscopic as the quantum level, lead to enormous changes in the evolving system.  Such instabilities in the atmosphere prevent reliable weather prediction for more than a few days.  This, in my view, is the manner in which “Intelligent Design” plays out.

Although retired from NASA, I still work part time on planetary research for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.  At a meeting of the employees a couple of years ago, I overheard another researcher praise the decision against Intelligent Design by a federal judge in Delaware.  When I asked him how one gets order from random processes, he stormed out, refusing to discuss the matter further.  On another occasion I exchanged e-mail about Darwinian evolution with a professor at an Eastern university.  I raised the Second Law problem, with a possible partial solution lying in chaos theory.  His reply was, in effect, that my argument about randomness and chaos was a “distinction without a difference.”  Of course, as I explained previously, they are not even remotely similar.

The Darwinists’ main objective seems to be the destruction of traditional religion.  While they have not accomplished that, they have succeeded in creating their own false god.