The cult of the good savage and the Western fascination with barbarism

The Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who has combined throughout his life a remarkable literary talent with an equally admirable political courage, wrote in The Ground Beneath His Feet:

"We have always preferred our iconic figures wounded...; we want to watch their beauty slowly crumble and observe their narcissistic pain. Not in spite of their flaws, but because of them, we worship them... By seeing ourselves in the mirror [they are] and forgiving them, we also forgive ourselves. They redeem us by their sins."

Rushdie was alluding to the profoundly human need to create icons, to worship figures that embody and exempt our own contradictions. But that phenomenon, literary and psychological, seems today to have taken on a disturbing political form: the cult, in certain progressive Western fringes, of Islamism.

Not Islam as a religion, which deserves the same respect as any other faith. No. We are talking about political Islamism, that ideology that presents itself with an iron identity and doctrinal musculature, with an inflexible masculinity, with a narrative of pride and moral superiority that does not seek to coexist, but to replace. It is not multiculturalism: it is militant monoculturalism.

What is surprising—and worrying—is how broad sectors in Europe have begun to show a sort of uncritical devotion to cultural and religious expressions that, in their political form, represent the opposite of the liberal values that those same societies claim to defend: gender equality, sexual freedom, secularism, democracy, individual rights.

Where does this fascination come from? Is it a sense of guilt? Is it outdated romanticism? Is it that clumsy search for redemption for a colonial past that today's generations only know from history books? If that is the case, there is a brutal irony: in the name of reparation for a supposed and past colonialism, the expansion of a new one—Islamist, Russian, Chinese—is justified, which is unfolding today before our eyes, without criticism or resistance.

The most paradoxical thing is how practices are celebrated, in the name of cultural respect, which—if they came from another religion or ideology—would be immediately rejected. The veil imposed on women is reinterpreted as an "empowered" choice; submission as a symbol of courage; censorship as freedom. The inconsistencies pile up: homosexuals defending regimes that execute people for their sexual orientation; feminists praising leaders who brutally restrict women's rights; atheists sympathizing with ruthless theocracies.

What explains this moral dissonance? Ignorance? Cynicism? A kind of cultural narcissism that turns the "other" into an idealized mirror with which to compare ourselves in order to always come out better off? Or perhaps it is, as Rushdie suggested, that by forgiving the faults of others we absolve ourselves. Even if those faults involve violence, intolerance, totalitarianism.

In any case, this willful blindness is not innocuous. It undermines the principles of coexistence, erodes the pillars of democracy and jeopardizes the freedom that the West has worked so hard to build.

However, if one thing is clear, it is that stupidity and shameless complicity can no longer be disguised as virtue.