What do you mean “educated”?

Vox Day is right.

It is apparent that the cunning plan of Western liberals to destroy the Dar al-Islam  by pushing secularized Western education on Islamic women has been comprehended by the strategists of the global Caliphate…Now liberals like Kristof are aghast at the fact that the very young women they intentionally turned into cultural weapons on behalf of their secular ideals are being targeted for enslavement and destruction. But what else did they expect? It would appear they were misled by the widespread failure of the Christians of the West to respond to the successful capture of their daughters by the secular establishment into thinking that the Muslims of the South and East would be similarly complacent.

Actually, Boko Haram is just as adamantly opposed to boys receiving Western education, and the boys they murder outright, but since those are just boys we in the West have of course already forgotten about them.

The fact that we are the aggressors in an African culture war is only concealed by the language we use to describe what we’re doing, a language that assumes a Western monopoly on legitimacy.  What are Westerners and those under their influence doing?  “Why, just providing education to boys and girls!”, I hear you say.  Who could possibly object to that, right?

Well, what do we mean by “education”?  Let us try to see things as a sociologist would, regarding all cognitive systems as social systems and considering them apart from their alleged truth value.  From a sociologist’s point of view, what is special about sending children to Western-style schools?  If they hadn’t gone to such schools, are we to believe that their minds would have been left totally blank?  No, that can’t be it.  Every culture on Earth teaches their boys and girls what they need to know to function in their station, and it gives them enough ideas about the world to satisfy basic curiosity and legitimize the tribe.

Is it that being taught in a school is the generally superior way of learning?  No, that can’t be it either, given the way we speak of Muslim schools as a malevolent force for extremism.  We may say that school is the most wonderful thing in the world, but we don’t like it when Muslims provide it for themselves.

When we say that girls need education (because, again, who gives a shit about boys?), we mean that it must be education with Western content.  Why is this?  From the sociologist’s perspective, there can be no answer to this question.  The only answer is that the Western system of ideas is Truth, that it alone counts as “education”, and that all outside of it is error and darkness.

Now, I think Western beliefs are indeed more reliable in some subjects but perversely wrong in others, but that’s not the point.  The point is that this is where liberalism always leads.  It claims not to enforce any beliefs, but because authoritative action always involves enforcing beliefs, the liberals just do it without realizing they’re doing it, without any sense of when it is inappropriate for them to do it, and without being able to so much as acknowledge the existence of other principled points of view.

Of course, we Christians and Muslims also believe our beliefs are true and seek to enforce them, but we are less totalitarian than liberalism in that we are authority pluralists.  God Himself might establish a Papacy or Caliphate to promote the true Faith, but He also put children under the rule of their parents.  Tellingly, in the wake of Boko Haram’s kidnappings, (mostly) Westerners have started passing around a #BringBackOurGirls hashtag on Twitter.  If they think they own girls in Africa, is there any doubt they think they own yours?