Lately I've been musing about President Bush's recent press conference, specifically his talk about the forces of the "civilized world" and am worried about such implications.

On the lowest level, I sincerely hope Bush means that killing people and harming people is not the stuff of civilization, and thus, any agent that kills or harms others is "uncivilized." But I am also sincerely worried that this is not the case.

Beneath this talk of civilization rests an entire history that can be divided into two vital epochs: First, that of pre-Western dominance, and second, that of Western dominance. It is no secret that the point of conflict between these two epochs is the Crusades, the clashing of Christian and Muslim forces.

Simple observation will tell that the West won, that the post-Crusade world is clearly designated as a Christian epoch, within which a largely white, monotheistic culture practices hegemony over the losers.

What I am interested in goes further beneath this surface, resting with the incommensurability of two ideologies: The prevailing hegemonic ideology of freedom, and the other that the West fails to understand.

Building an epoch on freedom is not all it appears to be. Whose conception of freedom ought we buy? And where does this freedom exist? If the West is holding the rest of the world at gunpoint (as it has done for so long), it becomes apparent that freedom is something more than we all think it to be; it is decidedly not something Hobbesian, namely, the absence of external impediments. If this was so, colonialism would never have happened.

I am worried that the "civilized" world Bush speaks of rests within this Western epoch — an epoch that cites as its foundation a freedom that is based in its Christian roots. Freedom is something spiritual, something guided. A paradox in that freedom is delivered by the Holy Spirit, held within the hands of God and delivered to man, with the full illusion of free will accompanying the hand.

This illusion tricks us into thinking that freedom might be something such as the absence of external impediments; Hobbes was certainly fooled. Rather, freedom here becomes something more — something that allows human beings the capacity to become inflamed with nonsense that one epoch can prevail over another, that one way exists.

What must be understood about these two epochs is that they are incommensurable; there exists no language with which to mend sides. God did not instill freedom in all people, for the conception of God doing so is, as we see it, a Western embellishment.

However, there does exist a cure. The more we attempt to understand the division between two worlds — a division that seemingly deems different forms of government appropriate for different people — the further we might escape from our epoch, and with it, shed the conception of freedom handed down to us from God. We must move beyond God's freedom and towards a human freedom, based upon something that is rightfully human, and more importantly, something that is only human.

As long as killing, occupations and cultural degradations and disrespect exist in the name of the spirit of his freedom, true God ceases to exist.

Man hurt himself here, for in constructing a God, he forgot one key detail: To follow the law that was handed down.

Zettel is a sophomore political science and philosophy major.

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