(via a great post from Parapundit)  David Kelley (not of Ally McBeal/Practice fame but rather, the exec director for the Objectivist Center) has a great article in Spiked about the philosophical root causes of the conflict between the West and Radical Islam.  (DISCLAIMER:  I'm not really a Randroid... but I do think that the Objectivists are more often correct than not;   Kelley's article was just plain cool.) 

As Parapundit points out, Bin Laden's most recent alleged letter points at the all-encompassing view of the conflict between the West and proponents of Radical Islam.   When the source of the beef seems to touch every fiber of your being, well, it's time to ask fundamental, philosophical questions about our fibers vs. theirs. 

Kelley adheres to the "rejection of modernity" school of thought for the root causes:

...terrorists' hostility is directed at 'the principles and values' of the West. On this view, what they hate is not the West as a society or a civilization per se, but rather the culture of modernity. Modernity was born in the West, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it is not inherently tied to the history or customs of any one society. It is a constellation of universal values - the secular culture of reason, science, individualism, progress, democracy, and capitalism - that have spread worldwide in different forms and to varying degrees.

By the same token, those who reject modernity, who fear and wish to destroy it, are to be found in every nation and civilization. And invariably they hate the USA as the fullest, most persuasive, and thus most dangerous embodiment of that culture.

Kelley takes on a core question shaping debates about the future of the Middle East --

• What constitutes the philosophy of "Modernity"?
• Does modernity actually mean "Western" or is it Universal?  

He presents this definition of the Renaissance/Enlightenment philosophical break with the "Christian Scholasticism" which dominated the Middle Ages in the West:

The cultural foundation of this new society, if we state it as a set of explicit theses, was the view

• that reason, not revelation, is the instrument of knowledge and arbiter of truth;
• that science, not religion, gives us the truth about nature;
• that the pursuit of happiness in this life, not suffering in preparation for the next, is the cardinal value;
• that reason can and should be used to increase human well being through economic and technological progress;
• that the individual person is an end in himself with the capacity to direct his own life, not a slave or a child to be ruled by others;
• that individuals have equal rights to freedom of thought, speech, and action;
• that religious belief should be a private affair, tolerance a social virtue, and church and state kept separate; and
• that we should replace command economies with markets, warfare with trade, and rule by king or commissar with democracy.

[VV:  I added bullet points to Kelley's text]

In addressing the Universality of these "Truths", Kelley first addresses "non-universalist" who typically argue that these ethics are Christian and therefore uniquely Western:

It is therefore misleading to call our civilization Christian, even though that remains the largest religion in terms of adherents. The West may still be a culture of Christians, by and large, but it is not a Christian culture anymore. It is a secular culture. And that is what the Islamists hate most about us.

And that the terrorist targets were not religious symbols but rather socio-economic ones.

According to Yossef Bodansky's Bin Laden, 'What [Islamism] primarily contests is the Western democratic and secular ideology. It wants to appropriate Western technology without embracing its ethos'. In sum, Islamist hatred of the West is not directed at Christianity as a rival religion but at modernism as an alternative to religion as such.

And, the strange bedfellows that Liberal Post Modernists and Fundamentalists necessarily become due to shared, anti-Enlightenment views:

Today, the predominant forms are postmodernism among the intellectuals, who attack reason, individualism, and capitalism as Western aberrations; and fundamentalist movements in religion, which have been on the rise for the past quarter century among Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.

...This is a profoundly anti-human outlook, and there can be no compromise with it. As we take aim at the terrorists who have attacked us, we must also take intellectual aim at the ideas that inspire them.