[Interviewer] The clash with Islam underlines this moral paralysis because we live, as the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz used to say, in "non-parallel historical times."

As a result we witness this paradox: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, citing Spinoza, has fled from faith to reason in the name of freedom, defecting from the womb of Islam and becoming an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" and atheist. Yet, Europe's most famous secular liberal philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, now argues that since postmodern society is unable to generate its own values, it can only "nourish" itself from religious sources. For him, Western values—liberty, conscience, human rights—are grounded in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

According to Habermas, "unbridled subjectivity"—the relativism which reigns today—clashes with "what is really absolute—the right of every creature to be respected as an ‘image of God.'"

What do you make of this double movement in history?

Fukuyama This problem of how our post-religious societies come up with values was the critical issue for two celebrated thinkers from the University of Chicago—Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, and Leo Strauss.

Strauss called this "the crisis of modernity." The question is whether there is a way of establishing values through reason and philosophical discourse without reverting to religion. His central argument was that classical political philosophy—the Greeks with their emphasis on "natural right," or nature deciphered by reason as a source of values—had been prematurely rejected by modern philosophy.

The way to think about this is that we have both a deep philosophical problem and a practical political problem. The two may be related, but not necessarily.

The deep philosophical problem is whether you can walk Western philosophy back from Heidegger and Nietzche and say that reason does permit the establishment of positive values—in other words that you can demonstrate the truth of certain ideas.

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