In Palmyra the world saw what the smashing of the idols looks like, as it did years ago at Bamiyan, where the Taliban smashed the great Buddhas. It is not an edifying sight, at least not for people who believe in freedom and the benedictions of diversity. It is the duty of such people to defend idolatry, not theologically but politically. Idols, after all, are just other peoples’ gods. And why fear a false god, especially if practices ordained by a false god do not differ from practices ordained by a true god? The Israelites were so aghast at the sacrifice of children in the cults of Canaan that they set out to kill Canaanite children. The catastrophe at Palmyra makes one want to fall to one’s knees and thank God, if one has God, for the miracle of secularization. It is a man-made miracle, and one of the greatest services ever rendered to religion.

Is there an obligation to the future to protect the past? Surely this is one of the essential concepts of civilization. There have been religious formulations of this concept: A learned friend has pointed out to me that the Koran instructs its readers to contemplate the ruins of ancient cities, whose fate it attributes to their corrupt refusal to recognize God. The fall of pre-Islamic cultures is adduced to vouch for the truth of Islam. (Christianity made a similar triumphalist claim about the lowly condition of the Jews in exile.)

But there are different reasons for admiring ruins. We need not dwell on them only to vindicate ourselves. We can dwell on them also to vindicate a notion of humanity. We preserve them to illustrate not divine purposes but human purposes. They are proof of the astonishing multiplicity of answers to life’s questions that have been created by our tirelessly self-interpreting kind. We restore them and we display them as a cosmopolitan way of regarding particularities, as an expression of our humane respect for the resourcefulness of the spirit over time. We imbue them with meanings that their makers could not have grasped, except perhaps in places such as Palmyra. Where others saw truth, we see beauty—but the beauty is not merely formal. What a spiritual accomplishment it is, to cherish—and in the case of Khaled al-Assad, to die for—the vestiges of a faith in which one does not believe.

But whose responsibility is it to protect this common heritage? Is it America’s? Not ours; no, sir. America is not the keeper of other people’s antiquities. America is not the keeper of other people’s liberties. America is not the keeper of other people’s rights. America is not the keeper of other people’s borders. Not after that last war; no, sir. We are the keepers only of ourselves, and of our president’s “legacy.” We practice a doctrine of strategic detachment and wrap ourselves in rectitude about it. To the persecuted of the world, to the dissidents, to the refugees, to the raped and the enslaved, to the victims of chemical weapons in a country where the United States was supposed to have confiscated all the chemical weapons, America says sauve qui peut.

America is no longer moved by the moral imperative of support and rescue, even when, as in Syria, it is plainly in its strategic interest. (I know, we rescued the Yazidis.) The 71 immigrants who were found dead in a truck on a Hungarian road, the corpse of a little boy that washed up on a Turkish beach, the hundreds of thousands of desperate people (out of 4 million) now making their way to Europe—these friendless people were killed or exiled in part by the Western refusal to face the horrors of Syria four years ago. All this was predicted. What did we think would happen if we did nothing?