Guts and Brains

Are “guts” and “brains” all we need to fight and defeat our current enemy, Islam?

A recent Jihad Watch commenter asked, with understandable frustration:

“Don’t we have any guts, at all, in the West to do something about this Islam crap?”

Well, we have the guts. It’s not a matter of an absence of guts. It’s a matter of properly framing the context in which our already present guts can motivate rational analysis and action.

And it’s not a matter of brains either. We have the brains.

I repeat: It’s a matter of properly framing the context in which our already present guts and brains can motivate rational action.

Currently, the dominant and mainstream framework, as it applies to the Problem of Islam, separates two things:

1) Islam itself + the vast majority of Muslims, deemed to be harmless

from

2) any and all bad things that come out of the Islamic milieu, deemed to be

i) represented by a “tiny minority of extremists” who have “hijacked a great and noble and wonderfully ethnic part of the world’s cultural rainbow (Islam)”

and

ii) motivated not by Islam but by economic and political “grievances”.

(I.e., for the dominant framework, there is no Problem of Islam, per se.)

However, as we Jihad Watchers know, a rational analysis of our predicament vis-à-vis the bad things that come out of the Islamic milieu tells us that we cannot really perform the simplistic separation of 1-2 above—for at least the following two reasons:

a) sociologically, the dangerous Muslims are easily camouflaged among the supposedly harmless Muslims;

and

b) ideologically, there seem to be broadly pervasive and unifying psycho-cultural factors throughout Islam whereby motivation for terrorism (and for its support in myriad ways) permeates globally;

(not to mention that we don't buy the sub-points of (2) above)—

and we therefore find it necessary for the West to treat all Muslims en bloc as potential terrorists and/or terrorist enablers (at least until such time as we have rational cause to begin to be able to discriminate among them).

However, for the various societies of the West—all deeply and broadly infected by PC Multiculturalism—to get to the point where we free our minds from the axioms of (1) and (2) above and realize the implications of (a) and (b) above and act upon them, we do not require guts or brains, which we already have plenty of.

What is required is a change in the way our guts and brains are channelled. We have to deconstruct the sociopolitically powerful PC Multicultralist framework by which our guts and brains are being re-routed away from rational analysis and action. And that most exigent deconstruction, I am afraid, is a much more difficult and complex proposition than merely rousing ourselves to have, or recover, “guts” and “brains”.

Unfortunately and tragically, this necessary deconstruction may be simplified and speeded up for us by a few and widely dispersed horrible attacks, far worse than 911, by Muslims in the future.

I realize that the ordinary Western person may not be roused by argumentations like mine; however, were we in our rhetoric to appeal to their “guts” and “brains” (the latter in the more rudimentary American sense of “know-how” and “can-do”), I don't think it would work, because it could have the opposite effect: I believe there are millions of ordinary Westerners whose “guts” and “brains” will, in fact, be roused to protect Muslims from “prejudice” and vigilantism and official attempts at “Big Brother” surveillance or worse, attempts at internment or even “genocide”.

Millions of ordinary Americans now (and Europeans when they contemplate with their anti-American animus) sincerely believe FDR’s internment of Japanese was a “shameful” act, and only a small minority has come to the epiphany that it was in fact a rational and good act under the circumstances. Back in the 1940s, the majority of the American people in fact urged FDR to intern Japanese, and only a tiny minority of utopian Socialist-type dreamers were opposed. That demographic has in the past 60 years reversed, reflecting the dominance of PC Multiculturalism. So a rousing of “guts” and “brains” will likely motivate millions to oppose, rather than support, any aggressive collective initiatives to treat Muslims en bloc.

The metaphor of a map is helpful: The ordinary people in the 1940s wanted to get home; the ordinary people in 2007 want to get home. In that basic sense, the two populations of ordinary people are the same. In the 1940s, however, we had a different map showing how to get home, and where home was. Now we have a different map that leads people elsewhere. But, of course, this map problem won’t be solved by just restoring the old map, since this cartography in the metaphor reflects profound sociopolitical and psychological changes framed as progress—not merely lines drawn on paper.