Sunday, March 11, 2007

Was Rousseau PC about Islam?

It would seem so, at least from this quote from his work The Social Contract (1762):

[When Christianity gained power with the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century A.D.] the humble Christians changed their language, and soon this so-called kingdom of the other world turned, under a visible leader, into the most violent of earthly despotisms... Mahomet held very sane views, and linked his political system well together; and, as long as the form of his government continued under the caliphs who succeeded him, that government was indeed one, and so far good.

In this quote, we see the two primary assumptions of the PC paradigm concerning the Problem of Islam:

1) The career of Western history is full of evil motivated by a Christianity easily manipulated by evil people and tyrants;

and

2) Islam’s career, by contrast, has been superior in enlightenment, morals, laws and politics.

When both of these assumptions are combined (as they usually are in the PC mind), they serve to function as an interpretive filter which assimilates all negative data about Muslim behavior and Islamic ideas, then processes that data according to the logical conclusion of the two assumptions combined: namely, that anything bad Muslims say or do has nothing to do with Islam itself, since Islam itself is good, but has most everything to do with the evil West.

A corollary to this is the incoherently paradoxical axiom that:

i) most Muslims are nice, harmless and moderate;

yet

ii) the bad Muslim behaviors rampant throughout the Muslim world (to the extent this is noticed, recognized and admitted by the PC apologist in question) are not “Islamic” but are rather just expressions of sociopolitical grievances, most of which have been exacerbated if not created by—again—the evil West.

So, in a nutshell, according to the PC paradigm, the Problem of Islam is caused by the evil West; so the solution must be... rather chilling to contemplate.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Herein lies the difference between the mediocre vs the greats. The greats seek out e strengths in order to capitalize on them. The mediocre tries to trivialize on an argument that magnimizes their own logical faults through the attachment of their own bias to matters of the mundane.