I got bogged down by too much information.
The problem is, there are so many interlocking parts to the particular dynamic of this fourth law, the formulation quickly becomes encumbered, and threatens to morph into an elaborately lengthy paragraph (if not a whole damned blog essay).
My fourth "law" has to do not with Muslims, per se (as did my first three laws -- see the previous three essays immediately below this one), but rather with the Westerners who enable Muslims.
Specifically, politically correct multi-culturalist Westerners (PC MCs) who, unfortunately, seem to be the mainstream majority throughout the West.
With this fourth law, as I said, I am having difficulty following one important general rule for formulating such "laws" -- keeping the formulation short and sweet.
So, at this point, I will merely adumbrate all the interlocking parts and put them on the table, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and invite the reader to go through this thought experiment with me, to see if we can't devise a concise formulation of a "law" that best captures the phenomenon.
At the end of the day, I may have to subdivide this fourth law into multiple laws; but I'd rather try to avoid that.
I hope I needn't remind my reader that this is no mere abstract intellectual exercise, but concerns a phenomenon that is enabling the revival of the worst enemy which the West, and which modern human rights, have ever had.
Pieces of the Puzzle:
a) PC MC is not synonymous with Leftism: it is a much broader sociocultural phenomenon, including in its orbit innumerable conservatives, centrists, and that more amorphous category of vaguely apolitical individuals.
b) Leftism is less significant than PC MC: Leftism is a comparatively small piece in this puzzle -- much smaller demographically than PC MC. While Leftism may perhaps be persuasively argued to be more significant ideologically in this regard, the logic of our puzzle leads us swiftly to the next piece:
c) The significance of Leftism as a part of the puzzle would be relatively inert, without the added help of PC MC: Whatever ideological significance Leftism has, and therefore whatever role it plays in the problem of Western myopia to, and continued enablement of, the problem of Islam, all of this would be a comparatively insignificant problem, if Western society at large had not become reconfigured over the past half century into a dominant and mainstream worldview of PC MC.
d) Leftists are a tiny minority in the West. I.e., the kind of Leftists who are purported to be literal traitors -- who literally hate the West (as opposed to hyperbolically and paradoxically and hypocritically and parasitically "bite the hand that feeds them") -- are a tiny minority in the West, because:
e) The modern West is relatively the healthiest collection of democratic polities in the history of Mankind.
f) Healthy democratic polities are not secretly controlled by cabals of evil people behind the scenes. Unhealthy ones, deeply deformed throughout their sociopolitical institutions and culture by Gnosticism, on the other hand -- like Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's Russia, or Mao's China -- are. The modern West, for all its faults, is not in the same category as the aforementioned diseased entities that flared up in recent history. To imply that it is qualitatively contiguous with them is to begin to succumb to that same disease of Gnosticism.
g) The vast majority of Westerners are not sheep: In a healthy collection of polities such as the modern West, the people of the non-Leftist majority (i.e., conservatives, centrists, and the amorphous category of vaguely apolitical people) are not sheep who allow a tiny minority of radical Leftists to tell them what to think and how to feel.
h) The vast majority of Westerners are not stupid -- at least, not that stupid. In fact, most educated academics, for example, are PC MC about Islam; so obviously, mere intelligence is not the crucial factor here. A more complex intellectual/psychological/cultural phenomenon is going on here, which I have in a previous analysis dubbed Quantum Ignorance which (as I say in that essay) may also be termed, paradoxically, "intelligent stupidity".
i) The vast majority of PC MCs are relatively good, decent, intelligent people. Thus, just as we must rule out sheep-like passivity on a mass scale, and simplistic stupidity, so we must rule out evil: evil cannot be a motivating factor for why the vast majority of Westerners continue to defend Islam and Muslims.
Put that all together -- (a) through (i) -- and then try to explain why the modern West persists in whitewashing and enabling Islam and Muslims. But I have put great effort over the years in lengthy, detailed analyses on this blog trying to do just that, and I've pretty much exhausted this very complex topic.
More pertinent to today's effort is: how to put all that together -- (a) through (i)-- into one pithy formulation.
I'll put on another pot of coffee.
12 comments:
Hesperado -
This ongoing effort of yours deserves at least another reader. Meanwhile, rest assured that this reader from Holland has - critical remarks notwithstanding - tremendous respect for your work on this subject.
I find it very unfortunate that the good people at GoV decided to take issue with your valuable contribution over there. Still puzzled by the whole thing..
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto,
Thanks for your comments.
To be fair to the powers that be at GOV, they never formally banned me. I simply got the feeling that they didn't like my style and content, and they kept communicating this to me in passive-aggressively subtle ways which, with the power to censor or ban as they have on their blog, rubbed me the wrong way. I don't like threats -- veiled or otherwise (and I don't care how much "velvet" softens or pads the veiled threat) -- to my free speech; particularly as I was not screaming foul-mouthed curses or spamming or doggedly repeating annoying hobbyhorses. I was simply standing up for my perspective, and they didn't like it, and then they kept making implied references to suppressing my ability to continue standing up for my perspective.
To which I did not take kindly; and I decided to withdraw from further participation there.
Part of this has to do with ideology; but part of it involves personality: Baron Bodissey and Dymphna both have a prickly, impatient attitude that tends to translate over into what I think should be an entirely separate matter: their power to arbitrate content on their blog.
I don't mind a blog owner who says he doesn't like me, and who tells me I'm wrong or full of shit. What I do mind is a blog owner translating that into "You'd better watch what you say, or you won't be here much longer."
That crosses a line into territory that differs little in substance from the very fascism they otherwise oppose.
I think your are on to something profound and insightful. Perhaps your fourth Law would be something like, "Politically correct multiculturalists pine for a harmonious society, oblivious of the fundamental hostility between the component cultures."
Actually, there is one more law about Muslims that is worth postulating, before you move on to the West:
Submitting to Islam would not end the problem of Islamically sanctioned violence.
Reason is pretty simple. Despite some scattered claims in some hadiths that claim the brotherhood of all Muslims, Muslims are all about Taqfir. Everybody is all the time competing about whose Islam is the true Islam - whether it's Shia vs Sunni in Iraq or Bahrein, Hanbali vs Hanafi in Saudi Arabia, Hanafi vs Shafii in Egypt or Syria, Sufi vs Deobandi in Pakistan or so on.
In Christianity, we did once have the Thirty Year war in Europe b/w Protestants and Catholics (although France was a strange member of the Protestant alliance, despite persecuting its own Hugenots), but by and large, in the countries that do have different sections of Christians, Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians, as well as any other denominations that fall outside these 3 just do their own thing and don't tell each other they are doing it wrong. Jews now have Orthodox vs Reform Judaism, but while they have their differences, they never have any bloodbath over it. Hindus have different people worshipping different members of the Hindu pantheon, but don't argue w/ each other as to which is the authentic Hinduism and which is heretical. Buddhists have the Mahayana and Theravada branches, but again, those 2 just do their own thing - no bloodbath b/w the 2 (actually, in no country do both these versions exit - Sri Lanka, Tibet and Mongolia are Mahayana, while Thailand, Myanmar and South East Asia are Theravada).
Totally different w/ Muslims. As an extension of their directive to ensure that Islam is supreme everywhere, it doesn't stop when someone accepts only one Allah and Mohammed as his prophet: in fact, it just gotten started! Then the Jihad continues into doing what's possible to ensure that that person follows Mohammed to the T, and that's where the other variables - which branch (Sunni/Shia), which sect (Sufi/Ismailiya/Salafi/Wahabi), which school (Hanafi/Shafii/Maliki/Hanbali), and so on all kick in. Then there is the issue of races, and as Blacks would testify, the conversion to Islam by Barbers, Sudanese and other North African Blacks hasn't done anything for them - they are still treated as slaves. And the condition of the Albanians or Bosniaks during the Ottoman empire wasn't more favored, so it's not like Whites who convert to Islam would leapfrog the Arabs.
Hence the above law.
P.S. I'm having trouble getting to the bottom of your page, under IE9. Anyone else finding this?
^^^ it's the one about you getting banned for racism - I couldn't read the end of the article, or the comments, if any
Nobody,
The takfir aspect of Islam is important to be sure; though I'm not sure I would frame the new law in quite the terms you have -- for your formulation implies even a consideration of Islam as serious or viable at all. (I'm sure you'd agree we're beyond that by now.) I would rather the formulation focus on how the psychopathic obsession with takfir in Islam is
1) the main cause of the ostensible "diversity" we see throughout Islam
and
2) how that "diversity" thus masks and underlying monolithic trait -- viz., precisely the psychopathic obsession with takfir.
Nobody,
As for IE9, I've only been using Firefox for over 3 years now, so I wouldn't know.
Correction to my comment above:
"2) how that "diversity" thus masks AN underlying monolithic trait..."
Hesperado
I worded my law that way b'cos most mainstream PCMC guys seem to be under the impression that if they submit to Islam, that would fix things for them. The taqfir aspect makes it clear that it won't.
It's not aimed @ members of the AIM, but rather, @ non-Muslim pcmc people who tend to think that Islamizing is not a problem, and would actually solve problems that the West has w/ Muslims.
The world also needs another set of Laws for How Islamic Apologists Fail to Defend Islamic Ideology -- such as: 1. Threaten Death or Eternal Damnation for Criticizing Islam or the Prophet, 2. The text you quoted was taken out of context, 3. The Quran can only be understood in Arabic, etc. etc.
Perhaps a useful approach may be to think of ourselves as being "mind-trained" to be pro-social. And have similarly well-trained reflexes to avoid "mind postures" that are anti-social.
And this is part of what makes our society the success that it is.
Such pro-social mind training (for aggressive tolerance) is a constructive thing as long as a critical mass of the population is likewise conditioned. This pattern produces harmony. That is, until one encounters "foreigners" with altogether predatory mind-training.
A well-trained mind is very hard to transcend or even examine, due to the nature of the mind. If it really "took" (and it did - starting in early childhood, followed by reinforcement at every turn), we are our mind training, and its outlook and reactions feel instinctive. Nature equipped us as best she could, but our hardware and software system has limitations it occasionally runs up against.
I'm thinking about this in reference to Buddhist mind training - deliberate daily mental exercises that cultivate compassion, and reduce self-absorbtion. Eventually, one's mind becomes the mind training.
But in parallel I'm considering it in regard to
Thar and how *instinctively ingrained* it is in societies suffused with Islam.
Rationality has no influence at the deep level where the long term results of mind training reside. It's like instinct. (And if the content so entrained is very positive, this is a beautiful result. If it's perverse - as with Thar - life is poisoned.)
I'm thinking:
Muslims have Thar, the West has PCMC.
To add something, when I said the result can be a beautiful thing, I meant the individual spiritual results, not political results. Indeed it may bring dangerous naivete as a side effect, and indeed I think many Buddhist societies just crumbled when they met Islam. At least, V.S. Naipul writes in Among the Believers about Indian Buddhists' suicidal naivete when the Muslims came for them. And he remarks on its parallel to the West's blind tolerance today (ie PCMC).
In the case of PCMC, the objective is not spiritual improvement but perhaps internal social harmony, as tolerance is expected to stimulate reciprocity. In our internal system, the cooperative critical mass is such that it mostly works (failures are the exception).
It's results wouldn't turn sour but for the entry of a large party with *very different ideas* about these things.
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