-- the Hindenburg blimp in 1936, a year before its disastrous flight
A reprise of an older essay, in which I analyze in detail the problem of the "learned fool" who dominates our Western mainstream with regard to the problem of Islam.
The premise being that a person with a high IQ (Intelligence Quotient) may very well also have high QI (Quantum Ignorance). To break the spell of the latter, it is not enough merely to have a high intelligence and more information; one needs also to make the quantum leap to a high Islamic Quotient (and let us hope enough of us in the West do this in the coming decades, to begin to steer us away from our Titanically disastrous course).
Give your brain a buzz:
5 comments:
Excellent article.
Our society's intellectual and moral response to the evil that is Islam is indeed quite baffling. But we aren't the sort of people who stood at the walls of Vienna or Constantinople or as men-at-arms at Tours. They were cut from a different cloth than we.
With that said, oddly enough the outliers of our society seem to understand boundaries and fundamental transgressions better than we do.
Take child molesters and serial rapists/killers. Convicts will kill them on the spot if given the chance. The convicts know there are certain things a man doesn't do and if he violates those rules he deserves to die.
Whereas on the outside, authorities all across the political spectrum talk about housing, rehab, funding half-way homes, for these incurable monsters.
A hundred years if such a creature was caught he just got a bullet in the head and ended up buried in the woods.
I'll add one other thing. About a decade ago Dennis Prager on his radio show talked about how in our society there are no real taboos left except Child Molestation. Even shame has went into the waste basket. Ever see Facebook?
In a sense our moral compass in the West is severely broken. Even the Christian churches have embraced relativism and consumerism to one degree or another. Many of them I must say baffle me, they aren't really Christian or much of anything except a social club that does sing-a-longs. It's made them blind to moral transgressions and made manifest the last lie in Hell - namely that there is no Evil.
Thanks. Well, as you know, I don't think the West's myopia with regard to Islam is really baffling. It follows the internal logic of the West's moral greatness. Certainly, it does reflect a disorder, a disease of reason; but I think it's less a matter of an abandonment of morals (though that is definitely an ongoing devolving problem) than of a transmutation of one half of our moral logic into the dominant half that threatens to engulf the other half increasingly subject to withering due to -- to maintain the organic disease metaphor -- ongoing insufficient blood supply.
I am not sure how this happened, but it seems to me that this whole Zeitgeist of Morosophy came about during the age of the Internet. In this day and age, it seems to me that popular opinion, gut feeling, i.e. learned ignorance has been elevated to the status of informed expertise one would expect from scientists or historians, etc. prior to the Internet age. In other words, there seems to be some tenacious consent among the masses that all fleeting opinions have become of equal validity in a sense, whilst the thorough examination of experts is deemed to be too drab, dull, flavorless ,complex, abstract or even to be too joyless to take into account. Apparently, there has to be some aspect of "fun" to these opinions as well, you can't be seen as a party pooper. People tend to be struggling with an image these days, and most of us want to be perceived as sociable, witty, outgoing, tolerant, streetwise, happy go lucky and all that, which tends to obscure complex issues that go against the grain of people trying to find gratification by being perceived as such.
I seriously believe that the incremental growth of the Internet tends to make many people overindulge in their own "expertise" by "serial opining", with the expectation they can elevate themselves that way. These opinions are easily discardable and have no depth to them. To some degree the shallowness of advertising is to blame. I've seen enough people around who talk absolute drivel on the Internet or in real life about any given subject they have absolutely no genuine knowledge of.
Which exacerbates the problem, the social consent with regards to this type of superficiality makes it all the more obvious that the inane disingenuous PC MC rhetoric used by the MSM can take hold of some people for a long time. I think some of the issues on this blog are in fact rooted in a general tendency of our "globalized village" to dumb down.
Either that, or we just have to live with the fact that real intellectuals will always be a minority, like a revolutionary vanguard. Maybe that's just typical of any Zeitgeist, you need a vanguard to wean people away from mass stupidity, enhanced by a ruling elite.
In any case, just as cultures are not equal, neither are opinions equal. So you have made a few good points with these essays.
Thanks AA.
"I seriously believe that the incremental growth of the Internet tends to make many people overindulge in their own "expertise" by "serial opining", with the expectation they can elevate themselves that way. These opinions are easily discardable and have no depth to them."
I hope I'm not guilty of that too!
"Either that, or we just have to live with the fact that real intellectuals will always be a minority..."
Yes, I think that's the more reasonable outlook. It came to me as an epiphany many years ago. One of the unhelpful assumptions of PC is bound up with the idea of Progress, the belief that through enlightened education (and a political system that organizes that along with a cultural apparatus that tries to inculcate it as a social fashion and ideal), "the People" will become wise.
I don't doubt that you have a point about the Internet; however, I wouldn't say it actually caused Quantum Ignorance. I would say it facilitates its virus massively and intricately, to be sure.
One older essay you may be interested in which touches on this, if you haven't read it yet, is
Morbus Publicus
(While reading it, feel free to try to ignore one relatively minor subtext that bookends it, so to speak -- namely an apparent resentment I'm expressing there against Hugh Fitzgerald and Robert Spencer; which nevertheless I have not seen fit to edit out all these years for reasons I feel are justified while others may disagree.)
Post a Comment