Two recent essays from the diverse (and, alas, still incoherent) community of the Counter-Jihad reminded me of my trope or meme, the "Explanatory Vacuum". I've never tackled it head-on, though I have adverted to it sideways off and on. Back in 2009, I penned an essay here examining how in different ways Robert Spencer and Lawrence Auster seem to indulge in it; so that essay helps flesh out a bit of what I mean by it.
One of the two recent essays I refer to today was written by Hugh Fitzgerald, the Counter-Jihadistically famous essayist who back in the day produced voluminously turgid & abstruse literary feats on Jihad Watch (of which he was "Vice-President" until some time in 2010 he left under mysterious circumstances, only to resurface again recently). In this recent essay, he takes a bird's-eye pause, to survey with an overview our collective situation now in late 2015, looking back on these past 14 years of Denial about the problem of Islam. The other essay was written by Fjordman, a blogger in his own right who also is featured frequently on the Gates of Vienna blog, about whom I've written in the past concerning his problem of indulging in the "Explanatory Vacuum".
I wrote a response to each of their essays today, each one subtly different. I'll reproduce them here -- first the one responding to Fitzgerald, then the one to Fjordman:
Two problems with this juncture of Fitzgerald’s essay. One is that money (or cupidity) we may reasonably conclude only would sway a very tiny minority of Westerners in influential positions in government, academe, news media, business, and arts & entertanment into consciously and willfully supporting Islam’s evil designs to destroy the West — for we reasonably conclude that only a very tiny minority of Westerners in influential positions in government, academe, news media, business, and arts & entertanment are that lucidly, seditiously evil. So cupidity doesn’t explain the phenomenon we are trying to explain — why the majority thorughout the West (not only the Dastardly Elites, and not only those Darned Leftists, but vast swathes of Ordinary People in all walks of life, on all points of the political spectrum, of every religious and cultural disposition imaginable) continue to whitewash Muslims and their Islam.
Then Fitzgerald’s juncture becomes a pivot toward another attempt at explaining this mass neurosis of the “Neo-Modern West”:
But money alone does not explain why so many people in the West have been so ready to ignore the evidence of Muslim malevolence, of widespread support for violent Jihad. Many In the West simply don’t want to see what is staring them in the face. For if Islam really does inculcate permanent hostility toward Infidels, what, then, is to be done about the tens of millions of Muslims already ensconced in Western lands?
But this isn’t really an explanation — “Many In the West simply don’t want to see what is staring them in the face.” It’s a description of the phenomenon; not an explanation for why it’s there. And given the massive dimensions of the Elephant in the Room it persists in industriously ignoring, not to mention the colossal gravity of the dereliction it causes in terms of an egregious myopia to monumental human rights abuses and disastrous dangers to our collective Western security, we — this canaries-in-a-coalmine spearhead of a rag-tag movement called the “Counter-Jihad”, whose main activity is trying to awaken its own West to this problem — need to come up with not merely a better explanation, but an explanation at all.
Over the last few years on my blog I have taken stabs at what an explanation would look like, with dozens of detailed and lengthy analyses (see my essay, A partial list of my Hesperado essays on the Problem of the Problem). I see few signs that anyone in the Counter-Jihad has thought deeply or carefully enough about this “Problem of the Problem” (where the primary Problem is that of Muslims and their Islam, and the secondary Problem is that of the West persisting in its myopia about the primary Problem) — and so they tend to lapse into reflexive assumptions based upon this “Explanatory Vacuum”, even if vaguely they have a dim sense that “political correctness” is the culprit.
2) Fjordman: The EU Elites' Positive View of Islam
“If somebody suggests that the EU elites actively welcome and embrace Islamization, this is quickly dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.” But is that true?” — asks Fjordman
The imputation of a conspiracy theory would tend to be accurate if the somebody who is suggesting that the EU elites actively welcome and embrace Islamization is also suggesting that EU elites are doing so with full knowledge that Islamization is a crucial part of the war against the West which Muslims have been waging for centuries and are now reviving in order to destroy the West and replace it with Islamic domination.
One would be more tempted to go this far when two conditions are present:
1) alienation from the structures of one’s own West (including “the government”)
2) an absence of an explanation for why not only “elites” but also millions of ordinary people from all walks of life would glibly assume a whole tissue of givens that would become a fashion of thought-cum-worldview predisposing them to reflexively whitewash Islam and Muslims, even irrationally so after more and more data becomes available indicating that their paradigm is untenable.
Over the last few years on my blog I have taken stabs at what an explanation would look like, with dozens of detailed and lengthy analyses. I see few signs that anyone in the Counter-Jihad has thought deeply or carefully enough about this “Problem of the Problem” (where the primary Problem is that of Muslims and their Islam, and the secondary Problem is that of the West persisting in its myopia about the primary Problem) — and so they tend to lapse into reflexive assumptions based upon this “Explanatory Vacuum”, even if vaguely they have a dim sense that “political correctness” is the culprit. The Problem of the Problem, then, becomes the Problem of the Problem of the Problem, where the Counter-Jihad continues to thrash about in this “Explanatory Vacuum”; and just as Nature abhors a vacuum, a sociopolitical movement concerning deadly threats to our national security will tend to fill its own vacuum with conspiracy theories.