Is war inevitable?
I can't find the quote online, but if I can trust my memory, it was from a V.S. Naipaul interview. The author was asked how he thought the situation in the Middle East would end, and he said that it would end with "victory for one side and defeat for the other". The interviewer thought this sounded a bit harsh, to which Naipaul replied that he was not condoning the situation, that was simply what he saw.
With the ascent of Obama to office, perhaps the world begins to look different. After all, the closure of the detention facilities at Guantanamo seems a symbolic and practical step towards dismantling entrenched mechanisms of war. However, it is probably still too early to become complacent in one's hope. In London Review of Books, David Bromwich has the following to say:
To judge by the nomination of Hilary Clinton as secretary of state and the likely nomination of Dennis Ross as Middle East envoy, Obama wants to be seen as someone who intends no major change of course. In a televised interview on 11 January, he said he would deal with Israel and Palestine in the manner of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The unhappy message of his recent utterances has been reconciliation without truth; and reconciliation, above all, for Americans. This preference for bringing-together over bringing-to-light is a trait of Obama's political character we are only now coming to see the extent of. It is an element – until lately an unperceived element – of a certain native moderation of temper that is likely to mark his presidency. Yet his silence on Gaza has been startling, even immoderate.
The implication of this passage is that Obama might believe peace possible only through chloroforming the truth. When both or all sides are allowed a voice, according to such a belief, conflict is inevitable. If Obama does, in fact, believe such a thing, then it might be hard to blame him. Historically, almost any kind of difference has been enough to inflame human insecurity to a murderous degree. To pluck one random example from history, Galileo expressed an opinion (now generally accepted as fact) that differed from many of those around him, and was put on trial and forced to recant – in this case the peace being enforced by chloroform.
Such controversies continue. For instance, not long ago. Michel Houellebecq was put on trial for calling Islam "the dumbest religion".
From the article linked to:
The controversial writer is being sued by four Islamic organisations over his comments about his book, Platform, in an interview last year with the literary magazine Lire.
The novel is also cited in the case being brought by the largest mosques in Paris and Lyon, the National Federation of French Muslims (FNMN) and the World Islamic League.
France's Human Rights League has also joined them, saying that Mr Houellebecq's comments amount to "Islamophobia".
The case has become a cause celebre, which, like the Salman Rushdie affair in the UK, raises questions about the appropriate limits, if any, to be placed on freedom of expression.
Houellebecq's position?
"I have never displayed the least contempt for Muslims," he said, but added, "I have as much contempt as ever for Islam".
This seems to be a retort of admirable clarity. There are, of course, differences between Galileo's trial and that of Houellebecq, but there is at least one very worrying similarity.
Mr Houellebecq's lawyer, Emmanuel Pierrat, argues that the case effectively re-establishes the notion of blasphemy, despite the fact that France is a secular state and has no such law.
Had he been found guilty, Houellebecq would have faced "up to a year in prison and a 52,000 euro fine".
Fortunately – I have no qualms in saying that – the suit was eventually dismissed.
Is war inevitable? Is the only way to peace to choloroform into silence the voices on one side?
I've been thinking about this a great deal recently. In Justin Isis's short story, Abandoned by God, Unable to Pay Gas, Water and Electric Bills, Unsuccessful for Trying Out at JV Football, Unable to Touch a Ganguro Gyaru's Face for Fifteen Seconds, Incapable of Remembering the Lyrics to Cocteau Twins, Unable to Successfully Learn Para Para Dance Steps, Rejected by Creditors, Incapable of Attaining Enlightenment, Defeated Routinely at Marvel vs Capcom 3, Declared Ritually Unclean by Shinto Priests, Downgraded from 'Boyfriend' to 'Sex Friend', Refused Service at Local Donut Shop, Unable to Touch a Ganjiro Gyaru's Face for Thirteen Seconds, there is the following passage:
The monk led him back through the forest of silver towers, to a clearing where he found the little man standing. He was looking at a sculpture resting on a pedestal. It was fashioned in the shape of a young woman, and at its base was a tiny slot with two metal switches. The little man depressed one switch, then the other, then flipped both.
"Well, what does it do?" Richard Dawkins said.
The little man closed his palm and brought it away from the sculpture, then offered it to Richard Dawkins, who held out his own hand. After a moment he felt something slippery and cold. He looked down. A little golden cube sparkled in the reflected light of the towers. As he watched, it melted in the palm of his hand. He held it to his lips and received a faint taste of cinnamon.
"It provides ice cubes," the little man said. "Some of the ice cubes are gold and others are silver, and others are gold and silver at the same time."
"You mean they're mixed. Their colors are mixed."
"No, that would be absurd. The combined cubes are both gold and silver at the same time."
"But the properties," Richard Dawkins said, "The properties are complementary. The gold and silver mix together."
The little man took another cube from the sculpture and popped it into his mouth.
"Ridiculous! Nothing in the world can be complementary. The gold and silver cubes are both exclusively gold and exclusively silver at the same time. Everything is exactly itself and nothing else. The quality of qualities is that they do not merge!"
"But that's impossible," Richard Dawkins said. "Black can't very well be white now, can it?"
"Can't it? Can't it?" the little man was fairly screaming now. "You might just as soon deny that anything exists at all!"
Then, composing himself, he walked away from the sculpture and stood very straight, facing Richard Dawkins.
"Look here Dawkins, you think I am mistaken, and I think you are mistaken. There's nothing left for us to do except fight to the death."
"I think that's overstating the case somewhat," Richard Dawkins said. "Surely we could agree to disagree?"
"Impossible," said the little man. He signalled, and one of the monks walked over, carrying a tray. On it were a number of rubber bands.
"Choose your weapon, Dawkins," said the little man, taking a thin old band of red elastic. He drew it back and aimed it at Richard Dawkins, who had chosen a thicker green band. The two of them moved several feet apart.
"On your mark," intoned the monk. "Get set…go."
The red elastic band zipped past Richard Dawkins' head. Richard Dawkins feinted to the side, then fired the green band at the little man, striking him in the chest. The little man collapsed to the sand.
"You've killed him," the monk said. "You've won."
Several of the other monks descended on the little man and helped him to his feet. He walked to the other side of Richard Dawkins. Then, without a word he took off his shoes. The monks handed him a box tied with a red lace thread.
"Now you must wear the shoes that can never be removed." one of them said.
The little man accepted the box, glared at Richard Dawkins with a look of immortal hatred, and set off back through the desert.
It struck me as very 'true' metaphysically, that as far as pure ideas are concerned, there is nothing to do but fight to the death. It is also interesting that, in this story, the death incurred is not necessarily literal, fatal death, or meaningful at all, but still results in "immortal hatred".
In her review of The God Delusion, Marilynne Robinson summarises as follows:
Indeed, Dawkins makes a bold attack on tolerance as it is manifested in society’s permitting people to rear their children in their own religious traditions. He turns an especially cold eye on the Amish:
“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture.”
The fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens this beleaguered planet as little as any to be found in the Western world merits not even a mention.
Yet Dawkins himself has posited not only memes but, since these mind viruses are highly analogous to genes, a meme pool as well. This would imply that there are more than sentimental reasons for valuing the diversity that he derides. Would not the attempt to narrow it only repeat the worst errors of eugenics at the cultural and intellectual level? When the Zeitgeist turns Gorgon, the impulses toward cultural and biological eugenics have proved to be one and the same. It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.
Memes, like genes, fight for evolutionary dominance. We know that biologcial diversity is valuable, and that dominance of the human race is undoing that diversity and threatening to tip us into catastrophe. But what about meme diversity. Theoretically, this is also favoured, by some, in what we call 'multi-culturalism'. And yet, in a way, meme diversity is even harder to keep in healthy balance than biological diversity, because, as portrayed in the Justin Isis tale, all memes are programmed to fight all other memes to the very death – victory for one side and defeat for the other. The only memes that make some – problematical – attempt to do otherwise are such pluralist memes as Daoism, Buddhism and so on, and even these are not yet entirely free from the 'defeat or victory', 'with us or against us' programming of other memes.
Recently, Momus wrote a blog post about this dilemma – how do the pluralist memes embrace the anti-pluralist memes as part of their pluralism? Or, as he put it, "whether, if we support openness, we must remain closed to the things we find closed, thereby contradicting ourselves."
I left some comments under the entry. I quote from one of them:
The essential issue you've written about (how to be open to what is closed, or whether you should be open to it), really is something that occupies a lot of mental space for me. I do find myself taking sides, but this frustrates me. It doesn't seem to get anywhere. It seems like conflict almost for the sake of it in the end, not in order to arrive at a resolution.
I suppose eternal war of this sort is tolerable if no one is playing to win, but only playing to play. But really to wish to vanquish the enemy, to have no more bambastic [sic], climactic art, for instance… Well, in this particular case, such a victory doesn't really appeal to me. I suppose there might be some areas in which I'd like to see such a victory.
Momus's reply was as follows:
Oh, you can take sides without banishing or vanquishing, Quentin! As Cage says, "We can both live".
We can both live. It seems so obvious. And yet, to many, it is not. To whoever killed Theo Van Gogh, for instance, it was not. Religion is a meme, and memes, as much as genes, seem to be about ensuring the immortality of a particular identity. To attack a meme – merely by disagreeing with it, by having a different meme – is to attack the very source of a person's proposed immortality, or so it must appear to them, depending on the meme.
If it's a case of victory and defeat with all memes, then it is war to the last standing, since all memes must vary slightly. Is that the logical conclusion of all this? One meme, just as genetic engineering and other factors would seem to promise that we are on the road to the dominance of one genetic pattern? Can a world even exist with such lack of diversity, or will it inevitably collapse on itself at that point?
Certainly, I don't know. All this is still a dilemma for me, and a serious question that requires the most serious consideration. One thing that seems sure is this, Sharia Law is not multi-culturalism.
We can both live. We can both live, as long as we are happy to see that even when our memes attempt to fight each other to death, our genes, our bodies, still live, and that, perhaps even in the case of meme-death, the death is not fatal, and immortality is ensured through "immortal hatred".
In The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq wrote that language seems almost designed for conflict (the battle of meme vs meme), but that in physical closeness (he was talking about sex, mainly) harmony can be achieved. Make love, not war? As Leonard Cohen might say, "You can still get married"? It's easy to hate someone you've never met, because you've only seen their ideas – their memes. It's usually harder to hate someone in their presence, and the presence of their body (I realise there are exceptions here). Perhaps if I have any hope that the war might ever end, or that it might become a war whose only casualities are the 'playing-to-play-not-to-win' casualties of memes, who pretend to die for a while for the sake of the game, it is in the curious idea that people might begin to listen to their bodies more – bodies that can live and let live, so that we can both live, and bodies that know the harmony that is not in language.
Justin Isis writes:
At the risk of negating the logic of my own story, I think there’s always the option of some kind of synthesis, or at least destroying the problem in a Gordian Knot fashion. For example, if Israelis and Palestinians stopped identifying as such and formed one cooperative, crossbred super-state, the problem would be over. Needless to say, in real life this seems unlikely to happen. To me, this is what J.G. Ballard meant when he said that the 21st century would consist of “warring psychopathologies.” (or memes)Samuel R. Delany said something similar in an interview, along the lines of solving the problems of race and gender inequality by simply removing the ideas of race and gender, or at least not taking them seriously. When the interviewer said that this seemed unrealistic, Delany responded with something like:”Well, yeah, but do you think Cotton Mather would have believed that the problems of witchcraft and possession would eventually be solved not by more witch trials and knowledge of the occult, but by people just not believing in witches anymore? It would have seemed as insane to him as not believing in race and gender would seem to us in the present.”I do think that these ideas will eventually not matter as much as they do in the present, if they matter at all. The world we’re in now is both really sophisticated and really primitive, and I’m sure a lot of assumptions we take for granted will eventually be seen as outdated in the same way we think of Mather’s views on witches. I mean, in a few hundred years we’ve gone from blasphemy meriting death to blasphemy meriting a fine and imprisonment to blasphemy not being illegal to blasphemy not even really meaning anything (for young people in the West now, I don’t think most even know what it means). In terms of world history that’s an amazingly fast change. Same thing with civil rights. Even ten years ago 2Pac was saying “we ain’t ready to see a black president,” and now we have Obama. Memes are always changing, just as the meanings of words change over time. Even “atheist” is a word that I think will eventually come to seem outdated, as people come to regard scientific materialism with as much suspicion and irony as they regard organized religion. Also, I demand the replacement in this post of a more attractive photo of me…something along these lines, maybe? http://farm1.static.flickr.com/82/266018038_1feb0be9de.jpgFits the ‘cultural diversity’ theme too!
At the risk of negating the logic of my own story, I think there’s always the option of some kind of synthesis, or at least destroying the problem in a Gordian Knot fashion.I hope so. I’ll get to work immediately on replacing the photograph, as suggested.
I don’t know how often people click on the links in blog entries (I suppose it depends on the person and the link), but the V.S. Naipaul article linked to is very interesting. Here’s a paragraph from it:The historians do not see the two religions as in any way irreconcilable; instead they tend to take the view that “the actual history of religious exchange suggests that there have never been clearly fixed groups, one labelled ‘Hindu’ and the other – both its opposite and rival – labelled ‘Muslim’.” Indeed, as one author points out, there is not a single medieval Sanskrit inscription that identifies “Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims”, but instead they refer more generally in terms of “linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk, ‘Turushka'”. The import of this is clear: the political groupings we today identify as “Muslim” were then “construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others”It almost seems as if people take these labels more seriously today than they did in the past. Even that perhaps would not be required. All they WE have to do is stop branding each other as Jews, Christians, Muslims or Hindus and looks at each other as HUMANS.I agree with this. I suppose I wrote this entry because I wonder why that seems so difficult for us.
crossbred super-state Even that, perhaps would not be required. All they WE have to do is stop branding each other as Jews, Christians, Muslims or Hindus and look at each other as HUMAN BEINGS.
At the risk of negating the logic of my own story, I think there’s always the option of some kind of synthesis, or at least destroying the problem in a Gordian Knot fashion.Actually, I think the biggest problem in what I wrote was that I took the idea of memes fighting to death – that no synthesis is possible – too seriously as a truth. It’s not necessarily a truth at all. I suppose I was struck by the extent to which it is a psychological truth in the world, that people act as if ideas are all either/or. This, of course, is one of the curses of logic, which identifies too strongly with language (and memes). To be able to hold two ‘contradictory’ truths in mind is actually a mark of being able to see the world more clearly. Not only that, it is necessary to any hopes of universal peace we might have.
Justin Isis writes:
I do think that memes, at least in their ‘pure’ forms, have a tendency to fight to the death, but this seems to happen more when dealing with fanatics (of any kind – for me Richard Dawkins is a fanatic in the same sense as Bin Laden or someone, in that he wants EVERYONE to be like him). Of course, fanaticism can become commonplace, but the reality, as far as I perceive it, is that most people freely hold contradictory ideas at the same time and logic has very little to do with how or why they believe things. This is why I implicitly trust fiction more than nonfiction, because fiction deals with complexities and shades of grey, and nonfiction has a pretense to some kind of objective, ‘this is what really happened’ stance, which needless to say is usually simplifying bullshit. I think this is why fiction is usually frowned on by fanatics. With Islamic extemism, I really see no acknowledgment of any need for a book OTHER than the Koran, because other books would constitute threats or alternative perspectives. I think for most leaders around the world, fiction is at best useless and at worst dangerous.
I do think that memes, at least in their ‘pure’ forms, have a tendency to fight to the death, but this seems to happen more when dealing with fanatics (of any kind – for me Richard Dawkins is a fanatic in the same sense as Bin Laden or someone, in that he wants EVERYONE to be like him).The strange thing is, I find myself trying to see the good in someone like Dawkins in a way that I don’t with other religious fanatics. I wonder why that is. It might be largely because my broad social group is predominantly atheist/agnostic. I also think it’s because I have become inculcated with the values of this group in the sense that science is not to be questioned. The assumption is that everything but science must be apologised for, if one is in agreement with it, whereas to attack science in any way is immediately to invalidate anything you say, because it is science that is the great validator. Because I share social background and significant political attitudes with those who call themselves atheists, it surprises me when, despite my attempts to look again and again at atheist attitudes in order to re-examine my attitudes towards them, I continue to find those attitudes humourless, arrogant, egotistical, adolescent, oppressive, shallow, dull, and secretly steeped in the desire to destroy life.You only have to look at the comments under that Marilynne Robinson review to see what I mean. For instance:Zak Kilhoffer said,
January 13, 2007 at 3:17 pm
“The fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens this beleaguered planet as little as any to be found in the Western world merits not even a mention.”
Dawkins didn’t argue that the Amish are as harmful as fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. He only pointed out that diversity is a sorry reason to deny yourself of the conveniences, pleasures, and medicines of modern life. Furthermore, though a note-worthy fraction of Amish children leave their communities in their teens, the majority have been sufficiently brainwashed to the point that they never even LEARN about modern ways of life.
The Amish people aren’t a burden on our society, but have they done anything to contribute to it?Deny yourself the convenience, pleasures and medicines of modern life? Makes me want to throw up. And shows the way in which science has become closely allied with capitalism, too. It’s all about having a sparkling modern kitchen and so on. And that ludicrous question about what the Amish have contributed to society. I suppose he thinks Dawkins has contributed something to society by flopping his huge ego out of his trouser flies and rubbing it in the world’s face. What is Dawkins’s end-goal, really? To reduce the world to ‘selfish genes’, presumably hoping that his genes, being the most selfish, will win the race.But what can you do? It seems clear that whatever memes are dominant in me, they are in conflict with the Dawkins memes. This is largely because my memes tend towards pluralism and Dawkins’s tend in the other direction, but here comes my dilemma. In opposing Dawkins’s memes, my memes sacrifice some of their pluralism. Dawkins, by his very existence, seems to leech pluralism from the world.To fight him is to lose (especially if you win, thereby becoming one of his selfish genes/memes). So, there’s no point. Because simply not to be Dawkins is to win.I remember the days when I thought of myself as atheist. It seems to me now a bit like the hypothetical situation of being a moderate Muslim finding yourself amongst a growing number of extremists who are setting slowly around you like concrete, and in that manner threatening to paralyse and suffocate you. Atheism was a necessary rejection, for most of us, of monotheistic dogma and so on, but while wearing the mask of healthy neutrality, it began to accumulate a hoard of agendas, proclaiming itself to be about nothing, while allying itself more and more closely to scientific materialism, which must be the most narrow-minded philosophy in the world (since in its mainstream it approaches the fanaticism that other philosophies only acheive at the fundamentalist end of the spectrum). And, like a hypothetical moderate Muslim appalled by the extremism around him, I got out. I’d like to be able to pinpoint what I mean by scientific materialism, though. What I think of as the really pernicious element in all this is not necessarily ‘atheism’, or ‘science’, and ‘materialism’ might be too vague, and even ‘scientific materialism’ too open to interpretation.I suppose what it comes down to is this: there is an element in the area of scientific enquiry of people who need certainty. Certainty is the need to control, the rational fear of the irrational and so on. I’ve read the observation that in the old, old days, physics was the dry realm of fixed, deterministic laws, and biology was more the woolly, and, of course, organic science, but that, at some point, they seem to have swapped roles. Now, of course, physics is full of all kinds of interesting uncertainties, paradoxes and so on, whereas biology is all about genetic determinism, thanks to the likes of Crick, Dawkins and so on. I don’t see why anyone would even want the universe to be so deterministic. To me, to fly such a flag is to go over to the dark side. Genetic engineering itself, seems to me basically another form of eugenics. It’s the master race by another name. Strangely – and I would agree that it is strange – I seem to find Dawkins even less likable than someone like Osama Bin Laden. But then, Bin Laden does have those misty Jesus eyes, and those moist, kissable lips of incarnadine, but quite possibly, an arse like a wizard’s sleeve.
I’ve gone on too long and in far too much detail, for which I’m sorry. Not at all. No need to be sorry.I believe our enemy (if we have one – and I’m taking about an enemy of humanity here) is not the Muslim, the Jew, or the Christian, but the zealot, the fanatic, the fundamentalist, regardless of creed!I agree. There are two points to make about the above post, first of all, in the twisting up of different conflicts, it might have become unclear what my own position was. Secondly, any position I have may well be misjudged, and is therefore only provisional. But just in case what I have said is not clear, the fanatic, to me, is one who too fiercely and rigidly identifies with a particular label. I have no wish myself to hold people to labels and to judge them according to labels I hold against them. Any criticisms I have are of people willingly reducing themselves or others to labels. I hope that makes sense.I don’t condone terrorism, but from what I can tell, the terrorism, or anyway, the unjust violence, whatever you want to call it, of the West against Afghanistan and Iraq has been far, far greater than any violence we have experienced in return. To me that’s a different issue to the criticism of religion. I’ve attempted to look at a number of different kinds of conflict in what I wrote above, and it may have come out confusing and sketchy. (Actually, I didn’t really talk about Iraq and Afghanistan at all, except that, of course, the invasions of both countries are associated with these issues, and V.S. Naipaul may have been referring to them, too, in the interview from which I think I was quoting at the beginning.)Was the assassination of Theo Van Gogh political or religious terrorism? It seems to me that it has to be the latter, as was the Fatwah against Salman Rushdie. This is another aspect of conflict – the conflict of ideologies. I’ve attempted to give examples of different kinds of intolerance, or aggression from different groups. I hope that makes sense.
Peter A Leonard writes:
“It almost seems as if people take these labels more seriously today than they did in the past.”Perhaps this is simply a new aspect of good old fashioned “nationalism”, cloaked in religion? With the collapse of communism in Europe, the “West” has tended to be more blatant in its approach to perceived “enemies” (I’m sure had the USSR still been a viable political entity there’d have been no invasion of Afghanistan by the US and Britain. It’s also doubtful if the invasion of Iraq could have taken place without embroiling all concerned in global conflagration). We should remember (for example) the USSR’s attempts to impose a military solution on Afghanistan where the flaring of tribal identity and a desire for self-determination melded with religion to create conflict and rebellion. Put simply it was the reform of the marriage laws, the attempt to remove feudalism from Afghan society that started this ball rolling. The USSR failed in their invasion. They failed in their support of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. For nine years bloodshed was the order of the day in that poor country. But you can’t fight ideas with gun and grenade. The West supported the Afghan rebels. They encouraged the Mujahideen, the Muslim jihad fighters. They assisted Osama bin Laden – who believed that the restoration of Sharia law would set things right in the Muslim world, and that all other ideologies were the product of the devil and to be opposed!Ethnically and linguistically the Afghan population is diverse, the Pashtuns are the largest grouping and are mostly associated with the Taliban (Pashtuns are also an important community in Pakistan, where they are prominently represented in the military and are the second-largest ethnic grouping; they also make up a sizable community in eastern Iran). The Pashtuns are the world’s largest (patriarchal) segmentary linage ethnic grouping. The total population of the group is estimated to be around 42 million. Many of the Muslims in central Asia have tribal kinship with Iran and Afghanistan. What this all means is that in talking about Muslims, we miss the ethnical connection. It is bin Laden’s stated belief that the Taliban (Pashtuns) was “the only Islamic country” in the Muslim world!Ironically the Pashtun people have a long mythic oral tradition that they descend from the Israelites! The “Encyclopedia of Islam” mentions this as does the “Taaqati-Nasiri”, which states that in the “7th century BC a people called the Bani Israel in Afghanistan migrated south and east. These references to Bani Israel agree with the commonly held view by Pashtuns that when the twelve tribes of Israel were dispersed the tribe of Joseph settled in the region. This oral tradition is widespread among the Pashtuns”.The Taliban (mostly Pashtuns) when deposed by the allies retreated to the NW frontier of Pakistan where they were welcomed by their brother tribesmen, better known to us perhaps as Pathans (but who are Pashtuns nevertheless). Here, they are again trying to build the “ideal state”. They have banned education for girls. Blown up a large number of schools. Murdered as many teachers as they can lay hands on. This is as much to do with “Pashtunwali” (the pre-Islamic honor code which governs the life of all Pashtuns) as the Muslim religion. The biggest criticism of the system of Pashtunwali is in the treatment of women, who should remain illiterate, without rights, without property in their own right, chattels of their fathers/husbands/brothers. Honor killings, too, can be a bit of an issue.Unfortunately it’s been the case that western media have made the words terrorist and Muslim almost synonymous in the minds of a huge number of people. Yet millions of Muslims worldwide had no real problem with the western democracies until the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. The West attacked two Muslim countries, one after the other, with little or no provocation. Afghanistan was invaded because a group of fanatical young Saudi Arabians took part in suicide attacks on the Twin Towers – those Saudi’s were followers of bin Laden who originally had been trained and supplied by the same people who now attacked Afghanistan to find him.Afghanistan was to be made safe not for democracy but for Union Oil of California. Their pipeline stretching from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan had been abandoned under the Taliban’s chaotic regime. Now the pipeline is back on the agenda, with a Unicol employee as American envoy to the new “democracy” whose president (surprise, surprise)is also a former Unocal employee. The invasion of Iraq, ultimately, had nothing to do with WMD. Oil, black gold, was again at the heart of everything. Oil and Gas money helped to pay for the Bush presidential campaign. Even Condoleezza Rice had been a director of Chevron-Texaco pre the Bush/ Cheney Junta. Islam has been (unfairly) demonized while bin Laden (fairly)has been shown to be an Islamic zealot. And the vast oil wealth of Iraq has, for the sake of a free world, been reassigned to US and European consortiums.So what ultimately must the average Muslim make of all this? Make of us? They see the (Christian) West behave in an aggressive and hostile manor towards Muslims and Muslim states. They see the US time and again support Israel in its actions (justified or not), and each time the UN passes a resolution criticising Israel the US use their veto to squash it. Interestingly, since the invasion of Iraq, with most of Europe condemning British and American action, the Israeli media has repeatedly referred to “anti-Semitic” Europe, so we’re not only anti-Muslim we’re anti-Semites, too.I’ve gone on too long and in far too much detail, for which I’m sorry. I believe our enemy (if we have one – and I’m taking about an enemy of humanity here) is not the Muslim, the Jew, or the Christian, but the zealot, the fanatic, the fundamentalist, regardless of creed! According to Bruce Hoffman, a professor with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program in Washington, ‘The enemy of all terrorists is moderation. They want to put harder-line parties in power. The oxygen they breath is polarization and enmity.’ The challenge for Britain and the US will be the implementation of this “moderation” – something none of us have seen for some while.RegardsPeter
I suppose one of these days I’ll really have to explain that I don’t mean ‘atheist’ when I say ‘atheist’, either. I don’t even believe in any of these labels, and yet language demands that we use them, at least sometimes.I suppose I shouldn’t care what anyone imagines that I believe based on words that I’ve put into sentences together. What I really wanted to get to in this post is how identities based on memes based on language cause conflict and trouble, but, of course, using language as I am… and, whether I like it or not, I suppose, infested with memes as I am… I probably only make things worse by trying. Oh well, my next posts will probably be about music (Momus and Kodagain) and literature (Aickbon) anyway, so there’ll be less room for me to do harm. I say that, but every time I say I’m going to write something, I lose the desire to do so…That’s the problem! Obviously I wrote about Dawkins again (amongst other things) because I decided that the subject was already done to death on this blog. I decided not to do it, and that’s why I did it. That’s why I can’t finish the Momus review – because I promised I would. It’s all becoming clear to me now. Okay, I promise that the next blog post will be about Richard Dawkins, science, terrorism, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan (not that all of these have been done to death on this blog), Islam, atheism, war, liberal guilt, nationalism, racism, Morrissey, Annette Funicello, climate change, Youtube, illiteracy, how shit Britain is and what a complete cunt I am, and that I will repeat the contents of this post, with slight rearrangements, in every single post I write thereafter, for ever and ever.
There’s some more stuff I was going to say, and I think I’ve managed to bore everyone away now, so it’s probaby safe to say things again.I agree with Dawkins about some things – which shouldn’t be too surprising, after all – and one of them is that the mainstream of any particular form of culture is related as well to the extreme or fundamentalist form of that culture. I think so, anyway. So, for instance, to say that most Muslims are moderate and so on in response to talk about Islamic extremism can be a way of not addressing the existence of such extremism, another form of turning a blind eye.An important thing to remember, of course, is that this does not mean everyone nominally sharing the same culture is equally guilty. To give an example, I feel guilty about the invasion of Iraq. I think that all British people should feel guilty, bad and sorry about it. However, if, by a miracle, justice were to be done, and Bush and Blair were to be put on trial for mass-murder, and if their sentences were, say, fifty years hard labour followed by death (not being a lawyer, I’m not sure what the proper sentence would be), I’d be a bit miffed if I too had to accept a similar sentence because I was guilty by the association of sharing my nationality with Blair. The extent to which we share responsibility for these crimes is a problematical question, but a question that is worth asking, anyway.Interestingly, although Dawkins is willing to hold all religious peeps responsible for the crimes of the worst amongst them, he does not apply the same logic to the scientific community. No scientist ever seems to. Science seems to take responsibility for nothing, and to answer to no one.
Steve writes:
I love you guys! Reading this discussion between the two of you has really opened my mind up to a lot.You’ve converted me… I’m no longer going to call myself an atheist, or put any identity on me whatsoever. In fact, I’m going to strife to be different in every way possible, mostly to give a middle finger to everybody who wants me to be like them.Literary geniuses such as yourselves are the coolest, most thoughtful people on this planet… it’s just too bad you’re such a rare breed of people.Keep up the awesome discussions! You’ve got a fan here!:)
Hello Steve.I’m not sure what to say. Thanks for commenting. To be honest, I can’t tell on a computer screen whether or not you’re being ironic, especially because some of the praise is too extravagant (I can’t talk for the others, but I don’t really think I’m cool at all). It’s okay if you are being ironic. Naturally, if you’re not, your words are very flattering. Either way, thanks.And either way, there’s no need to think of yourself as being converted. I keep meaning to clarify certain areas I’ve neglected so far. One thing I’ve wondered is whether it’s necessary to reject the ideas and labels mentioned completely, but I’m not sure it can really be done. I think that the best way to cope with it is to realise that you aren’t that thing, whatever it is, but that you contain it. But different things come to the fore at different times. I think in some ways I’ve sounded too anti-atheist. There are reasons for this, but I don’t want to go into unnecessary details. I think atheist memes have been useful, but people have become too attached to them. And the reason I tend to talk about these memes more than others is simply that, as far as I can see, the atheist memes, of the type championed by those who particularly base their atheism on scientific materialism, are more likely to attempt to invalidate all other memes – are, in a way less pluralist – than other memes are. You can have predominantly, say, Buddhist memes, or even Christian memes, and it doesn’t stop you thinking about the world in a physical way, but far too often, it seems, atheist memes mean that you’re only ever allowed to think about the world in a physical atheist way.All the best. :up:
Steve writes:
I wasn’t being ironic at all. I really think you’re a cool guy, not in the way that pop-culture defines “cool” but you have an intellectual coolness. After reading this blog, I re-examined a lot of “atheist” arguments and it really stood out to me just how much they want conformity to their ideas. Of course, it isn’t just “atheist” that do this, a lot of other groups or memes push for the same kind of conformity. I just find it ironic that “atheist” so often argue against “christians” for the desire they have toward conformity and obedience, while “atheist” often express desire the same. Recently I watched a video on Youtube where a guy brought up research that showed 63% of Americans rejected the idea of evolution, and according to him this meant that 63% of Americans were “morons.” Obviously anyone who doesn’t conform to the idea is a moron, and it makes me want to reject the idea, not necessarily because I think it’s wrong, but because I value diversity more.
Okay. I hope I didn’t sound ungracious. I’m perhaps not very skilled at taking compliments well. Thanks.Recently I watched a video on Youtube where a guy brought up research that showed 63% of Americans rejected the idea of evolution, and according to him this meant that 63% of Americans were “morons.” Obviously anyone who doesn’t conform to the idea is a moron, and it makes me want to reject the idea, not necessarily because I think it’s wrong, but because I value diversity more.I think you’re perfectly right. This happens a lot. I was listening to the radio the other day, and some similar statistic was quoted to a guest panel, and they immediately dismissed those who did not believe in evolution as idiots. Part of this is a polarisation that takes part in the minds of many atheists: You either believe in evolution or you believe in creationism. This shows a great inflexibility of thought.