Posted on 02/03/2004 5:19:18 AM PST by SJackson
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:51:00 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
A Princeton historian's diagnosis of the Muslim world's malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in the Mideast, have helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy in 50 years.
Bernard Lewis often tells audiences about an encounter he once had in Jordan. The Princeton University historian, author of more than 20 books on Islam and the Middle East, says he was chatting with Arab friends in Amman when one of them trotted out an argument familiar in that part of the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The setting was the august halls of the University of Chicago. On the upper floors of Pick Hall, the political science building. A nice, polite, well read young woman is going to give a short talk and take questions about her thesis, to whoever wanted to show up (not her defense, mind). She isn't a political scientist but the talk is there because it should be of interest. Her subject is Shakespeare in Egypt - what they read of him, how it is presented or performed, what plays, the politics of it and reactions to it.
She has traveled there, she speaks Arabic, she knows the plays. She is intelligent, speaks carefully after pausing to consider each question, grants points while shifting emphasis to what she is most concern about. She has found the reaction of Egyptians to the plays she loves troubling. They are so political about them. So judgmental. Everything is sides, identities, archetypes. To take them seriously at all is a declaration of political allegiance of a sort.
The young woman is intensely moral in a peculiar, relativistic, "meta" way. She fears making outright moral judgments. Of the plays, of the audiences, of Egypt, of others around her in the room. She is not avoiding them because they are hard, she sees them. She is avoiding them as sins, as conscious moral failings, as standing temptations. Beneath her entire demeanor and presentation, you can practically her here screaming "if I judge, I will become one of them".
The talk is of multi-voiced readings and the hermeneutics of the other, of the sense of awakening when seeing how differently someone else sees the same thing. The woman relates how surprised she once was to hear a Russian friend explain that "Hamlet" is all about justice, not indecision. Her openness to this so alien and original thought is a gleaming moral gem to her, that she rejoices to display for us all.
I suggest that perhaps the reason Egyptians see archetypes in Shakespeare is because he put them there. I suggest that if the entire Egyptian audience considers "the Merchant of Venice" to be a frankly antisemitic play and agree with it on that very basis, that perhaps they saw it that way because Shakespeare meant it that way, being something of an antisemite himself. That if they see the plays as political, perhaps it is because they are shot through with politics. And that the special somewhat twisted way of reading them in which they are not, may perhaps be a peculiarity of certain strange people who think about hermeneutics. That maybe the weirdness is a reflection.
She hopes not. She allows the justice of the "charge", but hopes there is more to multivoiced relativist openness as a morality than that - without breathing the taboo "m" word ("morality"). She quite agrees that there are archetypes in Shakespeare, that he meant them. But she was in Egypt. And she saw how much absolutely everyone thinks in these partisan, identity-allegiance terms. And, as earnestly yet humbly as she can, she testifies that it really was something strange and alien and...
Well, one can see she was "wigged". She as much as screams that they are all judgmental fascists, but to do so would be to cross over to the Dark Side where judgment occurs and fascism is sure to follow. The conversation segues back to the safer terrain of literary criticism, and the room breaths a bit easier. Judgment threatened, but was narrowly avoided by the silent moral discipline and shining non-judgmental excellence of everyone in the room (except of course for that guy who asked that question).
When these types see Bernard Lewis, when they read his books, they see facts on every page. Judgments drawn from them casually and immediately, as easy as breathing. They feel they are in the presence of monsters. To judge is a graver sin than murder. To judge thoroughly, page after page, to spin elaborate theories of what went wrong with an entire culture, why that would be as shocking as that dung-and-porn Mary in that New York museum was, to a different sensibility. They look at their shoes. It would be as though somebody made a mess on the carpet in the middle of their sherry hour. (Maybe two people "got it").
This was only a few months after 9-11.
Now, there are also bastards out there, commies I call them, for whom the innocent stupidity just explained is cover and smoke for hard core pushing of murder. The out and out Hamas apologists, the kind of people who would be running bomb factories in Gaza if they lived there and had the talents for it, instead of a talent (sometimes dubious enough) for rhetoric. But not all that many. Their influence is immensely heightened by the previous relativist attitude, by the echo chamber of earnest useful idiots. Lewis is sneered at not because he crosses the "commies", but because he does not toe the moralizing relativist line.
We've got a home front culture problem, in other words. One that is not simply a political problem, but a deeper intellectual and moral one. (Now I'll make your head spin - that very problem is part of why the Islamic nutjobs can't stand us...)
I am very puzzled by our donation of $2 billions/year to the Egyptian government, yet we are unable to extract ANY thing in return. The Egyptian government buys plastic explosives from us, then it turns a blind eye to its fanatical Islamists as they take the explosives and dig tunnels under the desert to give them away to the Palestinians in Gaza, who in turns blow up themselves and some Jews. We must hold Mubarak responsible for the weapon smuggling schemes, and for the 24X7 hate against us in his media.
It’s ironic. The original intent was to provide economic aid to prevent the rise of militant Islam and foster democracy in the country, another of Jimmy Carter’s failures. Just why we’ve converted most of it to military aid is beyond me, I see little benefit to the US in that. One of GWBs better ideas was holding foreign aid recipients to some standards in terms of economic and political freedom, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside.
This is not due to any inability to see it as evil. They are oppressed by it, psychologically. They are running away. They ascribe powers of moral contagion to evil, and think they are consciously resisting that contagion. Judgment involves assuming a role of power and responsibility that they fear will corrupt them.
Is this an ethical error? Yes. An epidemic one. But then, error is the ordinary state of mankind. They can't be reached by telling them their moral sense in the matter is intellectually flawed. They can't be reached by calling them to responsibility, when they consciously shrink from it. What they need is a way to combine moral judgment of men and things with underlying respect or love of them.
This is not an obvious point, either philosophically or ethically. It is something they simply have not been taught by the reigning philosophy they are constantly exposed to. At bottom it is a misdiagnosis of totalitarianism, and because of it a misformulation of the principle of tolerance. They think they must leave open the possibility the other side is right, or deny that right exists, to avoid annihilationist political consequences.
I have a well-developed sense of humor and am not particularly thin-skinned; I didn't pick up your irony if it was intended.
Christians have become the scape-goat of many in the current culture.
I counter this whenever false accusations are made.
Just keepin' it real!
It reminded me interesting ponderings by David Brin, Sci-Fi author in essay preceding his book Otherness. I did not find it online, but here is his explorations on struggle between different mentalities: http://www.davidbrin.com/newmemewar1.html and http://www.davidbrin.com/newmemewar2.html It's long and here is just an EXCERPT. It's interesting that he wrote this in 1989 and that variation I read (not this one I just found on his website) was much more skeptical about the whole idea. Looks like he was taken aback a bit later with fetishisizing of Otherness worshiping. The Dogma of Otherness is a worldview that actually encourages an appetite for newness. A hunger for diversity. An eagerness for change. Tolerance, naturally, plays a major role in the legends spread by this culture. (Look at the underlying message contained in most episodes of situation comedies!) A second pervasive thread, seen in the vast majority of our films and novels, is suspicion of authority.
Historically, this is a very strange meme, one which encourages such art forms as science fiction, and is in turn spread quite effectively by such forms. Its notion of a Golden Age, for instance, does not reside in some lost, lamented past but in a future that our children may create, if we hand them tools and a better world to work with. The importance of this reversal in the perceived timeflow of wisdom cannot be overstated. It represents a sea change in the human relationship with time.
Naturally, this way of looking at the world was rare in the past. Even today, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this meme "owns" territories like Europe or America. Even where it is strongest, it must contend ceaselessly with any other forces inimical to its goals. There are lots of Californians, for instance, who personally emphasize macho, paranoiac or homogenizing values, instead of tolerance and otherness.
What we can say, nevertheless, is that Otherness has become powerful in the official morality of most western societies. Look at the vocabulary used in most debates on issues concerning the public. So-called 'political correctness' can be seen in ironic light, as a rather pushy patriotism in favor of the tolerance meme! But even the other side often wraps itself in phrases like "freedom," or "color blindness," or "individual rights."
Even more important, though, is the fact that millions accept the deeply utopian notion that our institutions must be improvable, and that active criticism is one of the best ways to elicit change.
Now imagine if aliens made contact with people brought up in the fourth way I mentioned -- under the Dogma of Otherness. Forget Hollywood pathos about nasty CIA types and trigger-happy rednecks. Try to picture a flying saucer setting down in today's Los Angeles. The National Guard might be called out to encircle the vessel, but they wouldn't face inward. They would be far too busy facing in the opposite direction, protecting our alien visitors from autograph hounds, groupies, and hordes seeking novelty. The jury is still out whether the tolerance meme -- or other-fetishism -- is really any saner than older, paranoiac ways. No tribe ever before had the guts to make tolerance and individualism paramount themes, especially in the messages they feed the young and poor and powerless. Traditionally, the aristocracy would rally those below by pointing to some outside threat, thus making conformity a principal virtue. The whole existence of many tribes was based upon "It's them against us, and us should win." All right. That remark was intended to be ironic and I'm certainly glad most of you in the audience laughed just now! I would have felt a shiver if you hadn't!
The first thing that Californians would ask aliens is -- "Have you got any new cuisine?"
This fourth worldview is related to what we started out discussing this evening... the Look Forward way of conceptualizing truth and knowledge. The notion that, while some theories may be better than others, all can profit from criticism and experimentation.
Emphasizing diversity, this meme even welcomes a little disturbing eccentricity, now and then. You can earn a living as an iconoclast in the West today, especially if you make it entertaining. One gets ego points for being different, if you do it with style.
No guarantees.
And yet, I know where I stand. My preference cannot help coming out in my writing. Not just a shaman or an entertainer, I'm also a propagandist in this war. I'd like to think that people come away from my books feeling just a little more tolerant than before, or a little more eager for change and diversity in the future of this world.
In fact, I think that we should go forth and crush every other worldview that doesn't promote tolerance!
Let's check though... how many of you, despite your laughter, agree at least in part with what I just said?
As I expected. You are intolerant of intolerance... and at the same time amused by the paradox this puts you in!
Well, I'm not surprised. The fact that you are capable of laughing at yourself means, by my reckoning, that you are members of a worldview that says "Don't take yourself too damn seriously." Yet another emblematic trait of this new meme.
While sounding very enlightening, its goes too far. In practical terms it projects similar enlightenment on The Other. The only problem with it is if The Other is not as enlightened, it leaves us defenseless.
In other words, its so protective in guarding The Other's individuality, that it denies a possibility that this individuality will be really nasty.
They are unified only by a single opposite, which is itself a straw man - his past monolithic authority as us against them and us should win. With nothing imagined as a consequence of "winning" but survival for one and disappearence for the other. Measured by that straw man - itself a piece of 19th century pseudoscience - anything that allows the survival of multiple types appears as one thing.
And all the distinctions between versions of it thus disappear. This amounts to posing an exclusive disjunction between totalitarianism and relativism - when the evidence of the entire past, down to quite recent times, refutes the idea that the two exhaust the possibilities. It predicts that as you scan history you will either find one monolithic block, or will find full blown relativism. And this isn't remotely true, as mere historical fact.
Tolerance is not relativism. Relativism denies the existence of one truth. Tolerance does not. Relativism denies that anyone's notions of right and wrong could actually be mistaken. Tolerance does not. The hidden minor premise of this totalitarian-relativist dicotomy is that the truth would deserve to be made mandatory if it existed and were accessible, while error would deserve to be exterminated. The thesis of tolerance, to the contrary, is that error is not crime, and that truth can only be the subject of an invitation, not of a command.
Tolerance expects many views to exist indefinitely. There is nothing annihilationist about it. From the standpoint of the real principle of tolerance, the relativists aren't remotely tolerant enough. They only tolerate where they cannot show error. Tolerance is tolerance of error, real full blown known-to-a-certainty error, or it doesn't deserve the name. On the side of the tolerated, it is not an imperfection in ruling truth claims that it all hangs on. No, tolerance is a right to be wrong.
In the sense of mistaken, incorrect, or uninformed. In lesser matters, also in the moral sense, as weak, timid, or flawed. Beyond error there is a different category entirely, the category of crime. And error is not crime. Crime is also possibly from a position of correctness or truth. The two concepts are in fact at right angles to one another. One concerns the justice of our behavior toward our fellows. The other concerns not justice, but the adequacy of our mental representations and systems of symbols to the rest of the world, to the real relations they point toward.
Why are they so frequently confused? Because historically, certain sects at definite times and places attempted to criminalize what they regarded as errors of doctrine. They imputed all mistakes to willful error.
There is a marvelous passage in a medieval Islamic book that brings this out. Averroes objects to holding philosophic writers responsible for their mistakes about recondite matters of metaphysics (by banning their books or worse), pleading that giving one's assent to an indication within the soul is involuntary. This is as close as Islamic thought came to the later principle of tolerance. Then in less than two pages he turns clean around and declares that error by anyone except a learned philosopher while dealing with the most difficult subjects, is "sheer sin".
That is on the subject of theoretical error. Moral error is in a way more serious. It is moral judgment that gives the relativist types the willies. When Bush calls evil men and regimes evil as a matter of course, they freak. They don't understand chastising something to improve it - despite Brin's claim that relativist pluralism is open to that, the reality is you can't chastise anything without a definite standard for it to fail to live up to. Only moralists can chastise things. Pluralists just slink away and start a new fashion. Which might make a few more flowers bloom but does nothing to improve the older ones that aren't blooming.
To improve something, you have to be moralist enough to condemn its present state. But you also have to be attached enough to that thing that you consider it worthy of the trouble. The relativists of Brin's variety, or the young woman in my anecdote, aren't moralist enough to condemn the present state of Islamic political culture. The state department cynics who think tyranny is the natural government of Muslims aren't attached enough to any of it to think it worth any effort. A Bernard Lewis, on the other hand, sees the contrast between a once flourishing civilization and the present moral squalor, and chastises. He has an attachment not to their present state, but to what he thinks it could be.
Which is where all real moral reform must come from. But does our own culture teach this, successfully? It does not. It teaches it more successfully in practical life than in philosophy, but it falls short in both places. Academic types are short changed on the former and get triple doses of the latter.
The relativist left has been on a mission for several decades now, to rid us all of the scourge of power by first taking away our power of conviction. Emphatically it does not work. But the attempt leaves behind a peculiar trail of moral cripples, and a peculiar sort of moralized divide within the society that has attempted it.
Half of our people that by training and temper should be pillars of moral purpose, are at best useless and frequently worse than useless. Every instinct that young woman had was just. All her personal conduct was spotless, generous, even chivalrous. And it was all ashes, because of this prior error. The heart was sound, the head was broken, and the result was a maimed thing where there should have been a wonderful thing.
Notice that this is the opposite of the diagnosis others often have of us, or of much of the modern left, or of intellectuals in particular. Too sophisticated and not moral enough, middle America imagines. In one sense of "sophist-icated", a fair enough charge. But in many cases, not half sophisticated enough, intellectually.
Now notice, here too the principle of tolerance applies. These people are in error, but many of them aren't at all criminal. It would be ruin to follow their cracked heads, to be sure. But we must tolerate their error while trying to correct it. That means chastise them and call them to something better, but with an underlying attachment to them as fellow citizens and as people. Of exactly the same sort Lewis shows toward the Muslim world.
Conversion of the adversary is the missing term in Brin, above (and with it, human unity). At bottom, it is not a competition or a fight. At bottom, we are allies, in a war with our own limitations, both moral and intellectual. The "we" in that statement does not stop at the water's edge.
It is a pleasure to be able to talk about these things...
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