She still experiences the mind numbing terror and exquisite pain of her "punishment" that the "tribe" or "family" doesn't feel, and the one administering it would not want to feel the same himself or herself.
The notion fails at first principles. 
Posted on 12/18/2007 11:37:23 AM PST by BGHater
The clash of civilizations we're living through is widely seen as a battle between Islam and Christendom. I'm convinced it's more basic than that. The reason Iraq and Afghanistan remain unsettled battlefields isn't that our two civilizations can't agree on the nature of God. It's because we can't agree on the nature of man.
In the West, we take it for granted that human beings are autonomous individuals. We decide for ourselves how we dress, where we work, whom we marry. Our political system is an atomized democracy, in which everyone is expected to vote according to their own idiosyncratic values and interests. Our pop music and movies are about misunderstood loners. The ethos of individual empowerment fuels daytime talk shows.
Individualism has become so fundamental to the Western world view that most of us cannot imagine any other way of conceiving human existence. But in fact, there are billions of people on Earth -- including most of the world's Muslims -- that view our obsession with individualism as positively bizarre.
In most of South Asia and the Middle East, humans are viewed not primarily as individuals, but as agents of a family, tribe, clan or sect. As Rutgers scholar Robin Fox wrote in a brilliant essay -- excerpted in last month's issue of Harper's magazine -- this explains why so many Arabs marry their cousins. In tribal societies, your blood relations are the only people you can trust.
This fundamental difference in outlook explains much of what we find barbaric about traditional Muslim cultural practices. Honour killings -- to take a newsworthy example -- strike Westerners as a particularly horrific species of murder. But that's because we think of people as individuals. If you instead see a woman primarily as a low-status breeding agent of her patriarch's clan, everything changes. By taking up with an unapproved male, she is nullifying whatever value she once had as a human. In fact, her life has negative value in the sense that her shameful lifestyle is an ongoing humiliation to the men expected to enforce discipline within the clan's ranks.
An intractably tribal outlook also makes Western-style democracy impossible -- which explains why nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq has become such a thankless slog.
The reason many of us post-9/11 hawks had such high hopes for these campaigns is that we shared George W. Bush's sunny claim that "Freedom is universal. Freedom is etched in everybody's soul." It turns out that's not true. As Fox notes, freedom and individualism are relatively recent development in human history. Tribalism, on the other hand, is a deeply rooted instinct that has been "etched" on our evolutionary psychology since simian days. Even in Western societies, you can still see it rise to the surface when tensions flare (a point Paul Haggis made with exquisite artistry in his Oscar-award winning film Crash).
Democracy requires consensus-building and shared values. But in tribal societies, politics is viewed as a battle of all-against-all, in which the strongest tribe openly appropriates the state apparatus to enrich itself at everyone else's expense.
In this regard, Saddam Hussein was the ultimate tribal leader. Not only did he restrict his inner circle to Sunnis, but they were Sunnis from his own narrow Tikriti sub-clan. The idea of creating a "representative" government that includes Kurds and Shiites with their own independent power bases would have struck him as completely insane. So would the idea of handing over power to another tribe merely because its leaders chalked up more votes in an election. During most of human history, letting another tribe lord over yours meant yielding the power to pillage your granaries and rape your women. (In parts of Africa, it still does.)
This explains why the United States and NATO have gotten nowhere with grand national political projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are both intensely tribal societies. Instead, progress has come at the micro level -- with military commanders sitting down with individual tribal patriarchs and, essentially, bribing them with guns and money. In the West, we call that corruption. In tribal societies, it's politics.
Is there something about Islam that serves to lock in mankind's inherently tribal instincts? Perhaps. The word Islam translates to "submission." And empirically speaking, there seems to be something within the faith that discourages individualism and the democratic freedoms associated with it.
On the other hand, the non-Muslim nations of sub-Saharan Africa are every bit as tribalized as the Muslim nations of North Africa and Asia. And for all the media focus on Aqsa Parvez, several of Canada's first honour murders actually were performed by Sikhs. In any case, the successful integration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims into Canadian society shows that, after a generation or two, at least, the faith hardly prevents immigrants from coming around to our democratic, individualistic ways.
As for foreign entanglements, it's worth noting Fox's warning that our own Western march to individualism took centuries -- a grinding process in which we moved "from tribalism, through empire, feudalism, mercantile capitalism and the industrial revolution … shrugging off communism and fascism along the way."
In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are essentially asking the locals to cram all of this into a few years. We shouldn't be surprised if it takes a little longer.
jkay@nationalpost.com
Who makes breaking us all into ever smaller tribes but Libs/Socialists/Communists?
Communists?
Communism: “is an ideology that promotes establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership ...)
It’s (supposedly) about unification of peoples....
“Excessive tribalism in American politics is, ultimately, un-American. “
Yet is is alive and well in FedGov. Peoples who hold positions at the federal level rarely feel they are of the same “blood” as what would be the common demographic of a “middle class” American.
It’s the desert that Moses led the Jews out of............some get some never will.
in a fallen world, their communities are fallen, in some proportion to their lack of submission to the Church.
Ah. That explains it. I passed 18 just a few years before 1999 :)
Are there animals in the wild with this deranged mentality?
She still experiences the mind numbing terror and exquisite pain of her "punishment" that the "tribe" or "family" doesn't feel, and the one administering it would not want to feel the same himself or herself.
The notion fails at first principles.
No it isn't. islam is based upon the lie that Mecca can never be destroyed because allah himself protects it. A couple of W-88's dialed up to a 150 kilotons would disabuse these savages of the notion that their 'holy' places are invulnerable.
Once the spiritual center of their death cult lies in radioactive ruins the heart of this cancer upon humanity will be cut out.
Then we can put the Coulter Option into practice.
L
You may find this thread of interest. Images, links.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1940297/posts?page=1,50
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.