The Geek has posted often about the nature of Islamism, his shorthand term for politically oriented Islamic groups and individual Muslims. He has also posted frequently on jihadism which is the armed and violent progeny of Islamism.
Overall, in so far as a single goal unites all the Islamist and Islamist jihadist groups it is that portion of the Islamic belief system as expressed not only it Islam's sacred writings but in the vast and ancient corpus of Islamic jurisprudence which calls for constant struggle to both protect the Muslim community of faith and expand that community until it incorporates the entirety of the human race. The "House of War" as non-Muslims are characterized must be confronted and ultimately defeated if the age of perfect peace, harmony and justice for all people everywhere is to be achieved.
The longing for social, economic and political harmony, an absence of turbulence and a presence of community solidarity is deeply rooted in the human mind. It is a longing that is addressed by religions generally--as well as by assorted ideologies which are purely, even militantly secular.
Advocates of a religiously based harmonious and just community, whether it be one which is limited in size or global in nature often point to some allegedly Utopian time and place far in the distant past. The mythic Garden of Eden is such a time and place. So also is the Arabian Peninsula of the Eighth Century for at least a goodly portion of Muslims. And, for some Christians the halcyon time and place was Europe in the centuries between the fall of the Roman Western Empire and the coming of the Enlightenment.
Anti-modernity is the thread which connects Islamists and their Christian counterparts. (Hmm, what to call them? Kierkegaard has already used the term "Christendom" to cover the institutional Church so that one is out. How about "Christianists?" At least that term is equivalent in derivation to the use of the word "Islamist.")
Christianists view the Enlightenment and its aftermath as having destroyed the presumably stable, allegedly communitarian, and putatively harmonious later Middle Ages. In the estimate of Christianists such as those who founded and operate the Discovery Institute and its many ancillaries, the Enlightenment brought in its wake a dissolution of morals, a rampant materialism and a degenerate focus on the individual. In the estimate of these folks and others of like mind the consequences of the Enlightenment regardless of any progress in technological and scientific matters has been destructive overall of both the human community and the human spirit.
It seems that Christianists take as their paradigm for a more perfect society the Medieval Chain of Being. The well-ordered and of necessity harmonious human social, economic and political structures explicit in the Chain of Being with its hierarchical placement of all people, creatures and things from the deity down to the rocks and hills constitutes the ultimate touchstone. In a way which is nearly identical the Islamist sees the life of Mohammad, the Perfect Man, and the society which surrounded him over a millennium ago as being the infallible guide to how life should be lived.
Both the Islamist and the Christianist would agree that individuals and societies which exist in perfect keeping with the divinely appointed strictures would be pleasing to the deity. Each would argue to his listeners that the way to end the unpleasant, discomfiting, disconcerting complexities of life in the present would be by way of invoking the power of the past, the potency resident in either the Great Chain of Being or the life of the Prophet, the Perfect Man and his society.
Both Christianist and Islamist would agree that the evils of the world today have been and are the work of stiff necked people who refuse to submit to the strictures and requirements ordained by the deity. If only these stiff necked and evil doing people would either come to their senses and submit or, in the alternative, be removed, the Utopian past would be restored.
The Geek agrees that life can be very confusing, quite messy, often frustrating, and that it might be nice to call, "Time Out!" every now and then so that changes might be chewed, swallowed, and effectively digested. There is no doubt but that people at all times and places have felt exactly the same.
There is no doubt but that generation after generation, "Those were the good old days." Yep, the Good Old Days when life was simple, orderly; when people were nice to one another, children always polite and respectful; a bygone era when an honest day's work brought an honest day's pay, the customer was always right, the trains (or stagecoach) ran on time; when devout folks met every Sunday at the little church in the valley; a golden hued time when politicians were public servants; an eternal Spring when the ice cream was always made from whole milk and real chocolate. You get the point. The myth of the good old days is as old as the human race.
You also see the corollary, right, bucko? The corollary which reads, "The Good Old Days never were." That one. The one the Christianists and Islamists alike overlook. The corollary upon which their movements will, of necessity, founder.
The Great Chain of Being never really existed. Kings did not bow to Popes--particularly after the nation-state started its long emergence accompanied with such features as armies. Peasants never sweated happily for their "betters" as the numerous pre-Enlightenment revolts demonstrate in all their bloody colors. (Even animals did not walk cheerfully to slaughter back then or now, if the proliferation of wild cows, the escapees from nearby ranches indicates to the Geek whenever he hies himself into the forest seeking firewood.)
Nor is Eighth Century Arabia a halcyon place, a perfect model for life today. In all probability the people of the time periodically bewailed the changes wrought by the Perfect Man--particularly when the inevitable power struggles for succession reared their bloody heads.
A Utiopianized historical period is a pathetic guide for a dynamic life. And, make no mistake about it--human life is dynamic in nature. It must be. The alternative is stultification, decay and ultimately, death.
The underlying dilemma facing all of us is the tension between the need for a dynamic of constant change less we stultify and die and the need for a secure, harmonious social, economic, and political life along with the appearance of security those features provide. With the coming of the myriad events lumped under the names, "Renaissance," "Reformation" and "Enlightenment," the people and states of Europe and North America took one direction--the road sign reading "dynamic." Other peoples, other states, which for whatsoever reason did not partake of the type of events subsumed under these three terms took another direction, the direction of stasis, decay and ultimately a form of national death.
The people at the Discovery Institute who seek to put the genie of the Enlightenment back into the bottle from which it sprang by denying Darwin, denouncing Wallace, pretending contemporary geology and cosmology do not exist are engaging in a labor of Sisyphus. Like that mythic figure, the rock will always roll back upon them. The most extreme Christianists, the men of Christian Dominionism (this merry bunch is Taliban with a Bible, al-Shabaab with a Cross) are doomed to even more ignominious failure.
Ultimately, so also are the Islamists, particularly those of the jihad. As events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even Somalia have shown, people may find the back-to-the-past-as-the-future attractive in the abstract but they find it most distasteful in practice. Christians found the limits of theocratic rule centuries ago in Calvin's Geneva experiment or the pale imitation in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Christianism, Islamism, like Facism and even Marxism-Leninism can exist only if all features of human creativity are well and truly suppressed. Such repression, totally effective repression, can only exist for short periods and then only at the cost of all innovation, all invention, all discovery, all genuine progress. Progress can come in any field only by a dynamic of creativity. And, all creativity in any field comes only with concomitant destruction of the old.
We are divided in our own minds as to which is more important: security or freedom. We are internally torn over whether dynamic change should have priority or should pride of place go to stability, harmony and consequently lowered risk, increased predictability and certainty.
While the chasm may exist in the psyches of each of us, the answers have already been entered on the pages of history. You can read them by comparing the past five hundred years history of Europe and of the Muslim societies.
Any questions?
4 comments:
People who accept Intelligent Design theory, like those at the Discovery Institute, are not against science. It is not unscientific to question whether natural selection has the wide-ranging creative power that Charles Darwin attributed to it. One of the world's 10 most-cited authors is an organic chemist, a leader in nanotechnology, who says molecules just don't work the way evolution says they should. See http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6795911.html.
Even those who hold more extreme positions, like creationists, are not against science. Most of them are professional scientists. Ron Numbers, the most prominent historian of creationism, says they love science. That's why they are so concerned when science is hijacked by those who want to use it to promote philosophies like atheism and materialism. See http://www.counterbalance.org/transcript/num-body.html
Utopia identified with the Middle Ages? The Great Chain of Being? Those are more typical of a Catholic view of history. But Protestants do not idealize the Middle Ages. Nor do they typically accept the neo-Platonism that gave rise to the concept of the Great Chain.
Nor does biblical thinking accept the idea that the problem with society is "them"--some group of "stiff-necked" wicked people The term itself comes from the Jewish Scriptures, the Old Testament, where it was applied to . . . the Jews themselves, not to their enemies. And the message of the New Testamant is that, as Solhenitsyn put it, the line between good and evil does not lie between this group or that group, but runs through the middle of every human heart.
The tendency to identify some group as the enemy is not a religious tendency, it's a human tendency. Secular and liberal people do it too. Even moral relativists, who want to be "inclusive" and not say anyone is wrong. Paradoxically, they typically pride themselves on being morally superior to others. After all, *they* are tolerant and non-judgmental. *They* are not like other people who are insufferably bigoted and closed-minded and deserve the harshest condemnation. Every group draws a line in the sand somewhere that allows them to feel superior, just like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable who thanked God he was not like other people (Luke 19:11).
Well, the Geek has followed the exchange of diatribes between the creationists and those who are of the opposite camp primarily because he wanted to be a scientist long before he fell to the allure of history. When it comes to science the best education is to read the transcript of the case involving the Penn. school district and compare the two sides. Take a hard look at the pathetic job done by the "organic chemist" from the well known university in Penn who is one of the major proponents of both intelligent design and "irreducible complexity" which concept is both intellectually bankrupt and not rooted in either experiment or unbiased observation.
But, that was only one, rather small, part of the Geek's argument which was primarily focused on the reality that there is not much difference between the political ramifications of any of the monotheistic communities of faith.
Oh yes, the really nifty thing about religious writings and the beliefs behind them is the remarkable facility with which one may cherry pick those with which one is most cheerful agreement. The inherently subjective nature of faith and its expressions is a two edged axe: It provides meaning, comfort and a sense of belonging on the one side and the capacity as well as the justification for rigid intolerance, persecution and total rejection of competing world views on the other.
It is this subjectivism which provides the dangerous aspects of a religiously based political agenda as the world has seen again and again over the past few thousand years.
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