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« Mailbag: Answering Spam | Main | "Their campaign has not succeeded in appreciably slowing down, let alone stopping, the country's democratization." » May 19, 2006
Homework (Islam BlogFight)
Posted by Bill Read this ... Germans were not the problem. Even German nationalism was not the problem. And yet "Germany" was most definitely a problem.... and this: I've been informed by The Flea that poor attention-starved, Muslim-fearing Pierre LeGrand is once again writing silly things about Bill Ardolino and me, about our supposed blindness to the mass-murdering religion of Islam. I'm pressed for time, so I'll quickly add ... ... there is a continuum on which ideology - in this case, religious ideology - is scored in its power to influence systemically bad or good behavior among humans. The weighted score for this factor is one among several factors that determine a specific culture's character and behavior. We'll label it "cultural modeling." Of course the influence of a religion like Islam is not immaterial, and certain ideologies may be statistically more prone to abusive reading by extremists, for example, but it's also far, far from deterministic. And a religion's ostensibly fundamental definitions can adapt character and quickly reorder internal priorities in the face of a whole host of other, more powerful factors, succumbing to things like the consistently growing authority of humanistic impulses and man's chosen interpretation in open societies. As far as I'm concerned, the problem (to different degrees) with folks like Pierre LeGrand, Robert Spencer and the LGF comments section is one of proportion and perception: it's difficult for most humans to evaluate the nature of anything, especially a perceived threat or alien belief system, within a multifactorial context that escapes the "tyranny of the me and now." Basically, our amygdala keeps jerking the neocortex back towards simple answers for complex problems, lending a soothing confidence that a threat has been clearly defined and addressed, or, at least in LeGrand's case, defined and impotently raged about while offering nothing remotely resembling a constructive solution. Basically, these impulses are the foundation of bigotry without distinction, a consistent element of the human character. LeGrand mistakes my interpretation of Islam as something akin to typical cultural relativism among leftists, the inability to recognize threats as the product of an insulated society. Since I largely and explicitly reject this concept, I find that characterization amusing. In truth, I'm offering my best dispassionate evaluation of the problem of Islamic extremism and the realistic and constructive way to address it, rather than prioritizing an assertion of cultural superiority and personal comfort through simplistic threat definition. And while I consider Robert Spencer's treatises on Islam far more coherent and rational than any of the mad rantings scrawled in mud daub and poo on the rusted tin walls of LeGrand's backwoods hate shack, I also believe that he falls into a similar trap: assigning outsized, deterministic weight to the value of a Christian theologian's reading of "Islam," when attempting to define the roots of the Muslim world's recognized problem with violence and terrorism. As a specific example, the unerring tendency to cite elements of Koranic text as immutable proof of the religion's malicious character becomes tiresome, when most religious texts are remarkable studies in contradiction, contain some fairly nasty elements and have been situationally interpreted to dramatically different effect within the twin filters of culture and era. And while an individual like Spencer might make an analogous argument about folks like Dean, dorkafork, Flea and I - that we simplistically place undue weight on the value of political freedom to moderate the problems within the Muslim world, to the detriment of recognizing a fundamentally negative character of Islam - I'd strongly disagree. Because I believe that the historical record ably demonstrates that universal humanistic trends in open societies have been far more consistent in effect than subjective interpretations of religious doctrines. I'm not by any means devaluing all of his arguments - I just think that he's exagerrating the weights that he applies to them, a prisoner of the self-reinforcing frame of reference established and exemplified by the name of his site. And by the way, what would an example of the quiet advancement of humanism over literal religious doctrine look like in the Muslim world? Baby steps like this, I suppose.
Religion just doesn't work that way. Whether you're talking about Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other religion there are two rather different things: the formal doctrine of the religion and the folk religion - the religion as it is actually practiced by its adherents. Posted by Bill at May 19, 2006 11:08 AM | TrackBack (1) Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsIt's a pretty good insight that these people seem to think we're simply indulging in touchy-feely cultural relativism. I'll have to keep that in mind. 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