A very interesing set of comments in yesterday’s thread on warring fatwas, one of which I want to draw particular attention to (though I encourage you to go read the exchange between Ric Locke and arch, as well). This is from Nishizono Shinji:
The oral tradition of the Qu’ran is based on the oral traditions of the bedouin tribes. Arabic was spoken long before it was written. It is not a slurr to describe Mohammed as illiterate—arab society’s values and the short suras of the Qu’ran come from bedouin society, where the most revered members of the tribe were the rawis (lit., reciters) and poets. The haaj is based on the annual poetry competitions held at Mecca. Tribal warfare was sometimes fought in a competition of words by na’qaat, tribal combat poets. As a youth, Mohammed was sent to live among the bedouin, to learn tribal values.
The Qu’ran is also aural, meant to be recited and listened to. The decentralization of Islam is also based on autonomous tribal values. And can you think of a better way to spread viral memes than thru language?
A strong meme in the Qu’ran is that muslims shall not kill other muslims. The killers get around this psychologically by saying the muslims they kill have become collaborators. The victims have a hard time believing muslims could be killing them, ergo the genesis of conspiracy theories, that jews or westerners perpetrated the crimes, and blamed muslims. But experience is changing this memeset. Zarqawi’s hotel bombings are a good exqample—the King of Jordan was brilliant in putting the female suicide bomber on tv—she admitted the terrorists knew they were not going to kill collaborators or crusaders, but innocent women and children. The meme taht mulims don’t kill other muslims seems like a good place to leverage fatwas, to me.
The distributed nature of Islam makes it difficult to lauch a centralized memetic attack. This is an evolutionary advantage, but most likely arose because of the distributed nature of tribal autonomity. The best attack is a distributed one, spreading western memesets by tv, radio, and print media. An effective counter-memetic to Qu’ranic recitation (broadcast on radio stations now) is popular music. Qu’ranic reciters are the current rock stars of the ME. Their CDs sell in amazing quantity. Fundamentalists recognize memetic assault—that is why Iran is banning western music, and movies and songs are banned.
Yesterday I argued for a distributed counter-attack (as opposed to the kind of enforced, centralized assault favored by Jordan’s King Abdullah II) to the viral meme of Islamic radicalism—namely, the relentless introduction, by a variety of means, of freedom and liberalism into the Muslim world, to the extent that these are consistent with (or can be made to coexist with) the basic tenets of Islam. For those who have been arguing that the winning of hearts and minds of “moderate” Muslims is an essential component of winning the war against radical Islamism, military intelligence operations that place favorable stories in the Muslim press are an effective tactic, provided our own newspapers don’t work to undermine the effort. Likewise, the proliferation of weblogs, which the mullahs in Iran and the Chinese government greatly fear, as well as the proliferation of American culture abroad—the globalization ethos so violently opposed by many on the domestic and international left (and the paleocon right) who feel that “authenticity” is damaged by cultural miscegenation, and who favor an identity politics that thrives in a postmodern philosophical paradigm wherein “truth” is simply a matter of will and power extending from the assertion of deliminating authenticity—are the very kinds of things we should be supporting if our goal is the end to tyranny in the Muslim world, even if our motives for wishing this are purely self-interested. The administration’s repetitive assertions that freedom is universal—and that evil truly does exist—are, when viewed from the perspective of a competitive and corrective anti-viral meme, therefore “unnuanced” in a very important way: they are easily transferrable and digestable memes which directly counter the memes of radical Islamism, which, because they are identity based, place the locus of evil on the infidel (the Other) rather than on particular actions.
Which makes Bush’s war an extension of the culture wars we’ve been fighting in Humanities departments for years—only with the stakes set much higher than when Gerald Graff was battling Bill Bennett. Further, Humanism, having now adapted itself to the contingency-based worldview of the linguistic turn, is simply doing battle with other distributed memes for a place of ascendancy—the goal being for humanism to win the battle for what will ground a particular geopolitical belief system.
Unfortunately, our own press, in that they are responsible for shaping the narrative of our progress, has on the whole become the biggest obstacle to winning this global war, especially insofar as they see the effort as a gentleman’s game and are working hard to level the playing field—a mindset that is completely consistent with the progressivist ideology many in the national media have adopted. That is, they wish us to “fight fair,” which from what I can gather means demonizing our every tactic for fighting the enemy, from military force to imprisonment to intelligence gathering to the disemination of propaganda. And the reason for this, I’m coming to understand, is that their fidelity is to the very kind of identity politics that, at their linguistic base, necessarily oppose the ascendancy of enlightenment philosophy in all its presumptions to universality, and which believe in the enforced “equality” of those groups involved in the power dynamic. Right and wrong are relative terms. Only power matters.
The way to win the war is to win the philosophical battle; and the way to win the philosophical battle is to push back against the kinds of postmodern philosophical maneuvers that mistakenly assert that because all “truths” are linguistic constructs, evaluating those truths is somehow useless or, when done from the position of a hyperpower, necessarily faulty and indicative of a hegemonic (western imperialist) mindset.
Ironically, for a “universalized” belief system to take root, it must travel. And for it to travel, we need an information highway amenable to the free exchange of ideas—the very thing that comes from the liberalism we seek to spread. Meaning that the neocons really are on the right track, it seems to me.
****
Anyway, these are preliminary thoughts, so please, feel free to add your own critiques.
I don’t know, Jeff. Is the press’ fidelity to identity politics or to their own sense of power? I think they get more of a kick seeing themselves as the stalwart wall, single-handedly holding the barbarians at bay.
In this case, of course, the barbarians are our own elected officials (the Republican one only) and anyone who suspects we may really be at war with someone more dangerous than a President who actually believes in God.
TW: “army”: as in “The US army is only a force for good when a Democrat is in charge.”
The assertion that you make toward the end here, that the progressivist idea of ‘fighting fair’ regardless of right or wrong, enforcing equality, etc.; is faulty I find highly interesting.
But in adopting this stance, aren’t we also saying “Let’s lose the illusion that we’re all created equal. You [progressivists] are forcing equality when there are situations where we’re not equal, where someone is wrong and someone is right, regardless of who’s winning or losing the battle.”
Which, at this point to me seems logical – that we’re not all equal, and neither are our philosphies, or strategies, or end goals. There is always a right and a wrong – a victor and a defeated. But then you run into problems with lesser and greater. How can someone be right, and the other wrong, without one being considered greater than the other?
I’m just kind of exploring this here. Don’t mind me.
A very interesting argument Jeff.
I think we in the west also did the Middle East a disservice after the second world war when we, in the name of “self-determination”—itself a form of identity politics, since it places a premium on the tribe, the race, or the nation in place of the individual or to notions such as the universal rights of all men—let the most despotic rulers imaginable take over the region in favor of the old colonial empires (be they the British, French, or Turkish empires). We did so on the basis that these local rulers would be closer to the people, and therefore better than the hated foreigner. But when the local rulers proved to be even more terrible and despotic than the colonial powers they replaced, we did not immediately confront these regimes and demand that they make some guarantees of individual rights.
Some of this was because of our own isolationist lack of interest (“let them sort it out”), some of it was racism (“the savages will never learn”), some of it was because we were busy with other aspects of our own survival (keeping the Bear out of western Europe and away from the oil and warm water ports of the Middle East), and some of it was because we were still enamored of the ideal of self-determination.
To what extent did/do Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism play on that? I would argue that in their rhetoric, they play it, and us, like a fiddle, because the cries of “imperialism” we hear from the left are, where they are not reflexive, a response to the propaganda of our enemies.
When actually what is going on is that we realize that the basic rights of man (the individual) are more important to our safety than the notion of tribal self-determination. It is more important that the ruler of an Arab state act justly than that he be an Arab. If Saddam is a threat, his Arab-ness is no longer a protection for him. He was a nexus of misery, and misery breeds terrorism, and terrorism is a threat to us. So Saddam has to go.
The entire Arab world might be realizing that the old rules no longer apply. The biggest threat to us is no longer the Russians, and we now have the time and interest to demand better performance from the states in the Middle East. This should worry all of them, from Qaddafi in the west to the Mullahs in the east. We reserve the right to interfere and replace regimes when we are threatened. And we now realize that what we have to replace those regimes with is democracy.
If they’re smart, they’ll recognize it as an opportunity.
This kind of argument, funnily enough, goes over worst with the people most at home with its terms and styleâ€â€second-generation, secondary-literature Foucault- and Derridoidsâ€â€because it’s their new-boss institutional hegemony getting gored.
The dread Strauss-bots know what’s up; they have similar ideas with differentâ€â€and, ironically, less misleadingâ€â€names, and they’re using them to (currently) preferable ends.
So…yeah…
Good luck with all this. I don’t find it helps to speak-a de language. It is all about power.
[You need a “Foucault spinning in his grave (in Village People cop gear)” emoticon for these discussions.]
Let me dust off my copy of “Snow Crash,” decipher this and get back to you.
habba habba lalalala lahabala la la habalalalala haba la la lalalalalala
Indecent Bill, you delight me.
I hadn’t thought of “Snow Crash” and the raftwarriors.
Would you like to become a barcoder?
I think you have great potential.
I’m trying to get my head around the concept of a combat poet
You know, this tendency of the last few months, starting around the time of Katrina, to provide some of the sharpest, most intelligent posts in the blogosphere (including many of the ensuing comments), is a quite disturbing trend to people like me who just come here for the Joo jokes about huge cocks.
This is not good at all although I did like the new glasses thing – and that SonicCare whatever has promise – but otherwise, not good.
Shinji nails the tribal aspect of Islam. Islam attempted to amalgamate various tribes into one übertribe, the Muslims. The idea was to originally remove the political legitimacy of the sheik and transfer that to Allah with the Prophet, and later the caliphs and sultans acting as the viceregents on earth. The problem though is that this was the ideal, but not the reality. There still are sheiks in Islamic society, but they are not as powerful as they once were, they used to have absolute authority but they do not anymore, the absolute authority is Allah and his law enshrined in the sharia. The sheiks still have a considerable amount of power but they cannot make up their own laws anymore. Although many Muslims do identify with Islam first, they still divide each other among ethnic and sectarian lines. Islam may encourage them to co-exist but there are still tensions that erupt into wars because the old tribalism has not been replaced completely by the new tribalism (Islam). Part of this has to do with the weakness of human nature and part of it due to history (e.g. if you want to know why Persians dislike Arabs, just look at the history between the two).
The tribal nature of Islam is rooted in Bedouin history. Bedouins liked to be free and have their own autonomy. It is ironic that the precursors to Islam loved liberty and that is the reason for decentralization. However, whenever that liberty was threatened by another people, like say the Persians, the Bedouin tribes, who were mostly all rivals, put aside their differences and teamed up to take out the invaders. After the threat was quelled, they would disperse again and become rivals once more. What can we learn from this? Well, the Muslims of today are a lot like the Bedouin of yesterday. There are many ethnic and sectarian rivlaries, but once their liberty is threatened by an outside force (liberty is defined as sharia and the Islamic way of life and the outside force is defined as the infidels, and specifically America and Israel) then they will unite in order to expell the Crusader Zionist alliance but then they will go back to being rivals again. So it shouldn’t come to a great shock to Westerners when Osama bin Laden, a Salafist, is willing to work with Saddam Hussein, a “secularist” (more accurately, a hypocrite), and the Ayatollahs, Shia (but in Osama’s eyes, infidels).
A great book that describes the culture of pre-Islamic Bedouin is Andre Servier’s Psychology of the Musulman. Chapters two and three cover Bedouin history. Keep in mind that the book was written in 1922 so it does contain some racism and inaccuracies. Although it is flawed, his assessment of what Islam does to the mind is largely correct. Definitely worth a look.
Regarding the Press:
It seems that the two basic ideologies the press hangs onto are conflicted here. When reporting on domestic news (events occuring between to interests at home), they seem to push a progressive David vs. Goliath (Joe Homeowner vs. Big Business)or Liberal idealsistic (help the poor at all costs, and you’re a mean guy if you don’t) attitude. Internationally, they serve more as a “neutral” observer. They will allow a country, or group, a statis quo, equivalent morally to what they see in the U.S. Thus, they can decry our treatment of our criminals louder than countries that will stone, lop off limbs, etc. of their own criminals.
This is the only way I can see to justify being more outraged that we invaded a country, than the fact that the country we invaded posed both a threat and an opportunity.
Fighting fair may, to them, mean that we play by our rules (or rather, their version of our rules) while our enemies, with their twisted version of justice and politics can ignore them. See your many posts about how we are expected to extend Geneva Convention rights to the very same enemy that the convention specifically distinguished as different. It doesn’t matter that Iraq was attempting to purchase the glowing thunder, or that it had possession of WMD’s, or that it was not abiding by the tenets it had agreed to. That’s just them being them. We, however INVADED.
You see, we all have a starting point, but our side, being the more “enlightened” side, must be saddled with the heavy weight of western morality (which our enemies may be incapable of understanding. Kind of, I don’t know, prejudiced, if you ask me.
*spit*
The Hitchens piece on Edward Said is subscription only.
You can view the whole thing here.
Kind of, I don’t know, prejudiced, if you ask me.
Bullshit.
Uncle Dub, on a front porch somewhere in east Texas ca. 1962: Jes’ a bunch of sand niggers doin’ what sand niggers do, an’ we ain’t gonna change that. Bes’ jes’ stay outa th’ way while they kill one another.
The words are prettier nowadays. The sentiment is identical. The proper characterization is bigotry.
Regards,
Ric
Stupendous review. I suspect however the US mainstram media are engaged in a nihilistic anti-Western campaign. As a result, we are battling both Islamofascist and Leftist illiberalism simultaneously.
I agree with your approach. It’s too bad we have to convince the press this is a nation worth saving at the same time we are trying to save it. Cretins.
Pssssssst…
There is no govornor. Anywhere.
Pass it on…
Uh, Ric,
Just to be clear? I was talking about the Press, not ol’ Uncle Dub. The excuse that the ME governments act the way they do because the peeps are incapable of understanding democracy.
Re: Hitchens article on Said
“In his columns in the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram he is scornful and caustic about the failures and disgraces of Arab and Muslim society, and was being so before the celebrated recent United Nations Development Programme report on self-imposed barriers to Arab development, which was written by, among others, his friend Clovis Maksoud. Every year more books are translated and published in Athens than in all the Arab capitals combined. Where is there a decent Arab university? Where is there a “transparent” Arab election? Why does Arab propaganda resort to such ugliness and hysteria?”
Gee I wonder why, I guess the 800 pound gorilla in the room has nothing to do with it.
“Much of secular Arab nationalism was led and developed by Europeanized Christians, often Greek Orthodox, whereas much of atavistic Islamic jihad ism relies on anti-Jewish fabrications produced in the lower reaches of the tsarist Russian Orthodox police state.”
This is wrong on several counts. Arab Nationialism isn’t only adopted by Christians although they did have prominent roles in many nationalist movements and yes they were influenced by European ideas but so were the Muslims (look at Haj Amin al-Husseini’s love affair with Nazism for example). It is also adopted by Alawites in Syria who are not considered Muslim, Arab Sunnis like Saddam who are a minority, and megolomaniacs like Nasser who dreamed of a unified Arab world under his leadership. Each group adopted Arab Nationalism for various reasons. Nasser adopted it soley for power and influence. The Alawites are considered to be not-quite-Muslim and the only way they could legitimize their power in Syria is by downplaying the Islamic character of their country and focusing on their “Arabness”. That is why the Alawaites trust Christians more in their high ranks than the “real” Muslims. Arab Sunnis in Iraq did it for the same reason, namely they were a minority in a Shia dominanted country. The phenomenon of the Islamochristian, which includes Edward Said, and their ascendance in the propaganda wing in the Palestinian movement and nationalist movements is mainly due to the fact that those are the only options available to them. They cannot join an Islamist movement because they are Christian (this includes nominal Christians) and they cannot get very far in phony secular movements like the PLO because eventhough they are secular they still have an Islamic character. Arabness is very important to Islamochristians and that is why people like Edward Said will bend over backwards to defend Islam from the “racist” West while remaining ignorant of how Muslims have historically treated their Arab Christian brethren.
Furthermore, to deny the Islamic roots of anti-Semitism is just ignorant. Tell me Hitch, do the Protocols call the Jews the sons of apes and pigs? Where does that originate from? Why does the Koran call the Jews the killers of prophets (4:155), deceivers (5:13), corrupters of the earth (5:64), and the vilest enemies of the Muslims (5:82)? Is that a European export as well? But I shouldn’t be so hard on him, Bernard Lewis makes the same error, acting as if the Muslims and Jews historically got along if it wasn’t for that blasted Zionism. They never got along, read Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen to see how the Jews were treated by the Arab Muslims for more information.
“Orientalism” is a poor work and Bernard Lewis did a good job of responding to Said’s ridiculous criticism. However, Ibn Warraq probably has the best critique of Orientalism and it can be read here. It should be noted that Edward Said knows nothing about Islam, absolutely nothing, yet he still feels he is able to criticize its coverage on whether it is “balanced” or not. The fact that Hitchens thinks that Orientialism still has some worth is very telling. I’ll never forgive that bastard for helping Said write “Blaming the Victim”. To act as if the shock troops of the lesser jihad against Israel are the real victims is morally reprehensible. Said should be laughed out of town, as should Hitchens for putting up with his crapthink.
For the record, and as long-time readers know, I find the philosophical and linguistic underpinnings of Orientalism to be dangerous and logically incoherent.
I provided the link in the post simply as a background.
jeff-
your insight and explication have in the past two months vaulted to a new level. You tackle ideas as no one else does. I applaud your work! Keep it up.
Tom M,
Just to be clear, I too was talking about the Press and the Left-liberal Establishment.
They tawk purty, but the things they’re saying in such a sophisticated way are—my mother used to say “ugly as home-made sin”, and that about sums it up.
Regards,
Ric
Curious indeed that a “humor blog” (see 2005 webblog awards) such as this is capable of such deep and insightful analysis and thought provoking commentary….perhaps the humor is only a lure to draw the unwary and innocent within reach of Jeff’s memetic plagues.
Well, I’m not sold on any of this, though I’m beginning to convince myself there might be something to it.
Thanks for the kind words and criticisms.
What does fighting fair have to do with identity politics? That paragraph was very hard to follow.
I also think you overestimate the influence of postmodernism and poststructuralism (which significantly waned in the 90s).
If I read you correctly, you’re arguing that we need to abandon fighting fair and instead use easily digestible memes (i.e., propaganda). We can ethically do this because truth is on our side. Is that about right?
If so, I don’t see what’s controversial. Propaganda has been a crucial aspect of warfare for ages now.
Perhaps you’re also saying that the media now need to abandon the moral relativism that is the root of their uncertainty that we have the moral high ground (or that moral high grounds could even exist). Instead, the media need to accept the propaganda at face value, because we do have the moral high ground, and otherwise the propaganda will be less effective.
That, basically, would be an argument against a free press, which I doubt you’re making.
Anyhow, that’s just not going to happen. We’re going to have a free press for the foreseeable future, and that press will do its job, which is to shine a light on government tricks. And the government will do its job, which includes trying to trick the press during war. And it will be a healthy balance, as it has been for a long time now.
I feel like I’m missing something, but I have a graduate degree in political philosophy and I’ve read your post twice, so you’d think I’d be able to follow along.
Care to clarify?
Not really, no. And I can assure you that when I was studying hermeneutic theory at Cornell’s School of Crit and Theory in the late 90s (alas, my grad work was in a different field from yours) poststructuralism hadn’t waned at all; instead, its kernel ideas about how language functions—which is a regular topic on this site—had simply been folded into “new” critical paradigms with different names so that the next generation of lit theorists could assert their own authority over the texts of others.
If it helps any, though, your summary of my post is way off. Perhaps you’d better just give up on this one if you couldn’t get it after two tries. And maybe think about demanding some of that tuition money back.
Ah, “Crit and Theory.” That explains that.
Well, if you’re interesting in following along, my thesis is that the way we believe language to function has a very practical impact on our public policy.
You can start here and follow the links backward to get some idea of where I’m coming from.
lol, another adept in evil. ;-0
Derrida is not so dead after all.
look how that tricky Den Beste-sama portrays the noble press doing its job.
You will not get far as a memetic engineer if you believe memetic engineering == propaganda.
Perhaps you could read something on the biomechanics of belief before further revealing your ignorance.
Jeff,
Before going any further in a discussion with “Left Behinds”—suggest you check out his webpage and a few of his posts in your comments section from 10 Worst Americans Ever
#1—“1) Barbara Bush
For (one way or another) squeezing out of her otherwise airtight hooch the most despicable political dynasty in American history.
Posted by Left Behinds | permalink
on 12/27 at 09:45 PM”
#2—“I just am not sure that even under those circumstances the Manhattan Project was ethically justified, considering the long term consequences.
Posted by Left Behinds | permalink
on 12/28 at 04:06 AM
#3—“This might be the most juvenile board I’ve ever posted on, and I also post on a board called Gaytard.
I’m off to a different sandbox. Enjoy mindlessly reinforcing each other’s identical opinions. Thank you to whoever sent that article from the New Republic. Reading that made my sojourn to Protein Wisdom not a complete waste of time.”
Posted by Left Behinds | permalink
on 12/28 at 01:34 PM
Don’t believe there would be much of an open minded discussion.
I totally stand by everything I said in that thread. You guys were having kneejerk, juvenile reactions to my very anodyne comments (such as “if the Rosenbergs are implicated in the nuclear arms race, isn’t Oppenheimer, as well?”).
The only dumb thing I wrote was in this thread, and only because I was sleep-deprived and staring dumbfounded at some of this critical theory talk. I basically tried to translate it by stringing together a very simplistic argument using some of the same words you used, but that turned out to be a less than successful gambit.
In analytic philosophy we just don’t understand all this French talk.
I don’t believe I used any French talk. I think you tried to slap your intellectual penis on the table. Otherwise, why the mention of your advanced degree?
Anyway, as I noted, you can backtrack through the argument if you’d like. If you don’t like the jargon specific to semiotics, skip it. But do me the favor of not pronouncing on something you haven’t bothered to follow.
Boner of Zion-
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Man, I remember the days when gay S&M was for fun, not for literary criticism.
Wait…what did I just say…
t/w: “keep: as in, “Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.”
Cheeks—as in “Left Behinds”
anodyne = bland, insipid, tame, dull, antiseptic, inoffensive
Not sure your comparison of the Rosenbergs to Oppenhiemer is a “very anodyne†comment.
an(o) – negation
dyne – energy
therefore: anodyne – without energy
FWIW, I have nothing but a BA in theater and an MBA in accounting. And I have no problem following Jeff’s post.
Give the kids some Fiddy Cent to memorize and they won’t have time or inclanation to memorize the Qu’ran. Let them chat up the girls, they won’t want to stone them to death. Give them a chance – just a chance – at sex in this life and they won’t want 72 virgins in heaven.
Maybe I’m the stupidest person in the room, but it seems obvious to me.
RT has just nailed it. Unfortunately, I don’t know how we get there from where we are–although it does seem obvious that replacing despotic regimes with democracies could be a good first step.
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