Posting at Dean’s World, Dave Price has a number of interesting observations about the latest Cartoon War—and what it augurs for the west.
Writes Dave:
There’s an infamous event in Christian history in which Galileo was forced to recant, under the threat of violence from clerics, his heliocentric model of the universe. Ultimately, reason won out and the heliocentric model was allowed to be discussed and of course is now universally accepted. But suppose instead the Church had organized riots, smashed all the telescopes, and forbidden the study of astronomy specifically and scientific inquiry generally, suppressing Tycho Brahe’s painstaking and detailed measurements that allowed Johannes Kepler to formulate his laws of planetary motion which formed the basis of Newtonian physics that the Industrial Revolution was built on, creating the unprecedented improvement prosperity, technology and living standards we enjoy today, and (not incidentally) ultimately spreading Christianity across the globe. It’s fairly obvious in retrospect that doing so would have been a tragic error of great historical consequence.
So why did the Church initially resist Galileo’s ideas, despite the empirical proof? Because, of course, they saw those ideas as a threat to their power.
Similarly, anything that mocks Islam or contravenes its rules is not just a challenge to radical clerics’ authority, but also an opportunity to rally the faithful to a religious cause and thus increase their power. And thus in this cause they’re seeking to apply force to modify our society’s behavior, which is properly the sole domain of our democratically controlled states, subject to restriction by principles like free speech.
At this point, you’ll expect me to launch into another explanation on precisely how identity politics, particularly the “official narrative” ascendent within each group, provides the perfect conditions for such wills to power (and a corresponding surrendering to perceived “authenticity” on the part of those confronted by it, leading to an Orwellian brand of “tolerance” )— particularly when it is combined with an intellectual decenteredness and cultural relativism that is manifest in multiculturalist social dogma borne of a misapprehension of postmodern philosophy.
But instead, I’ll just say this: if we don’t start insisting that our culture return to its classical liberal roots and excommunicate dangerous collectivist social constructs, as well as correct what are becoming ingrained misunderstandings of the linguistic turn, then we are sure to lose not only this war—but the soul of our country, as well.
That is all.
Well…you know..Gallileo did have the planet running around in circles.
Jeff, out of curiousity, what’s the difference between interest-group politics and identity politics?
Or, maybe better, when does something stop being an interest group (like-minded individuals working together towards an agreed-upon goal) and start being an identity group?
No small part of the challenge for the Copernican/Galilean heliocentric model was that the solution provided less accurate predictions for the motion of the planets than the contemporary Ptolemaic systems.
The stunning power of the heliocentric was in its beauty, and not its predictive power. Like today, the little rodents of tyranny chewed and stank and crapped out their scattershot “evidence” to try to bring down the glorious idea. Theirs was “identity science”– a Frankstein’s monster cobbled together from retrograde wheels that approximated reality through the use of caveats, buts, and corrective action.
It was not until Kepler’s startling application of the ellipse that the heavens opened up. Would that there were such an egg to crack upon the heads of the fascists of the left.
May I suggest that ridicule is a powerful weapon, and we should all be using it fearlessly against those wishing to restore the caliphate? Yes, I may. So I do. Here is Mohammed sticking his tongue out…. @
TW: mother, as in “Mother, may I ridicule Muslims?” “Yes, dear, this is America, after all!”
Well, first off, identity politics is based on a form of implicit essentialism. And when one defines oneself by his or her membership in a group (the common factor being race, ethnicity, gender, or a common belief in a divinely ordained message that is metaphysically unassailable) and insists upon special dispensations for the group based on certain perceived rights / grievances accorded to the group (and has the corresponding power to excommunicate or render “inauthentic” those who share superficial similarities to group members but who refuse to accept the official group narrative)—one is engaged in identity politics.
Whereas when someone who participates in interest group politics stops participating in it, they have simply ceased to support a cause—and are not routinely characterized as ‘race traitors’ or ‘inauthentic blacks’ or ‘self-hating Jews’ or ‘women living in denial.’ And that’s because their connection to the interest in the first place was always thought of as arbitrary rather than essential.
This is an extemporaneous answer, but it more or less captures the distinction, I think.
Well that was one f’ed up emoticon I typed there. Anyone else want to try?
TW: miss, as in “Close, but a miss.”
I’ll try:
A Muslim walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long vest?”
That’s not funny, al. Prepare to meet the consequences. You shall burn in the hellfi…
… hey, pie!
Interest-group politics is much more narrow. Not that people involved in interest groups cannot be quite determined, if not fanatical about it, but the focus is usually on something a bit more specific and …um, finite? I.E. in Illinois, there was a group that got together to push the first attempt at tort reform. The bill passed and was signed into law – they packed up and dispersed. It isn’t as if CAIR would look at the Constitution and say – “Oh, Amendment I. We’re good everyone!” And dissolve…
Okay Steve. Will it help if I spread the wealth a little?
Two Catholics walk into a gay bar and one turns to the other and says, “Remember, we’re only going to have one drink.”
Slightly OT, but not by much…
I was listening to Glenn Beck this morning, and was shocked to hear him agree with Comedy Central in their decision to censor the picture of Mohammed on South Park. His reasoning? It’s a stupid cartoon show, and it’s not worth risking riots and killings over a stupid cartoon show.
So, I guess terrorism works after all. Who knew?
Now pardon me while I look for the world’s off switch.
Comedy Central has basically told Donahue at The Catholic League and Don Wildmon at the AFA that their silly tactics of boycotts and letter writing will get them nowhere. Instead, they should consider violence. It seems to get the job done.
Hmmm.
Why is “chum” both a term to describe blood and fish guts used to attract sharks *and* a term used to denote a person is a friend?
sw: I hope they teach this shit in college.
Every American or coalition death, every innocent Iraqi or Afghan death in this conflict is a tragedy for the people who loved the dead, and those of us who haven’t lost anyone personally can mourn at a distance, so to speak, for the loss of a life even if we have no connection to it. But it’s the Zero Tolerance for Casualties! thing that we seem to have acquired somewhere along the line that renders us so willing to roll.
Do others cringe whenever an American hostage is taken and the Bush Administration reminds us that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”? I do; and I’m absolutely a hawk. It must be a terrible feeling to have to say, on international television, that the policy of the United States, which the President could change if he wished, is to allow a hostage to die rather than to sharpen the single arrow in the terrorists’ quiver – our fear that we’ll be next. But it has to be done, or we’re all hostages rather than just the person being held.
If Comedy Central had run the episode uncensored, they would now be on the record as implying that a certain level of civilian casualties (that being the important metric in asymmetric warfare) is acceptable, and that’s an unusually outspoken position for a corporation to take. Instead, by censoring it, they have implied that the principle of free speech is less important than a single American (or employee, thinking smaller) life, which reveals (or seems to reveal) us as people ruled by principle-defeating fear, rather than people of principle that no fear can defeat.
Shorter: I understand why they did it, but my God, is our society really so cowardly that we think it’s worth scrapping a right formerly viewed as essential in order not to increase infinitesimally our risk of untimely death?
What was that Ben Franklin quote again?
I just want to know how you did it, so I’ll be prepared next time a comment thread is just one Moby licking a toilet bowl short of perfection.
Testing…
@https://www.proteinwisdom.com/images/smileys/rasberry.gif
ARRRRRGH!
The Reichwing Hate-osphere ate my
uterusIMG SRC tags!You could just as easily say they’re currently on record as implying that a certain level of civilian casualties (in the form of auto accidents to and from the office) is acceptable. Or a certain level of casualties due to lightning strikes, wolverine attacks, or any other statistically relevant or irrelavent event, is acceptable. That formulation seems to me nonsensical.
More meaningful would be the statement that terrorists have gone on record as saying a certain level of civilian casualties are acceptable. And that Comedy Central has gone on record as saying a credible threat of violence will control their programming decisions.
There you go. How much is it worth to you?
At the time, there was no “empirical proof” regarding heliocentrism. It was a rational enough idea, but fact is, the proof wasn’t there yet. Nor was heliocentrism a new idea; the Church had sponsored much astronomical speculation in that regard. Galileo got in trouble not because of his ideas but because of his unnecessary use of these ideas against Scripture.
I realize that my remarks may seem pedantic and even OT, but the whole Galileo story is its own sort of lie and should not be used in the good cause of fighting the jihadis and identity politics…
South Park and Comedy Central are important in two ways. First they, like Borders, show us a limitation inherent to our society. Expecting a fictitious person, in the form of a corporation, to show greater backbone than any real human being is unrealistic. As a first, or even last line of defense corporations are all but useless. Second, and more importantly, South Park is the proverbial canary-in-a-coal-mine. Rather than dissect the particulars of the episode and Comedy Central’s actions we should be more concerned about what it says of the general environment in which we exist.
DaveS.
By far the most shocking moment on TV this season was the 2-hour finale of a popular drama where the punchline was that the guy had no dick and they still blurred it out on the show’s 9pm cable time slot.
alppuccino: Why is that joke funny? Because Catholics are secretly up for anything? I’ll take any religious joke any day. I just don’t like being outwitted
“And still I delve further into this quite passable bottle of Michigan semi-dry white…”
Oh, wait, that’s me. Heh. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Jeff, perhaps getting our culture [to] return to its classical liberal roots and excommunicate dangerous collectivist social constructs, as well as correct what are becoming ingrained misunderstandings of the linguistic turn is the real war that is being fought. Even the liberation of Iraq is merely a hot battle in that war.
Turing Word: main, as in you’re my main man.
It seems to me all political ideology boils down to
reason and responsiblity on one side, and emotion and security on the other.
The reason I asked about interest vs. identity politics is because I’m not convinced that there’s a bright line there.
Collectivism is an essential part of American democracy, as noted by Madison, de Tocqueville, etc; the “associations” among citizens that AdT found so remarkable nurtured the American soul, and this blog is part of that tradition. As much as Americans revere individualism, collectivism, from the Pilgrims to the religious revivalists to the unions to the Rotarians, is every bit as important to the nation’s development.
From what I see, the race-based “identity group” and the local anti-tax activists are part of the same tradition.
Where Americans seem to draw the line is when authority over the collective leaves the members’ hands. To take a broad example, I think Americans hate the idea of “socialism,” not because they oppose collectivist action (in which they engage on a daily basis), but because they oppose unaccountable leadership (the Soviet model).
And Jeff, what you call the hallmark of “identity” politics are symptoms of leadership that can’t be help accountable, because members aren’t in charge, but instead authority is represented by a
Leaving leaders free to act in that power’s name, excommunicating the infidel, etc.—in other words, non-democratic.
So in a way, what I get from your description is that what you oppose is cultish behavior—collectives in which the power to define the mission is removed from the collective’s members, while they simultaneously lose the ability to choose whether to participate or not (“essentialism”). That this happens in religious settings is obvious; the secular equivalent is Soviet, in which everyone was a member of the state but no one had the right to gainsay the leaders who acted in the people’s names.
I think we all agree that unaccountable leadership is dangerous.
But does the term “identity” politics accurately describe the kind of cult collective that troubles you? I’m not sure that it does, in part because it seems to me that there are legitimate idenity-based gripes that demand indentity-based solutions. Again, an extreme example: Jim Crow. You’ve got laws that discriminate based on identity. So the law creates an idenity group, and it’s perfectly understandable that black people would join together to fight that law. Or take homosexuals; both law and culture combined to define what they could and could not do, so the homosexual community adopts a political agenda and a series of groups to oppose it. Is that inherently evil? I don’t think so.
What I get from your description of the difference between (good) interest groups and (bad) idenity groups is that it’s the behavior of the leadership that ultimately determines where a group falls on the good-bad continuum.
If the leadership acts like a bunch of assholes, setting some quasi-divine mission and excommunicating anybody who doesn’t get with the program, it’s bad.
But that’s true whether one’s talking about an interest group (a union boss, a creepy pastor, a bad-faith anti-tax zealot) or an identity group.
After all, an interest group are just as likely to:
I mean, that’s what interest groups do. We may like or dislike their particular agendas, but we live with them all the time without losing our national “soul.”