The End of Reason

I have been working on the next installment of my Cultural Insanity series and it is on the way, but since posting the first part I have seen something related to it that I would like to report as a separate post. Frankly, I have been a little distracted by monitoring the response to my first Cultural Insanity post; after all although I was trained as an anthropologist and not unfamiliar with psychological theory, in making the analogy between a personality disorder and two very different cultural sub-groups, I was treading on somewhat unfamiliar ground.

I was elated when ShrinkWrapped, a psych-blogger whom I respect enormously picked up on my ideas and posted a not unsupportive discussion of it mixing in material fro Dr. Sanity and Victor Davis Hansen. of it.

A day or so later Solomonia put up a post citing the video of a classic television confrontation between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and “an anti-American Canadian interviewer”, Avi Lewis of Canadian Television.



Lewis, in this clip, personifies the smug, self satisfied, passive aggressive argumentation style of the “progressive left”. But the very slickness of his approach combined with the emptiness of his arguments alerted me to something that I had never realized before about the way they argue. I saw immediately that I had identified another aspect of the psychological blindness that the lefties and Islamists have in common. It points back to my original diagnosis of Borderline Personality.

… They (the left and the Islamists) focus, as Avi Lewis does in this interview,on picking out isolated examples of widely disapproved of, squalid and reprehensible behaviors from Israel, America and The West (as when Lewis says “they shoot abortion doctors in the US”)and insisting that they are proof that we, as nations and a civilization, are not living up to our high ideals. Thus Israel, The U.S. and the west is held to account for an idealized, utopian standard of perfection without margin for error. The fact (and they never stoop to dispute the fact) that Israel, America and the west in general are far better in comparison to the rest of the (far more squalid and reprehensible) real world is avoided when possible and brushed off as rationalization when unavoidable. In the event that it is pointed out forcefully that the rest of the world is so much less democratic and desirable and that it is always an option to leave and that no one leaves- in fact, America is still the great magnet of immigration it has always been as Hirsi Ali does here the leftist will always shift the subject. Lewis counterattacks with a jocular but passive aggressive suggestion that she must have had to go to a special school to learn “these American clichés” as part of her application process”. This begs the question which Hirsi Ali asks this dope- "why don't you and your leftist friends go somewhere else?" Naturally, they'll never admit it but there IS no other place that they could tolerate and there is certainly very few that would tolerate them.

For the sake of accuracy I must point out that what I described in the last three sentences above did not occur as I first described it in that comment. What Hirsi Ali actually said was that she did not believe Lewis’ description of the plight of Muslim Americans was nearly as dire as Lewis described it to be. And she offered the opinion that if they were truly feeling under siege that they would do what other people all over the world have done when they have felt to be under siege, they would move away. She pointed out that there is no such population movement as this taking place and that there would not be. The first time through I had thought that I heard this exchange to include a challenge to Lewis on why he persists in living in a western country. I was mistaken. I believe that if she had made that challenge, the exchange would have gone much as I outlined it.

After seeing this post and responding to it in the comment stream I continued to reflect on this new insight into this essential similarity in tactics between the Islamists and the left. It was beginning to occur to me that there was something else, something deeper that I had not reached yet.

Meanwhile, for two days the comment trail on ShrinkWrapped’s post had been quite supportive- until someone with the screen name copithorne wrote a comment using a tactic out of the same family. Since I quote copithorne’s full comment in my reply I’ll let my reply speak for both…

A two sentence fisking:

copithorne says:

"Diatribes about "the left" in which no "leftist" appears -- no quotes, no policy positions -- are expressions of projection of a disowned shadow."

I say:

Leftists who don't bother to read a sincere analysis thoroughly enough to observe that it actually began with a live example of a leftist argument and then label such analysis as “diatribe” are intentionally projecting their own aggressive rejection of discourse on the conservative analyzer. It is not necessary (in informed and reasonable circles) to have exhaustive actual quotes of Hitler’s hate speech to know that he was a genocidal anti-Semite. It is not generally in question that Lenin and Stalin tried to institute a paradise of the workers by slaughtering, starving and persecuting them in their millions. Just so, if characterizations of the left hit their mark and sting to the degree that the only feasible defense seems to be a trivial
pettifogging by attacking the lack of “quotes” and “policy positions” it means that he has no real rebuttal for the characterizations themselves. It is a disingenuous trial lawyer’s trick to subvert meaningful point/counter point with meaningless "discovery” of inconsequential minutia. Note that he neither actually points to a faulty idea nor does he contradict anything ShrinkWrapped, Dr. Sanity, VDH or I say. If there is a disowned shadow in the neighborhood I say copithorne might do well to look and see if it’s connected to his own feet.

copithorne says:

This currently seems to be the total sum of contemporary conservative politics -- the appeal of having enemies on which a person can project material of which they are unable to be self-aware.

I say:

Who is projecting here? All I see is customary leftist rejection of all contradiction to his “ideas” on any technicality no matter how flimsy or arbitrary. It’s the pedant’s refuge, rejecting the student’s ideas and labor because they are beyond him with the
stinking hypocrisy that his footnotes are in the wrong format and his bibliography is not long enough.

So, up to this point, I have been concentrating on understanding how this method worked on a practical level. Now I had begun to see clearly that it was not just intentional blindness to (and twisting of) the the reality of the situation but, in fact, reflected the selective vision of splitting and dissociation. Assuming the unearned and undeserved position of moral, spiritual and intellectual superiority they are not open to dialog but insist on ignoring what we say and either “correcting our papers” or rejecting our thoughts and ideas on technicalities.

Then, on the blog Cuanas, I found another posting of the Lewis/Hirsi Ali interview with this comment posted by a fellow named Irfan Yusuf.


Irfan Yusuf said...

So let me get this right. This woman has little or no knowledge of the varieties of religion or communities she criticizes (apart from her own Somali upbringing).

She was caught by the Dutch telling lies to gain migration status. She told Ian Buruma that she committed "immigration fraud".

And now the Americans are lapping her up as some kind of long last(sp) daughter. Had she not been so anti-Muslim, you'd have tossed her in immigration detention yourself, if not in Guantanamo Bay (heck, her name is "Ali" and that's a common Ayrab (sp) terrorist name, isn't it?).

I can't wait to see how your evangelical conservatives behave when you realize (sp) she is pro-abortion and wants those teaching creation science to be thrown into prison.

What I see here is more like squirming to keep from seeing the truth. At a loss to prove Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrong or even mistaken about anything, Irfan does a crazy little Islamic tattletale dance (oooh, look she is a baaaad girl! Don’t talk to her! Don’t listen to her!) while at the same time accusing us of being blindly anti-Muslim. Here is the answer I posted:

Mr Yusf, exactly how much do you have to know about a bunch of communities in which the leaders and the apparent majority of the citizens consider anyone who worships a different God less human, practice honor killing, celebrate the killing of innocents in terror attacks and vow to make the entire earth into a Caliphate where everyone will be subject to the terror of Islamofascism in order to be qualified to criticize them? Something tells me that when her co-filmmaker and friend Theo Van Gogh was butchered in the streets for the film they made together and a threat against her was pinned to him with the murder weapon she earned the asylum of the United States of America.

If you think a technicality like a lie she told in order to insure her own escape from the hell of living under Islamic rule is going to persuade us to think less well of her you are even more blinded by your cultural disease than most of your compatriots. It’s pathetic that you write it as though we might think that it invalidates what she says and writes. Is that all you've got?

I should also have pointed out to Mr Yusuf that even if some of the more literal minded Christian evangelicals do not find her positions on abortion and evolution to be in agreement with theirs, they will issue no fatwas calling for her death, neither will they justify trying to treat her as a second-class citizen for it. Oh well, he wasn't really listening anyway...

I have been trying to pull this all together in my mind and, in the end, I keep remembering a short, pathetic little comment on ShrinkWrapped’s post that I had ignored as twaddle at first. The commentor’s screen name is Post Hole Digger, which I assume means he is a PhD in something.

Huh, here I thought that what I wanted was to see a world of peace and kindness,and to do toward others as I would want done toward me. I am now ashamed to admit, but I even thought that was actually a good thing. But now you explain that I'm really just insane. Instead of virtues, I have a grave psycho/emotional dysfunction. I just never realized.

This is not twaddle, it is the cry of a lost soul. Post Hole Digger is right, only his sarcasm is misplaced. Both Islamism and Leftism are attempts to see a world of peace and kindness. That is very nice to say but the unfortunate fact is that this is not a world of peace and kindness. There is no such world. This is a world that contains peace and kindness along with hatred, love, avarice, generosity, violence and cruelty. Both Leftism and Islamism are nothing more than ideologies that pretend to be able to control and rationalize the unfathomable complexity of life.

To anyone not enmeshed in their borderline systems the actual out come of their utopian schemes, proven out in the past, is obvious.

The Islamists would have their Caliphate where everyone and everything would submit to the will of Allah. That sounds OK until you ask who is interpreting Allah’s will for us. As it has turned out in the past, it has most often been the most bloodthirsty political infighter or conqueror capable of rising to the top of the Shari a system who has gotten to say what’s on Allah’s mind. The best that The Caliphate has been able to offer in the past has been the more moderate, slightly less megalomaniacal son or grandson of the deceased bloodthirsty political infighter or conqueror.

As for the poor, deluded lefties like PHD, they are destined to be frustrated by their efforts to help their fellow man. But for all their talk about equality, sharing, peace, love and understanding, if put to the test of leadership, they would, like all other leftist/socialists who have ascended to leadership (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc…) turn to violence, coercion and despotism out of their exasperated zeal to reform humanity against its wishes and nature. It is not insane to do toward others as one would want done toward one's self- that is a great moral principal- but it is insane to assume that others are on the same program and have the same vision of what is good.

Lorraine Ali's Travesty in Newsweek

Dennis Prager, who is a hero of mine, has a nice response to the now infamous review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Infidel”. Prager gets some of the details wrong (see comments)but he nails the historical comparison just right..

I’d like to add my say in the form of an address to Lorraine Ali. This is based on a comment I left on Prager’s article.

Dear Lorraine Ali,

Toward the end of your review of Infidel, you unconsciously betray the fatal flaw in your rhetorical stance when you write:

“Hirsi Ali is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women. That's problematic considering she describes herself in "Infidel" as a woman who "fights for the rights of Muslim women, the enlightenment of Islam and the security of the West." How can you change the lives of your former sisters, and work toward reform, when you've forged a career upon renouncing the religion and insulting its followers? Hirsi Ali says overhauling Islam is not her responsibility: she just lays out "the facts" and leaves it to others to go about fixing this supposedly broken faith.”

You have missed the point completely. Here is the point Lorraine, pay attention this time: Hirsi Ali is NOT A MUSLIM ANYMORE. She left because her experience with Islam was worse than the death she has been threatened with for leaving. Yes, even after her friend, Theo Van Gogh who was director and producer of her ground-breaking film, Submission was brutally murdered on a public street by a Muslim man, she had the courage to speak out in public and fight for what she believed to be the truth. She believes that Islam at its core is dangerous and repressive. She is telling the world what she thinks and why she thinks it. She has no interest in reforming Islam. The responsibility se feels toward her former sisters is to urge them to leave too. Hirsi Ali’s experience tells her that she cannot, as you do blithely dismiss the connection between Islam and the “patriarchal society” and “messed-up people” YOU blame for her life experience.

Lorraine Ali, you, who have grown up in America, sheltered by the finest example of free society the world has yet seen, have no idea what it is to be Hirsi Ali. You have no right to imply that she should work from the inside and fight for reform. How do you have the presumption? Women across the Islamic world are hanged, raped, beaten, stoned, stabbed and shot to death every day just for being women- let alone speaking up about inequality.

The final giveaway is that last phrase "leaves it to others to go about fixing this supposedly broken faith." Oh, Lorraine, don't look now but outside of the posh Mosques you might have been raised in here, most mosques in the world are seedbeds of hatred, repression and vile prejudice. Not a day goes by that they don't call for death to America, The Jews, the Bahais, the Dutch etc... According to many if not most Islamic clerics the majority of the people in the worlds are no more than pigs, dogs and monkeys. In Islamic countries the women and children are systematically terrorized (see my last two posts). This does not strike you as broken?

Just as Catholicism was during the Inquisition, Islam IS a faith that has become seduced by power and convinced that it has God’s blessing to convert, kill or subjugate every human being on earth. The Catholics grappled with their demons and are now a civilized sect. I would rather not have to wait several centuries for Islam to follow suit.

It is true that we have nothing to fear from you while you live here under our laws but what if your Islamic Mullahs had their way and there was a world-wide caliphate… Think about it. You’d no longer be allowed to peddle your silly, self important “criticisms” of western music to Newsweek, Rolling Stone and GQ. There’d be no glossy magazines and music store would be fire bombed by the world-wide Taliban.

Also, I’m not sure you know this but the Mullahs say you can’t quit if you want to. According to a preponderance of religious authority in the Islamic world, if you are born a Muslim and decide you no longer want to be, you are automatically a heretic and under death sentence.

And you? You’d be allowed (provided you kept your westernized trap shut) to hide yourself under 30 pounds of burkha and hope that your husband/father/brother/uncle is in a good mood.

If that is not broken, what is?

It is Way too Small a World!- at least for women in Islam...

Back from Disney!
My boys had a fantastic time and I got some time to think and renew. My primary reaction I is, “What a great country this is!” The place was jammed- you couldn’t stop walking with out having several people pile up behind you. In spite of long lines and fierce competition for places, I didn’t hear an uncivil word spoken all week. This has to be the most courteous and genuinely gracious group of people in the history of the human race!

I did find one thing a bit unnerving though. I refer to the ride “It’s a small world”. I wasn’t put off by the kitsch- I find that entertaining and cute. No, I tolerated that alright. I had, after all, resolved to make an effort to leave behind my usual critical edge and try to see the whole thing through my sons’ eyes.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it’s a Small World it’s a pretty typical Disney ride for the younger kids. You get into a little boat and you are floated along a sort of metaphorical stream that carries you past what seems like dozens of dioramas filled with animatronic figures representing a very broad sampling of world cultures. In each diorama a host of child-like animatronics, dressed in appropriately ethnic garb, serenades you with the tune “It’s a Small World”. In every setting there is some distinctive lilt or syncopation or inflection added to give the song an ethnic flavor. That was OK, I suppose, but then, toward the end of the ride, we came around another one of the bends in that “world river” that ran through all the settlements of the worlds children and we came upon an Arab grouping. There they were, with their veils, turbans and harem pants singing,

“There is just one moon and one golden sun
And a smile means friendship to everyone.
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small small world”

The thought occurred to me that the problem with multiculturalism might be deeper than I thought. Here we are teaching our kids to unconditionally offer to accept the good will of people who are not even remotely friendly.

We have fallen for the ideal of multiculturalism without thoroughly understanding what it is or what it requires. Multiculturalism comes with the benign sounding proposition that “society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural groups, with equal status”. The trap in multiculturalism is that it offers uncritical acceptance of foreign influences that may be illegal, immoral or injurious to society. It leaves to door open to everything from sickening animal sacrifice rituals to culturally sanctioned beating and murder of women. In doing so we have mistaken the maxim that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” for its evil twin “no opinion is any better than any other”. Now we are faced with a sizable portion of the Islamic world that calls us the “Great Satan” and believes that every single one of us should either believe exactly as they do or be killed. Yes, killed.

So who are these homunculi at Disney World who are lulling us and our children with this lethal lie of one world with a single dream of harmony? They are our wish that we could, by being of sufficiently good will, make them see that our way is better and that they should subscribe to our common dream. They are not about to do that though, and we need to temper our uncritical good will with a real defense against their evil.

Do I think that Disney should change the display to leave the Arab scenes out? Am I advocating that they turn them into a more realistic display where the children are being taught to chant "death to America, death to Jews!"? I am not sure that either is either possible or advisable. There are other things we need to do immediately however.

The first thing we need to do is to rethink our taboo against looking with a critical eye and speaking openly about other cultures and religions. We need to make value judgments on the basis of what we can see.

Consider the words of Ayaan Ali Hirsi, in her acceptance speech when she was given the Martin Luther King International Brotherhood Award, she said: “Human beings are equal; cultures are not.” Hirsi herself is proof of this. Since she fled the Islamic culture in which she was raised and westernized herself she has become one of the most powerful and sincere defenders of Western ideals. She has also earned a death sentence (fatwa) from Islamic clerics for her outspoken opinions.

Hirsi told an interviewer “Almost nobody in the West wants to understand that Islam's problems are structural. Contemporary Islam hardly exists. Islam stopped thinking in the year 900 and has stood still for more than a thousand years.”
Hirsi’s point of departure is Islam’s treatment of women. Here is another quote from that speech:

“I am being acknowledged here today because CORE wants to take Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream beyond racial inequality. CORE wants to be a platform from where the greatest inequality of our time, perhaps of all time, can be battled.
This is gender inequality: an inequality most obscene, expressed through acts such as mutilation, beatings, rape and murder--and almost all this aggression is justified in the name of culture and creed. Atrocities committed against girls and women in the most intimate setting of all: in the home; by dad or mom; by a brother or a sister; by a husband or his mother. The sort of persecution I talk about is one in which the religious leaders, the politicians, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers, all share the staunch belief that girls--that women--are born of a lesser god.

I was born into this culture. And I stress my emphasis on the word “culture”.
When I first came to a Western country, I was astonished to find men who said, "Ladies first"--yes, ladies first. I was amazed because I was born and raised in a culture that put me last because I was born a girl; where I was confined, because of my gender; where all the burden of what is considered good sexual conduct was for me to bear because I am female.”

We must believe her, we must try to use our critical faculties before it’s too late.

Everyday it’s too late for thousands of Muslim women who are mutilated, beaten, raped and murdered.

We also need to look at ourselves differently. Hirsi can help us get started there too. Instead of exclusive focus on negatives and shortcomings we need to recognize that we are the world’s best hope. Hirsi puts it this way:

A culture that celebrates femininity is not equal to a culture that trims the genitals of her girls.
A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confines them behind walls and veils.
A culture that spends millions on saving a baby girl’s life is not equal to a one that uses its first encounter with natal technology to undertake mass abortion simply because baby girls are not welcome.
A culture with courts that punish a husband for forcing his wife to have sex with him is not equal to a culture with a tribunal that decrees a young woman be gang-raped for talking to a boy of an allegedly higher caste.
A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that flogs or stones a girl for falling in love.
A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once.
A culture that protects women’s rights by law is not equal to a culture that denies women their alimony and half their inheritance.
A culture that insists on holding open a position for women in its Supreme Court is not equal to a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half of that of a man.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial equality has become a reality for some and remains a dream for many. It has become a reality for the few people privileged enough to live in this culture that values the human individual regardless of race or gender. It is this culture that provides me with the vocabulary, the legal tools, the material resources, the platforms, and most of all, the opportunity to meet like minded individuals who will stand for the rights of those fellow girls and women who haven’t been as lucky as me or you.

It is within this culture that it pays to fight for equality.
Unfortunately, it is this culture that is under threat today. Many of those born into it take it for granted--or worse, apologize for it.

So dear men and women of colour, and dear women of all colour: Let’s join together to protect this culture of life, this culture of liberty, this culture of "ladies first."

As a first step, lets stop apologizing. Then we can begin working on a firmer grasp on reality.