Cobb

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May 06, 2004

DenBeste's Three Forces

These paragraphs capture the nut of a nicely spun analysis of where three ways of thinking about the world turned on the events of nine-eleven.

Both p-idealism and Islamism deeply fear empiricism. They also resent and envy empiricist success. Both of them have a fundamental belief that they themselves were entitled to that kind of success, and to some extent feel as if empiricists have somehow stolen it.

So when a group of Islamists culminated a series of terrorist attacks against the US with one which far surpassed any other I've ever heard of in causing death and destruction, p-idealists in Europe and Asia and domestically within the US saw it as an opportunity, not a threat.

The best possible outcome, from their point of view, would have been for the attack to shatter empiricism's hold on the US, allowing p-idealism to take over. That, ultimately, was what the whole business about "ask yourselves why they hate you" was about; that was why there was a lot of expression of sympathy and commiseration, but with a strong tone of condescension and recrimination, in the three weeks or so after the 9/11 attacks.

Part of current p-idealist political dogma is a new "post-modern" idea of transnationalism, where nations (and nationalism) are seen as bad, and a rise of world governance run according to Socialist principles would replace the existing system. In this new Utopia, deep political disagreements which led nationalists to go to war would instead be settled by diplomacy and/or mediation. And the reason why that would work was because it was obviously elegant and clean; thus according to teleology that meant it would work. (And empiricist arguments to the contrary based on historical analysis and game theory were irrelevant.)

I am clearly an Empiricist in just about every sense of the way denBeste describes it, but as a conservative, I am attracted to the idea that there is a fixed notion about what is good in humanity. Although I agree that new value is created and destroyed in markets, I don't like the idea that these are the measures by which human value ought to be based. Therefore to the extent that p-idealists or islamicists insist that there is a teleological aspect to the human soul, I must agree.

And I think it is only upon reflection on the massive evil error of Stalinism which puts this into perspective. An Empiricist shouldn't need to be prompted along these lines. "How evil is the extermination of 20 million humans?" "I don't know, let's investigate."

Again I have some difficulty resolving this apparent contradiction between what I see as the value of religious conservatism, which is from my perspective the conservation of the idea of a transcendent soul, and that of Empiricism, scientific inquiry and the idea of Progress. When I speak of the notion of religious conservatism, I mean it in the context of my complaint against Hitchens. Or as expressed at the dictionary site denBeste references, over the interpretation of 'immanence'. I hope you can get the context for the commentary about Hitchens and I:

Briefly, I would say that the idea of a Social Contract is predicated on the belief that man has a soul - that there is some transcendent value in human beings. I would argue that before the discovery of non-zero sum games, it was indeed a leap of faith that anchored altruism. People hoped 'enlightened self-interest' would work better en masse, but they couldn't prove it. But the inclination towards it was for the betterment of society which originates in the populism of Jesus and continues with the individualism of the Reformation.

So while I buy into denBeste's thesis, I would also like to hear a bit more about the history on the Islamicist side. What exactly is the nature of the perversion of Islam into Islamicism from their own interpretation of history, or is it merely the error of Fundamentalism as Karen Armstrong suggests? Certainly there must be something to their religious beliefs that propose immanence in parallel with ours.

Islamic republics can be democratic. Witness Iran which has more females in parliament than we have. I can't help but believe we are missing some details here.

Posted by mbowen at May 6, 2004 01:29 PM

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