Inbreeding tends to accumulate genetic defects and as it continues through several generations often leads to animals that are less robust than their progenitors. As an example, consider the increased prevalence of hip dysplasia in Golden Retrievers.
The opposite of inbreeding often results in offspring which are more robust than their parents, a tendency referred to as Hybrid vigor. This has been found in domestic plants and animals as well as in experimental models, though it is not a universal outcome.
The same phenomenon can occur in the world of ideas. In science, the hybridization of different disciplines often leads to novel insights and entirely new fields of scientific inquiry. Recently I reviewed The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor and discussed some of the ways in which Andy Kessler imagines the continuing fusion of IT and Biology. Out of such a hybridization, we will all be living longer and healthier lives.
Unfortunately, as with all things human, there are ways in which such hybrid vigor threatens all of us. Last week, Armed Liberal at Winds of Change raised some questions about the provenance of Islamic terror:
Some Thoughts On Violence, Suicide, And Bad Philosophy
I'm going to talk about Bad Philosophy, violence and the threats of violence and suicide. I'm trying to make an abstract philosophical point, not to comment on the specifics of threats, violent acts, or specific suicides.
His post pulls together numerous strands, from recent news to philosophical musings. He posts brief quotes from various people who attempt to explain their disaffection with the West, and remarks on the apparent inner emptiness expressed:
These are all positions that come from a kind of spiritual hole, and seek to fill it with strong - even violent - action, as the purest expression of a self that is somehow battened down by the world.
I've believed for a while that the violent strains in Islamism come more from an infection with this Western disease than from intrinsic issues within Islam - although those issues may provide a fertile ground for the infection.
I don't think - and have never thought - that it is limited to Islam, though. I think there is a strong strain of it in the West as well. And recent events have brought that to mind.
While I can't speak for Armed Liberal, I would suggest that the fusion of Western Utopianism (which has been curdled in the cauldron of Existentialism, Deconstructionism, and Marxism) and Islamic Utopianism (curdled in the cauldron of the Muslim's worlds failures to modernize) have bred a virulent form of Ecstatic Terror that the West remains poorly prepared to combat.
[Dr. Sanity has also addressed the subject of Ecstatic Terror, especially in her post, Union With An Evil God.]
In many ways the West no longer has the necessary tools with which to combat the ideology of the new Leftist/Islamist hybrid. In fact, I would argue that it is our very success as a culture, with our freedoms and material wealth and ease, that renders our young particularly susceptible to the disease.
Armed Liberal arrives at this conclusion:
I've got to believe that it's rage, and a rage that really, really wants to pierce the banality of things with violent, orgasmic action. And it's a rage of the privileged, because it is the more bitter rage of the child against the parent; rage against that which made you, which comforted you, and which you know you owe a debt to, but somehow can't seem to agree to pay.
Why should the privileged children of wealthy cultures, who grew up without privation or deprivation, be so enraged?
I have seen many patients through the years who describe their parents as having provided everything they needed materially; there was nothing they wanted that they didn't have. Yet they almost uniformly described an aching hole in their core, a hole that nothing could fill. New and desperately desired "things" would offer a moment's bliss followed by the return of the desperate desire for something more. Promiscuity, drugs, and alcohol could all, for brief moments, fill the inner void, but never to any lasting extent. There are many pathways to arrive at this kind of empty desperation, and Psychiatrists have come up with various conceptualizations for it, but whether you understand the void as related to a dearth of emotional involvement from distant parents struggling to provide their children with all the material goods they could want, or the lack of adequate maternal mirroring in the offspring of Narcissistic characters, the explanations all point to the same final, common pathway:
Such people have no dependable core of their own and their chronic frustration and rage at a world which refuses to satiate their desperate inner hunger cannot be contained but must be externalized.
When the rage is externalized, all it needs is a coherent idea to give it meaning and shape. Islam, par excellence, is an ideology of Meaning. After all, by submitting to one's God, there are no further questions; all questions have been answered.
Perhaps at one time vulnerable children could have found Meaning in their religion, but our Western elites have managed to destroy religion as a source of inner strength for too many. Without meaning, they have nothing, which is the core of nihilism. Modern Multiculturalism and the deconstruction of Western reality has left too many of our elites with no fixed beliefs; nothing they believe has any meaning beyond their belief that nothing has any meaning. There is one exception for the Left:
All cultures are equal except for Western Civilization , which is evil and the source of all that is wrong with the world.
The suicide bomber is the apotheosis of all these trends, the ultimate fusion of Western and Islamic Utopianism/Nihilism. Armed Liberal links to an interview with Pierre Rehov at the Counter-terrorism blog in which the film maker of the documentary "Suicide Killers" reveals from where his fascination with the subjects derive:
What inspired you to produce “Suicide Killers,” your seventh film?
I started working with victims of suicide attacks to make a film on PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) when I became fascinated with the personalities of those who had committed those crimes, as they were described again and again by their victims. Especially the fact that suicide bombers are all smiling one second before they blow themselves up.
Many years ago a Psychoanalytic study described similarities in psychopathology between children of the very poor and the very wealthy. Among both groups there was an over abundance of emotional fragility and neediness, often overtly denied. In both settings the children grew up feeling emotionally deprived and neglected (and often there was actual neglect by absent parents.)
It is no coincidence that children of failed societies which are supported as dependent victims by the International elites should find common ground with the emotionally deprived children of the Wealthy Western elites. All it has taken to make the toxic brew come to fruition in the West is the potent virus of Islamic fascism.
I recognize that this is incomplete (for example, the role of libidinal contributions is left out altogether) and over-stated in places (not every child, or even most children, of the wealthy turn to radical Marxism or Islamism) but on the margins vulnerable members of wealthy Western societies which offer little in the way of alternative sources of personal (Western Civilization-derived) Meaning present fertile ground for radicalization by the siren song of Islamic Meaning.
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