The Brussels Journal takes a second look at the French Intifada from a more sociological point of view that dovetails nicely with my post yesterday. In The Writing on the Wall, Alexandra Colen points to some of the inter-generational aspects of the Intifada, which are blinding the authorities, once young counter-cultural revolutionaries themselves, to certain aspects of the struggle which should cause them to reflect on what they are doing, but probably won't. As she writes, the 60's radicals who rejected the crass materialism of their parent's generation are now being rejected themselves, and don't recognize it.
Those same cultural leaders, who still think of their own behaviour almost four decades ago as heroic and justified, find it hard to condemn the rioting “youths” of today. They are now condoning those who hate and despise them, because in their own secular “jihad” against the last remnants of the conservative Christian culture of Old Europe, they think that the Muslim immigrant “youths” are their allies. Hence, they fail to see their own mortal enemy. Conservative Christians and others who do not worship secular “multiculturalism” are branded as intolerant, racist xenophobes and laws are made to silence them. In doing so, however, the liberal establishment is feeding the beast that will eventually destroy it.
She concludes that these "youths" have no interest in being assimilated ("co-opted") into the system:
The “youths” burned down schools and sports centres because they perceived these for what they are: attempts to lure them into the culture of Western liberal society. From this point of view all the policies promoting integration and participation, equality, education and employment, especially when they are shrouded in liberal, “tolerant” rhetoric, can only be interpreted as insults to their dignity. They are Europe’s future because they are its youth, and they know it. The liberal media, by unqualifyingly describing them as “youths” confirmed this for all to see. What we witnessed in France in the first half of November 2005 was the writing on the wall: Europe’s Mene Tekel Upharsin – Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
The post is an excellent read and it also illustrates something that I do not think most writers, including myself, have emphasized enough. That is, that there is never a single cause or single explanation of an action which can completely explain it. All human behavior results from the interplay of internal forces, within the participants, conscious and unconscious, in a complex interaction with external forces which can be understood from multiple viewpoints, social, cultural, economic, religious, etc.
In Psychoanalytic thinking, there are two crucial concepts which can offer useful ways to organize one's thinking. They are the idea of multiple determination, and a corollary to this, compromise formation. What these ideas encapsulate is, essentially, that any and every behavior can be best understood as the result of many different forces coming together (the multiple determinants, such as various desires, drives, and wishes, along with prohibitions, fears, and anxieties, conscious and unconscious) with the ego or executive machinery of the mind, finding a way through the maze of competing wishes and fears, internal and external, to arrive at a behavior (the compromise) which can successfully accomplish what the person desires.
When writing we naturally tend to focus on a limited part of this equation and often will disagree with what part is most important at any particular time. It is almost always useful to discuss the relevance of the various threads and perhaps the blogosphere, by facilitating just such a discussion, will help determine the best approaches to solve the problems; perhaps the blogosphere can help us put this all together, a function which in the mind we refer to as the synthetic function of the ego.
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