A concept developed by Erik Erikson. He indicated that children who have secure attachments with their parents have a general sense that the world is predictable and reliable (this is basic trust). This basic trust, according to Erikson, is formed by loving, sensitive, care givers and not from genetic makeup or to a continuously positive environment. (Amplification here and here.)
Along with Basic Trust, a child's mind develops in close contact with their parents' minds and it is a late developmental milestone for a child to recognize that not everyone's mind works just like theirs does. People who develop Narcissistic characters never fully grasp this idea on an emotional rather than intellectual level.
Civilization allows for a wide range of mental arrangements but there are certain fundamentals without which civilization could not exist. I have often quoted Freud's famous aphorism:
"The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."
The requirement that is inherent in this aphorism is a baseline assumption that the stranger you are meeting will not do you harm without warning. Thus, men could shake hands, recognizing that the absence of a weapon meant that if violence was going to ensue, it would be preceded by talk.
Yesterday, Sigmund, Carl & Alfred posted a provocative (as in thought provoking) essay, discussing Why I Hate Islam. It is not what you might expect:
My hatred for all things Islamic stems from the truth that one of the people I admire most in the world is a Muslim. After 10 plus years, I can say my friend is the singularly most decent, honest and kindest person I know.
My friend believes in God, without equivocation, and my friend is outraged at yoke that must be borne by true Muslim believers because of the disintegration of Islam. The shame of many- but not all, who go to mosques to pray, cannot be measured. My friend describes an unwritten code and language decent Muslims share, so that they might find each other. They are too frightened to speak freely and they are too frightened to stand up to the bullies that have taken over the mosques and Islamic schools. They are the messengers of those that have redefined Islam.
These evil people are bullies, plain and simple. They are 'gang members' and agents of people in far away places that have an agenda of hate and destruction. In truth, allowing political and religious leaders in the Arab world to redefine Islam is equivalent to allowing gang member inmates to redefine what is America and what are American values.
The sad truth is that the situation is even worse than S,C&A suggests. The authoritarian and totalitarian leaders of the Muslim world, in their evil cynicism, have created conditions in the Muslim world in which their mirror images, vicious Islamist Imams and terrorists, have thrived. The only reason countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan offer any help to us in the war on Islamic fascism is that the Jihadists made the mistake of biting the hands that feed them. The world of Islam has shown itself to be extremely reluctant to confront the bullies who control their public face; this is understandable to some degree, but the danger to them is increasing daily.
Americans tend to be extremely tolerant people. After 9/11, despite the propaganda from groups like CAIR, there were very few real acts of bigotry directed against Muslims in this country. The assumption Americans make is that others share certain basic values. We all agree to meet each other with open hands. There are exceptions, of course, but the exceptions are treated like the criminals and thugs they are and locked up rather than aggrandized as Martyrs and heroes. President Bush made the assumption that the Arab world and the Muslim world was inhabited by people like us in that they would greet strangers with open hands and not tolerate criminals and thugs if we gave them the breathing space necessary to form a civil society. We have lost over 2000 of our finest young men and women in a noble mission to give a quarter of the world's people the breathing space they need to become modern people.
A series of events have been created and/or high-jacked by the worst in Islam, and the question now is whether or not this is the majority of Islam. Starting with the Iraqi insurgency that seemed to relish inhuman and inhumane behavior, many began to wonder if Iraq, and indeed if the entire Muslim world, was beyond Modernity. The Paris car-burning, the cartoon riots, the torture murder of a French Jew, Ilan Halimi, by Islamic barbarians, the destruction of the Golden Mosque; all these events have pushed more and more Americans to a tipping point.
Tipping points in complex, dynamically stable, but chaotic systems can never be predicted with a high degree of accuracy, but we are moving closer and closer to the tipping point, the point at which the zeitgeist will crystallize around the idea that the Muslim world is irredeemable.
The case of Abdul Rahman is a test of the fit between the modern world and Islam. Afghanistan is a country that we liberated from the grip of an evil theocracy. (For those who are confused about what a real theocracy is rather than the theocracy some imagine exists in this country, Kobayashi Maru has a primer on his site today.) Baron Bodissey describes the trouble that Mr. Rahman has found; he is a man who converted to Christianity many years ago and has now been denounced by his family. Under the constitution that we helped the Afghans forge, he is subject to Sharia law, which in the interpretation of the fundamentalists in Islam requires death for the apostate. I imagine Hamid Karzai wishes this whole problem would just go away and there are some who believe that by declaring Mr. Rahman psychotic, he will be spared execution. This does not fill me with jubilation. Many American families would be unhappy if their relative converted to a new faith; some would go so far as to cut off contact with the Jewish or Christian apostate; none would try to murder the wayward relative with state sanction. Today, the Baron posted more on the case, in response to a comment on last night's post, and pointed out the essence of Islam's conflict with modernity:
First of all, I refuse to be drawn into arguments about the bad things that Christianity did hundreds of years ago. I’ll stipulate to them, and I’ll let historians argue about which religion was the most brutal and bloody in 1000 AD or 1500 AD or whenever.
I’m interested in now. The fact is that right now Islamic states are the only religious polities which imprison and execute people solely for their religious beliefs. The other states which do this are either the Orthodox Atheists (i.e. the Communists) or the ordinary despotic dictatorships.
Christians and Jews and Hindus have their own histories, and all have been guilty of sectarian brutality. But all of them have evolved into modern nation states with a general tolerance of religious plurality.
But not Islam. Wherever Islam is officially established as the law of the land, not being Muslim is punishable by law in one way or another.
Like it or not, the modern tolerant secular state was a creation of European Christendom, channeling the ethics of Judaism. Somehow the Hindus and Sikhs managed to assimilate it and develop their own versions, but so far the Muslims have not been able to.
There is no way around it: Muslims states around the world cannot tolerate those whose minds work differently than theirs. And those of us who do not want to submit to Islam have begun to build walls to keep their viral menace out: India is building a wall in Kashmir; the Europeans are building a wall in North Africa; the Israelis are building a wall in Palestine. Americans are building metaphorical walls, with many pushing for the construction of real walls.
It has become clear in the opening rounds of this war that the extraordinary difficulty in successfully mid-wifing the birth of a tolerant, multi-communal society in the Muslim world means that further efforts of this kind will not be supported by the American people, which means that there are really only three options left in this war, a war which will continue for many, many years no matter what we do today:
1) The Muslim world can take advantage of the opening our troops have granted them; they will then Modernize and join the rest of the world in the 21st century. They have much less time than they think to pull this off and I would not want to bet on the outcome being positive, though I continue to hope for it.
2) The free world of modern civilizations will build walls to keep them out. The Muslim world will spin into intractable inter-communal violence and occasionally spill over into the West, where it will be met with a disproportionate, violent response.
3) The Muslim world will manage to provoke a truly apocalyptic response (by succeeding at another 9/11 level atrocity) in which case, at least some parts of it will be "bombed back into the stone age."
Most importantly, the choice is not ours; we have done all we can to offer them a way out. Unfortunately, some people are so committed to their hatred, their projections, their envy, that they cannot allow even a tiny glimmer of light to raise questions about their assumptions.
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