Many people have commented on the apparent incongruity of the de facto alliance between the left and radical Islam. On the surface, there appears to be little point of agreement between leftist atheists who are strongly feminist and favor homosexual rights and those who adhere to a fundamentalist Islam which advocates death to immodest women and gays, yet in the deeper structure of both ideologies, there are significant similarities which do much to explain their alliance.
[Digression:
First, a short digression concerning infantile development. Freud was the first who posited an oral stage of development in the infant. Pre-natally, an infant was imagined to be in a state of complete fulfillment; the infant in the womb would not experience hunger or thirst, feel too cold or too hot, or have any experience of deprivation or privation. Once born, the new-born infant, having been torn from the paradisaical sanctuary of the womb, was seen as a nascent individual who lacked an awareness of the distinction between the self and others; he was thought to be at the mercy of his inner drives and completely dependent on the ministrations of his mother to re-create the experience of satiety that was all he knew for the womb; the nursing experience was the paradigm for the infant, first suffering form the pain of hunger, only to be picked up, cuddled, and offered the breast to relieve the pain. As the infant grew older he slowly developed a sense of separateness and began to recognize that his discomforts could only be relieved by his mother (initially related to as a breast.) Those Psychoanalysts of the British school who followed and developed Melanie Klein's theories, suggested that the youngest child divided the world into the good breast, which gratified all needs, and the bad breast, which frustrated all needs. The bad breast became an object of hate and rage for frustrating the infantile wishes to return to the sate of bliss that was once his lot.
As the child grows older, healthier children are able to synthesize and integrate the loving/gratifying and hateful/frustrating maternal objects (the breasts and eventually, as all the various images/representations of the mother begin to cohere) into a single object, Mother. Children whose development is impaired by a disturbed mother or congenitally derived low tolerance for frustration, would have difficulty with this syntheses; this is the genesis of the Psychological defense known as "splitting." Such children would be very prone to decompensate and regress in the face of frustration and descend into a state of incoherent, oral rage. Psychiatrists see this in situations where Borderline Patients feel neglected or frustrated; we also commonly see this in situations where addicted patients demand drugs and are denied. Occasionally there are terrible stories in the news of addicted individuals who turn on the people who have offered them shelter and murder them in crimes of intense rage and passion. Usually, this follows the parent or grandparent finally setting limits and refusing to continue enabling the addicts substance abuse.
Digression over.]
The shared structure of the left and the Islamists is a belief that the natural state of the world, if only they can create the conditions amenable to its development, is a world in which their most basic desires are fulfilled. The Islamists imagine a restored Caliphate in which they rule over all and take whatever they desire. Their ideology allows, demands, that all infidels serve them, that infidel women are fair game for their desires, that the infidels must pay them the Jizza (tax) to support their material desires. Further, the premise of martyrdom is the granting of all desires in Heaven to the Shahid who will receive his 72 virgins once he dies in battle. When the real world fails to gratify their desires, rage is the response.
Similarly, the left believes that in their Utopian vision, there is no want. "To each according to his needs" is the credo of the infant desirous of the safety and security of the womb; the imagined place where there is no want and no one is frustrated. There is no need to describe how many millions have already perished in the service of this Utopian dream. It is also no surprise that leftist "pacifists" have no difficulty expressing their rage at those who do not see the wisdom of their ways and frustrate their desire.
Consider one area in particular where the left and the radical Islamists meet: Palestine.
The founding myth of the Palestinian people is that they were living in blissful peace, happy, and untroubled, when the colonial overlords from Europe, white Jewish infidels, came into their land and stole their paradise on earth away from them. Since 1948 they have yearned to return and push the Jews back where they came from.
In contrast, the founding myths of the state of Israel include the idea that the starving, half-dead survivors of the worst trauma of the 20th century came to their ancestral home with barely the clothes on their back, fought off 5 Arab armies to survive, and then built a great nation out of the desert.
Even for those who find fault with either narrative, it is worth asking the question: which view is more likely to lead to a successful society?
Submitting to oral rage and directing one's hate at those who you imagine represent a cold, hard world that fails to gratify your every wish, is a way to maintain one's status as a victim. It has worked for the Palestinians since at least the early 1970s, yet it has only led to the death of many Israelis, many more Palestinians, and the hopeless situation I described in my post yesterday. The Palestinians look backward (as do the Islamists) to a fantasied Utopian past, which leaves them bereft of a future. No amount of effort by the Palestinians will ever achieve what they want. Even if they destroy Israel, they will be left with a nation built on hate and death and, just as in Gaza, will next have to turn on each other when their Utopia fails to materialize and gratify all their desires. All they will have is a Dystopian Pit of Despair.
Israel's founding belief, that through hard work and dedication you can achieve anything by your own labors (a sentiment shared by the Israeli left, center, and right, despite their many differences) is a prescription for a dynamic society in which the future is welcomed. No one will give you anything, no one owes you anything; you must work for what you want and create it and sometimes fight and die for it. If this sounds familiar, it is because Americans, by and large, share with Israel such beliefs, and that is what joins our fate to theirs in so many ways.
Recent Comments