On Sunday, Richard Landes reminded me of an article by Danial Pipes from December of last year which described How the West Could Lose. Pipes noted three major weaknesses that the West has in fighting against the Islamic fascists.
(In an interesting discussion at Breath of the Beast, Yaacov Ben Moshe refers to the enemy as Caliphate Islam.)
Pipes describes pacifism, self-hatred, complacency and elaborates on all three points in his article, which is well worth reviewing. I would concentrate on complacency, since that is the primary danger that arises from the apathy of the majority, especially on the liberal end of the political spectrum. I do not see them as evil, or in league with the enemy, but I do find most liberals to be intellectually lazy and complacent; many have commented here that when people write notes that disagree with the thesis that we are facing an existential danger, they rarely address arguments with any facts or take issue with particular points, rather they typically make ad hominem arguments and/or simply assert that the dangers are overblown and the result of the cynical politics of fear. I agree with Pipes that their complacency puts us all in danger; as Pipes puts it:
Complacency: The absence of an impressive Islamist military machine imbues many Westerners, especially on the left, with a feeling of disdain. Whereas conventional war – with its men in uniform, its ships, tanks, and planes, and its bloody battles for land and resources – is simple to comprehend, the asymmetric war with radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters and suicide belts make it difficult to perceive this enemy as a worthy opponent. With John Kerry, too many dismiss terrorism as a mere "nuisance."
• Islamists deploy formidable capabilities, however, that go far beyond small-scale terrorism:
• A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.
• A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.
• An impressively conceptualized, funded, and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill, and electoral success.
• An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians. The movement almost defies sociological definition.
• A non-violent approach – what I call "lawful Islamism" – that pursues Islamification through educational, political, and religious means, without recourse to illegality or terrorism. Lawful Islamism is proving successful in Muslim-majority countries like Algeria and Muslim-minority ones like the United Kingdom.
• A huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10% to 15% of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.
How is it that so few people's minds are changed by argument? We claim to be rational beings and pride ourselves on our rationality, yet if we are truly rational, then good arguments would defeat fact-free exercises in "arguments from emotion" that pass for debate in our current climate; the fact that so few can be convicted to question their basic assumptions, let alone change their minds and/or admit uncertainty, speaks for itself. [This comment can certainly apply to both right and left, but I would submit that I rarely see reasoned argument from the left these days.]
This reminds me of a proto-typical experience among first year candidates in Psychoanalysis.
During the first year of training, Candidates have already been in their own personal Psychoanalysis for at least a year and at some point during the year, start their first case. We learn to interpret psychological defenses first, for without our patients first understanding how they deceive themselves they have no hope of learning why they deceive themselves. Typically, we mix interpretations of defense with interpretations of impulses and wishes, and interpret how such wishes are expressed in the analytic situation, ie within the transference. I can recall the first time a patient experienced a mutative interpretation, ie an interpretation that led to true emotional insight and allowed them to begin to make fundamental changes. At the time, I did not appreciative the full significance of the event but did appreciate a delicious bit of irony that accompanied the insight.
My patient was a young woman with significant Narcissistic pathology (would my readers expect anything else?) As part of her pathology, she expected disapproval from everyone and anyone around her. I spent many early sessions pointing out to her that she was extremely self-critical, that she assumed everyone else was as critical of her as she was, and that she imagined I was judgmental of her even in the absence of any evidence for such an attitude on my part. Her typical response was that she couldn't help it if I didn't like her and that most people found her difficult. She knew she was difficult and could be arrogant, but that was because so many people are so limited. She didn't think she was particularly difficult on herself, but could tell that other people found fault with most things she did, just as her Father had when she was growing up. She knew that I didn't think she was a good patient; she could tell by my silences that I didn't think she was doing a good job. She wondered if she was too stupid to be in Psychoanalysis. (She has a PhD today.) This went on for several months. I must have interpreted her self-critical attitude 50 times in 50 different ways. It was, at times, exasperating. I was a young, inexperienced Psychoanalyst, the material seemed absolutely clear, my Supervisor kept suggesting new ways to say the same things, and there was no progress. Until she could understand this particular dynamic it was unlikely that any real analytic work, which depends on being able to examine oneself with some modicum of self-reflective objectivity, could actually be successfully accomplished.
And then, one day ti happened.
My patient came into the office, lay down on the couch, and proudly announced to me that she had figured something out. She had suddenly realized that she was incredibly self-critical. She watched herself constantly and was unforgiving of any flaws in anything she did. It made it impossible for her to actually listen to the content of my interpretations since all my comments just felt like criticism. She triumphantly added, "why didn't you ever tell me that?"
WHY DIDN'T I TELL HER THAT??? I had told her 50 times! Luckily, I knew enough not to race to my own defense. It was a powerful learning experience for me. This young woman had an intense emotional investment in maintaining her view of herself. This view, a complex mix of positive and negative self-representations, with a need for perfection and concomitant intolerance of error, was intimately connected with her relationship to her parents and would not be abandoned easily; it involved her very concept of who she was. To question any aspect of her make-up was to question everything about her. It took months of work to show her all the myriad ways in which she defended herself against self-knowledge. It took months to build up a strong enough working relationship, a therapeutic alliance, for her to feel safe enough to allow insight to occur. Finally, her fragile self-esteem could barley tolerate admitting ignorance about herself; the insight could only be tolerated if she took it as her idea, not mine and not derived from me. Eventually much of these dynamics became better understood, but no progress could have been possible without her first recognizing that her own sensitivity to criticism stemmed form within and interfered with her ability to learn.
Too many people are complacent today because their political beliefs have become part of their self-concept. The liberal who needs to see himself as part of a group that is more caring, kinder, gentle, more peace-loving, will have a terribly difficult time questioning any of the reigning liberal shibboleths.
9/11 was an interpretation of the most stark kind, a traumatic interpretation, if you will. The SS Cole, the first WTC bombing, the Imams on the plane are all less traumatic interpretations, but interpretations nonetheless. Most recently, we have seen new interpretations made by the Iranians, committing an act of war by seizing British Sailors and Marines. We have seen a new low of depravity with the use of children as props to commit a terrorist bombing targeting innocents. Dennis Prager describes, in New Form of Evil Is Why America Has Not Won Iraq War how we are slowly learning about the enemy, as they continue to make the interpretations we need to understand who he we are dealing with:
If America had to fight an insurgency directed solely against us and coalition forces -- even including suicide bombers -- we would surely have succeeded. No one, right, left or center, could imagine a group of people so evil, so devoid of the most elementary and universal concepts of morality, that they would target their own people, especially the most vulnerable, for murder.
That is why we have not yet prevailed in Iraq. Even without all the mistakes made by the Bush administration -- and what political or military leadership has not made many errors in prosecuting a war? -- it could not have foreseen this new form of evil we are witnessing in Iraq.
That is why we have not won.
There are respectable arguments to be made against America's initially going into Iraq. But intellectually honest opponents of the war have to acknowledge that no one could anticipate an "insurgency" that included people leaving children in a car and then blowing them up.
My experience as a Psychoanalyst suggests that many people will require many more interpretations before they are able to see more clearly the enemy who is threatening the foundations of the civilized world.
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