ShrinkWrapped

Hugh Hewitt Debates Tom Barnett

Readers of my blog will not find it surprising that I think very highly of both Hugh Hewitt and Tom Barnett.  They have been engaged in a particularly interesting debate about the War in Iraq. 

Tom Barnett insists that we cannot midwife consensual democracy in Iraq and our presence can, at best, slow down the pace of the inevitable ethnic cleansing that must take place before a stable Iraq can emerge.  In addition, he assigns a fair amount of blame to the Bush administration for, essentially, their neglect of the realpolitik that he espouses:

Why the killings to follow will all be blamed on Bush

Bush let the Sunni-Shia civil war unfold by waiting too long to surge the necessary numbers.

Bush THEN accelerates a fight with Iran on WMD, despite his intell community's judgment that Iran is 3-5 years away from fielding a bomb.

By doing that, and prepping the American public for military strikes with Iran, Bush not only loses popular support at home (sheer fear over a premature escalation and spreading of the war) but encourages (!!!!) Tehran to push as hard as possible in its proxy war in Iraq, so as to keep us diverted and bleed our troops. THAT Bush decision kills ours troops unnecessarily.

THAT Bush decision also encourages (!!!) Riyadh to counter in Iraq with its own effort. That effort also unnecessarily leads to American troop deaths.

Finally, Bush refuses any serious diplomatic surge to accompany the troop surge, and that means he's led America into a strategic cul-de-sac: we either preside over slo-mo ethnic cleansing, losing troops unnecessarily along the way, or we watch it go faster from the sidelines. Either way, our credibility in the region plummets. If we lose enough Americans in this idiotic pathway of Bush's stubborn creation, he'll singlehandedly kill American popular support for a long-term presence in the region. Those deaths that follow will also sit on Bush's head.

Hugh Hewitt has fundamental differences with Tom Barnett and his conclusions flow from a contrary set of assumptions and expectations:

On Moderate Muslims, Continued

Over the last few days, in response to my post A Recurrent Theme: On Moderate Muslims there has been another in a series of fairly intense and well thought out discussions concerning the existence or non-existence of Moderate Muslims.  The tone has been civil throughout though those who suggest that Islam is irredeemably violent and immoderate sometimes come close to a nihilistic position. 

Ken Spiker, in particular, makes an eloquent case for the problems with Islam arising from the toxic combination of the most intolerant and radical explication of Islam and primitive child rearing techniques:

Islam is a religion and a political ideology and on the surface it might seem possible to change people's minds once the advantages of, reason, liberal democracy and free markets are demonstrated to them. But Islam, like other cultural and ethnic systems, is also a style of child rearing, pre-conscious and therefore unaccessible to rational thought. ...

... Criminals, psychopaths, for the most part, are created by bad (sometimes horribly bad) parenting and genetic factors, none of which are cured by either reason or a better environment. Sometimes the factors can't be known, but the character distortions that result in psychopathic behavior are rather permanent and incurable. The same with Muslims--there's something twisted in their family dynamics that is impervious in later life to reason or experience. How else can one explain that it's Muslims, and only Muslims, who are are sufficiently motivated to blow themselves up in order to kill innocents? In my opinion it would have to be more than the persuasion of ideas, which are the catalyst, but do not in themselves supply the overwhelming emotional impetus to do such hideous acts or even to condone them. Naturally there are Muslims on whom the distortions of personality that characterizes Islamic emotional style are more or less severe. Some must be reasonable and free from ideological certainty. ...

There are books waiting to be written on the intersection of tribal, primitive child rearing and Islamist ideology and violence against infidels; unfortunately, there is a limited amount of material readily available upon which to base a thesis but the connection seems more than plausible.  Nonetheless Ken, perhaps unknowingly, leaves a large "out" in his thesis. 

A Recurrent Theme: On Moderate Muslims

When I write about our current struggle with Radical Islam, I try to maintain a careful differentiation between the Radical Islamists (Islamic fascists) who desire to kill as many of us as possible and impose their will upon us, and those "Moderate" Muslims who are more willing to live and let live.  On a fairly regular basis, such posts are met with comments that are variations on a theme:

Moderate Islam is an oxymoron.  There is no such thing as Moderate Islam.  Islam itself is an imperialistic, intolerant, and murderous ideology. 

Sadly enough, such comments may be accurate, if we accept the words of such an authority on the subject as the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan: [HT: Snouck Hurgronje]

PM Erdogan: The Term “Moderate Islam” Is Ugly And Offensive; There Is No Moderate Islam; Islam Is Islam

Speaking at Kanal D TV’s Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term “moderate Islam”, often used in the West to describe AKP and said, ‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

This is especially disheartening when we consider that Turkey has been the shining light of an Islamic democracy.  Yet I would propose a radical notion of my own:

Even if there is no such thing as Moderate Islam it is in our best interests (and the Muslim World's best interests) to act as if the distinction is valid.

I have written about Moderate Muslims on many occasions.  I have discussed the parallels between "Good Muslims" and "Good Germans":

An Emerging Consensus?

While I am still not ready to resume daily blogging, a serendipitous combination of events have led me to the tentative conclusion that we may be seeing signs of an emerging consensus.  To that end I will be posting a book review, a magazine review, and some conclusions that offer support to the contention that Western elites are beginning to recognize our common interests and beginning to come to grips with the need for a more unified approach in the war against Radical Islam. 

Last week I finished reading The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West by Lee Harris.   My initial impression was of disappointment.  I thought Harris did an excellent job of offering a historical overview of the development of the modern Western liberal political philosophy based on Reason and of the current threats to that tradition which are inherent in our over-valuation of reason, yet I also felt that his arguments would not add much to the debate.  Those who were already convinced would find little they did not already know, though his presentation added detail and a historical context to the argument, while those who would most benefit by becoming engaged in the discussion would be unlikely to read such a book.  Two things have given me some optimism that we may be seeing the beginning of an emerging consensus about the current conflict between the West and Radical Islam.

Yesterday, the cover of the New York Times magazine section was devoted to Mark Lilla's The Politics of God.  Where Harris focused on the difficult journey toward Reason as the prime organizer of society, Lilla focused on the inverse, that is, our difficult journey away from Religion as the prime organizer of society.  Both approaches are complementary and both are necessary to understand the space that Radical Islam occupies in the world. 

The other events that feed into my argument, that we can glimpse the outlines of an emerging consensus linking most of the Right and Left in the preeminent ideological struggle of our times, can best be described by two vignettes over the weekend.

On Saturday night we had dinner with some old friends we hadn't seen in a while.  They are both Pediatricians, eclectic thinkers, quite intellectual, and well versed in Reason.  Dave is the head of a Neonatal ICU and Kathy runs a Pediatric ICU.  They are reliable New York liberals faced with a problem.

"Man by Nature" and Our Evolving Meta-Psychology

Each generation finds its own best fit "theory of the mind" using current technology and scientific understanding.  When Freud developed his metapsychology he was heavily influenced by recent discoveries in science and technology, especially in regards to the nature of electricity and its behavior.  The similarity of electrical flow and hydraulic flow led him to postulate a metapsychology filled with concepts of conflicting pressures (instincts versus repression, for example.) 

Someone developing a metapsychology today is much more likely to attempt to integrate cutting edge neuroscience, cybernetics, and information technology.  Adam Leonard, in a very readable series of essays does just that in Man by Nature.  The subtitle of Adam's book is "The Hidden Programming Controlling Human Behavior" and he does a respectable job, as might be expected of (as described on the book's back cover) an "Engineering Scientist whose vocation has been programming computers to analyze and display engineering data, and whose avocation has been analyzing human behavior based on the research published in the life science fields."

As luck would have it, my particular metapsychology has been heavily influenced by computing science in combination with Psychoanalytic metapsychology.  Furthermore, the exponential leaps in our knowledge of neuroscience and the organization of the brain are leading us toward an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the structure and function of the brain; as we increase our understanding of the brain, our understanding of the mind follows.  I have written before (here, here, and here especially) of research in neuroscience which supports some of the basic tenets of Psychoanalysis, especially related to concepts such as the dynamic unconscious, self-object differentiation, and identification.  As long time readers of my blog know, I see our conscious, rational minds as existing in a thin and rather friable crust atop a sea of irrationality. 

Last Tuesday, in the Science Times, in Who’s Minding the Mind?  Benedict Carey reported on more evidence for the existence, if not primacy, of an unconscious mind: