ShrinkWrapped

Islam and Democracy: Part II

Whenever I post on such topics as Moderate Muslims and Islam and Democracy, I receive numerous comments supporting the contention that there is no such thing as a Moderate Muslim and that Islam is incompatible with democracy.  There is little doubt that any form of Islam that supports Sharia law is, in fact, incompatible with democracy.  For the purposes of this post, I will even go further and agree, for argument's sake, that the vast majority of Muslims have incorporated some of the most egregious tenets of their religion.  Let us assume that they believe that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims, that the Koran is the infallible and unchangeable word of Allah, and that every devout Muslim must wage Jihad against infidels.  Further, let us agree that most Muslims clearly recognize that Jihad does not refer to a spiritual struggle but to a more prosaic struggle to force infidels to submit to Islam.  What are the implications of such a position?

The ultimate conclusion to be drawn from the supposition that Western Civilization and expansionist Islam are mutually exclusive and inexorably heading toward a clash, is that the planet is simply not big enough to support both civilizations.  This supports the idea that at some indeterminate point, the second of Richard Fernandez's Three Conjectures will come to fruition:

Conjecture 2: Attaining WMDs will destroy Islam

[If you have never read The Three Conjectures, read it now; this post will still be here when you return.]

Since Iran is speedily approaching the point of no return in their quest for a deliverable nuclear weapon, despite the NIE which chose to err on the side of inanity, Conjecture 2 is looking more and more possible.

I suspect even those of us who take the dimmest view of Islam would agree that losing Western cities in exchange for destroying hundreds of millions of Muslims is the worst case scenario.  That raises the question of what policies and behaviors the West could adopt which could minimize the risk of the worst case scenario.  After all, we should not particularly care if 75% or 90% of Muslims think they are superior to us and want us all to submit or die, as long as they do not actively seek to bring it about.  The question then becomes, how do we best convince them to leave us alone.

Thus far, in some areas we are doing an adequate job, in some areas we are doing a poor job, and in other areas we are actively advancing the worst case scenarios.

Islam and Democracy

Richard Fernandez has taken a look at a question that has been examined here on many occasions and is at the core of our struggle against Islamic terror. 

Unspoken

There seems to be a bipartisan political consensus not to examine the subject of political Islam publicly. It is the most verboten of foreign policy subjects. But like other "open secrets", its exclusion from formal discussion doesn't banish it from public consciousness. It merely pushes it underground, like Barack Obama's middle name.

The key problem with subjecting the question of political Islam to debate is that every other conclusion except that of regarding it as a "religion of peace" implies consequences no one dares face. Concluding that Islam is a 'religion of war' would precipitate a revolution in diplomacy, energy policy and military strategy. It's a bottle of nitro nobody wants to shake; it's a can of worms nobody wants to open: not a Republican administration and most especially not a Democratic one.

Explosive questions such as this are as likely to be resolved by events as by debate. To a very great extent the West is genuinely hoping that Islam is a "religion of peace"; and I suspect many Muslims are too. Unfolding events will resolve the issue -- and perceptions -- one way or the other. Ten years from today we'll have a better understanding of the truth.

In response, Josh Manchester e-mailed Richard from Anbar province and made several important points, all of which summed to the conclusion that the question of Islam as a "religion of Peace" versus the Unspeakable consequences that would follow from the alternative is too complex to be readily answerable.

Spoken

The real text to turn to in understanding what comes next is not the Koran but the Leviathan. The Iraqis have lived in a state of nature for the past 5 years, and in a state of nature there is no law, no order, no justice or injustice, only survival, period. And so, their ability to care about each other is stunted a bit. Not only that, but the history of Saddam's regime is that of playing people off against each other and destroying the trust between them. These are the crucial issues today in my town in Iraq -- social trust, how to incubate it, and especially how it relates to good governance. Nepotism and corruption are part and parcel of life here, as I imagine they are in many parts of the developing world, Muslim or not. Advancing democracy in Iraq is not a question of Islam, it's a question of helping the Iraqis move past the concept of "me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, all three of us against everyone else." Perhaps it seems a gargantuan task, but so did defeating Al Qaeda in Anbar about a year ago.

I think that when we frame the question as whether or not Islam is compatible with freedom, democracy, and peace, we are doing a disservice to ourselves, the Islamic world, and the complexity of the question.  Those who attempt to simplify an extremely complex set of interactions make the least propitious outcomes more likely.  We need to think about this war in terms of asking what policies we can adopt that will minimize the chances of worst case outcomes and maximize the chances of better case outcomes.

First, an appreciation of the complexity involved.

Splitting and the Presidential Election

It is clear from even a brief scan of the blogosphere this morning that we, in fact and with apologies to John Edwards, are living in two different countries though we share the same physical space. 

One country is involved in a struggle against totalitarian terror with one front in Iraq where we are succeeding, though more slowly than desired.  The other country is involved in a misguided and lost war which distracted us from the war against criminal terrorists; we must retreat as quickly as possible and refocus on the real enemies.

One country sees a near existential threat from an impending new nuclear power and a subsequent nuclear arms race in the most unstable part of the world.  The other sees a rational opponent who can be managed and persuaded through negotiations to behave in a civilized manner.  Both split-countries have tacitly agreed that no definitive resolution of the situation will take place for at least one year.

The splits in our perception of the world continue on the home front and appear to be unbridgeable.  Barack Obama may well be a new kind of politician, but no politician, no matter how talented, will be able to bridge the gap between the split images of ourselves and the world that remain the dominant lenses through which we view and understand the world.

What does this say about us at this particular time and place?  And how best can the next President attempt to ameliorate the passions that will be aroused in the election cycle?

Splitting is the pathological defense that (unconsciously) divides important objects into all-good and all-bad.  The typical example would be an abused child who sees the abusive parent as beating him or her out of Love.  The child splits off the hated and devalued aspects of the parent and internalizes them; the child is bad and thats why the parent hits him.  Alternatively, the mother is all-good, an idealized victim, and the father is all-bad, an evil monster.  In both cases the bad imagoes are ultimately internalized and hidden, always liable to be projected into new objects and the outside world when the person is stressed.

The Sanity Squad on Blogtalkradio Tonight

The Sanity Squad will be discussing the phenomenon of Barak Obama this evening.  Obama has been called a Rorschach test and I suspect very few people know exactly what he stands for beyond his opposition to the war in Iraq and his espousal of "Hope."  Will that be enough to gain a nomination and maybe become our next President?

Join Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Neo, and me for what is sure to be a lively discussion from a psychological perspective that only the Sanity Squad can provide!

Click on the link below to listen between 8:00 pm and 8:30 live!  (until then, if you click on the link it will play the podcast recorded last Monday) .

The call-in number for the live program is (646) 716-9116

Growing Up

The winter issue of City Journal features a sad and dispiriting article about the difficulty some of our young men have been having growing up.  Kay S. Hymowitz describes the rise of the Maxim man, the Child-Man in the Promised Land,  trapped "in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood." 

(A more succinct version of her article appeared in the New York Post over the weekend: Rise of the Manchild:  What Happens When Boys Refuse to Grow Up.)

Hymowitz describes the emergence of a young male culture of infantile pleasures and adolescent avoidance of responsibility and involvement:

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see “The New Girl Order,” Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.

Hymowitz takes a stab at finding explanations for the effective surrender of so many young men to the pleasures of unbridled play and sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of adult responsibilities but all of her explanations seem wanting.  Is it a reaction the feminist assault on traditional masculinity?  Simply an outgrowth of the traditional male rebellion against authority and bourgeois expectations?  Her ultimate explanation is non-explanatory:

On Gordian Knots and Nuclear Weapons: Part II

Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World  is meant to be a prescription for how the Western democracies and like minded nations can develop a new strategic vision and new structures to deal with the increasing uncertainty and complexity of the modern world.  It is a deeply depressing document, not least because of its measured and realistic tone and content.  The document notes that in our highly interconnected world, there are no longer "local" problems; all problems are potentially global: (page 66)

As we have indicated, trends, risks, dangers and specific threats cannot be seen in isolation from each other. Because there are fewer geographical limitations to a problem, a viable risk assessment must be global. It is necessary to appreciate the interlinking complexity of the present challenges and their potentially huge scale. It is a hallmark of the globalised world that threats are multi-faceted and multi-directional.  We have to formulate a strategic response that matches the complexities we face. 

War never was the application of military force alone. But today, non-military means have a more prominent role to play than ever before. In addition to conventional military and nuclear balances of power, asymmetric threats will be used more frequently. States or non-state actors may well start conflicts by proxy, by abusing their leverage in energy resources, or through the financial ‘weapon’. There exists a great – and unprecedented – danger that multiple players could wage war on the West by deploying these various instruments simultaneously.

However, there are two interconnected problems with developing systemic responses robust enough to deal with the complexity.   The first problem is that there are no structures in place that can effectively deal with the modern world's problems.  NATO comes closest but as pointed out by the authors, NATO is undermanned, underfunded, and suffers from its own problem of action by committee, ie "NATO action" is increasingly becoming an oxymoron for reasons of confused and conflicted leadership, lack of political will, and lack of military capabilities:  (page 78)

On Gordian Knots and Nuclear Weapons: Part I

The Gordian Knot is a legend concerning Alexander the Great.  Wikipedia describes the most common version:

At one time the Phrygians were without a legitimate king. An oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Phrygia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. The next man was a poor peasant, Ahmidas son of Gordias, who drove his parents into town on his father's ox-cart. He was declared king by the priests. This had been predicted in a second way by a sign of the gods - before Ahmidas' birth, an eagle had once landed on that ox-cart. In gratitude, he dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and either tied it to a post or tied its shaft with an intricate knot of cornel (Cornus mas) bark. It was further prophesied by an oracle that the one to untie the knot would become the king of Asia (today's Asia Minor).

The ox-cart, often depicted as a chariot, was an emblem of power and constant military readiness. It still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire.

In 333 BC, wintering at Gordium, Alexander attempted to untie the knot. When he could find no end to the knot, to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends (the so-called "Alexandrian solution", taken by the Hellenic Army IV Army Corps as their motto). ... Alexander did go on to conquer Asia, fulfilling the prophecy.

A Gordian Knot has come to denote a problem of extraordinary complexity and Alexander's sword, an action oriented, brute force response to complexity.  We are currently facing a world which has become exponentially more complex and our institutions have struggled to keep pace.  In the international arena we are clearly losing the race with complexity.

Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World is an attempt to address the Gordian Knot that we currently face; the pamphlet  has an impressive pedigree and a deeply troubling set of messages.

You Read It Here First

Headline in today's New York Sun:

'Paradigm Change' Is Seen as Arabs Flee Gaza

Key paragraphs:

"If Egypt and international welfare organizations are so concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, why don't they just reroute the deliveries? They can send food and necessities to Egypt, and then deliver them to Gaza through the Rafah crossing," the Israeli official said.

...

According to the 2005 agreements, European Union observers were supposed to be present at the Rafah border crossing alongside Egypt's security forces, to help monitor the flow of weapons. But the European observers fled shortly after arriving there, and since then Egypt had sole control of the crossing. Mr. Abdelaziz yesterday cited the lack of European observers as the "legal" reason that prevents Egypt from allowing humanitarian goods to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

For Israel, yesterday's event was a good opportunity to remind its critics that it is not in complete control of Gaza's borders. "We have no troops in Rafah," said Mr. Mekel. "This is a problem Egypt alone should solve."

Richard Landes Responds

Richard Landes posted a response to Knowledge and Counter-Knowledge.    I took issue with his assertion that "rationality and reality testing are the default mode of thinking for the population."  Here is a part of Response to Shrinkwrapped on Counter-Knowledge in which he cogently disagrees:

I don’t think this represents my position. (I’ll let Damian speak for himself.) I think that a) SW is right that reality testing is a mental habit painstakingly assembled over the course a long time — more or less a millennium in Western Europe — and not the default mode. On the other hand the reason I may sound like I think the way SW says, is that I think that this manner of “reading reality” — which includes self-criticism, a renunciation of narcissistic vanity, exegetical modesty — is at the core of civil society. So if we have a civil society it’s good evidence that this form of thinking has become the “norm” or “default mode” of western civilization, and if this kind of flakey thinking is still seeping into the mainstream, then this is a deviation — from a Western norm.

I don't think Richard and I are that far apart.  It requires constant work to maintain the manner of "reading reality" that we both agree is at risk.  The problem in the last 40 years has been two-fold.  We have been raising children with enhanced narcissism who, as a consequence, have little tolerance for criticism, self generated or otherwise and further, the erosion of the liberal arts education has progressed so far that far too many young adults, graduates of our finest Universities, have no grounding in the classics of Western Civilization and no conception of the precious gift they do not even realize has been denied them.

Read his entire post and see for yourself what he thinks.

Good News From Gaza?

There has been an impressive conspiracy of silence regarding one particular aspect of the situation in Hamastan (Gaza) which may be dissolving of necessity; this conspiracy reeks of hypocrisy and venality but has served the needs of the Palestinians, their Arab brethren, and the usual demonizers of Israel, which includes the UN and much of the Western press.  It is a two part fiction.  The first part deals with the Palestinian/Gazan relationship with Egypt.  Despite the fact that every map of Palestine shows a long border between Egypt and Gaza, the MSM typically neglects to follow a simple line of logic; ie, while it may be true that the Israelis at long last had finally cut off some supplies into Gaza from Israel in response to the dramatic escalation of rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza into Southern Israel, few Diplomats or Media spokespeople were so impolite as to mention that it would be a trivial matter for Egypt to take over the task of distributing the West's largess to the suffering population of Gaza.  To those who might object that Israel would not allow Egypt to do so, perhaps Condoleeza Rice could remind them that as part of the current push for a "peace process" Israel ceded the border between Gaza and Egypt to Egyptian administration.  While food, fuel, medical supplies could have easily been imported through Egypt, for political reasons both Egypt and Gaza abjured such an obvious solution.  Maintaining the fiction that the big, bad Israelis were starving the poor Innocent Palestinians was of more value than actually caring for th Gaza population.  Further, Egypt, to all accounts, has always had a rather porous border when it came to military supplies.

The second part of the fiction is part of a larger one, Arab solidarity with the Palestinians.  The Ummah has been primarily concerned with destroying Israel and Palestinian suffering and Palestinian terror has been their primary weapon.

Both of these issues have been clarified in the last 24 hours.

Details are uncertain.  Steven Erlanger, the resident Palestinian apologist at the New York Times, offers one view:

Palestinians Topple Gaza Wall and Cross to Egypt

Thousands of Palestinians streamed from the Gaza Strip into Egypt on Wednesday after a fence at the Rafah border crossing was toppled, going on a buying spree of fuel, medicine, soap, cigarettes and many other supplies that have been cut off during days of blockade by Israel.