They’re not awful people — they’re just programmed that way. 🙂 What has got my interest today — as soon as I settle down from shooting someone else’s artwork a little later — is the difference between language programming — the methods we use to discern and invest meaning in symbols and their arrangements — and “scripting” which I think of as the ranting content overlaying the programming. These guys who boast, brag, cajole, and threaten and wind themselves up around violence and death belie their humanity when they ask for help, would that they would do it sooner!
Changing scripts may be easy — it’s what copywriters and poets do — compared to getting to the reception programming, but that’s where our battle actually exists. Everything else is surface noise.
Early language uptake programming and scripting — methods in listening and cognition : environmental content filtered and signified — deserves a page, at least. I’m sure there are academic volumes written around the themes, but in relation to conflict, one wants as distilled and schematic a concept as possible.
Addendum
The poisoned and amplified focus on a broad array of targets, Israel foremost but much else with similar prejudice. This energy channeled into and expended on malicious thought is something humans do but perhaps in a fated way, a wild invented way, that becomes cultural habit.
I don’t know if the world knows to confront or, actually, delve into basic language uptake issues in relation to conflict.
It both delights and pains me to know that if you “Google” the string “conflict metonymy”, my blog shows up fourth on the first page of results. Unbelievable! What are the institutions doing? And what am I doing without funding?!
🙂
This gets better with the behavioral definition of “backchannels” as opposed to a more symbolic words-behind-the-words : cognitive hallucination : emotion approach. Someone’s making good money looking into the meaning of “hmmm” and “uh huh” and I’m playing that old “glass beads game” with the gravity, weight, and stability of relationships between nouns.
We might get ahead of ourselves with computers, but that’s another line and a bit sci-fi, but for conflict attenuation, the earliest complement to the construction of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, i.e., programming on one hand and scripting on the other, seems to me where attention should go (and I would like to be included when the research money catches on).
So it goes (nodding to Vonnegut while nonetheless turning away from the New Old Now Old Lost and Far Out Left) and much preferring Everett’s reporting to Chomsky’s asserting.
Confession, also: I haven’t read Hesse’s Magister Ludi since college and haven’t a clue as to what I may have absorbed from it, if anything but the notion that symbols offer themselves to play and some players their work with evil designs.
“However, you all know the answer to the above questions. The painful truth is that much of the world is largely insensitive to the oppression and sufferings of Muslims” — the statement is not true, or I and so many others would not be engaged here at all. Every Muslim death matters! That the carnage involves Muslim-on-Muslim violence, however, makes every form of cooperation, criticism, and intervention difficult and problematic.
Just back of Harun Yahya’s statement lays a hidden grammatical rule involving the concept of loyalty that is true to the speaker but perhaps not every reader. The statement sides with Muslims on a familiar but provocative and timeless note: “it is more important, more safe, more good or good-feeling, to be with one’s own (on the basis of a single noun) than to be uncertain among others however decent and noble they may appear.” As much echoes the notion that it may be better to believe or tell a loyal lie than to live with an uncomfortable reality and truth.
Note that in the American Civil War, both sides held The Bible high in defense of their positions; perhaps similar ambiguity and ambivalence attends philosophy over the Qur’an; and it may be noted that Judaism involves itself eagerly in schismatic argument, but in Judaism, that’s part of the charm (look up “Hillel and Shammai”).
Values associated with the greater dignity of man, ennoblement — “One scholar is worth more against the devil . . . .” — may persist through the Ummah’s internal fighting and its interfaces, and I hope they do — but Islam’s travail ties to language behaviors and concepts largely irrelevant to others developed and engaged in living in other ways, largely nullifying the legitimacy of messianic intention, the mighty spark of “political Islam”.
“Bigotry” is a loyalty-related issue bound up in the social grammar of one talking head or another within some population. Reasonable and reasoning human beings contain themselves; nasty people may bait and provoke the reasonable; and nasty bigoted people cannot help themselves: with those, it’s “garbage in-garbage out” and the garbage probably gets in very, very early in the development of their verbal cognitive style to form the basis for the subsequent content and manners that erupt in their speech.
As of this moment, the Islamic Small Wars (ISWs) have nothing to do with how Jews think about Muslims, how Americans think about Muslims, how Buddhists and Hindus and Sudanese animists think about Muslims, or how Islamic Humanists think about Muslims, or even how Muslims think about Muslims. The ISWs have to do with assumptive thinking seeded into the mind at a very early age and bending adult thought in a rule-based way for a long time to come.
Without a language update, without the fresh breeze of free, considerate, and empathetic thought, without the good and sweet rest of imagination and heart and preparation, perhaps, for something a little different and much, much better, the Muslim-on-Muslim destruction and self-destruction (in myriad ways, much including the drugs-for-guns criminality of the Taliban) will continue.
Some settlers may not be perfect 🙂 I don’t know for the paucity of mainstream media or otherwise vetted journalists combing the territory and less weighed down with agenda channeled by a special interest press. The “Pallywood” and issues related involve a stepped concept: the belief that 1) information is power, and if that is so, then 2) power over information must be really powerful. That organizations would arm Palestinians with cameras for their defense but also do so in an environment in which baiting, false flag, and provocation seem a part of the atmosphere may well produce viscerally compelling images without necessarily telling a whole story. Accompanying the idea that “power over information must be really powerful” (let’s ask Putin what he thinks about that — and also what he learned on the way to becoming a colonel) may be the conceit that one is above it and others merely susceptible tools, especially if the information environment is pervasive enough and there’s a little something in the target’s heart (in my world: learned but forgotten messages gleaned during early childhood language uptake) that wants confirmation still of the rule embedded and unconsciously in suspension.
Much of the Islamic Small Wars as well as the ghosts of the Soviet Union persist in informational dark space. Neither Fatah nor Hamas have produced around them anything close to “open democracy”. http://www.cpj.org/tags/fatah-voice For all the bloodshed along the several axis coinciding in these so far small wars — autocratic, criminal (narcotics, arms running, kidnapping, extortion, other trade), and religious — much would abate with growing strength in integrity and perhaps greater insight into the cognitive mechanics of “malignant narcissism”.
The interpretation of the world in language – how one knows how to talk about the experience of life in a place — may be also reflective of language programming in the head. That programming is powerful, sufficient, certainly, to see in some fashion – or confirm with enthusiasm someone else’s observation — ghosts and witches in one century and to find the experience of either inaccessible in the next.
Autocrat, dictator, or totalitarian monster would wish his constituents (and everyone else) to see things his way.
Perhaps the little monster consign themselves to writing poetry while the larger ones erupt with whole political programs.
In any case, I suspect both grandiose and hateful desires and illusions follow sensibly from the time-hidden tracks of childhood’s social grammar.
What might keep a really bad train boiling down the line?
Absence of resistance linked to concepts not articulated within or otherwise remote from thought suspended generally in the cognitive texture of the culture of interest: one cannot call a man crazy who appears (given the tools at hand) merely inspired and passionate even if he turns out a copy of Charles Manson. Indeed, there’s a certain malignancy that knows its targets cannot defend themselves from what they cannot — or for love, will not — perceive in the reality that has approached them to engulf, use, and eventually destroy them.
In the arts, we may refer to a certain state in performance as contained and connected and that with God, nature, and the universe. — put together some observations in psychology — Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961). I happen to think our Homo sapiens sapiens is as wild a species as any but with a large brain and a phenomenal mouth, and one has proven capable of great creativity and intuition and the other of aiding the invention of languages (of which there are more than 7,000 separable extant as I type in just one) and language culture, each of the thousands embracing and entertaining one form of divinity or another.
Mine (edited lightly).
* * *
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings.
Human life (actually for those bedding down on Siberian ledges to watch the sunset, bear life too) entails, whether we or the bears like it or not, an aesthetic and spiritual emotional and emotive experience.
That’s life.
The wonder is how many approaches have been adopted, created, discovered, embraced, invented, and modified in service to those experiences.
Betwixt and between, then and now, but then I turned a first graduate degree toward facets of the experience of leisure time — boredom, ecstasy,flow, motivation, peak experiences, self-concept, self-as-entertainer, etc. — and among the predicates were youth, mountains, and music.
Not much has changed about me, but my views have been broadened, and here in the blogland of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, it may be worth taking a moment while fighting rages in Syria, Iran struggles to obtain The Bomb, and terror drips into everyday life somewhere in Iraq and Pakistan on a daily to weekly basis that our humanity is of just one species and that species, about 7.124 billion in number, communicates by way of more than 7,000 languages, each addressing the aesthetic and spiritual percepts of its speakers.
While the kingdom’s quest has often been set in the context of countering Iran’s atomic programme, it is now possible that the Saudis might be able to deploy such devices more quickly than the Islamic republic.
Earlier this year, a senior Nato decision maker told me that he had seen intelligence reporting that nuclear weapons made in Pakistan on behalf of Saudi Arabia are now sitting ready for delivery.
Welcome the worst of all possible worlds, i.e., a nuclear arms race in the middle east, and the contenders in the pursuit of the threat of boiling glory for one or the other turn out — no surprise — Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Someone asks you a question a cogent question about an issue in the news — and, granted, the question has to do with your own religious attitudes and may be thought of as provocative — but you assault him.
I’m looking forward to reading about the arrests and following the trial.
With this anti-Semitic outburst, the powder was already formulated and tamped, the sensitivity to Everything Islam in the News, from associated honor killings (if not Qur’an-based, tolerated and transmitted within cultures that have embraced Islam) to dress-code challenging hijab headlines, had already raised the heat, and it turns out the question was the match.
On one point I may express ambivalence: what are we doing with others and our recording devices in public? Are we all suddenly broadcasters and journalists?
I’ll tell you one thing about me today: if you see very few people in my photography (a recent collection from Antietam has been picking up page views lately), it’s because I wish to avoid the complexities involved in creating social relationships between myself and strangers while outdoors with a camera. I’d have no problem with the imprimatur of a media assignment or, perhaps, a well thought out social photography project, but if you’re wearing a burqa or hijab and happen to see me coming toward you with a camera, not to worry: I’m not interested in you or what you’re wearing and am on my way to photographing something else.
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In the past year alone, the Jewish cemeteries in Warsaw and Myślenice have been vandalized; gravestones in Blonie, Kalisz and Otmuchowie have been defiled and destroyed, and anti-Semitic graffiti has been scrawled at the monument to resistance hero Mordechai Anielewicz in the Warsaw ghetto and on the synagogues in Gdansk and Zamoc.
There are routine incidents of anti-Semitism, too, at soccer matches in Lodz and Krakow, and statements from public figures such as prominent historian Krzysztof Jasiewicz, who argued in April that the Holocaust “was only possible because the Jews themselves participated in the murder of their own people.”
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, a thriving Palestinian-led initiative that attacks institutional links to Israel’s illegal settlements, has been gaining in popularity. In Australia, the movement has been slowly growing as Israel continues to defy international law – and it now faces one of its greatest opportunities in the court of public opinion.
Along with hate in a coffee shop and bigotry expressed in graveyards, it seems we have hate justified in the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist portion of the liberal press.
I saw worse on Facebook this morning (“. . . and death is very sweet when it is for the sake of our Palestine . . . .”), but the points are about the same: the Jews stole the land and subjugate the Palestinians worse than the Nazis did the Jews themselves.
Bunk.
And the Palestinians, whose own police are funded by the United States and trained by Israelis (in Jordan) know it; the tunnel millionaires know it; the Palestinians working in Israel know it; the farmers trading with Israel know it; the utilities managers — electricity, water, roads, municipal construction — know it; Palestinian doctors know it; but the promoters of hate — still the PLO amply joined in similar spirit by Hamas — and their useful peacocks ascending the crumbling barricades of the New Old Now Old Lost and Far Out Left don’t seem to know it.
* * *
That the BDS movement and its supporters, now tacitly endorsed by the AAUP, have been given a platform to single out Israel as absolutely the worst society on Earth is distressing and is nothing less than a “ready-made conclusion” of the most extreme sort.
The AAUP should stand up against such polemicists; instead it legitimizes them by offering them a platform to promote racism.
Hate, much like deception, mentioned yesterday, is easy too.
Love, like truth, is hard.
How much of language do we memorize and then report out as thought?
How much of language do we actually synthesize to produce original expression?
I’d rather academics delve into those questions than how it has come about that Arabs keep Arabs in Arab refugee camps bereft of normal state-based rights while in Gaza and on the west bank teachers, in fact, continue to teach their children how to hate The Jews.
The urgent post-9/11 intelligence directive became: “Do more, do better, do it differently, and do it now.” In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing—a scant two months before Snowden’s first leaks—the FBI was accused of not doing enough to track suspected terrorist sympathizers (even though those suspicions had come from the Russian intelligence service formerly known as the KGB). Two events, two contradictory reactions by the American public: one demanding that the government take action to identify and defeat terrorist threats, the other wary and untrusting of that same government.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Those who promote fear and do so with deceit also on occasion promote the “black swan” theory, the idea that nature produces an improbable event — like life on earth, for example, or two schnooks setting off compression cooker bombs cruelly designed to cut the legs from beneath marathon runners.
The grim review of improvised explosive devices deployed to encourage the adoption of “Islamic values” — or to discourage and subjugate others in the name of Islam — suggests such events are less “black swans”, or “bolts out of the blue” — another trite analog that works — than whole flocks of malevolent black crows.
In online chatyping, the subject of secrecy in Jihad / anti-Jihad activities and other spheres has come up, and I’ve playfully suggested the obvious: change computers and location, persona and voice.
Revert thoughts and data to paper — then burn the paper and rely on memory.
Some professions, say the performing arts, place premiums on memorization as the fundamental part of the craft.
Notably, in English literary arts, a part of the graduate examinations involve questions about who you know and what you know about them, but “who” and “them” may number among the thousands of characters of historic fictions.
In Arabic literature, I am guessing, the “who” and “them” may be the souls legend from earlier generations.
Indeed, my favorite correspondent on many subtopics Islamic suggests that operational code will only drill more deeply into remote corners of Islamic scripture, commentary, and law. The scholars of interest (believing themselves ” . . . more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”) would seem suspected of having their own communications, command, and control language subculture, and that in Arabic, within the depths of Arabic, and tucked away and harbored like precious and useful intellectual metal.
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Beginning with George Washington’s first State of the Union Address, in which he requested a secret fund for clandestine activities, intelligence has been an instrument to achieve the broad goals of the American people and the policies advanced by their duly elected representatives.
Put on a mask and other elements of costume; alter the walk and the talk; step out of primary character and into some other creature; and work it for a while.
Truth is hard.
One has to live with it and in the company of others who challenge and entertain about the same observations and perceptions. If, whatever it may be, proves relentlessly reliable and obstreperously valid — true! and whether we like it or not — it acquires a stability all its own and needs no help by way of arms, punishments, and threats.
The truth is not belief but a stubborn “is” and unmindful and uncaring of whatever human investment may be in it or not.
In the quotation section to the left of where you’re reading, you will find this from Maimonides:
“Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it.”
And I thought I was being original.
Be that as it may, the deceitful, I believe, persist in bending truth to will, the better to beatify and glorify themselves, to make themselves legend, eternally regarded — and that if not in greater social realities than their own heads and small and deeply isolated circles.
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In recent months also, I have read of lineage traced back to King David, an argument for the divine allocation of the right to rule over others.
No cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
As a Jew, I have been gently but firmly reminded of God’s demands for animal sacrifice and the restoration of Judaism to literal Levitican standards.
Again, no cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
If such beliefs, levers, and sentiments have been suspended by mind in the language cherished by some minds, in just how many heads do the same arrangements persist?
What was read?
What was heard?
What was consequently formulated (about royal bloodlines, say, or irrational obligations and rituals)?
While I believe the human capacity for language invention and the invention of language-congruent cultural behavior bounded only by the necessities of place and responses to them plus desire and its many facets, I believe also that symbolic arrangements in language may be mapped, comprehended, and remapped. When that remapping has taken place in the natural development of a culture, and, say, “twerking” makes its way from youth novelty to something boring old grandmother used to do, we note the remarkable ability and flexibility English has for adaptive evolution; when force comes to erase or overlay a culture and its language, we think of that as cultural warfare and the prize is what is prised from the possession of the minds targeted.
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In Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire, the annual budget cited for secret U.S. intelligence operations in their totality was $52 billion.
I hope there is some money in that green ocean for poets.
Language may be the cultural tool that we invent to invent and sustain ourselves in coherent isolated societies. Very few societies — language cultures, all — remain purely themselves given encounters with conflict, including invasion, and with expanding trade relationships. For western onlookers involved with the Islamic Small Wars, the Sunni-Shiite schism and much else have been only latent to western popular knowledge and not latent at all in the minds of the owners of each respective legacy who are now the captives of their own archaic thought as contained by old language and, indeed, related “habits of mind”.
The Islamic Small Wars will end with poetry, not bullets, with freedom from archaic language, not subjugation, with mere human equality — and with “compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity — and not the delusions of grandeur associated with supremacist hegemony.
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All of the above . . . because I say so.
😉
The full brief would be lengthier and more complicated, but suffice it to say that what has happened in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere along the links of the Islamic Small Wars owns no place other than the past among the world’s nations. The enthused fighting in Syria, however vigorous, becomes also more socially incoherent and subject to individual and small group interests by the day, and similarly motivated fighting and “struggle” elsewhere seem not to prove any better as regards gaining traction in their districts.
We may not like the cultural blender or centrifuge fashioning the humanity of humanity and coalescing most in the monotheist traditions around a monotheist humanism (the proposed universal values and virtues I apply for that are compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity), but that may be where we’re going. The so-called “real” Islam, which carries the burden of the Banu Qurayza legend (was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was the slaughter just? Today, Aafia Siddiqui — heroine or villain?) or the “real” Christianity, which owes much of its “realness” to Constantine’s marches (that one had a colossus made of himself), or the “real” Judaism that preoccupies Kirs Joel in New York State spin out in schism, separation, and war. Those come apart and the “humanity of humanuty” recovers its main and progressing regions.
Every child born comes equipped with a legacy in culture, customs, family, language, and religion. Perhaps the greater the separation from others, say the tribe from the greater family of man — or here the person from social anchorage — the more autonomously evolving, eclectic, and narcissistic.
The narcissistic bubble, the house of mirrors, even perhaps Plato’s cave afford freedom within their interior boundary responsive entirely to its inhabitants — or inhabitant — but introduce some cultural and political commerce to that sealed environment (and should you hear in that phrase an echo of the “sealed nectar”, enjoy the faint metonymy) and something is going to change.
In what direction always — and tragically after much fighting, shouting, suffering, and dying?
Call that the “humanity of humanity”.
Analog: Lincoln’s “better angels”.
Inspiration for the thought here: my uncle’s old Haggadah in which was stated in Jewish memory of the exodus from Egypt: “With each generation, a little more freedom is won.”
As we enter an era of dangerous and delicate energy technology, i.e., more nuclear power plants, expansive solar panel arrays, their vulnerability in war and our dependence on them for living plus improving qualities of living wants the clearing away of those who trouble lands with their own romantic mythos borne of deeply evolved isolation (evolved in thought in language) and once unhindered by any consideration of others.
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Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Notably, Lincoln’s message preceded the greater carnage of the Civil War.
The cynical may say he gambled.
The believing, however, may believe Lincoln knew and wrote the end of the matter at the beginning.
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