Perhaps we got better at laying in nuts-and-bolts development infrastructure than feudal-to-modern transitioning intellectual infrastructure. Much of the world needs a new poetics — new heroes, new legends — that connects deeply with the heart and sets them bravely against both the tyrant and the miscreant.
While it’s good seeing Pakistan’s Defense Force finally sanding away the Taliban, one wishes for far, far less disruptive methods (you have a lot of refugees moving about, many with freshly shaven faces) and intellectually more certain ones — in cultural development as well as intelligence – as well. It really is a kind of person that embraces or promotes violence and terrorism to achieve ends in which they themselves must be perpetually the star of the show
The “win” is toward the middle of humanity, not toward those who go against the grain of nature in human aspiration and adjustment.
However, forming the martial power of the moderate in their majority has proven most difficult. For the sticks that are fear and punishment and the carrots that are bribery and patronage, “loyalty” (to the ruthless with guns) trumps integrity throughout the fronts of the Islamic Small Wars: it seems one either flees the “God Mob”, dies fighting it, or succumbs to its ultimately self-serving political program.
Among my favorite bulwarks for making this point: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.
My correspondent asked, “So very true, but where do find them?”
Well, whether legends or writers, my response —
We settle down to creative writing on behalf of the more innately fair, forgiving, and just of humanity. With that kind of writing, God helps, and I do not believe the contributors need to be raving bipolar narcissistic megalomaniacs themselves — just good people with great empathy and strength and some connection — the spooky part — with life, the universe, and a little bit the miracle that is God.
You’re among the writers or among the facilitators of such writers.
Our now familiar “malignant narcissists” count on “information control” — censorship, ignorance, repression — to get away with doing what they do. The way to fight back: open the mouth: speak!
And those possessed of abundant empathy and integrity among the articulate and forceful: do your thing.
As a culture may be its language and the possession of its history in language, the argument over succession is unresolvable from the outset, but that the perception of the prize inspires so much animosity, contempt, and jealousy spells a dismal future for either hewing to such a legacy or, as discomforting but less absurd, retreating from the same.
While Hillel goes unremarked (“This which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another”), the greater world goes on around this schism that mires its humanity in its own sealed environment, which is more essentially an environment sustained in the poetry known to its own mind.
A book is a world, a movie a mirror of our own character in community.
The work of creative writers partially involves showing us to ourselves. Some criticize their societies. Some patronize them. Of the two, I would prefer honest critics.
Threat does not look like what you think it looks like and can be very hard to detect . . . . Symbols and signals will fly. We may be able to catch them in the air with NSA tools, but catching is not identification, now is it? I can catch a pretty insect in my back yard. But if I am not able to identify it, [if] it is poisonous and it bites me, it does me no good. It is not enough to capture words. We must understand these words and what they mean.
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I’ve long characterized the Islamic Small Wars as wars for detectives and poets: detectives because so much that happens has been planned and put together in closely guarded private channels; poets because language and motivation seem inseparable, and language and objects made symbols may be used to facilitate operations.
The points of mutuality, as with the validation of the Torah, are also points of appropriation. The Jews, already hard forged in the crucible of history, rejected Muhammad in his day and Muhammad who had prayed toward Jerusalem turned about and prayed toward Mecca.
The central psychology, divinely blessed or crazed and gifted, places the “locus of control” in Muhammad, a presumptuous position from a Jewish perspective, an infallible stance from a Muslim point of view, for if Muhammad is the Prophet of God, then the defiant (rejectionist) Jews have erred. Pandered or true, the implicit political program — it hasn’t been much different with Christianity — places the Jews as backwards on the periphery of the Real Deal, and, whaddayaknow — the fighting begins.
I’d rather go back to being brothers, recast from Judaism after Hillel a neo-Judaism accessible to all (inclusive) and amenable to adaptation and favored labeling. Probably “ChriJewsLims” will not work but it would be good to get to about the same page without (!) getting to the apocalyptic end of each thread.
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It’s not hard living entirely offline.
It’s impossible.
We have to check our e-mail for business and domestic obligations, if nothing else.
Then we may check our blogs, Facebook presence, Twitter account.
We / I have followings.
We’re not going to disappear on our fans (if we can help it).
I thought yesterday’s observation up top worth repeating here.
It’s rich.
It certainly attacks the idea of one monotheist “true religion”, although it’s completely accurate and fair to note that without the Torah and the Jews, neither Christianity nor Islam have any other completely different and independent foundation.
As he did for Pharaoh, Moses proves unavoidable and powerful.
Today’s follow-up:
The power of poetry gives us our minds — many symbols, many arrangements, many perceptions, many interpretations x social grammar, normative language behavior . . . so ye poets 🙂 , let’s go and find the good together.
And with the help of God, nature, and the universe, build some things — a little at a time — for the mind more helpful, greater, wondrous.
If it has to do with mind, it has also to do with language and language culture, and that in turn has to do with listening behavior (programming) and learned expressive behavior (scripting). If that could not be changed, we would all be speaking Latin or Lithuanian.
Poets work to change the cultural and intellectual technology we call “language”; however, poets seldom agree on how one should read or listen (except in awe of their own overwhelming intellectual powers, perhaps) or what stance one should acquire in life and course take.
However, if conflicts were primarily about “whose programming” and “whose script”, they would peter out for the distribution of populations across the globe: as many as we are, Russia is not crowded, Mongolia is lonely, practically, and one may still find solitude within an hour or two of the boundaries of a great city. If “my kind vs your kind” drove conflict on the basis of proximity, I should think it India that would be constantly embroiled in fighting, but, no.
Today’s primary driver: criminal willfulness.
I want your land too.
I want the proceeds from your gas and oil wells and from your creativity and productivity in business, also your illegal tunnels, arms, and heroin trades, and perhaps too, your building rents.
It seems there’s a lot of wealth Out There for a few who have brought themselves up to do business with a grasping hand and a ready fist.
When it’s just one guy alone, call the cops or a psychiatrist and isolate the same in criminal or other institutional confines; when it’s one guy alone with an army, a treasury, and, perhaps, a state, cordon the country, send in humanitarian aid, trade with it delicately, and leave the same and the people of the place to miserable fate, although most tyrants who keep it in the house make it to old age and the privilege of dying in their sleep (I can’t name any but could put a few dictators on the waiting list for that).
When the whole culture has gone sociopath rotten, THEN someone might want to fiddle with the sound of the music of the language seducing their ears. Perhaps as children they should not have listened so meekly or passively to garbage; perhaps they are living a bad dream — as bad as it gets in Syria, in the Central African Republic, in Somalia, etc. — and need to wake up either to their better humanity or to their tormentors.
Earlier this month, Richard Spencer writing for The Telegraph took note of a recent tweet out of Syria:
Here is what one jihadist wrote recently as a caption to a photograph of some blindfolded captives: “Got these criminals today. Insha’Allah will be killed tomorrow. Cant wait for that feeling when U just killed some1.”
Hormones, one might say, with naturally unstable young teenagers.
With adults, I would suggest that as children, even as infants, they picked up on something early, later heard or read something to add to it, and then in their late teens and early twenties and beyond arrived somewhere to play a part in an inside-out theater and thereby fulfill their programming and their scripting.
Empathy with an emphasis on compassion, and here with that as related to casualties and displaced from Syria’s agonizing civil war, signals something good in the general humanity, but it’s not going to be enough to promote band-aids when the war is sustained on the absence of an armed force of a middle and perhaps now modern temperament.
It’s notable also that Russia pledged $10 million to refugee relief in Syria while spending $52 billion, the largest amount ever, for the winter Olympics at Sochi.
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My partner in the short conversation then said, “Humanity in the true sense has lost all its values.”
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Not really although it sometimes seems to. We’re a wild species suspended in about, oh, 6,900 living languages, each of which represents a cultural invention and technology and conveys from one generation to the next a behavioral program fit to the character of the language community in a given circumstance in place and time.
I believe the variance in that language-driven and language-derived behavior shapes consciousness and conscience and with regard to empathy, may emphasize the cultivation of that ability to meld emotion and imagination on behalf of someone else, or it may harden the heart against the same.
Other qualities may obtain similar support and the tapestry of whole cultures, whether that of, say, a living sun king or that of a god remote and separate from the mortal, becomes made of such threads. With the aforementioned 6,900 differences in cultural cognitive style wrapped in language, it’s amazing we don’t have more conflict on our plates than we do, but, ever optimistic here, if we drift toward a moderate middle together, we can clean up and forestall a lot of this kind of mess.
The modern dictator’s values — any side (one chessboard – same player on both sides, lol) — build on heroic myth to develop power over others for the purpose of obtaining continuous and inexhaustible “narcissistic supply” — the adoration and adulation of the realm: and they often sail themselves and their own to disaster on the wings of a grandiose messianic delusion.
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The inspiration for the above portion of threaded conversation appears to be a contrivance but quite pointed:
The best way to save the children is, alas, to save the adults, get enough on to about the same page in their attitudes, ethics, ideals, and values with regard to others, and then get them to challenge, eject, or evolve the kind of deeply narcissistic and lost personalities who have attempted to paint reality for others through what they do in the pursuit of war.
Of the Assad regime and the al-Nusra et al. counterpoints, I’ve remarked “different talk: same walk”: each will use the lives of noncombatants for political chips. Perhaps nowhere in the whole sorry tragedy has that been made more clear than in the approach of each side to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp, where one side laid siege as part became a rebel base, and the rebels, true to form, used the helpless and unarmed residents as their own human shields.
Is there anyone reading this post that might want to see that obscenity again?
Attitudes and beliefs, including beliefs about Jews, about loyalty, about the west, about the Baath Party and the Soviet Union (or its ghost from 22 years ago) play a role in impeding the development of an effective and true Syrian people’s army. Moreover, but along similar lines, the three sides — Assad; more secular revolutionary forces; and, of course, the al-Qaeda types — have found themselves trapped in the immense shadows cast by the glorious wars of yesteryear, which for each is different: Bashar al-Assad has been trying to fight his father’s war, an armed insurrection against the state; the battles in mind, perhaps literally, for the al-Qaeda affiliates need little introduction and would seem to be expressed in battlefield and political behavior; and the moderates who seem to be carrying around the load of combined internationalist and Islamist hate for Israel, Jews, and “The West” just haven’t found their way to daylight.
I don’t know where to change that “Jew hate” that signals so much else about the three parties sewing Syria with destruction, and I’m not sure it’s my job alone to locate those cognitive switches in the languages alive on the fields of battle, but finding that would be a good place to start.
Syrians needs Syria — I know of no culture free of a relationship with its land and landscape — and they need to own it for themselves in peace.
To obtain that ownership and peace, the defense Syrians may need most of all, the defense most absent in the three years of continuous and brutal fighting, is not defense from Israel, which is treating Syrian wounded today, but defense from those among themselves who would seek their own excessive aggrandizement at the costs now well displayed in death, displacement, and suffering.
Related (updated 3/18/2014) from The Torah, Exodus 31-32:
31The LORD did as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of insects from Pharaoh, from his servants and from his people; not one remained. 32But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and he did not let the people go.
Here’s an interesting divide: do we choose the security of a loyal untruth over the presence of a disloyal but uncomfortable truth?
As you know, because you have read “Shimmer”, I track Pamela Geller as a friend (friendly) but not as the final word on Islam: I know and love too many “Islamic Humanists”, Muslim Americans living with all Americans no differently than Christian Americans or Jewish Americans or Sikh Americans or Hindu Americans (the list of religious affiliations and differentiation in America gets quite long). I enjoy the effort of Irshad Manji and and Mudar Zahran and others to know the location of their hearts and ethics and find it in their lives as Muslims.
The American anti-Jihad and counter-terrorism and related communities — not to mention the consultant-watchers of NSA and other organizations about — is fairly extensive and scholarly in their reading (I haven’t friend Robert Spencer) in their reading of Qur’an and Hadith in something like the manner in which those elements are interpreted by terrorists who are Muslim and who carry out their crimes with what they believe accords injunction found in the Qur’an.
Geller rakes muck, perhaps doesn’t follow up as meticulously as she should, and she writes with interest, so we may frame her in the “special interest” press, not far off the Coptic press, the Catholic one, the Jewish one, or, alas, the jihad ones with the black flags. Nonetheless, and having looked, I must accept Jeremy D. Mayer’s criticism, she’s on a right track IF we’re chatyping about al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Muslim Brotherhood as exemplified in the policies and practices demonstrated so swiftly by former Egyptian President Morsi, etc. She asks — as Sinem Tezyapar might ask — what kind of human, what kind of Muslim, troops into Mumbai, for example, and commits the atrocities committed there? Were those humans Muslims or not? New York – London – Madrid: same question. Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya: Muslim? Not Muslim? Something else?
Here’s where I differ some from Pamela Geller: I’m willing to recognize the humanity in my humanist, reformation, trying hard Muslim friends because they recognize humanity in me, a Jew, a Zionist, and have in their deeds and in their words both goodness and integrity.
It’s that last word that the fighting — all of it, from the Gaza Strip to to whatever’s going on today in Iraq — is all about.
Is it permissible to deceive the infidel? Or not? In the name of Islam?
There’s a lot of money tied up in conflict, and not all of it — probably little of it — goes into fighting. It goes into extraordinary self-aggrandizement (count the number of Saddam’s palaces – and we rue the day we did business that way: that’s an era that has passed, God willing). It goes into “skimmers” who use their political power to dip their hands into the state’s wealth, or leverage it (Putin-Assad-Khamenei could not be more different in their talk, but for the character of their person, they are the same person, until one, and only one has the power today, turns around).
So what manner of Muslim these days – “Carlos” solidarity, OBL base, out into the universe with Rumi (I like him), tenuously holding on to balance like Musharraf, promoting the whole program like Zia Haq? This is hard stuff. The Jews, for the most part, are arranged differently: we don’t take the word of God at face value (because we believe He doesn’t want us to but rather means for us to discover His meaning from one generation to the next: it doesn’t give us a lot of room for launching offensives in the manner of Constantine or other generals; we don’t conflate men with God; and we search tirelessly for better answers in accord with Hillel’s question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?”
Pamela Geller isn’t about hate. She’s about love. So I believe are many others I have met and what they have in them may be less the province of religion and more the nature of a decent and still emerging humanity.
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Most conversations like the above that I’ve encountered take place in a spectrum of what I call “middle east hate-peace peace groups”. Some are nasty. It’s easy to meet through chatyping the most strident of Israeli nationalists and the worst of hidebound anti-Semites, not that I’m about to name names. Some are closed and collegial and inclined to scrape up the documents and narratives of hurtful histories but, alas, with parochial spin.
I co-moderated one such group on another social network a long time ago (or, here in cyberspace, what seems like a long time ago). Since then and with the memory of my first encounter with deeply embedded anti-Semitism have arrived at some thought that is close to the heart of this blog, i.e., that “attitudes and beliefs” are contingent on early language uptake programming — how we are taught to listen and to know what is important to listen to — and scripting, which is the transmitted way of a (language) culture. To navigate through and out of conflict that has its life primarily in the mind means addressing some early programming and scripting with the knowledge that some things need to become the artifacts of age left behind.
“O you who believe! Be upholders of justice, bearing witness for Allah alone, even against yourselves or your parents and relatives. Whether they are rich or poor, Allah is well able to look after them. Do not follow your own desires and deviate from the truth. If you twist or turn away, Allah is aware of what you do.” (Surat an-Nisa’: 135)
My response:
I always enjoy this passage on two grounds: 1) common law seems to recognize that close relations or obligated relations may not tell the truth or, just as importantly, listen fairly, so in courts, prospective witnesses and jury members may be examined for attitudinal or relationship bias in advance of trial: the upshot is it may be a little more ideal than realistic and ideal; 2) Muhammad recognized both the problem posed and power associated with dishonest or disingenuous speech. “Do not follow your own desires and deviate from the truth” slips power to the speaker, for it could have been stated, “Follow your own desires but do not deviate from the truth. Be always honest.”
The one variable to which all of the warfare and suffering we are witnessing from within the Muslim-majority states of the world troubled by violence or political unrest and scandal distills to one word: integrity.
How the use of language and the value of integrity differs from one geopolitical space to another is a large topic but one generally pitting acquisitiveness, fear, greed, and loyalty against a perhaps privileged altruistic idealism.
Am I suggesting that all that dying and suffering in Syria (and similar elsewheres) is about integrity?
Yes.
Unfair dealing would seem to characterize both opposed systems, the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad and the breathtaking brutality of the equally autocratic and full of itself al-Nusra and associates (elsewhere dictators in power vs. dictators challenging power).
Neither have good to offer and both approach battle mounted on lies and misdirection.
It is no wonder that the conflict in Syria (and those elsewhere) has generated a heart wrenching flight within the state and without, for no one not engaged in the purpose of battle has any life interest in it either apart from plain corporeal survival.
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