The Hard Bigotry of No Expectations

HonestReporting.com. has a story about The Dubliner, which claims to be "widely regarded as the definitive guide to Irish culture", publishing an op-ed piece that "not only disputes Israel's right to exist but also denigrates Jewish history and culture at the same time":

"In the immediate aftermath of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call to 'wipe Israel from the face of the map', this magazine's November issue publishes an opinion piece alluding to the same idea by former Irish Labor Minister Justin Keating. While couched in less violent terms than Ahmadinejad, Keating claims 'the Zionists have absolutely no right in what they call Israel, that they have built their state not beside but on top of the Palestinian people, and that there can be no peace as long as contemporary Israel retains its present form.'

Keating not only takes issue with Israel's right to exist but, unlike any serious historian, also questions the entire Jewish historical and religious connection to the land, asking. 'Did the Jews of the Old Testament come from what is now Israel? The answer is No.' .... Keating portrays the Jews as 'people who occupied some land two thousand years ago for a historically brief period, to the detriment of those who have been there since.' .... Keating even states that the UN Resolution of 1947 did not give Israel the right to exist as a sovereign state, claiming 'they [the Zionists] have continuously and relentlessly violated that resolution for more than half a century, so that any tatters that now remain are void, by their action.'"

Ever wonder why the United States and Israel are the most hated countries on earth, or why Judaism and Christianity are the most despised religions? If you listen to the American or European left, they feel absolutely no compunction or hesitation to spew the most vile and bigoted rhetoric about America, about President Bush, or about our history of "genocide" and "imperialism." Since anyone with a shred of common sense or historical perspective can see that this is nonsense, one has to ask, "what is going on?" It's not that these critics are stupid, or uneducated, or necessarily even bad-intentioned. And yet, they believe things that are not only untrue, but cannot possibly be true.

As I may have mentioned before, as a psychologist looking at history, I am not particularly interested in ignorance, which, after all, is perfectly understandable and can afflict anyone. It simply means that you don't know something. What is far more interesting from a psychological standpoint is what I call motivated stupidity, that is, the promulgation of some patently false belief based on underlying emotional need.

Every day we hear about the horrors perpetrated in the name of Islam, and yet, the left ignores them. Or, if they do pay attention to them, they try to explain the horrors as having been warranted by something we must have done to them. This happened just the other day, when Chris Matthews made some particularly idiotic statements during a college speech about how we must try to understand "why our enemies hate us."

You will notice the reverse is never true. It never occurred to Matthews to say that Islamists must look within and ask themselves why we might have some hostility toward them. No one on the left asks, "Gee, I wonder what Saddam must have done to deserve getting toppled by President Bush?," Or, "I wonder why Israel needs to build that big fence?" There is a sort of barrier to natural curiosity, a rigid psychic defense that curtails rational thought and says STOP! DON'T GO THERE!

This leftist attitude actually betrays more than a "soft bigotry of low expectations" toward Islam. Rather, it is a hard bigotry of no expectations toward the Muslim world.

For example, I believe the Palestinians receive no criticism from the left (and the world community at large), not because they think so highly of them, but because they have think so badly about them -- in fact, they actually have no expectations whatsoever about them.

In other words, it is not because the Palestinians are so wonderful that they are immune from criticism, but because everyone knows that it would be absurd to hold Muslims to the same standards as Christians, or Jews, or Zen Buddhists -- to any standards of decency at all, really. No one is shocked at the barbarity of the Islamic world, whether it is committed by terrorists, or perpetrated in the name of the Saudi or Iranian governments.

For example, if a single Christian soldier in Iraq went nuts and killed a single Muslim, there would be riots and protests all over the world. Why? Because we expect certain behaviors from Americans and from Christians.

So in a perverse way, the more we are hated by the left, the more it is a kind of tribute to us. Imagine being foolish enough to have any moral expectations of the Chinese, or the Palestinians, or the Saudis, or the North Koreans. We expect them to behave barbarously. And they never fail us. And when they do behave in their predictably bestial way, it is never their fault. It is either overlooked completely, or blamed on some provocation, some "underlying cause." But it would be ludicrous to think that a leftist would ever look for an exculpatory "root cause" of Israel's behavior toward their bloodthirsty Arab neighbors.

You will notice how this plays out in the U.S. When an idiot like Pat Robertson makes one of his predictably foolish statements, he is lambasted by comedians, and rightfully so. But why are there no jokes about someone who was not just a moron, but truly evil, like Yasser Arafat? Likewise, Christianity is fair game -- note, for example, all of the jokes about the Catholic church's homosexual priest problem. (Correction -- because of the dictates of victimology, that scandal had to be fraudulently changed into a "pedophile priest" problem to make it acceptable for ridicule.)

Why is there a blackout on jokes about Palestinians, who are so eminently jokeworthy? Most of my attempts at good-natured humor on this site would never be considered acceptable to the MSM, who go out of their way to treat Islam not just the same as other religions, but better than other religions (and yet, somehow more fragile at the same time).

This is so ironic, because it obviously has nothing to do with the secular left's affinity for religion, which they otherwise despise. In other words, Islam is not a protected species because it is a religion. It is protected because it is anti-Western, because its adherents tend to have slightly darker skin than caucasians, and because it has been granted victim status. Therefore it is untouchable.

The fact that we don't mercilessly make fun of our enemies is part of the same syndrome that has prevented Hollywood from making any movies about the war on terror, for fear of insulting Muslims (and, of course, because they don't want to show our military engaged in a heroic struggle against evil). We live in a morally upside down world, in which making fun of the Islamist ideology is forbidden, but committing mass murder in the name of Islam is explained away.

So if I ridicule Palestinians, it is because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I still have some expectations of them. This is unlike the bigots of the left -- bigots like Juan Cole, who heap scorn on the United States but make every excuse imaginable for the moral failings of Islam. We will know that Muslims have come a long way when they can start making fun of themselves in the same way that Americans have always made fun of themselves, their institutions, their politicians, and their religion.

Oh well. What can you do but laugh about the situation?

Do you remember when Arafat died, how his wife, Suha, rushed from Paris to be by his side? Turns out that was actually part of the pre-nup: they had agreed to be together over his dead body.

Jeopardy answer: "Thuggery, buggery, and skulduggery."
Question: "What were Yasser Arafat's favorite activities?"

At least they have a right to medical care in the Palestinian territories. One lady brought her 13 year old to a psychiatrist, worried that he had become obsessed with not killing himself. And they're trying to do something to rid their classrooms of the psychotic anti-Semitism. I don't know if I like that idea. It means their children will have to learn bits and pieces of genocidal ideology from each other, instead of from an expert.

They keep saying that the problem is that Islam has just been "hijacked" by the terrorists. I don't know about that, but maybe Israel needs to Lojack the Palestinians, so they know where they are at all times.

But anti-Semites have it so easy. If you want to boycott the Palestinians, what are you supposed to do, put off purchasing that new suicide belt?

And now the Palestinians even use teenage girls for suicide bombers. In fact, the girls don't actually use suicide belts. Rather, they call them "chastity belts," because it's the only way to be certain they'll never be seen holding hands with a Christian boy.

Bottom line: in Palestine, it's every parents' nightmare to die before their children.

But I give the Palestinians credit. They've evolved from primitive kinship structures to barbarous gang affiliations. With luck, they can eventually became a racket, and then perhaps a crime syndicate. Evolution doesn't happen over night.

Now the Palestinians are complaining that it's unfair for us to withhold funds until Abbas institutes some meaningful reforms. I guess they have a point. It's like we're biting the hand that steals from us.

At least with Abbas, they finally have a moderate in there. Sure, he's a Holocaust denier, but at least he's a moderate holocaust denier. That is, he believes that six million Jews were inconvenienced in WWII.

So much conversion to the Nation of Islam goes on in American prisons, it's more accurate to call it them "Islamic gated communities."

It's making some judges a little concerned. One guy was sentenced to eleven years behind bars, double that for good Muslim behavior. And Farrakhan insists that they have their own chaplains in prison. They bow their heads and say, "Let us prey.... on Jews and other infidels."

But we need to be fair. According to CAIR, when Muslims give money to charity that ends up in the hands of terrorists, it's no different than when charitable donations end up in the hands of the military wing of the Salvation Army.

On the positive side, CAIR has issued a strongly worded statement that unambiguously condemns sawing off heads by either side in Iraq.

Islamists and their Symbolic Struggle Against Reality (and Real Struggle Against Irony)

As I have said before, the war on Islamo-fascism will be over the day Muslims can laugh at their dopey religion instead of seeing insults and slights everywhere and demanding respect that they have never earned.

Did you hear the latest horror (HT Dr. Sanity) about the two journalists kidnapped by the Palestinian beasts? According to the story, they were videotaped in long Muslim robes reading a statement announcing that they had converted to Islam.

If it weren’t so serious, what with two men’s lives at stake, you would almost have to laugh at the preposterousness of this stunt. It’s like a bad Monty Python skit. Imagine the brilliant discussion that went into it, probably not dissimilar to the dozen or so leftist revolutionaries in Life of Brian who spend the movie plotting how they are going to overthrow the Roman empire. In one scene, in the interest of diversity, they debate whether a man should be able to call himself Loretta and have babies:

LORETTA: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
 
REG: But... you can't have babies.
 
LORETTA: Don't you oppress me.
 
REG: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! -- Where's the fetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!
 
LORETTA: [crying]
 
JUDITH: Here! I-- I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the right to have babies.
 
FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.
 
REG: What's the point?
 
FRANCIS: What?
 
REG: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!
 
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
 
REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.

****

PALESTINIAN #1: Let’s kidnap some infidel journalists and force them to convert to Islam on video!

PALESTINIAN #2: Why? What's the point?
 
PALESTINIAN #1: Huh?
 
PALESTINIAN #2: Oh, I get it. This is brilliant, Hassan. Just brilliant. Once they convert, the journalists can hold themselves hostage, so they can negotiate with themselves for their own release and leave us out of it. Maybe while they're at it they can hold a knife to their own throats unless the infidels vote for Ned Lamont.
 
PALESTINIAN #1: It is symbolic of our struggle against the Zionist occupation!
 
PALESTINIAN #2: Yeah, right. Symbolic of your struggle against reality is more like it.

*****

In a recent editorial, Roger Scruton suggests that the Muslims' habitual readiness to take offense is just one step removed from terrorism. It is

“not yet terrorism--but it is a sign of the deep-down insecurity of the Muslim psyche in the modern world. In the presence of Islam, we all feel, you have to tread carefully, as though humoring a dangerous animal. The Koran must never be questioned; Islam must be described as a religion of peace--isn't that the meaning of the word?--and jokes about the prophet are an absolute no-no. If religion comes up in conversation, best to slip quietly away, accompanying your departure with abject apologies for the Crusades. And in Europe this pussyfooting is now being transcribed into law, with 'Islamophobia' already a crime in Belgium and movements across the continent to censor everything at which a Muslim might take offense, including articles like this one.”

In short, seriousness is a serious problem for Muslims--and therefore, for us. Scruton concludes his piece by noting that “Whenever I consider this matter I am struck by a singular fact about the Christian religion..., which is that it is informed by a spirit of irony. Irony means accepting ‘the other', as someone other than you. It was irony that led Christ to declare that his ‘kingdom is not of this world,’ not to be achieved through politics. Such irony is a long way from the humorless incantations of the Koran. Yet it is from a posture of irony that every real negotiation, every offer of peace, every acceptance of the other, begins. The way forward, it seems to me, is to encourage the re-emergence of an ironical Islam, of the kind you find in the philosophy of Averroës, in Persian poetry and in ‘The Thousand and One Nights.’ We should also encourage those ethnic and religious jokes which did so much to defuse tension in the days before political correctness. And maybe, one day, the rigid face of some puritanical mullah will crack open in a hesitant smile, and negotiations can at last begin.

Amen. We can’t just smoke ‘em out of their holes. We have to joke ‘em out of their holes.

The comedic “hands off” attitude toward Islam betrays more than a "soft bigotry of low expectations.” Rather, it is a hard bigotry of no expectations toward the Muslim world. The Palestinians receive no criticism from the left (and the world community at large), not because they think so highly of them, but because they think so badly about them--in fact, they actually have no expectations whatsoever about them. In other words, it is not because the Palestinians are so wonderful that they are immune from criticism and mockery, but because everyone knows that it would be absurd to hold Muslims to the same standards as Christians, or Jews, or Zen Buddhists--to any standards of decency at all, really. No one is shocked at the barbarity of the Islamic world, whether it is committed by terrorists, or perpetrated in the name of the Saudi or Iranian governments.

Why is there a blackout on jokes about Palestinians, who are so eminently jokeworthy, perhaps the most laughably dysfunctional culture on earth? Likewise, the MSM goes out of its way to treat Islam not just the same as other religions, but better than other religions (and yet, somehow more fragile at the same time). This is so ironic, because it obviously has nothing to do with the secular left's affinity for religion, which they otherwise despise. In other words, Islam is not a protected species because it is a religion. It is protected because it is anti-Western, because its adherents tend to have slightly darker skin than caucasians, and because it has been granted victim status. Therefore it is untouchable.

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that we don't mercilessly make fun of our enemies is part of the same syndrome that has prevented Hollywood from making any movies about the war on terror, for fear of insulting Muslims (and, of course, because they don't want to show our military engaged in a heroic struggle against evil). We live in a morally upside down world, in which making fun of the Islamist ideology is forbidden, but committing mass murder in the name of Islam is explained away. Humorless bigots such as Juan Cole heap scorn on the United States but make every excuse imaginable for the moral failings of Islam. We will know that Muslims have come a long way when they can start making fun of themselves in the same way that Americans have always made fun of themselves, their institutions, their politicians, and their religions.

Oh well. What can you do but laugh about the situation, with a compendium pre-enjoyed One Cosmos gags from the past several months?

Do you remember when Arafat died, how his wife, Suha, rushed from Paris to be by his side? Turns out that was actually part of the pre-nup: they had agreed to be together over his dead body.

Jeopardy answer: "Thuggery, buggery, and skullduggery."
Question: "What were Yasser Arafat's favorite activities?"

At least the Palestinians are trying to do something to rid their classrooms of the psychotic anti-Semitism. I don't know if I like that idea. It means their children will end pick up bits and pieces of genocidal ideology from each other, instead of from an expert.

But anti-Semites have it so easy. If you want to boycott the Palestinians, what are you supposed to do, put off purchasing that new suicide belt? And now the Palestinians even use teenage girls for suicide bombers. In fact, the girls don't actually use suicide belts. Rather, they call them "chastity belts," because it's the only way to be certain they'll never be seen holding hands with a Christian boy.

Bottom line: in Palestine, it's every parent's nightmare to die before their children. But I give the Palestinians credit. They've evolved from primitive kinship structures to barbarous gang affiliations. With luck, they can eventually became a racket, and then perhaps a crime syndicate. Evolution doesn't happen over night.

Now the Palestinians are complaining that it's unfair for us to withhold funds until Abbas institutes some meaningful reforms. I guess they have a point. It's like we're biting the hand that steals from us. At least with Abbas, they finally have a moderate in there. Sure, he's a holocaust denier, but at least he's a moderate holocaust denier. That is, he believes that six million Jews were genuinely inconvenienced in WWII.

So much conversion to the Nation of Islam goes on in American prisons, it's more accurate to call it them "Islamic gated communities." It's making some judges a little concerned. One guy was sentenced to eleven years behind bars, double that for good Muslim behavior.

But we need to be fair. According to CAIR, when Muslims give money to charity that ends up in the hands of terrorists, it's no different than when charitable donations end up in the hands of the military wing of the Salvation Army. On the positive side, CAIR has issued a strongly worded statement that unambiguously condemns kidnapping journalists by either side.

But I think I have a solution to the problem: we could just kidnap one of their journalists, say, Christiane Amanpour, and arrange a hostage exchange. Of course, first we’d have to get her on video confessing her love for the United States.... but only as a symbol of our grasp of irony.

All Men are Created Equally Racist

As mentioned yesterday, the group -- the interior collective -- shouldn't be thought of as a "location," but rather, a conception. It is only when -- and because -- everyone has the same group conception that we don't see it. It's analogous to, say, an accent. We don't notice our own, so long as we live in a region in which everyone has the same one (although I really don't have one).

Furthermore, it might even be said that the group is a "part" of the individual's functioning, as is, somewhat paradoxically, the "individual." Again, there is always this dynamic complementarity of group <--> individual taking place, out of which our sense of self emerges.

Think of the so-called Palestinians, who claim to want a "state." But they've had a remarkably stable one for 63 years. It is a state of mind that makes them one of the most depraved cultures on the planet, since it is centered around everything that is wrong with human beings: bigotry, hatred, envy, child abuse, misogyny, scapegoating, systematic lying, sacrificial violence, etc.

The Palestinians have exactly the state which they and other Arabs wish them to have. Now they want the world to officially recognize this state of mind by drawing external boundaries around it, presumably on the pretext that this nasty state of cultural mind results from a lack of said boundaries.

Which is more than a little condescending, because for the Palestinians, it is not a nasty, much less dysfunctional, state of mind. After all, doesn't everyone want to exterminate the Jews? The Palestinians believe -- and have every right to do so, given the amount of foreign aid that flows their way -- that "we just have the balls to actually do what everyone else is only thinking."

Hitler felt the same way -- that he was doing the world a huge favor -- at great inconvenience I might add, since genocide can be a messy and thankless job. Look at the poor Turks. Not only does no one thank them for the Armenian genocide, but they have to pretend it never happened. Is the world upside-down?

Ironically, I've been reading Jaffa's classic works on Lincoln, who, at risk of putting words in his mouth, believed that there was only one type of government worth creating and fighting for, since its principles were universal. Any other type of state is just one of the many masks of tyranny, so why should Americans, of all people, grant it any legitimacy? To paraphrase Tolstoy, just governments are all alike; every unjust government is unjust in its own way.

The whole thing reminds me of the words of young Nelson on the Simpsons, whose mother is an alcoholic pole dancer: "I gotta get home. My mom gets upset if she wakes up and no one's there to tell her where she is. Heh.... typical mom."

"I gotta get to the UN and vote on Palestinian statehood. They'll go all intifada on us and start blowing up their kids if we don't give them a state. Heh... typical culture."

Jaffa shows that Lincoln -- his homespun demeanor to the contrary notwithstanding -- spent his life thinking long and hard about just this subject -- almost as if he were being prepared for the messianic (this time in the real sense) task before him, which is to say, a new birth of freedom, only this time truly universal. In one sense, our Fathers (as he always called them) did all of the heavy lifting, so it was only for subsequent generations to transmit it intact to the next.

But everyone knew that there was something at the heart of the matter -- a snake in the garden, a rot at the foundation, a stark internal contradiction -- that threatened to delegitimize the whole noble experiment. For if one man has the intrinsic right to enslave another man, then no man is free, and self-government is a chimera.

Rather, the only consistent principle in which self-rule may be grounded is: all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator -- not by any state, and certainly not any culture -- with certain unalienable rights. This principle cannot be contingent or accidental. Rather, it must be essential, i.e., "self-evident."

And please note that "self-evident" doesn't only pertain to material or efficient causes located in the "past," but to final and ontological causes located both in the future and in the upper vertical.

What I mean by this is that the self-evidence of the proposition only becomes fully clear by virtue of believing and living it. As such, it is very much analogous to faith, which must be similarly lived in order to yield its harvest.

Was that clear? Perhaps not. What it means is that there is a manner in which man was meant to live, and in the absence of which he cannot thrive. It is like saying, "we hold this truth to be self-evident, that babies need maternal love in order to thrive." "But how do you know that? Show me the scientific study that proves there's such a thing as 'love.'"

Well, just see what happens if you deprive the child of this vital substance. He will be alive, but not really. He'll still be human, but only technically, in the sense that he will have been blocked from becoming what he should have. Likewise, it is partly because America was grounded in human truth that it became the most prosperous, powerful, and decent nation in history.

For Lincoln, the above-noted principle embodied in the Declaration is "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times"; and in order to be secure from those who would deny it, it "must be grounded in a reality that is not itself timebound" (Jaffa). How much political mischief could be avoided if only members of both parties acknowledged this American creed, our "political religion," that was once held sacred by all citizens!

Which brings up a critical point regarding the left's constant refrain that we must seek "compromise," which essentially means that we must not only acknowledge their principles as valid, but respect and ultimately cave into them.

Yes, they are absolutely correct that politics is the art of compromise. But on policies, not on principles. If we cannot agree on the same principles, then compromise is actually impossible.

For example, what is the compromise position between "Israel has a right to exist" and "Israel must be purged of every single Jewish man, woman and child"? What, just exterminate some Jews?

Likewise, what is the compromise position between "all men are created equal" and "some men are created equal," or "all men are somewhat equal," or "the state shall determine who is equal"? Answer: there isn't one. Hence, war.

Just as we have been involved in a war of Jihad for 60 years (great book) without acknowledging it, so too have we been involved in an interior war that is once again striking at the heart of our political religion and tearing us in two. This began in the open latrine of academia, seeped into the streams of the MSM, polluted the groundwater of public education, and now flows from every faucet of culture.

"[I]n our time, historicism and its offspring nihilism have continued to dominate the blind mice of academic discourse." That is to say, "in denying the possibility of moral and political principles that transcend time, historicism denies the possibility of rational judgment of men and events within historic time" (Jaffa).

Do you see why? Because there is no objective standard with which to judge. Who are you to say that Israeli culture is superior to Arab culture? What, are you a racist?

Truly, we are well past the point of absurdity when to affirm that "all men are created equal" is to admit to racism.

Israel and the Defense of Civilization

If Israel is quelled or destroyed, we will be succumbing to forces targeting capitalism and freedom everywhere. We will allow a fatal triumph of the barbarian masses that may well end up demoralizing and destroying the United States as well. --George Gilder

(Readers may want to warm up with the prequel to this post from two days ago, Israel Has No Right to Exist.)

I remember Dennis Prager making a point about how throughout history, the best humanity has to offer always suffers at the hands of the worst. Unfortunately, this is axiomatic, since bad people want to hurt others, while good people don't want to hurt anybody. So every time an American soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, it is a case of the worst killing the best. Every time a Palestinian monster blows himself up in Israel, the worst have murdered the best. Likewise, only God knows how much human greatness was denied the world due to the Nazi genocide of an earlier era.

So what do we do about it? We give the Palestinians another billion dollars to further cultivate their depravity. And tell Israel to close their settlements, since we don't want the good people to irritate the bad people.

The very existence of Israel -- which embodies the best humanity has to offer -- is now under imminent threat by the most evil regime on the planet, Iran. Once again, the worst wishes to annihilate the best. And if and when Israel does respond, you can be sure that she will be vilified by millions if not billions of enablers who allow evil to thrive. Iran has nothing to fear from "the world community." Nor is she fearful of good and courageous people, unless those people are prepared to unleash hell upon evil.

In The Israel Test, Gilder discusses how game theory explains why even (or especially) good people end up encouraging evil. This is especially true of the left, since in implementing policies, they only consult their good intentions, never the system of incentives -- the rules of the game -- they are putting in place. This is why they can never see that the long term results of those incentives usually aggravate the problem the policy was designed to address.

This is also true of the moral simpletons who imagine that wanting peace is the only barrier to having it. In reality, the more one communicates the desire to have peace with evildoers, the more power one gives them.

In the case of Israel, "by relentlessly seeking Peace Now," they have "predictably communicated to the Arabs that terror and aggression work. By repeatedly informing the Arabs that it wants peace more than victory, Israel evinces a short-term strategy that powerfully and consistently rewards bad behavior. As a result, Israel gets neither peace nor victory, and the Palestinians get neither economic growth nor political progress" (Gilder). By appeasing evil, only the good suffer, both in Israel and in the Palestinian territories (which, due to their proximity to Israel, had by far the highest standard of living in the Arab world before declaring the most recent intifada in 2000).

According to game theory, a long-term player will be penalized for doing business with a short-term player. Imagine if every business transaction were with someone you were never going to do business with again. This would encourage predatory and dishonest behavior on the part of the seller. We would live under the economic law of the jungle.

Note that this is not a result of anyone's intentions, just the rules of the game: "In a single exchange, the rational policy is predatory. If predatory action brings success, a player is never induced to extend the time horizon. By accommodating aggression, a nation invites it. Peace requires the imposition of penalties on aggression."

Oddly, the left understands how this principle applies to illegal and predatory activity on Wall Street, but does not apply that lesson to the world.

As Gilder explains, "the single greatest domestic threat to the United States is not the jihad but the peace movement." Just last week, Obama voiced his desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons, which makes him the most powerful ally and abettor of evil in the world. Again, his intention is "peace," but the result would be an unprecedented escalation of violence and aggression.

Obama simply wishes to change the rules of the game, so that it is less costly for evil regimes to compete. If we have overwhelming military superiority, criminal regimes can never catch up, so it's not even worth it to try. But imagine if the police were to announce to criminals that from now on, in order to reduce crime, they are only going to use knives. In reducing the potential cost of crime, it would increase both criminal behavior and the pool of criminals. The risks associated with criminality would plunge.

What is especially odd is that both Iran and the Palestinians have explicitly communicated their desire and intention to destroy Israel. Why don't we believe them? Why don't we take them at their word, and respond accordingly? If my neighbor communicates a desire to kill me and my family, I don't say to him, "would you settle for just taking a corner of my lawn?" What if I give him the lawn and he still wants to kill me? Then what?

What if my neighbor says to me that he wants my lawn because to him the lawn is "holy." Well, if you are a leftist, it's not a problem, since for you, nothing is holy, especially private property. But you can see where this attitude will lead, for if nothing is holy, there is nothing worth defending.

In truth, Israel is under no moral, legal, or political obligation to give land to people who explicitly wish to use that land for purposes of genocide. No one is morally obligated to participate in their own destruction.

Again, for us -- and for all decent people on earth -- Israel's moral obligation is to go on existing, given the staggeringly disproportionate contribution they make to the betterment of the world. This is not just Israel vs. Iran or the Palestinians. Rather, this is the leading edge of freedom, democracy, liberty, and capitalism vs. the atavistic forces that fundamentally oppose them. It is progress vs. misery, civilization vs. barbarism, light vs. darkness. If we don't wake up to the fact that Israel is the canary in the Islamist ghoul mind, we'll all be sitting ducks.

For as Gilder writes, "our loyalty to Israel arises, not from a cold calculus of survival, but from a sense of the holy. What Americans must fathom with both heart and mind is that this instinct is true -- and vital to our survival -- that if we would live, we must defend the Holy Land."

The Adventure of Reality and How to Avoid It

As Mead exhaustively demonstrates in God and Gold, the Anglo-Americans have been by far the most successful people in the history of the planet. You could go so far as to say that they even "invented" success, which is to say, "progress." Before the 17th century or so, the world was essentially static, going nowhere. There was no democracy, no science, no free market, and no freedom of inquiry. The vast majority of people lived their lives as anonymous peasants or slaves performing back-breaking work, and were lucky to live to the age of 40, by which time their worn out bodies would be "old" by our standards. War, famine, and plague were either present or on the horizon. Rates of infant mortality were appalling, so there was little point in emotionally investing in children until it was too late.

That is, we now understand that a deep emotional investment during the first two years of life is the most critical for psychological health later in life. Its absence leaves permanent scars, including depression and emptiness, unregulated anger, shame and envy, paranoia and distrust of the world, and inability to establish emotionally rewarding bonds of love with others. Thus, in my opinion, mankind was in a deep rut, a vicious cycle of dysfunctional cultures producing dysfunctional people, century in, century out. (This is explained in more detail in my book.)

Today we look at, say, the Palestinians, and see a comprehensively depraved and dysfunctional people, unable to evolve out of their deep rut. But they probably wouldn't have been out of place 500 years ago, when most groups were angry, murderous, paranoid, self-defeating, and prone to magical thinking (not to mention, anti-Semitic). The only difference is that they probably would have been much more successful in such a context, given their homicidal ruthlessness.

So when I say that the Anglo-Americans both discovered and created reality, I am being quite literal. And please don't cite all the exceptions to the rule. Of course there are bad Anglo-Americans and good and decent people from other cultures. Of course Anglo-Americans have perpetrated some awful things. But that is not because they are Anglo-Americans. It is because they are fallen human beings. Immorality is the rule in history; it hardly needs explanation. Decency is the exception; thus, people are puzzled by "the problem of evil," when the much deeper coonundrum is the problem of good.

The question is, how did human beings ever escape the enduring rut they had been in for so many centuries? The whole notion of progress didn't exist, because it wasn't something that anyone had personally experienced in their lives. Rather, change was almost always bad, so the natural impulse was to try to prevent or suppress it.

Perhaps I shouldn't say "natural" impulse; or at least we have to admit of a counter-impulse in the direction of novelty and adventure, or else we never could have escaped the rut. Humans are obviously equipped with both impulses, and the idea is to balance them, not exaggerate one or the other. You might even say that we are born with "conservative" and "liberal" impulses, not in the political sense, but in the sense of a dialectic between security and adventure, established knowledge and curiosity, closed stasis and open dynanism, boundaries and drives.

When we speak of the impulse toward curiosity and adventure, consider the original human beings who ventured out of Africa some 50,000 years ago, or whenever it was (the exact date escapes me at the moment, but I do remember that it was on a Tuesday). Originally we were a tiny band of oddballs numbering perhaps 5000 or less. For reasons we can scarcely imagine, these explorers decided to venture out of Africa, and keep venturing -- north, east, and west, then further west until there was no place to go but up and now in. From our vantage point, we can see that, all along, this has been an adventure -- no, the Adventure of Consciousness.

But obviously, there have been roadblocks and obstacles along the way -- personal, collective, cultural, economic, bacterial, viral, genetic, psychological, political, educational, religious, ideological.

Today, for the average person privileged to live in the West, none of these roadblocks exist, with the exception of the personal/psychological. If your life is not an adventure of consciousness, then it's most likely your own damn fault. Or even if it's not, then there is plenty you can do about it. You can change. You can progress. You can grow.

Unless you are still imprisoned in a culture or ideology untouched by Anglo-American ideals. Let's again take the example of the Palestinians. Let's say there is a Palestinian who actually wishes to be good. He would prefer to live in freedom, and he does not wish to murder Jews as the universal solution to all of life's problems. Practically speaking, this is not something he is free to articulate publicly, let alone choose. Palestinian savagery toward Jews is perhaps only exceeded by what they do to their own "collaborators." In a morally twisted culture such as the Palestinians, one is simply not free to be good, which is an awful catch-22 to be in. Those necessarily silent people, whoever they are, certainly deserve our sympathy.

Now, the West has its own version of a dysfunctional ideology that puts up obstacles to personal development and which runs counter to the Adventure of Consciousness: the psycho-spiritual left in all its insidious varieties and permutations. Let's take an example that comes readily to mind, the attempt to shackle black people in a cognitive prison in which they are indoctrinated to believe that their greatest obstacles are not within, but without. In spite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, condescending leftists try to indoctrinate blacks with the notions that they are hated and despised, that personal effort is futile, and that they will get nowhere in life without the assistance of white liberals.

As such, to a leftist, there is no one more hated than a black person who not only proves them wrong, but who has contempt for them in return.

For example, Clarence Thomas, without a doubt one of the greatest and most courageous living Americans.

A recent article by Shelby Steel in National Review calls him "The Freest Black Man in America." Steel's essential argument is that blacks have become so accustomed to living by the kindness of white liberal racists, that it has become a sort of addiction. Of so-called "civil rights leaders" who reinforce the same dependency that segregation imposed, he writes that "In the very bowels of slavery there was never a more egregious form of Uncle Tomism than this determination, even in the midst of freedom, to portray one's own people as nearly helpless victims.... There simply could be no greater threat to civil rights organizations than the themes that most animate Thomas's life: individuality and will." Another way of saying it is that the left erodes individuality by equating the will with futility, so that the adventure of consciousness can never get off the ground

By the way, Steel does not argue that blacks have no reason for having this attitude; rather, he emphasizes that it was a strategy born of centuries of group impotence and intense insecurity. But as a result, this historically meant that group identity became the enemy of individuality: "In its insecurity, the group is naturally threatened by the impulse in some of its members to think for themselves. Individuals like this seem to put the group at risk." Steel writes that it is as if the group is saying, "Your indulgence in individuality jeopardizes the carefully constructed mask we present to the powerful majority. Your individuality collaborates with them. So knock it off. Get in line, or we will shun you to the point of extinction."

Thus, white and black leftists do not, as do the Palestinians, physically lynch such an individual. But they do so psychologically. That is, they engage in gang rape of a person's good name and reputation, as they did and still do with Thomas. And as Dennis Prager has eloquently written, the rape of a name can be as emotionally devastating as the rape of a body, and is every bit as despicably immoral.

Indeed, because of the issue of abortion, Thomas essentially became the "poor black man nailed to the cross by wealthy white women." This was the price he paid for his individuality by virtue of stepping outside their liberal racist stereotype -- for straying off the plantation. He was still free to be an individual and do the right thing. But because of liberal racists, taking advantage of that freedom required much more courage than most of us will likely ever need.

Petey's Big Night

Petey's supposedly got a gig New Year's Eve at some kind of comedy club "on the other side," and he wants to test-run some of the material on you. He rarely asks for favors, and I can't think of anything to write about anyway, so here it is. Frankly, some of the material makes me a little squeamish, because Petey sometimes hits below the suicide belt. But that's his problem. Don't hold me accountable.

********

Everyone thinks the Left is just being cynical in their relentless attacks on the war effort, but there's a greater principle involved. That is, if they change their normal behavior and stop trying to weaken the nation, it's like the terrorists have won. Making us less safe is their way of sticking it to the terrorists.

And why should the the Left stop attacking the Boy Scouts? After all, the ACLU just wants to make sure that the Boy Scouts will always be a safe place to scout for boys.

I guess what really disgusts the Left about the Boy Scouts is their policy of racial profiling. You know, helping little old ladies cross the street but not Muslim men in their twenties.

Then again, I have an idea for how the Boy Scouts could get around the the ACLU's attempts to bar them from using public property. Just have the boys run around naked in the woods and smear each other with chocolate syrup, and then give them an NEA grant.

Or, maybe the Boy Scouts could strike a compromise with homosexual activists and allow a merit badge for fabulous makeovers.

Personally, I think it would be a good idea for the Scouts to begin awarding a merit badge for keying an ACLU attorney's BMW.

I guess I just don't get it. Why do these leftists need to change the Boy Scouts so that they'll fit in? If they want to be part of a group of atheistic, morally relativistic, America-hating adolescents, they can always join the Democratic party.

I don't know how you feel about Bush spying on the terrorists, but I'm all for it. They need to monitor these mosques and do some basic ignorance gathering. But these Muslim groups like CAIR are always complaining, deflecting responsibility. It's like they're raising an entire not-me! generation.

I read a study that says that in some Muslim countries, sixty percent of the girls are forced to undergo clitoridectomies. I like to look on the bright side. This means that forty percent of the girls can run faster than their brothers.

What about this new President of Iran? I'd say he's a few goats short of a harem. Either that or a few nails short of a suicide bomb.

And the Democrats are still calling for us to surrender in Iraq. Then again, they do support the troops. In fact, if their support gets any stronger, the troops will have to obtain a restraining order.

Of course, if only Kerry had been elected, none of this would have happened. Unlike Bush, he promised to bend over forwards to rebuild our alliances. In fact, if Kerry had been elected, France would never have left Americans' behind. Nor, with John Edwards by his side, would we be living in "two Americas," one that can afford the finest hair care products, the other living in constant fear of a bad hair day.

But at the moment they're stuck with Howard Dean at the helm of the DNC. He works so closely with the a-holes at dailykos and moveon.org, that after his chairmanship is over he'll be able to switch his specialty to proctology.

Speaking of France, everyone thinks they're anti-Semitic, but they're actually quite evenhanded toward Jews and Palestinians. True, they want the Palestinians to have a homeland, but they also clamored for the return of Jews to their homeland in Germany during W.W.II.

I still hate the MSM. Could they be any more clueless? Their motto ought to be, "Always the last to know, so you won't have to be." They're always looking for "the roots of terror." What do you need to know about the roots of terror except that the average Palestinian roots for terror?

At least now that Israel is out of Gaza, the Palestinians are fighting with each other. It's even worse than when they escalated the truce with Israel. In fact, they're fighting like the Jihatfields & McMartyrs.

I read a story the other day about China selling arms to the Sudan, which, last time I checked, was committing genocide against Christians. That reminded me of some of the lost sayings of Confucius:

--Confucius say man who feed allahgator get eaten last.

--Confucius say man who do business with Muslim must beware of evil in tent.

--Confucius say Christians pay arm and leg for arms sold to Sudan.

--Confucius say Chinese government like peeping Tom--enjoy watching Christians get screwed.

--Confucius say Bill Clintons' secretary not permanent unless screwed on desk.

How did that one get in there? That was 1998.

Why Are People Such Assouls?

Probably easier to just write a new post than dig through the arkive for the Saturday re-run.

Ever wonder why human beings -- I mean mankind at large, not this or that individual -- are such assholes?

That's an important question, isn't it? As the cliché goes, the leftist/radical/revolutionary loves mankind. It's people he hates. You know, Joe the Plumber. Sarah the Hockey Mom. Bob the Suburban Mystic.

For the Raccoon -- and any properly religious person -- it's more or less the opposite. He doesn't hate mankind. But he doesn't hold it in much esteem. At best, it is a neutral stance, in that for every great achievement of mankind, there are two or three abominations. For every peak, there is an equal and opposite valley. Charles Murray discusses this point in Human Accomplishment:

"What, I ask, can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?... Military accomplishment is out -- putting 'Defeated Hitler' on the human resume is too much like putting 'Beat my drug habit' on a personal one. I also omit governance and commerce.... those achievements are akin to paying the rent and putting food on the table..."

Amazingly, the left believes that it can turn this situation around by merely increasing the size of government and the amount of rent they will charge us for it. They love to make fun of religious people, but can you imagine a more naive belief system?

The problem is not just that man is fallen, but that if he fails to realize this, he will not recognize the very medium in which he swims. Furthermore, he will mistake movement and agitation for real change, when it is merely disintegration and descent.

Everyone can see that there is a kind of "natural balance" in the biosphere. Or at least there was until the humans moved in and wrecked the neighborhood. People who imagine that only modern humans have done this are strictly fooling themselves. In fact, this is the take-away point of Genesis, isn't it? That the moment Man opens his eyes to dualism and self-awareness, trouble begins. Truly, there were no problem in the cosmos prior to that moment.

You could even delve more deeply into this problem and reduce it to its most basic element. This is what Bion did. He noted that the universal problem facing mankind -- both collectively and individually -- is thoughts and what to do about them. The obvious answer is to think them, but we all know how rare that is.

Or perhaps you don't. But virtually every psychotherapy patient is suffering from this problem if they are lucky. In other words, they are persecuted by depressed thoughts, anxious thoughts, thoughts of inadequacy or low self esteem, envious thoughts, obsessive thoughts, etc. Wealth doesn't matter. If anything, it only serves to underscore their misery, in that they realize better than anyone that no amount of money can eliminate the mind parasites that make one's head uninhabitable.

But most people don't even bother to think those thoughts. Instead, they enact things before they have a chance to become thoughts. Or they evoke them in others and make them miserable. Or they embody the thoughts in the form of pain or dysfunction. Or often they just deaden the source of the thoughts, either through drugs or alcohol, or sometimes just systematic neglect. Most people have never had an original thought in their lives.

So, man is clearly a kind of "new category" in the cosmos. There was no good in the cosmos prior to his arrival. But nor was there any evil. UF writes that man may "go beyond the limits of the law and engender arbitrarily malicious forces whose nature and action are beyond the framework of the law," for example, "the Molochs and other 'gods' of Canaa, Phoenecia, Carthage, ancient Mexico and other lands, which exacted human sacrifice."

Yes, these beings are the product of thought + imagination, except that they are for the purpose of destroying thought and imagination. That such cultures cannot evolve should go without saying, any more than the bloodthirsty Palestinians can evolve. The trouble with Palestinians is that they cannot ask the simple question: why am I persecuted by all these hateful demons? Instead of thinking the thoughts, they violently project them from the psyche, and then murder them. It seems to be the Muslim way.

How much better off they would be if they had a culture that recognized man's fallen nature! Such a culture will not externalize blame or adopt the role of victim. Rather, such a culture will collectively ask, "what did I do wrong, and what can I do to fix it?" You will note that the culture of the secular left has much more in common with the Palestinians, in that it never occurs to them that people are largely responsible for their own problems. Indeed, this is one of the purposes of a culture of liberty: to allow people to fuck up on their own. What a blessing! It has never occurred to me that I am a victim of circumstance. Rather, if I look a little deeper, I can always find something I could have done differently. Or not. Sometimes the problem is just me. Being me simply has a price. It would have been easy to be someone else.

Individuality is freedom lived. Or, to turn it around, freedom in the abstract is meaningless. So too is merely "embodied" freedom. Rather, what we are after is mental and spiritual freedom. These are the freedoms that the left resists. They do not want you to actually be an individual. Rather, you are a member of a group, i.e., black, hispanic, female, homosexual, transgendered, etc. But as UF points out, mystical revelation restores the freedom that has been partially or totally lost, in particular, the freedom to be oneself, which again, is the only real, concrete freedom. The left offers only counterfeit freedom -- for example the "freedom" to choose an abortion, even while they compel the premature sexualization of the innocent. Or a compulsory "fairness doctrine" that eliminates free speech.

Only the awakening of free will can deliver one "from possession by fixed ideas and psychopathological complexes." As Freud put it, "where id was, there ego shall be" (the real meaning of which is where it was, there I shall be). This is just another way of saying that, just as we have been attempting to colonize an enslaved world with liberal principles over the past 250 years, so too must we colonize the individual mind with those same principles. It serves no purpose to free a culture for socialism, as it is a contradiction in terms. It is like freeing an individual to become a slave.

Real lived freedom is a kind of every day sacred magic inserted from on high into the cosmos. For it is an analogue of the Creator's vertical generation of the cosmos itself.

Free Will, Authentic Evil, and The Infectiousness of the Morally Unrepressed

Bolton points out that "the last animal of a species spends its life doing exactly the same things as were done by the first one. Only man does not have to keep doing the same things ad infinitum, regardless of their value."

But it wasn't too long ago that human beings were caught in that same evolutionary rut (and most still are). As I wrote in the book, one of our immediate predecessors, Homo erectus bumbled around the evolutionary stage for a million and a-half years with no evidence of change in the archaeological record, despite having a bigger brain than most Raider fans. As one scholar put it, "As a whole, the archaeological record between 1.4 million and 100,000 years ago seems to revolve around an almost limitless number of minor variations on a small set of technical and economic themes." Imagine the numbing repetition of hip-hop, only for a million years instead of 20.

But this is how mere Darwinian evolution works. With the exception of modern human beings, all animals are trapped in an evolutionary rut. Animals find their successful adaptations, and stick with them. That's called "winning the Darwinian lottery."

But to what is free will an adaptation? First of all, as we touched on yesterday, if it is adapted to bad ideas or to a faulty conception of reality, it "will result in changes which would be for the worse" (Bolton). As such, although this gives the superficial appearance of freedom, it cannot really be free in any useful way, "because it is worse than no change at all."

No, freedom, if it is to be truly free, must be an adaptation to Truth. Truth must be anterior to freedom, or there can be no real freedom. More pointedly, to the extent that you have internalized bad ideas, you are a slave, even though you probably feel subjectively free. But that's just the pseudo-freedom of a kind of reactionary rebellion. You are still bound to the truth, but in revolt against it.

Materialism necessarily results in loss of liberty, because in identifying with matter, the mind inverts the cosmos and shares in the materialistic mode of being.

But if for no other reason than the fact that we have two cerebral hemispheres which regard the world and process information in radically different ways, we cannot really identify with the material mode. As I have written before, human beings are bi-logical; it is not so much that we operate with two different modes of logic, but that, in a healthy person, we synthesize those two modes into a "higher third," or what Grotstein calls the "transcendent position" (and Ogden calls the "historical position," more on which later, as it has important implications for the eradication and control of mind parasites).

What this means in reality is that human consciousness is proportioned to the "transcendent object," which necessarily bifurcates into the two modes of logic in the herebelow (or herewithin). In other words -- or symbols -- you could once again draw a triangle, with the transcendent object at the apex, which in turn bifurcates into right and left hemispheres, and all they imply (or better yet, Matte Blanco's symmetrical and asymmetrical logic, respectively). In short, you need no less than two brains to know the One. Which is why reductionistic Darwinians and other materialists are such half-wits.

It's way too vast a subject to get into in detail at this point, but Balthasar's magisterial Glory of the Lord only spends about 10,000 pages going into why it is necessary to understand God in this more hyperdimensional, aesthetic manner, and conversely, how we are foredoomed to failure if we attempt to comprehend God and revelation in solely naturalistic terms. In short, theology becomes positively deranged in the absence of the third transcendental, beauty. He has so many arresting passages that illuminate this point, that it's difficult to just pick one or two. Here are a couple of random quotes:

"Will this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself?... The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty."

Or better yet, "Whoever insists that he can neither see it nor read it, or whoever cannot accept it, but rather seeks to 'break it up' critically into supposedly prior components, that person falls into the void and, what is worse, he falls into what is opposed to the true and good."

Do you see the problem? God is not only whole, but the very condition and possibility of wholeness. Therefore, to treat God as, say, a biological object that one dissects on a table, is to kill the very object one wishes to understand. God cannot be understood from the bottom up, only the top down (and only then from the bottom up). The apprehension of God is like a "form" that radiates celestial beauty that is inseparable from its truth and goodness. "If form is broken down into subdivisions and auxiliary parts for the sake of explanation, this is unfortunately a sign that the true from has not been perceived as such at all." The form is seen first, just as a biologist must first be able to apprehend life before dissecting it into parts

But it is no different with man. To treat a man as an object is to have failed to understand what man is. Likewise, to treat scripture as a literary form to be deconstructed is to have failed to see the object one is so casually dismembering. One must first see the "whole," and then understand how it radiates into all the parts. If you don't first "see" Jesus, you can't possibly begin to understand him, for "the Incarnation uses created Being at a new depth as a language and a means of expression for the divine Being and essence."

As I said, that's a topic for another 100 posts. Back to Bolton. He points out that "the lack of free will which can be seen in animals results from the fact that their wills relate only to objects in the outside world." Now, don't you know, it is the same problem vis-a-vis mind parasites and man. This is another huge topic, and I'm not sure I can do justice to it in such a short space, but a mind parasite essentially comes down to an unconsciously internalized relationship with the environment, that then goes on repeating itself in a circular way.

For example, say the infant is abused or emotionally abandoned by a parent. This relationship -- which consists of two subjects and an affective link between them -- is internalized, say, into an oppressor-victim constellation. Later in life, the person will unconsciously re-enact the mind parasite, but due to the magic of symmetrical logic, he or she can at times sadistically identify with the oppressor in relationship to a projected victim, or masochistically identify with the victim in search of a persecutory oppressor.

Thus, in a perverse way, victims need their oppressors and cannot live without them. The Democrat party is proof of this. Many blacks, for example, are "addicted" to racism, just as so many Muslims are addicted to "Islamophobia." Again, because of the magic of symmetrical logic, they convert their own bloodthirsty impulses into the insane idea that 10 million Jews control and persecute a billion Muslims. Madness. A "proportionate response" would actually to be to nurture genocidal impulses toward Muslims, so Muslims should be careful what they wish for.

Note, by the way, that the Palestinians can never recognize the right of Israel to exist, because that would spell the death of their mind parasites -- a kind of "interior auto-genocide." They would rather physically die than allow their parasites to perish. Which again puts an interesting spin on the Darwinian aspect of all this, because the so-called "Palestinians" are not adapted to external reality; rather, they must bend reality to the will of their mind parasites, even at the cost of their own physical survival. Nor can you grant them "freedom," because they will only use the freedom to enslave themselves, as they have done in Gaza.

Morality -- i.e., conformity to the Good -- can only enter in the space between freedom and necessity. Free will is actually "movement" in a higher dimension, and one of those dimensions is the dimension of objective morality. Are Palestinians free to choose the Good? Hardly. If you do that, you will be murdered by another Palestinian.

Ironically, Bolton points out that in Islamic terminology, such beings are known as "saints of satan," that is, "authentic beings who are either evil or deranged, or both, but who have all the self-assurance of those who know themselves to be authentic."

In America, our problem is that half our population has no such-self assurance. For these totolerantarians reject the beautiful moral basis of our own civilization, but identify with the monstrous "authenticity" of the Palestinians. There is nothing like the "infectiousness of the morally unrepressed" (Becker) to get a liberal's heart pounding, since they are so free of everything liberals despise about themselves and their civilization.

Long day. Gotta run. Vote (remember, you can vote once a day):

The Arc of Salvation in the Theo-Cosmic Drama

The arc of salvation.

That phrase just popped into my head while making coffee this morning. I don't know what to make of it, but it sounds like a good title for a book. Or post, anyway.

I've been rethinking my approach to, er, the Whole Existentialada, and this phrase seems to sum up my concerns. As I mentioned the other day, Eastern religions are analogous to purely spatial descents, whereas Western religion unfolds temporally in one continuous story: the Arc of Salvation, as it were. Looked at in this way, revelation cannot be complete, but must be an unfolding drama -- the Theo-Drama, as Balthasar called it (although in a specifically Catholic context).

Naturally I am appropriating Judaism into Christianity in a way that Jews would consider inappropriating, but what can one do? In many ways, the development of Christianity represented the temporalization of the spatial revelation given to the ancient Hebrews. In other words, the Jews were given the law, or the "constitution," so to speak, and we all know how much mischief is engendered by people who think that the constitution is a "living document."

This latter idea is one of the principle tools of ideologues who wish to legitimize their devolutionary policies, always under the banner of "evolution." As such, we must naturally be skeptical of volks who look progressive but who merely wish to overturn the divine-cosmic order so that they will feel more at home in the world. This, of course, is what the left habitually does, since its core constituency consists of alienated cosmic misfits of one sort or another. It's hard to imagine a left without "alienation," which is why we are halfway to a nation of aliens.

Now, in order for the arc of salvation to get underway, a group had to be chosen to receive the law. The Mishnah, or one of those other Jewish thingys, says that the Jews were not chosen in the sense of being better than other human groups. Rather, they were chosen for a divine mission -- truly a Mission Impossible if you know anything about the hideous barbarity of ancient man.

At the time, what God was asking of the Jews could not have been more against the grain of what passed for "humanness": child sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, horrible treatment of women, and incredible intergroup violence and paranoia. The ancient Hebrews were not just given a "religious" mission, but a civilizing mission. In short, in order for the arc of salvation to leave the starting post, it was necessary to prepare a human group. This group turned out to be the Jews, something which in hindsight is obvious, as all Raccoons may trace their own spiritual descent to father Abraham, who got the old ka-ball a-rolling. (In Coonspeak, this is referred to as our "Abraham Linking.")

Spirituality, since it involves a vertical descent, accounts for the sudden, otherwise inexplicable "right angles" in horizontal human history. Thus, the story of the Jews is one long line that runs perpendicular to profane history, and which created a space for the ongoing ingression of divine energies -- including the preparation of a human body for the next phase of the mission.

We're getting ahead of ourselves a bit, but this human body could not have come from any other human group that existed at the time. If you know anything about cultural anthropology (in other words, assuming you don't have a Ph.D. in it), then you know that it is preposterous to think that this human body could have come from, say, the nomadic Arabs, or the Aztec, or the native north Americans, or the ancient Celts, or the Romans, or any other group that existed at the time. They were all far too barbaric to bear this birth. At the very least, it had to be a group that did not practice infanticide, so the Romans were obviously not in the running.

In fact, there are many contemporary human groups -- both foreign and domestic -- untouched by the Judaic message, that would still be too barbaric to bear the light of this body, including virtually all of the Islamic world. Imagine this body coming out of (ironically) the so-called Palestinians -- or even CAIR, or the ACLU -- and you get the picture.

You might say that our mission in Iraq is nothing less than a forced vertical descent, which -- tragically -- may well be impossible. It may not be possible to "speed up" the arc of salvation in this manner, as one must "assent" or surrender to the descent -- as did the Jews and as did the Jewish body that was chosen for phase II of the mission. (Critically, it was necessary for both mother and child -- and father too -- to surrender to the divine mission, which emphasizes its intergenerational arc. The mother in particular had to surrender in faith to a millennia-long evolutionary mission she could not possibly have imagined.)

Perhaps it is because I have been incubating these curious ideas for so long, but it is not even a question to me that the Jews were evolutionary agents chosen for a divine mission -- or, if they were not, they might as well have been. In the course of writing my book, many obscure books synchronistically fell into my eager coon paws at precisely the right moment, including In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions by Martin Bergmann, and Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Through the Ages and Today by Sander Breiner.

(As an aside, you may notice that both of these books surpass even my own in terms of obscurity, in that they are in the amazon "top two million." In most any other day and age, an ordinary cosmic citizen such as myself never would have happened upon them [and these are just two of many]. In a previous post I mentioned how important the internet -- and amazon in particular -- was in the evolution of my thinking -- to my own "mission," as it were. Deputy Will has in the past spoken of the spiritual "quickening" that the internet facilitates -- or will facilitate -- in general. Could it be that the internet will prove to be an integral part of "phase III" of the divine mission? My fellow Coons, you know the answer to that question, in that you are the answer, are you not? What do you think we're doing here?)

Not coincidentally, both of the above books were written not by anthropologists or historians -- who tend to be too blinded by academic correctness to see reality -- but by psychoanalysts, who are accustomed to piercing through the BS and looking at the human condition in all its barbaric splendor. Psychoanalysts specialize in the vertical -- the lower vertical. Freud himself likened the exploration of the unconscious to a sort of archaeological dig, under which are deeper and deeper layers of our personal history. You might say that his brilliant disciple Melanie Klein and some of her own gifted followers (including Bion) hit bottom and kept digging into prehistory -- into the preverbal, pre-oedipal foundation of the mind, a disturbingly phantasmagoric reality explored previously only in literature or perhaps in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

But what is true of the individual is true of the collective, and these two psychoanalysts looked under the rocks of history to try to understand some of the more disturbing and troubling "acting out" that humans had been engaged in since the dawn of humanness. In particular, Bergmann focuses on the puzzling right turn that occurred in human history when Abraham, instead of sacrificing his son -- which any good father would do, including contemporary Palestinians -- hears the voice of God telling him not to. (You will note that contemporary Palestinians are quite frank and unapologetic in letting the world know that they are still in thrall to a pre-Abrahamic voice they call "Allah" urging them to sacrifice their children.)

One of the virtues of the book we recently discussed, Before the Dawn, is that it pulls no PC punches in chronicling just how unimaginably savage human beings were in the past. I don't have time to look up the exact statistic at the moment, but Wade mentioned something to the effect that if the murder rate in the 20th century had been comparable to what it was among primitive human groups, the deaths due to war would have run in the billions instead of a "mere" 100 million.

Thus, from our vantage point, the 20th century looks like a catastrophe, but from the vantage point of antiquity it was conspicuously peaceful -- even though seven out of ten European descendents of Abraham were incinerated in the process. This is hardly a coincidence, as the fascist/socialist rebellion of the 20th century represented nothing less than a vertical "counter-revolution" which had to involve the Jews, just as the Islamist devolution must involve them -- as if the light produces a rebellious shadow in the lower vertical. The devolutionary forces of the lower vertical are always visible in groups that oppose the Jews, currently Islam and the international Left.

In his book, Breiner analyzes the vast cultural differences between the ancient Jews and their contemporaries -- the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, and Chinese. The notion that these vast differences can be explained by "genetics" is strict nonsense. This would be the position of Wade and other orthodox Darwinians -- as if Abraham didn't sacrifice Isaac because of a random genetic mutation! Perhaps tomorrow I'll discuss further the cosmic "righteous angle" represented by the people chosen to carry out phase I of the arc of cosmic salvation.

Complaint Department: Do Sick Cultures Produce Sick People?

Yesterday I received several emails from someone who was unable to post his comments on the blog. He is not my usual many-monikered troll, but someone who's comments deserve serious consideration. He is apparently a psychiatrist--or at least an MD--who falls squarely within the politically and academically correct view that one cannot say that certain cultures are more likely to produce mentally ill individuals.

He says that I commit "the same logical error that ShrinkWrapped" makes, which at least places me in illustrious company. That is, "You cannot make a jump from cultural personality styles to individual psychopathology. There are far more shame cultures on the planet than guilt cultures, which we assume to be superior... Mediterranean cultures, including Moslem, are normatively paranoid and shame-motivated."

In other words, there are more shame cultures than guilt cultures, so therefore the latter cannot be deemed superior to the former. It's all arbitrary--perhaps even just the usual ethnocentrism that causes one to inevitably think that one's own culture is superior to others.

We could go further and say that the majority of cultures throughout human history have practiced human sacrifice. It is an absolutely universal practice that appeared all over the globe. As such, we cannot say that individuals from cultures that refrain from human sacrifice are any different from those, such as the Aztec, who systematically murdered some 20,000 sacrificial victims a year, cutting out the beating heart of the victim and drinking their blood in order to appease an angry sun that might otherwise extinguish without a constant supply of fresh blood. It's just a different belief, that's all. In the Aztec world, Jeffrey Dahmer would be just a regular guy.

Slavery was also universal. Thus, we cannot say that there is anything different in the personality makeup of someone whose empathy causes them to instinctively recoil at the thought of enslaving another human being, vs. someone that has no such empathy and thinks slavery is a wonderful idea.

I assume that you and I cannot even contemplate what it would be like to have sex with a child--we can't even go there, so to speak--but we are no different that the ancient Greek men who were emotionally incapable of loving women, and instead used young boys as their sexual outlet. Just a different cultural practice, that's all. Sex is just an instinct. Its object is of no consequence, be it a goat, a child, a woman, or a watermelon.

In the ancient world, the Jews were mocked and ridiculed because of their oddly humane treatment of women and children. In fact, it is my belief that it was precisely this humane treatment of women and children that caused Jews to create psychologically healthier people and to rocket ahead of other human groups. This is why, on a per capita basis, they have contributed more to human progress than any other group, despite the most horrible treatment from other groups. But the view expressed by my reader would suggest that, for example, there is no difference in the mental health of the average Palestinian vs. the average Israeli. One believes life is sacred, the other worships death. Just a different belief, that's all.

In fact, that's exactly what the reader says: "Mediterranean cultures, including Moslem, are normatively paranoid and shame-motivated." In other words, if someone from a Muslim culture is a paranoid anti-Semite and has dysregulated shame, it's normal. There is no judgment a psychologist can make one way or the other as to the general mental health of the individual. He even favorably quotes Nietzsche's famous cliche that "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." As if culture is anything other than human personality writ large, and personality a private culture.

The reader goes on to say that wife abuse is indeed "normal" in Iraq and Iran. But "Normal is a statistical concept, not a statement about good or bad." He refers to the famous Milgram Experiment, apparently in the belief that it means that, just because people do bad things, we cannot judge them as bad. It seems to me that this is missing the deeper meaning of the experiment. After all, how do we even know that the subjects of the experiment did something bad if we do not a priori know that it was bad?

I could conduct a similar study and easily prove that a significant majority of human beings are not operating in Piaget's highest stage of cognitive development, formal operations. Does this mean that the ideas of a concrete operations thinker are just as valid as those of someone in formal operations? As a matter of fact, that is exactly what the average postmodern academic would say. It is arrogant for us to distinguish between nuclear physics vs. Indian rain dancing, or psychotherapy vs. going to the hajj and stoning satan to rid yourself of demons.

The reader states on the one hand that while he believes in unconscious motivation, he also believes that personality is "probably heavily genetic in itself, develops and is shaped by a cultural as well as a family context the way a sapling grows towards the sun." Such a view flies in the face of the most cutting edge research on early attachment and its role in most all forms of psychopathology.

In other words, it is hardly as if a child comes into the world with no objective needs at all, and that his personality will more or less turn out the same no matter how he is treated. I know that this is the dominant academic view, and that there is a lot of bogus feminist research trying to prove that mothering and attachment have no major impact on a child's psychological health, but I couldn't disagree more. It is proven to me every day in my clinical practice. Of course there are some temperamentally resilient children who seem to survive unscathed despite having been abused. But does this mean that it's okay to abuse children, and that there is no psychological difference between someone who abuses children and someone who recoils at the thought?

By the way, I see patients from virtually all cultures around the world, so I have rather intimate familiarity with how a particular culture distorts and warps the personality in more or less permanent ways. It is not so much that this or that culture merely produces this or that kind of personality. Rather, I am able to readily discern how a given culture produces a certain type of character pathology. Does it mean that all individuals from the culture are mentally ill? Of course not. But there is no question that it makes it more likely. Of this I am utterly convinced.
 
As I may have mentioned before, as a psychologist looking at culture and history, I am not particularly interested in ignorance, which, after all, can afflict anyone and is perfectly understandable. It simply means that you don't know something. What is far more interesting from a psychological standpoint is what I call motivated stupidity, that is, the widespread belief in some patently false belief based on underlying emotional need.

I believe the attitude that dismisses the crazy beliefs of the Muslim world is another example of the hard bigotry of no expectations. It causes real damage, because it panders to the worst in human beings and lets them off the hook. It is like a bad therapist who simply supports a patient rather than interpreting, clarifying, and sometimes confronting.

For example, I believe the Palestinians receive no criticism from the left (and the world community at large), not because they think so highly of them, but because they have think so badly about them--in fact, they actually have no expectations whatsoever about them. In other words, it is not because the Palestinians are so wonderful that they are immune from criticism, but because everyone knows that it would be absurd to hold Muslims to the same standards as Christians, or Jews, or Zen Buddhists--to any standards of decency at all, really. No one is shocked at the barbarity of the Islamic world, whether it is committed by terrorists, or perpetrated in the name of the Saudi or Iranian governments. Imagine being foolish enough to have any moral expectations of the Chinese, or the Palestinians, or the Saudis, or the North Koreans. We expect them to behave barbarously. And they never fail us. And when they do behave in their predictably bestial way, it is never their fault. It is either overlooked completely, or blamed on some provocation, some "underlying cause."

My reader and I have just carried on a dialogue in which we were able to observe culture in an abstract way by standing "outside" of it and looking at it the same way that a scientist observes the material world. Is this not in itself inherently superior to cultures that cannot stand outside themselves and view themselves from the standpoint of another? Or is the developmental acquisition of such objectivity no better than being hopelessly immersed in the subjective and emotional, like a child?

I think you know my answer.



*****

By the way, I believe this reader has his own blog. If he has a response, I will be happy to direct you to it.

Religious Cartoons and Cartoonish Religions

"You'd complain if you were on fire." That's what my old gagDad* would good-naturedly say to me as a kid. At the time, I'm not sure I understood exactly what he meant. "Of course I'd complain if I were on fire. Nobody wants to be on fire." But it was his way of saying "better to light a single match than curse the darkness," or "stop whining and do something about it."

At least until the emergence of the modern left, America has never been a complaining country, but an action oriented one. It was considered weak and unmanly to complain, to whine, to blame others. Classical liberalism in no way resembled its modern leftist perversion, in that it emphasized individual liberty, following the rules, making one's way in the emporium of a free market, rising to the level of one's own abilities, and letting the chips fall where they may.

But more than differentiating between ideologies, I find that ideologies and political parties differentiate between "psychoclasses"--that is, different sorts of people reflecting different levels of psychological development. Of course, I am making a huge generalization, but the modern left is the party of complainers, while the modern conservative movement is the party of Doing Something About It. Importantly, the complainers are completely detached from the realm of solutions. No matter how much things improve, the improvement is never acknowledged. It is as if the original complaint is preserved in amber, like a sacred relic.

This applies to almost any issue you care to discuss--the environment (which has never been better), the economy (which is flourishing), the war, voting rights, whatever. Consider the civil rights movement. By all rights, it achieved its purpose 30 or 40 years ago, but it doesn't matter. It is now an institutionalized grievance department run by frauds, hustlers and race-baiters like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other Democrats who are adept at exploiting and nurturing this limitless pool of human grievance and converting it into personal wealth and power. Think of the collective reservoir of bitterness and resentment as analogous to any other human energy. It is "fungible"--that is, able to be converted into valuable cash prizes, no different than positive and pro-social attributes such as personal initiative, creativity, ambition and drive.

Look at the feminist movement. It is based on so many demonstrable myths, lies and distortions, but the myths create a sort of energy through which many people are ironically able to make a nice living--for example, Justice Ginsberg, who parlayed her fierce and uncompromising female envy into a seat on the Supreme Court. Feminists still promulgate the lie that women earn 59 cents to the dollar that men earn in equivalent jobs, but this has been thoroughly debunked. It doesn't matter. If you are going to parasitically exploit the grievances of a class of people, you first must indoctrinate the "host" by peddling victimhood to them. Then the parasite is able to ride the wave of resentment all the way to the bank, the political office, the academic position, or the judicial bench.

In my local paper the other day, there was a remarkable but typical lead story with the headline "County Failing Latinos." It purported to be an objective academic study about all the ways government is supposedly failing Latinos around Los Angeles. For example, Latinos are more overwwight, less healthy, and less likely to graduate high school. But naturally, there wasn't a single statement as to whether any of these problems have to do with self-defeating beliefs and behaviors of Latino culture. It's okay to call people fat, stupid and lazy as long as it's a liberal saying it, because to the liberal, none of these things are your fault. You're a victim of the government, and the liberal is here to help you.

Why not a different headline: "Latino Culture Dysfunctional Compared to Asian Culture," or “Problems of Black Community Solved by Inculcating Mormon Values.” After all, elite California universities are vastly over-represented by Asian Americans, and Provo, Utah is the safest place to live in the country. On the other hand, our prison system is conspicuously underrepresented by Asians and Mormons. Perhaps someone should introduce an an affirmative action program to place more Asians and Mormons in prison in order to achieve diversity. After all, our prisons ought to "look like America."

Come to think of it, we rarely even hear much about Asian culture. They don't seem to complain much, despite a much greater history of real discrimination. In fact, it wasn't too long ago that they weren't even allowed to own property in much of California. Even with the W.W.II internment, by and large they simply took their lumps and moved on. On the other hand, there is a serious movement among African Americans pushing for reparations for slavery, as if that will solve any of their problems.

Isn't this what's going in in the Muslim world? It is a world of perpetual victims who literally don't know any other way to exist. In over half a century it has never even occurred to the so-called Palestinians that instead of foolishly trying to eliminate Israel, they might imitate her. But Job One for the Palestinians has always been and will remain the extermination of Israel. Once that is achieved, then they can think about schools, hospitals, roads, and anything else that creates a decent society. Yeah, right, just like every other Muslim paradise. There is no question that if Israel never existed, its current geographical area would be a squalid and undeveloped piece of generally worthless land, occupied by gang of idle complainers blaming Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon for their plight.

At Gates of Vienna there was a very illuminating discussion around a post by Ali Eteraz, who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan. He describes his experiences as a child in Pakistan, and the traditional fatalism of Islam that was drummed into him. He grew up in a place "where the harshness of life has made the exterior of its citizens tough enough to withstand the heat of the desert. The spirits of its people, on the other hand, are not as taut and unbending as their bodies suggest." Rather, the man living under the weight of Islamic indoctrination "welcomes sorrow, relishes pain, and exalts suffering. For him there is no value in the success of his relationships unless they add to one's misery; there is no value in tears because they would mitigate the sorrows — and that is not wanted. The irony is that even if one comes to realize the unhealthiness of such a way of life, the impracticability of always being life’s martyr, one dares not let go of it, because being happy now, in this life, means being damned tomorrow."

Despite transplanting himself to America, Mr. Eteraz has struggled to slough off these unhealthy attitudes: "I became fatalistic and apathetic... I remained within the folds of Islam because it gave me a framework in which to be submissive; and in being submissive, remain static. It let me believe that my inertness was tolerable, if not altogether ideal.... I always chuckle when I hear the political pundits calling people like me... the 'saving force' of Islam simply because we are not firebrands like Bin Laden.... Many pundits... have rested their hopes upon us muted ones. They expect us to free global Islam from the Tazirs and Bin Ladens of the religion."

"Somehow we cows, chewing on the cud of our paranoia-stricken life have been labeled 'moderate' as if we offer a counterweight to the extremists." But "One of the chronic conditions of Islam, moderate or otherwise, is to blame non-Muslims for the problems afflicting Islam. It’s like the alcoholic who blames his wife’s behavior for his drunken binges. It’s time for Islam to live with the hangover and sober up. And, perhaps, go to an AA meeting and start on the first of the Twelve Steps."

Amen. So now, throughout the world, Muslim jihasbeens-that-never-were are expressing their murderous outrage over some silly cartoons. Truly, they'd complain if they were on fire. Yesterday Egypt refused Israel's offer of assistance to help out with the stricken ferry boat. At least Muslims are a diverse lot. They can also complain while drowning.



*Interestingly, my father served in the British Army in occupied Palestine, back when it really was occupied--by the British Army. He didn't talk much about his experience, but he was impressed--if impressed is the right word--by the barbarism of the local Arabs. He didn't have a bigoted bone in his body, but I remember him casually mentioning that they had the ability to steal your watch while your arm dangled outside the window of a moving train. A prescient comment in light of the uniquely criminal and murderous culture that continues to flourish there. As Mark Steyn has observed, they are "the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the planet" through no one's fault but their own, but with big assists from the U.N. and their Arab neighbors. The Palestinians are the all-purpose complaint department of the entire Muslim world. All problems are somehow related to them.