Once Upon a Time There Was a Caliphator Coming Down the Road with a Bomb Strapped to His Chest

Caliphator: one who believes that in our day, in this generation, Islam will triumph over all other religions and establish a global Caliphate, i.e., a participant in an apocalyptic millennial movement (Landes).

So, crazy. But why? What makes millions of people believe in the impossible? 

And of course, just because it's impossible, this hardly prevents them from causing great damage to reality -- not just the lives lost or ruined, but the billions of dollars that must be spent to manage this primitive menace, to keep the Caliphators from flying planes into buildings, setting off suicide bombs, warring with their neighbors, etc.

Way back in the early days of the blog, there were many posts on the failure to synchronize our calendars, what with Christendom existing in the 21st century, Islam back in the 7th. Even if they're living in the 10th or 15th, that's still a lot of catching up to do. 

Problem is, the Caliphators also want to synchronize the calendars, only by turning ours back. 

Now, outside human experience, time is just time: it has no qualities, but rather, is just quantitative duration, a measure of change, except with no one there to notice that things changed. 

In order for time to be noticed, one must partially transcend it, and this is what humans do, some of us more effectively than others. 

Again, we've had many posts on the subject of developmental time, but yesterday's post got me to thinking about it again, because Caliphator time is very different from... what shall we call our time? I don't know, but something will pop into my head as we proceed.

Suffice it to say that the time of physics is not the time of humans, let alone that of God, who is of course "outside time," but not completely, otherwise he wouldn't be here with us. In this regard, he's like us, only more so. Indeed, you could say he's even more in and out of time than we are. Or just say Emmanuel, God with or amongus.

Schuon says some things about time that touch on our way of looking at it, for example, "Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time is the duration which this change renders measurable," which is what we mean by the distinction above between mere clock time and human developmental time.

Regarding developmental time, think of how an infant must experience time versus how a child or adult does -- and everyone in between, both healthy and pathological. 

Even thinking about these differences makes me suspect I've bitten off more than you'll want to chew. Nevertheless, let's keep chewing, even if we won't be able to swallow it all in a single post, much less digest it.

Unfortunately for readers, the first name that pops into my head is Joyce -- no, not (yet) Finnegans Wake, but rather, a certain portrait of him as a child. On its first page he tries to paint a verbal picture of what it is like to exist in what Piaget would call sensorimotor time, perhaps on the cusp of language acquisition:

the sensorimotor stage "extends from birth to the acquisition of language." In this stage, infants progressively construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences (such as vision and hearing) from physical interactions with objects (such as grasping, sucking, and stepping). Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform within it. They progress from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage.

What must that be like? Don't you remama the infanity? Joyce does:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.... 

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.... 

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father.... 

Mine too! I also remember the rough stubble. On my father, that is.

"Joyce called the new way a presentation of the past as a 'fluid succession of presents.'" 

There is no past in the book: only a continuous present with a style that shifts to follow every curve in the fluid continuum, expressing or "discovering" it (Anderson). 

Explain this Important Quote:

These first lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represent Joyce’s attempt to capture the perceptions of a very young boy. The language is childish: “moocow,” “tuckoo,” and “nicens” are words a child might say, or words that an adult might say to a child. 

In addition to using childlike speech, Joyce tries to emulate a child’s thought processes through the syntax of his sentences and paragraphs. He jumps from thought to thought with no apparent motivation or sense of time. We have no idea how much time goes by between Stephen’s father telling him the story and Stephen wetting the bed. 

Moreover, the way Stephen’s thoughts turn inward reflects the way children see themselves as the center of the universe. Stephen is the same Baby Tuckoo as the one in the story his father tells, and the song Stephen hears is “his song.” As Stephen ages, Joyce’s style becomes less childish, tracking and emulating the thoughts and feelings of the maturing Stephen as closely as possible. 

Eventually we learn-- some of us at any rate -- that we    

are separate from the environment. [We] can think about aspects of the environment, even though these may be outside the reach of the child's senses. In this stage, according to Piaget, the development of object permanence is one of the most important accomplishments. 

Object permanence is a child's understanding that an object continues to exist even though they cannot see or hear it. Peek-a-boo is a game in which children who have yet to fully develop object permanence respond to sudden hiding and revealing of a face. By the end of the sensorimotor period, children develop a permanent sense of self and object and will quickly lose interest in Peek-a-boo (Wiki).

This is much more important than you might suspect, but in order to explain why, we'll have to go even more irritatingly far afield, into Winnicott's theory of transitional objects:

One of the elements that Winnicott considered could be lost in childhood was what he called the sense of being -- for him, a primary element, of which a sense of doing is only a derivative. The capacity for being -- the ability to feel genuinely alive inside, which Winnicott saw as essential to the maintenance of a true self -- was fostered in his view by the practice of childhood play. 

More to the point, 

Playing can also be seen in the use of a transitional object, Winnicott's term for an object, such as a teddy bear, that has a quality for a small child of being both real and made-up at the same time. Winnicott pointed out that no one demands that a toddler explain whether his Binky is a "real bear" or a creation of the child's own imagination, and went on to argue that it's very important that the child is allowed to experience the Binky as being in an undefined, "transitional" status between the child's imagination and the real world outside the child. 

For Winnicott, one of the most important and precarious stages of development was in the first three years of life, when an infant grows into a child with an increasingly separate sense of self in relation to a larger world of other people. In health, the child learns to bring his or her spontaneous, real self into play with others; in a false self disorder, the child has found it unsafe or impossible to do so, and instead feels compelled to hide the true self from other people, and pretend to be whatever they want instead. Playing with a transitional object can be an important early bridge between self and other, which helps a child develop the capacity to be genuine in relationships, and creative.

Playing for Winnicott ultimately extended all the way up from earliest childhood experience to what he called "the abstractions of politics and economics and philosophy and culture... this "third area," that of cultural experience which is a derivative of play."

With this in mind, we're finally in a position to better understand the apocalyptic dream of Caliphator time. But haven't I taxed the reader's patience long enough? I well remember sitting in class, when the time between 2:45 to 3:00 was an eternity. I remember my butt falling asleep, or at least it felt that way, and I don't want to do that you, for you've suffered enough.

We'll end with a passage by Landes and resume tomorrow, when the feeling in your butt has returned:

Caliphators believer that now is the time for Islam to fulfill its disrupted destiny, and where there was Dar al Harb (realm of war, of free / unsubjected kuffar / infidels), there shall be Dar al Islam (realm of submission to Allah and his servants, of dhimmi kuffar).

All because our psychological / developmental calendars aren't synchronized.