Update: Trivial prediction: more Muslims will die because of "protests" and riots because of the Danish cartoons than non-Muslims.
Matt McIntosh has posted a piece titled We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us at my other blog. It has spawned a lot of comments. Many people were offended by the way Matt couched his thought experiment and the character of his exposition. I jumped in to defend him, and below is a somewhat florid summation at the end of the thread (excuse the lack of capitalization, it is not an affectation, just a way to save keystrokes when I'm entering comments):
ok, here is my opinion, not to make too much of a stretched analogy, but consider rene descartes. though i'm more of an 'empiricist' than a 'rationalist' in sentiment, descartes and his rationalist project were magnificant extrapolations of what makes us human, our ability to abstract and metarepresent alternative ideas in our mind's eye. cartesian rationalism started from a point of radical doubt and skepticism of all the values and intuitions that his contemporaries held dear. descartes' radicalism extended to god, he doubted god himself before coming around to the inevitable 'proof' (a variation on the ontological proof from what i recall). the point here is that descartes remained a faithful catholic, but he explored the implications of rationality to its logical limit, which included his own religion.i am a liberal in the broad, classical, sense. as is matt. i have a powerful personal animus toward islam especially amongst the religions that man has created. nevertheless, i believe a position of radical amoral doubt is important in comprehending the nature of the beast, we must shed our heart and look deep into our minds and see if we can gather some insight on topics that are pretty difficult for the 'scientific' method to investigate. cognitive psychology of religion is important because thoughts are the atoms upon which the institution of religion is built, even though the institution is shaped by a host of higher order cultural and historical factors. why did the people of carthage offer up their children in burnt offerings to their gods? (i believe that the urns are evidence of child sacrifice, i know some dissent) why did the kamikazes behave the way they did? why do muslims behave so bestially?
ultimately, these are questions whose roots lay in human psychology, i believe. they may not, but we will never known unless we strike into those waters, shorn, at least temporarily, of anything but the coldest eye of clinical examination.
descarte wondered how he could know that an evil demon did not generate the world as an illusion, how could he trust one's intuitons? that did not mean that he denied his senses in the operational activity of his daily intercourse with other humans, that he ceased to be a fully feeling human embedded in convential exchanges based on an assumption of the validity of his eyes and ears. suspending heart felt judgement and values is necessary for us to conceive of islam clearly and distinctly. i don't know if it is possible to study religion in a scientific way as anthropologists like scott atran or pascal boyer are attempting, but we should try.
there are many places on the web where muslims are treated as oppressed minorities who are driven to barbarism by western racism. in other places they are metaphysically inspiried animals who are unfathomable, creatures outside the bounds of rational understanding. in these places various emotions reign supreme. i am trying to clear the waters for a small place where we are disciplined and put aside our feelings in the service of unnatural expositions and examinations.
for truth, i agree with hume, reason is just the servant of passion. my passions are clear, and they lay with the west, there is no doubt of that. but for reason to go about its task the master must let the leash loose on occasion so that it may hunt in the darkness that passion can not perceive. some of us have great hounds of reason at our disposal, i like to think, and my wish is that the hounds should gather and swarm here, out of the sights of the masters for a bit, and see what emerges from the darkness.
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I would sum up like this:
1. All cultures are ultimately faith-based.
2. Seemingly passionately-held beliefs can be very shallow.
3. Appeals to authority can be very potent.
4. In these, the West is no different from the Islamic world.
5. The difference lies in the particulars.
6. It is very important to get the particulars right.
It is one thing to note the similarities of religion, the West, cultrure to Islam and another to suggest that our reactions--burning, death threats, rioting--are today similar to the medieval-like crazy behavior of Muslims...they simply are not the same. Period.
Wasn't there a study recently that showed that political "true believers" get a drug-addict-like rush when they ignore the facts in favour of their emotions? I strongly suspect that much of religion has its roots in the same phenomenon.
I've seen myself getting a similar rush in the evolution/creation debate (and others). The difference being that I, and the other "rational" debaters involved in this, force ourselves to not ignore the facts. It's a skill that's closely related to aspects of good scientific practice, so it's no surprise that this particular debate is polarised so strongly between rational folk and religious nuts.
It is one thing to note the similarities of religion, the West, cultrure to Islam and another to suggest that our reactions--burning, death threats, rioting--are today similar to the medieval-like crazy behavior of Muslims...they simply are not the same. Period.
such faith in your own assertions aren't fruitful when it comes to analysis.
David, that's a good summary. Really, it's actually a somewhat trivial point about norms of reaction. But sometimes when passions run high, the trivial needs restating and emphasizing.