A few days ago I posted on "Islamic finance," which to non-Muslim eyes looks an awful lot like an intellectually dishonest "work around." This sort of thing is not limited to Muslims, at one point the Catholic Church took the ban upon usury seriously, opening up a niche for Jews as moneylenders. But what about financial transactions amongst the Jews themselves? The reality is that Orthodox Judaism is not nearly as friendly toward exploitative financial transactions between Jews, in a manner not dissimilar to Islam, and so naturally "work arounds" emerged which followed the letter of the law if not the spirit. How do believers reconcile these dodges and legalistic gymnastics with an omniscient deity? I don't personally know in any detail, but I am convinced that the ubiquity of these sorts of practices emerge from the partially encapsulated & fragmented nature of human cognition. In other words, these work arounds not only take advantage of "gaps" in the word of God, they leverage "inefficiencies" in reflective thought which results in imperfect coherency and consistency.
But it isn't only in the context of religion that I've been thinking about the relationship between law and spirit. A friend of mine was telling me the other day about a "blogwar" where a liberal blogger "sicked" his readers on a woman who included a racist post in the feed for her blog aggregation site. Whether this was a conscious inclusion or not, the blogger in question presumed that the woman was condoning racism, so his readers took things in their own hands (eventually leading to her resignation from her workplace). For me the interesting point was that misogynistic insults were including the barrage of emails she received. This doesn't surprise me, but, what does raise eyebrows is presumably the readers of the original blogger who raised the cry were very liberal and abhorred racism, and so one would assume that concomitantly they would on principle abhor sexist slurs. But of course empirically we know this isn't how things work out, and to some extent one can rationalize it as a rock-paper-scissors dynamic: it is acceptable to call someone a "whore" and a "bitch" if they are racist. Michelle Malkin knows this well, I recall reading on blogs like Atrios rogue commenters not only mocking her maiden name in a racist fashion, but someone offering up the bizarre scenario of her being gang raped by fat old white conservative males (presumably her fantasy). Doesn't Michelle Malkin deserve some respect as a human being no matter her politics? Ah, "But she's Michelle Malkin...."
A few years ago a cousin of mine invited me over to his place and asked me to indulge myself in the pornographic films in his collection of DVDs as I sat under a wall poster of the Kabba on his couch. Later he told me luridly about how he had sex with a woman in his bedroom while our other cousin listened to their grunts. At this point he offered me a beer, and waxed eloquently about how "our women" are not "like that" and are "pure." He has a daughter now (with one of "our women"), and of course he would fly into a rage if anyone treated her as an object purely of sexual gratification at some point in the future. This sort of behavior is not unknown amongst Muslim males, indulgences in the pleasures of the flesh with "kuffar" women is within the bound of acceptability because questions of honor, shame and virtue are irrelevant when it comes to those outside of Islam. When I was a in high school many of my male friends, Mormons and Baptists, would enter into sexual relationships with the school "sluts." The purpose of these relationships was not to build a foundation for the future, but to extract sexual favors and accrue experience and points. Of course, at some point in the future these same boys, now men, would marry women who were pure virgins.
We all have principles, and we try to tell ourselves that we're following them even when we "bend" the rules. Our mental hardware and the software built on top of it is flexible and amenable to these white lies. Religious believers may believe that God knows all, but to our introspection is blinded by the many shadows in the twilight world of our minds which allow us to put aside indiscretions and infidelities away from the glare of our self-criticism. Shame is no consideration within the community agrees that the infidels/mleccha/liberal/conservative/kuffar/gentile/babarian/gaijian/etc. are outside the bounds of respectable treatment. Guilt is not a cross to bear when the mind is a master of self-deceit as a matter of course. What one does not glean within the mind's eye one does not regret, the unseen sin is no sin.
I was struck by all this while reading The Chinese Experience, a cultural history of the Middle Kingdom from antiquity to the 20th century. While the law is viewed positively in the West, a legacy of Rome, in China it is abhorred. The reason is historical, as the Legalistic camp in ancient China left the nasty legacy of a crushing totalitarianism. After the rebirth of Confucianism in the wake of the collapse of the Chin dynasty and the crystallization of classical Chinese civilization under the Han the law had a dirty name. Rather, the emphasis was on the judgment of morally upright scholar-officials. Cardinal virtues like jen or li served as broad guidelines, but there was no great reverence for divine law. Heaven served as the bulwark and grounding for the decisions and actions of man, but Heaven was not a precise dictator. Certainly Chinese civilization ossified and became overly reliant on precedent and proper forms (li) during its later phases so that the ideal of virtuous gentlemen making the best and most pragmatic decision seems laughable. Nevertheless, do note that East Asian societies have been rather open to making selective changes and modernizing due to the Western challenge. In contrast, Islamic societies have been more resistant as "reformist" streams which reject the West have risen to become extremely popular. I think part of the flexibility of the East is due to the fact there is no specific law sanctioned by God which requires argumentation or marginalization. The Chinese lack of respect for inflexible and blind law has caused problems in the modern context because of the necessity of fixed and predictable legal regimes for a capitalist economy, but in the Islamic case you have a situation where all sorts of ridiculous circumlocutions around the letter of the law (e.g., "Islamic banking") are necessary to align with the spirit of the age. Similarly, the emphasis on moral character framed by general exhortations toward goodness seems far more practicable than the laundry list of "things to do to be a good person" which some Western religious and cultural traditions embarked upon, simply because the lists are invariably "gamed" to the satisfaction of opportunistic individuals.
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Observing similar contradictions in the 'believers' around me started the doubts about Islam in my mind. I didn't understand why our supposed monopoly on truth didn't produce people with a better a better moral compass than the norm. I started finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile my faith with the world I saw around me. I then read the blank slate and realised I didn't have to - it gave me more answers than 20 years of religion ever had.
I shall pounce on the provokative, bolded sentence.
I find this a bit selective. China underwent systematic atrophiziation because of its unwillingness to adapt to modernity, and was nearly swallowed up whole by the west. Japan only reformed after the huge external shock of the black ships and other embarrasments, via an elite coup (which is what the Meiji Restoration was) but things could have gone differently. And if I recall correctly the Emperor in the early 1860's supported the anti-westerners at Shimonoseki, Japans westernization has historically been at the behest of a conservative, unrepresentative elite, from the Meiji to MacArthur.
Anti-western/modern forces were very powerful in Japan throughout the entire modernization period, some were co-opted as useful legitimizers of modernization to preserve Japanese identity, some rebelled (Satsuma), while some of the rebels were eventually encorporatated into the national mythplex (Saigo Takimori).
The elite who started WWII were NOT Fascist, and had little in common with the brute thugs and social misfits who took over in Germany - they were upright members of the nationalist elite. They became fanatical, for sure, but at heart remained more Hindenburg than Hitler. They were 'anti-modern' in the way that many Islamic countries are, that is contemptuous of the west, but in love with its toys, especially its weaponry.
Reformists in the Islamic world have been entirely elite affairs as well - Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan...
Take Nasser. He was a 'modernist', as in he really wanted to make Egypt a modern, relatively progressive nation, nationalist, for sure, but similar to the Meiji modernizers. The only problem was that at the time modernity and 'the future' was supposed to be fabian socialism, he was an avid reader of Le Monde and the New Statesman, the results were as disastrous as expected. But what if he had been a modernist of the capitalist, Pinochet variety? How would Egypt look today? The Muslim Brotherhood were huge opponents of Nasser's programme, much like the the Samurai, but have endured and become emboldened because Nasser's socialist programme was such a failure, while the Samurai past was ultimately undermined by Japan's success.
I guess my point is that modernization is painful, it takes time for things to adjust and seeing the past uprooted before your eyes can be a tough experience. In this hard transition period there is a lot of room for anti-modernist movements reaching back to a mythical nationalist/religious past to emerge, but they can be undermined after a country has reached a certain level of development. They will never go away completely, and will lie in wait for every dark cloud on the horizon to pop up again. Japan never got rid of its anti-western/modern elements until MacArthur's (ultimately mild) purges.
Islamic countries were hampered by the fact that some had oil (which created the sloth and idleness where fanaticism can flourish) and that their elites believed socialism was modernity. So they went through the uprootedness period, but there was no light at the end, because they were uprooted in favor of a flawed economic system, so their societies atrophied. They changed in the wrong fashion, but they tried.
"do note that East Asian societies have been rather open to making selective changes and modernizing due to the Western challenge." what i was responding to
China underwent systematic atrophiziation because of its unwillingness to adapt to modernity, and was nearly swallowed up whole by the west.
well, i assume most readers are aware of the general arc of chinese history. i assume, for example, that they are aware that in the 18th century china was the wealthiest and most powerful nation-empire in the world. a 2 century correction did ensue.
slamic countries were hampered by the fact that some had oil (which created the sloth and idleness where fanaticism can flourish) and that their elites believed socialism was modernity. So they went through the uprootedness period, but there was no light at the end, because they were uprooted in favor of a flawed economic system, so their societies atrophied.
But what if he had been a modernist of the capitalist, Pinochet variety? How would Egypt look today?
muhammad ali wasn't exactly a socialist.
speaking of selective
1) very few islamic countries have oil
2) of those that do, very few can use that oil to subsidize their citizen's quality of life like saudi arabia or kuwait can
3) the association between islamic countries and oil only started in the mid-20th century
The elite who started WWII were NOT Fascist ... They became fanatical, for sure, but at heart remained more Hindenburg than Hitler. They were 'anti-modern' in the way that many Islamic countries are, that is contemptuous of the west, but in love with its toys, especially its weaponry.
My own impression of the German hankering for "old times" is that it was more a sentiment against Christianity (because of its Judaic roots) and for the "pure" pre-Christian nordic way of life idealized by Knut Hamson and others. I don't think the Germans were anti-west. May be anti-other Europeans, especially those from the south and the east. In fact if any thing, they considered themselves the epitome of what was the best of the west.
And oh! Those elites who started WWII, WERE fascists. They may not have been genocidal killers like Hitler. But militaristic fascism sat well with them.