I’ve never done an “open thread” post before but I’ve gotten bogged down with a monster work deadline this week, so I thought I’d give it a shot. There’s no reason you guys shouldn’t be able to talk to each other while I’m working on getting the next post up, right?
So have at it! Feel free to post about anything at all. The only rule is the standard one: I won’t tolerate douchebaggery here, so don’t be a douchebag.
To get the ball rolling, here are a few questions that have been kickin’ around in my own head…
- Have you read The Trickster & The Paranormal? Ran recommended this book to me when he was here but I only recently started reading it. I’m about 3/4 of the way thru. What did you think of it?
- Along with that — what do you think of the vast increase in paranormal-related media the past 10 years or so? Do you think there’s been an increase in paranormal phenomena, or do you think there’s just more media attention now? Do you think this is related to collapse and if so, how?
- Has anyone here been a peaknik long enough to remember relocalization? How do you think Transition Towns, and more recently John Robb’s Resilient Communities project, stack up?
- Did you go to the Age of Limits conference, or follow the blog posts & such about it? What did/do you think of this attempt to bring spirituality into the collapse conversation?
- How do you personally manage navigating a world in which TPTB relentlessly bombard the populace with blatantly transparent lies about everything under the sun, including things that really don’t need to be lied about?
- What do you suppose keeps Christian fundamentalists from rioting and killing people over perceived offenses, while Islamic fundamentalists seem to go berserk over the slightest trespass? Will Christian fundamentalists start going berserk at some point and if so, what will push them over the edge?
…so we’ll see how this goes. Again, don’t feel constrained by the questions listed above, those are just things I’d be interested in hearing your opinions about.
I was arguing about the religious riots this morning with my brother. There have been isolated cases of similar things from Christians – the Paris theater bombing during ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ being a good example.
I actually think it’s about power, though. Christian nations invade and occupy Islamic ones over “perceived offenses”, so individual Christians have no need to riot. Islamic nations don’t have that kind of power, and in fact are disempowered. Christian nations can issue edicts and UN resolutions, Islamic ones are either ignored or already puppets of the West. And so on.
Note that we do get extreme/violent Christian behaviour in areas where Christianity is no longer dominant, e.g. abortion clinic bombings.
So, I expect to start seeing more outbursts in areas where Christianity’s dominance is being eroded.
I think Christian Fundamentalist theology is a little different than Muslim Fundamentalism in key ways, but Dominion Theology is similar to Muslim Fundamentalism/Sharia Law. I think Christian Fundamentalism was originally totally different than Domionionism, but Through Christian Radio and Books, they are trying to make inroads. But if you go to Fundy Bible College like I did you learn what the difference is.
Baptists for example believe in “Dispensationalism” which means that the Old Testament law was for a certain period of time and now that time is passed and so it holds no legal force, but can be read for insights into God’s character.
I think this sytem of Theology makes fairly good sense of the New testament. So the idea for Baptists anyway, is for everyone to “get saved” and Follow Jesus, and not rather get them to Eat Kosher, follow various laws in the OT etc.
Also most Fundamentalists, these days are kind of slack on moral standards, so probably they aren’t as hard on others as they would be otherwise. Fundamentalist Muslims seems like they really tow the line more. Just as many Fundamentalists are divorced as the rest of the population etc. So They go through cycles of guilt and forgiveness.
i’ve felt for decades that americans’ UFO “fantasies” and the like, which started around midcentury i think and interested jung greatly, are a collective outward projection of our guilt over what we as a society/nation have done to other people around the world for so many decades without any moral reckoning, just getting away with pillaging whatever we can from other cultures/peoples, killing and laying waste wherever our greedy attention turns, while pretending we’re doing it for “their own good” (spreading “democracy”), without any comeuppance or atonement.
i’ve always suspected that our repressed guilt over what we collectively know we have done to others comes out in people’s fantasies or very real feeling experiences of aliens invading our homeland, torturing and experimenting on us, as this is the only way our conscious collective mind can allow us to expiate our tremendous sense of guilt over all that we supposedly possess and enjoy at the expense of so many others. something in us insists on some kind of balancing for our transgressions of the greater order and love of the universe, and because we have no collective ritual or process for dealing with our immense accumulation of collective guilt, we project it in individual fantasies that tend to have remarkably similar forms.
at the same time, there is something so emotionally powerful about plain old masochistic fantasy–the fantasy of being tortured and abused by something monstrous and malevolent–maybe that’s all that’s needed to explain these kinds of “experiences”. those who understand the psychology of such fantasies can surely explain why so many people seem to find themselves having them and whether this is a human phenomenon that has been going on for centuries, just with different versions of the alien/monster/torturer.
in the christian west, there used to be hell, and it really scared people–maybe there was something about that that we somehow believe (unconsciously) we need and are somehow trying to provide to ourselves, now that the “fact” of hell has become less “real” for many.
Oswald Spengler said the Islamic consciousness is built around the concensus community. This is different to democracy, in that once a decision has been reached all dissenting or differing opinions are worthless. But all cultures seem to assume other cultures think the same way they do. So when someone in the west produces something blasphemous, they assume everyone in the west must agree with the blasphemy.. they assume a concensus has been reached, whereas it is more a case of freedom of speech at work.
Most Christians on the other hand, whether they know it or not, are really just Hegelian modernists, like everyone else they believe in progress… so long as it is progress on their own terms. There really is no such thing as conservatism anymore, capitalism is the most progressive, so progressive it doesn’t even need humans anymore, only flows of energy, resources, capital and disembodied labor. In the face of this I don’t think Christianity has any real power, that is why it is so easily co-opted by powerful interests.
About how the “increase” in paranormal related media relates to collapse and whether it’s an actual increase or not, I see it mostly this way:
Reality has facets which are predictable, mechanical, and impersonal, and it also has facets which are wildly unpredictable, interactive, inter/intra-personal, and full on artistic/aesthetic. The way this is experienced in this culture is that most of reality is of the first category, and only when you go out on the fringes do you bump into the second kind of reality. But of course for a wild animal or uncivilized human, the two kinds of facets of reality are not so unbalanced; they’re equally present, and mix together almost constantly. For a civilized human, however, life revolves around the predictable, mechanical, and impersonal, and so anyone who is being successful at being civilized is virtually by definition being successful at avoiding the paranormal. As people end up with less of the reliable, mechanical processes determining their lives (regardless of how they end up that way), they seem to inevitably encounter more of the paranormal.
Maybe their sensitivity (the Muslims) is due to the fact that there has been interventions in their country by the US, which has included the death of thousands of innocent people and the destruction of certain countries (Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan). It’s interesting how Americans forget this.
I haven’t forgotten about any of that in any way. However, they are not rampaging over there because of American foreign policy. They’re doing it because someone made a movie that they find offensive, just as they do every time some offensive bit of Western pop culture gets widespread coverage in Mid-East media. The reaction is the same regardless of where the offending item comes from. I highly doubt the vast majority of rioters in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen would ascribe their anger to anything related to US foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine.
No, what’s going on is the most extreme kind of religious intolerance. There is no excuse for it.
I wonder if its more like feeling dissed than just being intolerant. I mean its not just anybody that made the film, its Americans that made it, the Dominant World Power. The Empire.
I mean people fear that if Muslims came into power they would impose Sharia law on everyone in the World, but I think Fundamentalism is actually a sign of feeling powerless and so they go to extremes to reassure themselves and fight off cognitive dissonance. I mean Christian Nations have had the most recent Empires and eventually feeling confident in their power they became more religiously tolerant.
So I think its a result of feeling insulted by people they sense have more power then they do.
I’m thinking that maybe it’s a breaking point. When this is added to the high levels of violence inflicted upon them, and our ongoing support for corrupt leaders (i.e., Saudia Arabia), maybe it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
@Ted — I think that’s probably true to a degree, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. In historically Christian nations, Christian fundamentalism has grown increasingly intolerant over time, even as these nations consolidate and increase their power over the rest of the world.
Fundamentalism is indeed dependent upon feeling victimized; however, fundamentalists feel victimized if even one person makes one offensive statement. Fundamentalism is blind to its own power, no matter of much power it manages to accumulate.
@slabinja — I’m sorry but I just don’t see how these repeated incidents of religious rioting are connected to foreign policy blowback. The strains of Islamic fundamentalism that give rise to this particular type of religious violence are also responsible for other heinous displays of religious violence, such as throwing acid in women’s faces, murdering a woman who has been raped because she supposedly disgraced her family, beheading fellow Muslims who are insufficiently medieval, dragging people into the street and stoning them to death for slight infractions, framing a disabled child for a capital offense in attempt to “get rid of Christians,” etc.
There’s no question that the US stomps around the world crushing people and spreading mayhem in its wake. I don’t dispute this at all. What I dispute is the notion that any empire is so all-powerful that it can simply cancel whole populations’ internal motivation and capacity to act.
I also think it’s more than a bit arrogant for Americans to assume everyone in the world behaves as they do because of America.
No, the religious rioting in response to the offensive film is motivated by something inherent to fundamentalism, not by victimization at the hands of America. The response would be the same — possibly worse — if the filmmaker were an equally oppressed-by-America, non-fundamentalist Muslim.
I’d have to say there’s a fair bit of intolerance in New Zealand toward the US. Despite the fact that we watch 50% US show on TV here (and consequently absorb american values) people don’t really like teh US because they’re the big boys on the block.
Its defintely intolerance and it’s not particularly thought out. I used to dislike hearing American accents until I started a show on our local community radio where I would play talks by the likes of Noam Chomsky and eventually got accustomed to them.
“Stop playing that American shit” a caller once told me, having completely failed to understand that the speaker was dumping all over the US. He just didn’t like hearing the accent (US actors soften their accents considerably) and felt entirely justified in telling me to stop.
So yeah, people love to hate the US.
Don’t forget though that the riot’s you see are probably mis-reported by journalists who know that amping up images of fundamentalist Muslims will ensure they get the headline story and the best ratings. Robert Fisk once reported observing a small group of young men somewhere in the middle east pretending to be angry about something the US had done and generally hamming it up for TV cameras (before collapsing in a fit of giggles). Later that night on the TV news the serious voice of a journnalist intoned that “tensions are rising here…” over the shot of the same young men hamming it up. They just cut the giggling out of the edit so it looked dead serious.
@Paula….Why do you think the religious rioting is a recent phenomena?…Why hasn’t it happened in the past? Also, I’m not sure all of the incidents that you list are related. The incidents you are describing occurred mainly in Afghanistan, where the Fundamentalism (Wasabi) that you refer to comes from Saudi Arabia (an unquestionable US ally, and one of the most oppressive regimes in the world). I don’t think events that occur in Libya are related to events in Afghanistan. However, they are places that the US intervened violently. I do believe that we as a country are in great denial how horrendous our invasions and support for despots have been to the region.
I don’t think the religious rioting is a recent phenomenon. I think it’s always been there to some degree, but is becoming more frequent and more widespread as the internet and mobile phone technologies make inroads into previously isolated countries. The same communications technologies that catalyzed Arab Spring also catalyze religious rioting.
The incidents I listed are related in that they spring from fundamentalism. They are in no way relegated to Afghanistan. In fact, acid attacks against women are most common in India if I’m not mistaken.
I don’t have time at the moment to dig up links to statistics, but I suspect no amount of research or reportage from humanitarian organizations would change your mind. You seem to have already decided that no evil can exist in the world apart from what America creates. America is the devil, and “the devil made me do it” is, for you, an acceptable justification for any atrocity.
I think you are in denial about just how bad fundamentalism is. Here in America, our fundamentalists don’t attack women with acid or go around beheading people or engage in frenzied rampages against gay bars — YET. But none of these things are doctrinally unacceptable. The violent behavior of Islamic fundamentalists is very much in the hearts and minds of American Christian fundamentalists. In fact, American fundamentalists harbor a grudging respect for fundamentalist Muslims’ willingness to commit such horrific acts of violence. They count themselves as weak in the face of the Islamic enemy because they cannot bring themselves to behave in the same manner.
Fundamentalism is a serious problem. Shifting responsibility for Islamic religious violence from fundamentalism to US foreign policy ignores the fact that American fundamentalists aspire to the same violence. What is it that keeps American fundamentalists in check? I don’t know — though the comments earlier in this thread offer some good insight, ultimately this barrier is going to break down, and I personally am not willing to remain ignorant about it.
I think its definately a Middle Ages mindset there. No doubt about that. Maybe Ken Wilbur is right andSpiral Dynamics is true and they are a more primitive society.
You definately have to make judgements at times and it doesn’t seem like many fundamentalist muslims can tolerate differences in belief on things. That’s just calling a spade a spade.
Paula, this is a very insightful article on the riots:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/16/bacevich-what-the-arab-movie-riots-mean-for-u-s-foreign-policy.html
I don’t think that article is particularly insightful for me or readers of this blog. We’re not so indoctrinated as to think the US is actually in the Middle East to spread democracy and freedom. The US is in the Middle East to ensure the continued flow of oil to the West, and to a lesser degree to protect trade routes.”Democracy” and “freedom” are the propaganda used to manufacture public consent for military and covert operations that serve, primarily, corporate interests.
As I said before, I do not dispute that the US stomps around the world with giant murderous shoes, nor do I think Muslim anger with the US is unjustified.
The point I’m making, and which you (and others) seem intent on ignoring, is that the current ongoing riots are not about US foreign policy. They are about religion.
Fundamentalist Islam, like all fundamentalisms, seeks to silence — or preferably exterminate — all dissent. The movie riots and murders are against infidels, NOT oppressors.
Pakistani officials have announced a bounty on a filmmaker, NOT on Hillary Clinton.
How is it that this distinction is so difficult for you to make?
I’m getting really tired of all the hand-wringing over those poor people who are so oppressed by US foreign policy that they spontaneously erupt into murderous rampages. That’s bullshit — some of the richest nations in the world are involved. They are rioting in fucking Australia for fuck’s sake.
The Islamic world is murderously rampaging because they believe their religion requires them to kill anyone who expresses blasphemy. This is the nature of fundamentalism, and it really is as simple as that.
How do you define “murderous rampage?” You are referring to how many deaths?
When Australian citizens are carrying signs saying “behead those who insult the prophet”, there’s obviously murderous intent.
See also the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
The death count is largely irrelevant; does anyone doubt that they genuinely mean to murder those involved? (See Theo van Gogh.)
Don’t sidetrack the issue.
The murderous rampages are about religion, not American foreign policy. The Islamic rioters are behaving exactly as they choose. They are rioting, burning shit down, killing people, and doing all manner of violence as a substitute for the atrocities they consciously and deliberately wish to commit against those who would exercise their right to free speech.
No one can possibly bear responsibility for this except themselves. There’s no excuse. There are no mitigating factors. There is no justification. Their behavior and goals are totally and completely fucking unacceptable. There’s no way around it.
America does bad shit, but that does not mean America is solely responsible for all bad shit everywhere. Fundamentalism is bad all on its own, without outside help, regardless of whether it comes from America or elsewhere. Which is the entire point of my original question: what exactly is preventing American Christian fundamentalists from the same behavior?
In one way, I agree with you. In another, I read “There are no mitigating factors. There is no justification [to my Western values].” and “Their behavior and goals are totally and completely fucking unacceptable [to my Western values].”
I don’t mean this in a patronising way; it’s more, I think, that we forget how genuinely foreign other societies can be. And also, that perhaps they once had good reasons for being like that. In a world of little tribes fighting each other, it was fairly important that your tribe could put up a united front. If there’s only 20 men of fighting age in the tribe, there’s not really any room for a single dissenter.
The only right or wrong, in a certain deep sense, is whether your tribe survives or whether it doesn’t.
I think (and I say this quite tentatively) that perhaps we’ve gotten so used to the globalised west being everywhere that we forget there are other extremely foreign ways of being.
I would say that if you want to look back that far, the cultures of the Middle East spring from the same Mesopotamian root as Western cultures. That “might makes right” mentality you’re referring to is equally alive and well in the West because culturally we’re descended from the same group of little Tigris-Euphrates tribes circa 15,000 BC or thereabouts.
It’s too late at night right now to get into the fine details, but I firmly believe that the line of cultures & civilizations spawned by Sumer are psychotically fucked up due to a cognitive impairment that showed up among those tribes. This cognitive impairment makes its sufferers incapable of comprehending anything except in terms of binary oppositions. The first and still reigning of these binary oppositions is man v. nature. This is the ultimate motivation that underlies all Mesopotamian-derived cultures and civilizations.
In the West, the frenzied drive to defend against and ultimately conquer nature manifests most recently as capitalism. In the Mid-East, it manifests most recently as a rabid fundamentalism that fears chaos — read: nature — so profoundly it seeks to exterminate anything it cannot control. Taken to their logical conclusions, both strive to kill off the remains of nature — read: chaos, i.e., diversity of opinion/expression/feeling/culture — in human nature; and both strive to end nature itself and set themselves up as rulers of a scorched universe.
We are much too far down the path of planetary and global civil collapse to entertain double standards based on identity politics. Tolerating intolerance is no longer a choice, because it means an even greater impoverishment of the breadth and depth of ideas and insights that humanity needs to pull through collapse and out the other side. Today it’s a film trailer; what’ll it be tomorrow? Will it be something actually useful or joyful or scientifically significant? How is the Muslim world going to react when serious people drop the double-standards thing and start publishing thoughtful, academically rigorous criticisms of Islam, the way they’ve been publishing thoughtful, academically rigorous criticisms of Christianity for centuries now? Especially in the context of collapse — what applies to Christiandom largely applies to Islam as well. Does the world’s second-largest and fastest-growing religion get a pass because… well, just because?
So yeah. Their behavior and goals are completely and totally fucking unacceptable — not because they are foreign and offend my Western sensibilities, but because they are the same old familiar authoritarian desert monotheists who would crush the human spirit, and the Earth itself, under their heels if they could. I cannot in good conscience or intellectual honesty identify anything that makes religious violence toward these ends okay.
Ah, I begin to follow. (I’m in New Zealand, just to add some context to my perspective.)
I don’t disagree, by the way, that it’s an abhorrent way of life. I don’t want to live in a world where the normal is murdered schoolteachers, no education for girls, women forced to marry their rapists, etc etc. Honour/shame cultures in general seem like a dead-end to me (even more than consumertopia).
But I still wonder if, to use your terms, control is the first choice, then destruction is the response to a loss of control? (Although “it could happen to Americans/Christian fundamentalists” seems contradictory to “perhaps it’s utterly foreign and non-western”, so I’m not sure what I’m up to there.)
OK, just to stir the pot how about this argument: Decades of murderous stomping by the US in the middle east has disrupted their society to the point where it is now fertile ground for foundamentalist view points. Much like the state of Germany between WW1 and WW2 was fertile ground for Hitler’s Xenophobic storyline.
Naturally this is not to let anyone off the hook for any bonkers islamic fundamentalism that is going on but it does make me look sideways at any criticism of said fundamentalism emanating from the US.
Sorry I came back late to this party but thought I’d throw this in anyway