From the beginning, June of 2006...
These copy-paste reproductions may have sloppy results...
The Hesperado
Rearranging deck chairs on the H.M.S. Titanic...
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Islam Redivivus—Part Two
I will now adumbrate the 1,384-year career of Islam. This will illustrate the sense of applying the term ‘redivivus’ to the pathologies emanating out of the Muslim world today.
1) Out of the weltering backwardness and savagery of the Arabian culture in the early 7th century A.D., the Prophet Mohammed ingeniously transforms Arabian polytheism into a monotheism whose monomaniacal logic focuses the energies of Arabs.
2) Mohammed proceeds to harness this focus to use his small band (his Ikhwan or ‘Brotherhood’) of Arabs to conquer and swallow up all Arab tribes on the Peninsula (in the meantime fighting Jews and Christians).
3) Mohammed proceeds to try to conquer the entire Ecumene, with the express goal being to put the world under Islamic rule in order to prepare the world for the end of history and its transformation into the eternal eschaton.
4) The recalcitrance of the real world, of course, resists Mohammed’s eschatological pothos.
5) After Mohammed’s death, his successors, inflamed by the same eschatological zeal and militaristic imperialism by which to pragmatically further that zeal, continue his attempts to conquer the world, and are, similarly, limited by the various forms of recalcitrance of the real world.
6) The various forms of recalcitrance of the real world include not only the resistance of some of those whom Muslims sought to conquer, but also include internecine factors within the expanding Islam itself.
7) Notwithstanding the various forms of recalcitrance of the real world, Islam expands at an astonishing velocity and over a stupendous extent of geographical space. It is arguable that the Islamic empire far exceeded, in geographical extent, in temporal duration and in fanatical devotion, those of Alexander the Great or of the Romans. Though constantly beset by internecine pressures and limitations, nevertheless the eschatopathological entelechy that guides Islam’s imperialistic voracity continued to motivate Islam and to ensure its concrete and successful expansion over territories spanning from the Atlantic coast of Spain and North Africa all the way to the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, and most places in between, including the astonishingly colossal conquests of Persia and India, not to mention Spain and Byzantium.
8) At some point, Islam’s expansionist voracity begins to slow down, and it subsides into an indefinitely temporary acceptance that it will not conquer the entire world. This acceptance is due to the three factors of:
a) the centrifugal pressures of internecine conflicts and ambitions
b) the formidable resistance and entrenchment of Europe proper, holding its ground as Islam digs into its Western flank (Spain) and its Eastern flank (the Balkans and northwest Asia Minor)
c) the sheer fact that it had already spread so far and wide already.
9) Though Islam’s expansionist voracity subsided by the 13th century, this does not mean it was stable and mellow after that: Muslims would continue to attack the West and would continue to try to penetrate Europe, most particularly at its Eastern flank as the center of power of Islam began to be relocated with the Turkish dynasty. Similarly, staggering inroads continued to be made in central Asia and India, as well as Southeast Asia and central Africa.
10) The pattern typified by the paradoxical dynamic of #8-9 above continued to govern Islam, until a new global geopolitical dynamic appeared on the world scene: the rise of Western superiority. This began roughly in the 16th century, perhaps not entirely coincidentally with the re-conquest of Spain (1492) by Spanish and European allies, finally taking back all of Spain from the Muslims after eight centuries of Islamic domination.
11) Western superiority began in the 16th century, then increased at an amazingly exponential rate with each passing century—manifesting this superiority on nearly every level conceivable: technological, scientific, military, legal, political, philosophical, social and cultural. By the time the Muslims attempted their last significant offensive against Europe, attacking Vienna in 1683, Europe was progressing at such a rapid rate that with another century after that, Islam had become a corrupt, regressive and relatively impotent ghetto of the world and French forces under Napoleon, for example, could stride over its countries as though playing in a sandbox (not without a few fierce battles, of course). Beginning in the 17th century also, the West began its worldwide Colonialism, eating away at the Muslim World from all sides, and increasingly rendering it subservient to a new world economy.
12) One mistake the West made during this period was to more or less permit the Muslim World to retreat into itself and hunker down as a kind of contracted version of its former glorious self, thereby allowing and even encouraging its cultural pathologies to fester in humiliation and frustration at this unprecedented turning of the tables. The West should have simply conquered the entire Muslim World and dismantled the Islam that constitutes its totalitarian cultural texture. The West could have done this easily by the 18th century, or any time up to the end of World War I.
13) Unfortunately, the West did not conquer the Muslim World, but let it hunker down in festering pathologies that, given its cultural imperatives to conquer the world in the name of its divine mandate of eschatological supremacy, would have to rear their ugly heads sooner or later.
14) In the meantime, the West underwent severe pathologies of its own:
a) pathologies that resulted in two catastrophic World Wars and a deadly Cold War in the 20th century, the Second of those World Wars and the Cold War due to Gnostic immanentizations of the eschaton;
b) the pathology of PC Multiculturalism and its undetachable corollary of the excessive self-criticism of the West by Westerners afflicted with this pathology.
15) Also in the meantime, major parts of the Muslim World inherited through sheer geological accident vast amounts of oil and became billionaires, and now trillionaires, virtually overnight.
16) The late 20th century saw the dissemination of technology which even backward Muslims can use in order to further their jihadist goals.
17) The creation of the state of Israel has galvanized the inveterate hatred of Muslims around the world, whose volatile passions cannot tolerate a piece of Islamic land being re-taken not only by Infidels (that would be bad enough) but by Jews (even worse). The subsequent geopolitical nexus between Israel and America (the latter increasingly seen, rightfully, as the spearhead of Western superiority in the world) has also aggravated this “Little Jihad” (as Hugh Fitzgerald terms it) against Israel which, in turn, fans the flames of the revival of the “Greater Jihad” (ib.) against the entire world first catalyzed by the Prophet Mohammed some 1,380 years ago.
18) Beginning in earnest in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and coinciding with the unprecedented and disastrous dismantling of Western Colonialism (a process that would take decades to fully realize itself), untold numbers of Muslims were allowed and even encouraged to immigrate deep within the West, such that by the turn of the 21st century, there flourished millions of Muslims throughout the West, with mosques and Muslim organizations being set up like ant colonies everywhere, from the depths of Mississippi and Texas, to Canada, to Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and on and on and on.
This is not to mention as part of this process the deep infiltration of Muslims into various strata and interstices of Western societies -- not merely as clerks in 7-11 stores or as taxi drivers, but throughout schools as teachers and administrators, throughout Academe as professors and heads of departments, throughout police forces, firefighter organizations, government offices (municipal and federal, in all levels from clerical and administrative to actual governance), throughout legal institutsion (as clerks, lawyers and judges), throughout various forms of industry from food processing to power plants to white collar businesses, in pop culture media from the news to television to cinema, and even in our intelligence agencies and our militaries. This process of allowing, and even encouraging, this unprecedented influx of millions of Muslims has, by the paradoxical perversity of PC MC, only increased post-911.
19) Finally, into this inflammable mix was injected the 911 terrorist attack, and all the subsequent concatenation of events, including America’s response, the dominantly PC counter-responses of the anti-American West, and the escalating and emboldened resumption of the ancient Jihad against the entire world: Islam Redivivus.
20) The coordination and unified consciousness of Islam Redivivus as it stands currently is still not as cohesive and crystallized as it could be, in Pan-Islamic terms. Many factors militate against such a Pan-Islamic cohesion.
We shall explore these factors in Part Three.
Posted by Hesperado at June 18, 2006 2 comments:
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Islam Redivivus—Part One
This first part which I post today will be a somewhat leisurely and verbose introduction to the topic. Please sit back, sip some cognac, and simply relax into my wordiness. As my overall narrative, explicated in two more posts in as many days, becomes tauter and more crystallized, the implications folded in to this first post will unfold and, hopefully, take hold.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the danger to the modern world of an Islam Redivivus.
Apparently, I did not coin that phrase, as I once thought (some proto-PC MC intellectual from the 19th century, Arminius Vambéry, may have been the first to use that phrase; though it seems, from a casual Googling, that the present use, at least on the Net, is mostly mine). Feeling a mite generous, I’ll save the reader the agony of a few mouse-clicks to find an on-line dictionary: redivivus means “making a strong comeback after a long hibernation”.
Right from the get-go, the word in this context implies a politically incorrect assumption: namely, that Islam used to be a great danger to the world. The politically correct assumption is that, if Islam poses a danger at all today (see my post The Leftist Two-Step, where I describe the sophistical process by which the danger Islam poses is denied in the first dance step, then suddenly acknowledged in the second dance step which seeks a clumsy alternative tactic to refuting the proposition), it is a new, unprecedented phenomenon, probably caused somehow by Western influence and/or interference; since we all know that Islam was a ‘great’ world religion with at least one if not many ‘Golden Ages’ of shining tolerance and philosophical genius putting to shame the dark and gibbous West of the time. This is not to mention the various tactics used to take the teeth out of any substantive critique of present-day Islam based upon a sound interpretation of the copious and globally disparate amount of disturbing data emanating from the trans-national world of Muslims—tactics which all boil down to attempting to surgically separate Islam from all serious problems emanating out of Islam, in order to preserve a pristine and blameless Islam from the “tiny minority of extremists who have hijacked a great and noble religion of peace”. Such tactics, when successful at least in the impoverished minds of some (actually successful in the minds of all too many in our time), would pull the Persian rug out from under any specter of an ‘Islam Redivivus’—since there is argued to be nothing bad about the original Islam that is supposedly making a comeback, the point being that our recent problems and dangers are some weird, unprecedented eruption, ultimately caused, in one way or another, by the evil West, either through its Colonial evils, or through its more recent post-Colonial crypto-Colonialist evils; or a combination of the two.)
At any rate, the proper thesis here is that this term, Islam Redivivus, implies that the dangerous imperialism of original Islam, based upon a deformed eschatology -- which is essentially and intrinsically supremacist, expansionist and geopolitical -- is making a comeback now in the 21st century, after a fallow period which some would date from the defeat against the Turkish Muslims attempting to conquer Europe at the end of the 17th century: roughly 300 years of Islamic hibernation, out of a total existence of 1,350-odd years. Doing the math, this means that Islam was an active and conspicuous danger for a solid millennium, then for various complex historical reasons, receded into itself and hunkered down for another three centuries, and only recently began stirring and waking up again. (In later posts, I shall argue that certain inflammations of post-17th-century belligerence on the part of Muslims—such as, for example, the Mediterranean piracy and the resistance of the juramentados of the Philippines—were expressions not of the triumphalist expansionism typical of the earlier millennium of Islam’s main history, but were, rather, expressions precisely of an Islam acting out in the historically changed context of a stupendously superior West that geopolitically frustrated Muslims in their normal entelechy typified by their former glory days—though those glory days were not, by any means, uniformly palmy.)
In Part Two, I will adumbrate more clearly and simply this 1,350-year career of Islam and attempt to sketch in some sense to the meaning and structure of Islamic history from the Infidel’s-eye view.
Posted by Hesperado at June 17, 2006 1 comment:
Friday, June 16, 2006
Church and State: Separation or Tension?
In my post of yesterday, I concluded with the idea that
...the ‘separation’ of Church and State is really more of a tension—sort of like the tension one sees in keeping a magnet apart from metal.
I will now adumbrate a meditation on this idea:
1) The word ‘Church’ in this context means more than simply the Catholic Church, or Christian churches in the institutional sense; it means religion in general.
2) This broader sense of ‘Church’ is not merely a semantic convenience on my part; it reflects the concrete historical evolution of Christianity in the modern West (which some would term a ‘devolution’), insofar as the institutional fabric and socio-cultural texture of Christianity has, over the past three centuries, become unravelled and taken on new shapes and functions.
3) My ‘magnet’ metaphor implies that there is a kind of symbiosis between religion and the secular sphere. In the modern West, this symbiosis is not simplistically a relationship between two unrelated spheres; it is rather the expression of their intimate kinship: Church and State are siblings, where the ‘younger brother’, as it were—viz., secularism—has turned the tables and changed the family dynamic such that he is now the head of the family.
4) As ‘head of the family’, Secularism has, in the modern West, not demonstrated a tyrannical nature. Secularism in the modern West has, by and large, provided a ‘home’ for his sibling, Religion, where that sibling’s needs and freedoms are respected. The major limitation imposed by the younger brother upon his elder—ever since their ‘father’—viz., the medieval Church—left the home (or was deposed, or died) has been the marginalization of his politico-legal power.
5) The marginalization of the politico-legal power of Religion in the modern West reflects the fact that the Judaeo-Christian theocracy underwent a long process of centrifugal dissolution, and, in effect, Christianitas became a field of multiple Christianities. These multiple Christianities, furthermore, demonstrated, repeatedly and ad nauseam, their inability to unify harmoniously without sociopolitically convulsive strife. Under that condition alone, politico-legal powers had to be taken away from Religion, since such powers were, seemingly unavoidably, manifesting themselves in internecine violence.
6) When I write in #5 above that “politico-legal powers had to be taken away from Religion”, this should not be understood in the simple-minded terms that thinks there already existed an entity able to “take away” those powers at the time they were taken away; and that this “taking away” was a quick and simple act rather than a protracted process; and, finally, that there was some kind of a “place”, or domain, to where these powers could be readily relocated. No, these simple-minded terms ignore the concrete historical complexities. For now, we will not embroil ourselves in them, only to put them in a temporary nutshell for brevity’s sake and for the sake of highlighting the paradox at their heart:
The very taking away of socio-political powers from Religion was itself the same process as the creation of the secular domain by which those powers were taken away and to which they were taken.
In later posts, we shall further explore the complex paradox at the heart of the Church-State tension. This paradox has been itself the ongoing process of the reconfiguration of the West into the ‘modern West’—which in turn is the same thing as ‘Modernity’.
Posted by Hesperado at June 16, 2006 No comments:
Thursday, June 15, 2006
The Dilemma of Abortion
— Dedicated to my lovely Maria.
I wouldn’t ordinarily raise the topic of abortion on this blog, except that it highlights one of the key strengths of the modern West: the ability to concretize into civil law the tension between perfection and imperfection, within the framework of the separation of Church and State.
I am not unreservedly praising the modern West’s consensus on abortion: it embodies many thorny problems, and in many ways touches on tragedy. But in this life, tragedy is not always avoidable, and as the ancient Greeks so wisely knew, it is not in abolishing tragedy that man finds happiness—if only because it is impossible to banish tragedy from the mystery of existence—but in his mature response to tragedy: happiness, in this life, always a relative balance, not a static condition.
What makes abortion complex is two features:
1) the human birth is a process of increasing humanity;
and
2) the infant seems at some point to be part of the mother’s body.
Both of these features complicate the issue of the rights of the infant in the politico-legal sense.
The modern West has, more or less, tentatively concluded that the radical approach to defining the human in utero—in the Catholic view, from the instant of the zygote—is an untenable and inflexible response to the mystery of human generation.
The hardcore anti-abortion activists are being logical—too logical. They pursue their logic to its extremist conclusion. They ignore the two particular mysteries noted above, which I will rephrase:
1) Human being is a paradoxical process.
Human being is not simply a static and unchangeably whole entity: it also seems to develop from being less human to being more human. Even the recognized human being, on one level, never seems to arrive at a state that is beyond process. As the philosopher Eric Voegelin noted, human being is unfinished (which is to say, imperfect). On the other hand, we shouldn’t fall into the error of slipping out of the paradox: human being is not merely process. Human being is, in fact, a paradox between and state and process. Neither side of this paradox should be ignored. Hardcore anti-abortion activists tend to ignore the process aspect of human being; hardcore pro-choice activists, in their turn, tend to ignore the state aspect of human being (and in so doing, their anthropology becomes uncomfortably contiguous with those that could define who is human, and who is not human, at the whim of an ideology). The truth is somewhere in-between, and the truth is not a hard, cold fact, but rather a paradoxical mystery that in the infirmity of our human understanding in this life, we can only imperfectly illuminate.
2) Human being begins as part of the mother’s nature.
The embryonic human being seems to go through a period where its nature is mysteriously implicated with the nature of the mother. However, as we noted above, the radical anthropology most famously articulated by Catholic doctrine pushes the opposite logic to the extreme, and maintains a whole human nature for the embryonic human as ontologically distinct and ethically independent of the mother from the instant of the zygote. This kind of logic, we conclude, is a willfully obsessive attempt to control the disturbing and imperfect mystery of existence—with good motives, to be sure.
In closing, I would reiterate that the tentative consensus on abortion reached by modern Western polities is the best response, not a perfect response: it is the only workable response for a civilization committed to the secular separation of Church and State.
The reader will see in a later posting on this blog how the ‘separation’ of Church and State is really more of a tension—sort of like the tension one sees in keeping a magnet apart from metal. In the secular paradigm, the goal is not to separate the magnet (Church) from the metal (State) completely, by moving them so far apart they become utterly disconnected. Nor is the goal to simply let them collapse together into a unit. The goal is to keep only a certain amount of distance between them, in the interest of cultivating a magnetic energy, where each side may be respected and both may beneficially influence one another. The realization of this goal is always dynamic, never static, and as such, is always an imperfect process, never a perfect state.
In terms of this goal, the modern Western consensus on abortion is, on the whole, the best compromise, finding the magnetic balance somewhere between collapsing the tension into theocracy, or sundering the tension apart into two unrelated spheres of action—which could result either in civil war between religious people and atheists, or a devolution into Godless barbarism on the part of the State, or both.
Posted by Hesperado at June 15, 2006 No comments:
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
The Leftist Two-Step
The Leftist Two-Step is a bit of rhetorical tap-dancing I have noticed come, innumerable times, out of the mouths, or fingers, of Leftists (I will define Leftist in a later post).
This tap-dancing is usually a reflex response to politically incorrect assertions and/or challenges.
The following would be an example:
Politically incorrect assertion: “Muslims are acting violently all over the world.”
(Before I get to the first step of the Leftist Two-Step, I would note a typical tactic of obfuscation or distraction on the part of the Leftist interlocutor—not always, to be fair, perpetrated deceptively, but often simply a semi-conscious spasm of ignorance or sloppy thinking—: to wit, the Leftist would retort to the above politically incorrect assertion that, “Hey, you idiot, not all Muslims are acting violently.” The assertion to which they retort thusly, however, never claimed that all Muslims are acting violently, only that, with perfectly factual consistency, Muslims are acting violently. The indefinite nuance of the lack of qualifier is appropriate; though it would perhaps be better to use a locution like “Too many Muslims are acting violently all over the world”—and thereby leave open for further discussion what reasonably constitutes “too many”.)
Now, back to the first step of the Leftist’s tap dance—which the reader will recall is the typical reflex response to the politically incorrect assertion presented above.
Leftist Step #1: “No they’re not, you stupid Islamophobe!”
The politically incorrect person then, if he takes a deep breath and maintains patience, will proceed to provide ample documentation from the mountain of data out there of Muslims acting violently around the world, going back several years (and not even needing to reach further back into history for the veritable mountain ranges of data of Islamic violence throughout its 1350-odd years of existence).
At this point, the Leftist moves on to his second step, and he or she has three different types of second step to choose from, often tapping out all three:
Leftist Step #2:
a) “Well, all those Muslims are acting violently because of the terrible situation of corruption and tyranny in their lands which is the fault of Western Colonialism and Neo- or Crypto-Neo-Colonialism!”
b) “Well, all those Muslims are acting violently because of many different reasons that cannot be unified as an ‘Islamic’ problem, but which reflect a wide range of diverse political and cultural and social problems!”
c) “Well, what about the West, what about Christians, they’ve done some bad things too—I mean, look at the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Witch Burnings, the genocide against the Native Americans, Slavery, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, abortion clinic bombings. . .!”
Dance move (c) is, of course, the trusty Tu Quoque—or, since the Leftist is pointing a finger at his own culture and history, more aptly termed the Ego Quoque.
Notice how the Leftist’s second step contradicts his first step. Some Leftists are just plain sloppy thinkers and obtusely belligerent interlocutors. However, this cannot explain the prevalent recourse among Leftists to the Two-Step. Something else is afoot, and that is the Gnostic substratum of Leftism: just as the ancient Gnostic convinced himself to be an enemy of the Cosmos, so the modern Leftist Gnostic convinces himself to be an enemy of the modern Cosmos, which is, in terms of the mythopoesis of the modern world, none other than the West.
Now, what causes the Gnostic Leftist to respond with a two-step tap dance? If he were a candid and fully conscious Gnostic, he would not tap-dance. He would baldly declare his affinity for the Revolution against the West and his desire to replace the West with the immanentized eschaton of one form of Utopia or another. No, the Leftist tap-dances because he is either a Crypto-Gnostic (consciously deceiving, or obfuscating the challenges of, his interlocutor), or a semi-conscious Gnostic (his semi-conscious confusion manifesting itself in the transparent backpedaling of the tap dance).
The consciously deceptive tactic of the Crypto-Gnostic Leftist is often more sophisticated than the above example of the Two-Step makes it appear, since it usually involves more rhetorical complications around the essential backpedaling that is at the heart of it. The essence that the above example reveals is the transparently incoherent position—or lack of position—central to any Gnostic Leftist who is not the bold, bald Revolutionary of the type of Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc.
Posted by Hesperado at June 14, 2006 2 comments:
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Hesperado’s Guiding Theme
1) The modern West is superior to all other cultures and civilizations in world history.
2) The descriptor “superior” does not mean “supreme”, nor does it mean “perfect”. It simply means better, in some meaningfully overall sense.
3) The modern West developed out of Christendom—which, in turn, developed out of the Classical Graeco-Roman West. Just as the Classical West was not obliterated by the new synthesis of Christendom, but was assimilated by it, so too the modern West has not risen upon the ashes of its Judaeo-Christian past, but is a beneficent, organic development out of that past.
4) The modern West is currently threatened by two nebulas:
a) an Islam Redivivus, and
b) an anti-Western pathology of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism that is, paradoxically, itself Western in origin as well as in continuing expression.
This blog, The Hesperado, is predicated upon the hope that the West can recover the rationality of its Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian roots in time to dismantle Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism sufficiently in order to deal with the dangers of Islam. Often I struggle with a sense of desperation that the West is doomed, but nevertheless I hold on to the hope that it will prevail. Who knows, there might come a day when I announce in an essay here that I have given up hope. Every day that I encounter fellow Westerners responding with irrationally silly, morally bankrupt, and dangerously reckless “respect” for Muslims and their Islam, I move that much closer to abandoning hope. And yet, I continue to hold on to a tenuous filament connecting me to the greatness of the West. I hope that my hope will have been worth it.
Posted by Hesperado at June 13, 2006 No comments:
Monday, June 12, 2006
Healthy Paradise & Toxic Paradise: The Paradox of Paradise
In my previous post of yesterday, Sunday June 11, I alluded to the Greek myth of the Hesperides as involving:
...a pre-Christian echo of the symbolism of Paradise—symbolizing the eschatological basis for the existential experience of hope and its transcendent source.
For the most part, the Paradise symbolism of pre-Christian Antiquity, of pre- and para-Christian Judaism, and of the Christian synthesis of Classical mythology and Israelite revelation, are all examples of a "healthy" Paradise. The healthy symbolism reflects, and nourishes, the healthy experience of a foretaste of Paradise that is available to us in terms of an existential paradox of absence and presence. This Paradox of Paradise is really quite simple, on one level:
1) Paradise symbolizes the satisfaction of our deepest longings.
2) In our experience of longing, we have a foretaste of, a participation in, what would fulfill this longing.
3) Furthermore, in our daily human lives, our various experiences of happiness all contain, imperfectly, a measure, a glimpse—sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker—of the fullness of Paradise.
4) The existence we find ourselves in—where we have deepest longings that go unfulfilled yet which are variously, tantalizingly prefigurations of a fulfillment—raises in us the corollary existential experience of hope for the logical entelechy of our longings and foretastes: a final fulfillment on one level would seem to be as natural as this state of tension, paradox and mystery which continually frustrates that logical conclusion of our lives, and of the history of all Mankind.
5) Nevertheless, we learn—if we have had the benefit of a good pedagogy based in the wisdom of our elders—that we are not in control of Paradise: its eventuality and fulfillment are out of our hands, in the hands of a higher power. We must humbly and patiently abide by our existential situation of paradox, enjoy what foretastes are offered us, and not begrudge what frustrations and pains come our way. What little control we have pertains to the "little Paradises" our lives encounter, and often that control involves as much prudence as it does the ability to let go of control. And insofar as we help others find more, rather than less, of Paradise in this life, we are participating in the very central substance of Paradise: Love.
6) The preceding five points adumbrate elemental propositions about the healthy Paradise—that is, about our healthy relationship to the Paradox of Paradise that is our existential situation. With respect to virtually every single point, and to virtually every single nuance within each point, we can say that the culture of Islam utterly botches the whole process. Islam does not merely botch it on a theoretical, or mythological, or theological level. Islam botches it on the human, existential, ethical and spiritual levels. Islam's deformation of the symbolism & experience of Paradise not only damages minds, hearts and souls: it tends to manifest that damage in physically violent terms, in profoundly dysfunctional and deranged behaviors in terms of political existence, and geopolitical coexistence. In a nutshell, the pneumopathic lust for Paradise in Islam, as well as its grossly materialized conception in Islam, seriously toxifies both the experience and the symbolism, thereby subverting the Paradox of Paradise, which amounts to a Gnostic repudiation of God. In sum, Islam helps to sustain and nourish a pathological culture whose pathology poses an increasing danger to all non-Muslims.
Posted by Hesperado at June 12, 2006 No comments:
Sunday, June 11, 2006
The reverberations in the name.
The Hesperado.
The name of this blog implies a few associations: the first that comes to mind, of course, is the desperado—the gunslinger whose Spanish sobriquet meant literally “a guy who’s lost hope”. The hesperado, by contrast, and by its assonancy with esperance (hope), would be a guy who has hope.
That’s not all: the “hesper” part comes from the Greek Hesperos, which means the evening star, the setting sun, and by extension, the West. The hesperado has hope in the West.
A further ripple in this linguistic pond is the Hesperides of Greek mythology, who were “daughters of the Evening”, dwelt on a Western island of the ocean, and guarded a garden of golden apples: a pre-Christian echo of the symbolism of Paradise—symbolizing the eschatological basis for the existential experience of hope and its transcendent source.
Then we recall the “Wild West”, the fabled stomping ground of the desperado, a place and an era evoking the “Manifest Destiny” of America, and some of its virtues of freedom, independence, pluck and individuality. The Wild West in many ways symbolized the ongoing creation and progress of America—not a static polity frozen in time with the Founding Fathers, but moving, growing, dynamic, organic; yes, often violent and blustery, but full of a spirit that would come to nourish a culture that valued fairness, tolerance, flexbility, a wide open mind, fun, inventiveness, and a common decency.
The Wild West also symbolized a long fight against regression, stagnation and savagery—taming the Indians of America, most of whom sadly—and often quite brutally—refused to accept the invitations to move forward with us and civilize. (And though the early Americans often retaliated brutally as well, we would ask of our fellow Westerners who tend to be hyper-self-critical of their own West that, at the very least, they accord those pioneers the same exculpatory apologies which they often bend over backwards to accord most other non-Western cultures and non-Western eras whenever their struggles are brought up for critical review).
Put this all together, and you have the Hesperado: a courageous supporter and champion of the modern West, whose writer recently—almost too late—became conscious of another culture representing not only regression, stagnation and savagery, but also an inveterate enmity against the West, from at least as early as the 7th century A.D. to the present: Islam.
Posted by Hesperado at June 11, 2006 No comments:
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