More from The Hesperado (2006-2018)
copy-pasting my postings from yesteryear, one page at a time (about 5 postings per page)
The Hesperado
Rearranging deck chairs on the H.M.S. Titanic...
Friday, June 30, 2006
Islam: Henotheistic, not Monotheistic
The ancient Near East & Mesopotamian regions were rife with religions whose theology essentially fused militarism and religion: they were the polytheist religions out of which Israel differentiated, and out of which Jesus further differentiated. They were not eschatologically imperialistic—as Islam is—because their ideology was not structured by the nexus between Empire and Eschaton (see Eric Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age, fourth volume of his work Order and History, for an extended and definitive treatment of this nexus); but the essence of militarism which characterizes the heart of Islam was there just the same.
Mohammed did not differentiate out of these Mesopotamian religions, as did Israel and later Christianity, but rather apotheosized their principle of theomachy (battles among gods), never fully evolving from henotheism—where one God holds hegemonic power over a pantheon of lesser gods—into monotheism, the theophany par excellence of the West from Abraham to Moses to Jesus, and from the Pre-Socratics to Socrates to Plato to Aristotle: these two oceans—the Judaeo-Christian and the Classical Philosophical—flowing together in medieval Christendom and thence its successor, the modern West.
Islam has been all along, and is still, waging a Mesopotamian henotheistic theomachy against lesser gods—i.e., against the Israelite God, against the Christian God (insofar as they are seen to be distinct enemies), against all the pagan gods of the world (various peoples and tribes which Islam has conquered, and continues to try to conquer), against the Zoroastrian God, against the Hindu pantheon, against the Buddhist “gods”, etc. Hence the crucial war cry of the Mohammedan, the takbir -- "Allahu Akbar!" -- which should be translated not as "God is great!" but rather as "God is greater!" This of course raises the question, “greater than what?” The answer: “greater than all other existing gods and all their followers”, emphasizing the henotheistic import which reflects the worldview of Islam as an ecumenic battlefield of gods and religions, a battlefield Muslims have been commanded by their particular War God and his Messenger to fight and win.
One way, therefore, to look at Islamic Jihad is that it is a war of one particular God (through his human agents) for pantheonic cosmic supremacy, waged on the battlefield of Earth in History against all other gods who are not “non-existent”—as they become under the differentiation of monotheism—but only inferior, to Allah.
The goal of a henotheistic theomachy in Islam—unlike in all other henotheisms of history—is eschatological: the end of history: utter victory for Allah and eternal annihilation of the other gods. This is what is new about Islam. The previous polytheistic and henotheistic religions of the Mesopotamian and wider Near Eastern regions had constant battles among the gods in their mythologies, but no End of History: history was eternally cyclic, not eschatologically linear. In Mohammed, there occurred the fusion of this Mesopotamian mythology with a superficially appropriated Judaeo-Christian monotheism: both of these theologoumena were available to Mohammed; and while the former was more organically a part of his psychology and heritage as an Arab Bedouin, the latter was seen by him, as a kind of envious outsider at the fringes of this new movement that had already risen as high as a Roman Emperor some three hundred years before Mohammed, as some kind of powerful amulet to be stolen and used, though the Qur’an and Hadiths demonstrate a remarkably imperfect and incoherent grasp of the logic and substance behind the power of this relatively new amulet in the Ecumene.
This final victory of the privileged tribal god over all other gods has been the goal of Islam from the very beginning, with Mohammed, and it remains an essential goal sacralized in the Qur’an as divine mandates which must be taken literally by good Muslims and can never be neutralized or eliminated without a severe and radical reformation of Islamic theology—a reformation that is looking less, not more, likely with every passing day (and one which never really stood a chance in its history).
Conclusion:
The divine mandate to conquer the world for Islamic supremacy remains firmly in place in the essential and central ideology of Islam, and its zealous entelechy will not be assuaged and realized, according to Islamic eschatology, until the apocalyptic end of history. The Mesopotamian War God, Allah, will not rest until His goal of utter supremacy is realized, and that will only happen when all the other gods are dead—and that will only happen when all the human agents of those gods have been killed and sent to the eternal tortures of Hell.
As I have argued many times before on this blog, the reasonable fear we have of the danger of Muslims following their Islamic blueprint is not that they will succeed in their psychotically and fanatically grandiose desideratum—it is rather in the misery and mayhem which innumerable numbers among them will be able to wreak in our societies through merely trying, but failing, to succeed.
Posted by Hesperado at June 30, 2006 5 comments:
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Neo-Gnosticism
This subject belongs under the category of the epochal sea change of the West, a topic of a couple of previous postings of mine on this blog.
A major feature of that sea change has been the rise of Neo-Gnosticism, or ‘modern Gnosticism’ as it is more commonly known (a term used by the philosopher Eric Voegelin, among others).
The ‘Neo-’ of course implies an original Gnosticism. We may in fact discern three distinct phases in the history of Gnosticism:
1) Ancient, or classical, Gnosticism
2) Heterodox Christian and Judaic Gnosticism in medieval Europe and satellite regions
3) Neo-Gnosticism or modern Gnosticism.
Before we unpack these three points, we should note at the outset that Gnosticism is a pathology peculiar to the West, insofar as it is an existential response to the differentiation in consciousness which is Western. One does find Gnostic mythologies also far afield in Persia and central Asia—and it may well be that Gnosticism originated there—but this may be chalked up to the perennially liminal relationship between the West and the ‘Orient’, insofar as the ‘West’ is not an impermeable historical entity but has always had relatively porous borders through which its substance and forms have been informed by exotic elements—and indeed, even its borders have been formed, and informed, through a paradoxical process of a crystallization of self-definition combined with a fungible absorption of the Other. (Note: this particular paradox of self-definition is not unique to the West, but is probably universal to all cultures whose discrete cohesiveness rises to a threshhold of becoming discernible.) At any rate, even if Gnosticism was germinated in Persia or even north of Persia somewhere in central Asia possibly in the 7th or 6th centuries B.C.E., its major locus shifted Westward by the time of the Ecumenic Age (roughly beginning with Alexander the Great, 4th century B.C.E.), and that transplantation only increased in demographic and cultural significance with each passing century after that.
Now, to return to our unpacking of the three points:
1) Ancient, or classical, Gnosticism: an umbrella term for an amorphous nebula of eclectic pseudo-philosophical schools and quasi-mystic religious cults that seemed to have begun to appear in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor areas beginning about 300 years before Christ, increasing with each passing century. By the time that Christianity was beginning to spread as an underground movement in the late 1st century C.E., many Gnostic manifestations appeared using Christian symbolisms. Soon thereafter, the Gnostic influence increased to such an extent that significant Christian heresies could be said to be Gnostic in part, or as a whole. The borders of orthodox Christianity were not immune to the Gnostic virus, and Gnostic tendencies infiltrated and informed some aspects of orthodox Christianity (Voegelin among others have noted Gnostic ‘tendencies’ in the New Testament itself, notably the Gospel of John) , insofar as orthodox Christianity was a work-in-progress, with a self-definition in creative flux, not a done deal from the get-go. (Indeed, we can say that orthodox Christianity is characterizable by this dynamic as a perennial constant, at least on one level—though, again, this is paradoxical and therefore does not obviate the concordant reality of a thing that has to be there in the first place in order to be changing.) The increasing crystallization of orthodoxy through the first six centuries after Christ—given an enormous boost by the conversion of the Roman Empire itself in the 4th century C.E.—which at times dealt with heterodoxy with a heavy hand—tended to have the effect of pushing Gnosticism underground. This paved the way for the second phase in the career of Gnosticism.
2) Heterodox Christian and Judaic Gnosticism in medieval Europe and satellite regions (i.e., the Balkans and Asia Minor): Gnosticism throughout the Middle Ages (roughly the 6th century C.E. to the 16th century C.E.) basically displayed the simplex process of beginning as a relatively suppressed patchwork of underground movements and slowly increasing in influence on thought and culture as the centuries went along. By the time of the Protestant Reformation which—due to many factors unrelated to Gnosticism—introduced some radical and convulsive solvents to the structures that had more or less successfully (decreasing in capability as the centuries went along) kept a lid on the heterodox undercurrents of which Gnosticism was a major part. Gnosticism in this new environment was, essentially, the incipient stage of the ultimate dissolution of Christendom, and began its modern career of coming out of the closet so to speak and spreading with increasing influence, in myriad flavors and degrees, throughout the sociocultural spheres of the modern West. Of course, this new vitality and ebullience of Gnosticism beginning in the early modern period was not met without resistance: it in fact significantly colored the ongoing debate and tension between an increasingly reactionary Church—and soon thereafter and increasingly reactionary Christianity in general—and an increasingly eclectic, syncretistic and unavoidably philodoxic secular sphere. The secular sphere during the modern period, it should be noted, has manifested the interesting paradox of simultaneously nourishing this syncretistic philodoxy which in turn allowed various flavors of Gnosticisms to run rampant, while at the same time developing a sociocultural health and strength that fostered the intellectual infrastructure of a parallel progress in noetic science. These two paradoxical parallel tracks did not run smoothly—there have often ensued struggles and conflicts—nor have these tracks allowed for equal spheres of power and influence: there has been a complex process of waxing and waning, relative ascendancy of the one at the expense of the other, regional or localized entrenchments of the one or the other, strange symbiotic relations between the two, and much public and intellectual confusion of the issues throughout the modern period. Notwithstanding what from one perspective is a fabulous and grand and protracted mess in the ongoing state of true philosophy throughout the modern period, the very fact that the cultivation and progress of noetic science has been possible in the modern West to the extent that it in fact has, demonstrates a decidedly noetic fiber to the texture of the modern West, and therefore one cannot roundly condemn the West to hopeless ‘decline’ without being simplistic—and indeed, without succumbing to the temptation of a Gnostic explanation of history.
3) Neo-Gnosticism or modern Gnosticism: in our previous explication in #2, we have unavoidably overstepped our bounds into the modern period, insofar as the law of paradoxical fungibility applies as much to epochs as it does to cultures (cf. supra). Suffice it to say that the third phase of Gnosticism continues the dynamic of the second phase, with a dramatic increase in intensity. Gnosticism began erupting in cataclysmic bouts of sociopolitical expression in the French Revolution by the late 18th century, and a century later in Soviet Communism, German Nazism and European Fascism in the 20th century.
Meanwhile, there emerged the Gnosticism of the Cultural Revolution by the mid-20th century, from which was born PC multiculturalism, which currently is one major reason why the 21st-century West remains irrationally hobbled in its ability to defend itself from Islam ideologically, politically and—insofar as wars cannot be successfully prosecuted without ideological and political support—militarily. This dramatic intensification of the dynamic of the second phase has concomitantly continued the paradox, such that significant sectors of noetic health have continued to grow in strength and health, resulting in an overall configuration where noesis and Gnosticism are each represented in the socipolitical mosaic—on one level roughly equally, on another level with Gnosticism (mainly in its form of PC multiculturalism) decidedly dominant.
This curious paradox may be expressed thusly: there is a third term aside from noesis and Gnosticism, almost a third ‘invisible partner’, which provides an overarching umbrella in which Gnosticism and noesis may thrive and jockey for influence, even when one or the other gains the upper hand. The fact that this third term exists at all as a supportive superstructure allowing for the ongoing progress of noetic health and strength suggests a noetic input into the third term. On the other hand, Gnosticism would not be as strongly supported by the superstructure as it is were there not a significant degree of opacity, philodoxy and naivety inhering in the regime of the superstructure, undermining any sense to the conclusion that it is noetically directed. The paradox reaches up to the next stage, into the third term itself—perhaps suggesting that the third term is a magnificently accidental, or incidental, excrudescence of the primary paradox between noesis and Gnosticism. Or perhaps this third term, this superstructure, is simply—but still magnificently—the manifestation of the inherent, essential, indissoluble, mysterious paradox of the nature of the West itself.
Posted by Hesperado at June 29, 2006 No comments:
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
The Church-State Tension
In an earlier post (of 6/16/06), I promised the reader more analysis of the tension between—not so much ‘separation’ of—Church and State.
In that post, I used the following metaphor to describe the tensional symbiosis between religion and politics 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.
Metaphors are intrinsically imperfect, and at some point in their use, a dissonance often appears between their nature and the reality to which they have been applied as an explanatory model. My ‘sibling’ metaphor was helpful for conveying the intimacy of relation between two things. However, there comes a point in this analysis where the paradox of the tension becomes more acute: with the Church-State dynamic in the modern West, we are not so much talking about two entities, as we are considering one entity that evinces the paradox of an internal relation. The hackneyed phrase “two sides of the same coin” is about the best locution we can employ; the only other idea that conveys the same thing is ‘schizophrenia’, and that has infelicitous connotations—though it is significant that the ‘Godfather’ of modern Muslim jihadism, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), denigrated the modern Western concept of separation of Church and State (which Qutb knew had roots in earlier Western tradition) as precisely ‘schizophrenic’: being a good Muslim who likes his truth fanatically purged of all paradox and doubt, Qutb likely was incapable of fathoming the paradoxical tension inherent to this ‘separation’.
So, the tension between Church and State (or, as I pointed out in the previous post, more accurately between religion and politics) in the modern West is a tensional dynamic that is a quality of a single entity: and that single entity is the West in its sociopolitico-spiritual dimension. Insofar as this sociopolitico-spiritual dimension affects all other levels of existence—from the technological, to the scientific, to the infrastructural, to the cultural, to the psychological—, we can say this tensional dynamic is an expression of the West itself.
Does this adjustment of our metaphor significantly alter the extension of that metaphor in our previous post? Let us see. In the quote above, we noted that the ‘younger brother’ (secularism—i.e., the State) has turned the tables and changed the family dynamic such that he is now the head of the family.
So far, we have not necessarily split the entity into two: we could merely be describing how the one entity underwent a change of orientation such that its ‘magnetic pole’ became switched.
Let us continue:
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 language is beginning to veer towards a tonality of ‘schizophrenic’ or even a split into two, but even here we could be talking about a single entity that, after it has undergone remedial change, nevertheless continues to respect and find room for some of its former ways.
We continue further:
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.
Here the metaphor begins to edge toward becoming cumbersome and even misleading. The tendency to personify the centrifugal forces in the paradox may invite reification of those forces. My penultimate thoughts in my former post attempted to redress this tendency:
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.
What I was trying to get at here, of course, was that we are not talking about multiple entities and contexts, but about a single entity undergoing multiple phases in a complex pattern of simultaneity and extrapolation. Why not, then, just consistently use language of one entity that is undergoing changes? This would simplify matters, and avoid paradox. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. The underlying, original template for the separation of Church and State is the eschatology that is central to the synthesis of Christendom: more specifically, the eschatological tension between ‘this life’ and the ‘next life’ (which can be formulated a variety of ways—including a tension between the imperfect Cosmos in History and the pleromatically transfigured Cosmos at the end of History) is at the heart of the tension between Church and State. Just as the tension between Church and State is not a static fact that has been known all along in one form, but is a dynamic process that has undergone various complex phases of development, so too eschatology is not a static fact: it too is a dynamic process that has undergone various complex phases of development.
In one sense, of course, the two entities denoted by ‘this life’ and the ‘next life’ (and all its equivalent formulations) are one entity: but in an important sense, or on another important level, they are indeed two entities. The law of transfiguration, and the reality of imperfection, demand that nothing short of paradoxical language can do the eschatological process justice. And since the tension between Church and State is, in effect, a socio-political eikon of that eschatological process, and since ‘the Church’ or ‘religion’ are not to be collapsed into secularism but are to be respected in their integrity as luminous for the eschatological directionality of transcendence—just as the saeculum is to be respected in its integrity as representing the context by which the process toward the eschaton (as well as its mysterious frustration) happens at all—, so the tension between religion and secularism must be rendered with paradoxical language to adequately express the inherent perplexity of the process.
There is a further twist or wrinkle to this paradox as it unfolds in history: religion increasingly becomes immanentized, and secularism increasingly becomes transcendentalized (or endowed with the role formerly the province of religion in orientation to transcendence). This process of convergence is both good and bad: it involves a dilution or ‘cheapening’ of each (or, at times, a dangerous intensification of one or the other); yet it also involves a mysterious, interesting and indefinitely progressive paradigm shift in the one entity of which they—‘religion’ and ‘secularism’—are vectors.
Posted by Hesperado at June 28, 2006 No comments:
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
The Camel in the Room: Prefixes, Suffixes, Qualifiers and Euphemisms
The ‘camel’ in the room is Islam.
The ‘room’ is the public conversation about the problem of terrorism.
Since 911, the public conversation has avoided the camel in the room. This avoidance takes a variety of forms and methods. The particular form I’m referring to in today’s post is descriptive language.
There are two principal ways to tackle head-on and rationally the problem which the West—and the Rest (of the World)—faces in our era:
1) radically, by seeing Islam itself as the problem, and concluding with a politico-philosophical condemnation of Islam;
2) tentatively, by seeing Islam at least as a significant and major source of the problem.
Even the tentative attempt of #2 is avoided in our public conversation, as our public conversation is dominated by PC multiculturalism and its various strains of anti-Occidentalism.
Our public conversation has seen, since 911 (and for decades prior to 911), a lexicon exhibiting a veritable parade of prefixes, suffixes, qualifers and euphemisms (or their opposite, dysphemisms)—all with the intent, and result, of surgically detaching any manifestations of the problem from an Islam that thereby remains blameless and pure.
Instead of critically examining Islam, then, we erect any one or all of the following:
a fundamentalism or a fundamentalist version of Islam or fundamentalist Muslims
or, a variant on the above, conservative Islam and conservative Muslims
a radical version of Islam or radical Muslims
an extremist version of Islam or extremist Muslims
and, of course, one of the more popular: Islamists.
Then we have the process whereby the problem is linguistically delimited as Al Qaeda or the Taliban [or -- my future self zooms in over ten years later (October 16, 2017) -- to add Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Al Nusra, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and Isis (not to mention the perennial Muslim Brotherhood)], and a source for these eruptions of major disorder are groped around for, locating the following:
Wahhabism
Salafism
Deobandism.
When Wahhabism is seen to be a little too circumscribed to sufficiently explain the problem, it is widened out slightly to Salafism (or at a perpendicular tangent, to Deobandism). These terms provide the advantage, to the avoider of the camel in the room, of being historically recent movements, and so they can be chalked up to modern afflictions (usually caused by evil Western Colonialism and/or Post-Colonialist Western Crypto-Colonialism) which Islam has only recently suffered—thereby, once again, sparing Islam itself from any blame or role in the problem. And, of course, they are further padded and softened with that nearly ubiquitous suffix, the “-ism”.
So far, I am aware of no wider term to denote the source of the problem than Salafism—and even that term is rarely used, so timid are the PC multiculturalists in venturing their little toe into the waters of speculative, rational analysis of the problem. Of course, we are increasingly seeing that the problem cannot be delimited to Al Qaeda, and that the pullulation of jihadists around the world far exceeds the capacities of one specific organization like that.
The above list is likely incomplete, and I will add to it whenever I find other examples.
It should be noted that the first three terms listed rarely are employed with simply Islam or Muslim, but are usually buttressed (i.e., further obfuscated) by Islamism and Islamist.
Another category of linguistically avoiding the camel in the room is the euphemism: the males and asians who perpetrate urban jihad in Great Britain, who are never identified as Muslims; similarly the youths in France and other European countries (recently making an appearance in London), and less commonly the foreign immigrants.
A closely related category is the various words used to describe Muslim terrorists in the war in Iraq (and elsewhere where there is actual jihad guerilla warfare): we have insurgents, rebels, warlords, and the truly euphemistic freedom fighters.
We also have seen various ways to try to connote the Extremist by using terms like conservative and hardliner. About the former, Robert Spencer has often noted the irony that when Muslims pursue their anti-liberal "extremism" they are conservatives; and when Western non-Muslims oppose this extremism, they too are conservatives.
Meanwhile, a pertinent criticism of the use of terrorist—even if it were qualified (though it almost never is) with Muslim—has been defended at Jihad Watch by, among others, one of its principal writers, Hugh Fitzgerald. The criticism notes that a more accurate term would be jihadist. I agree with the substution of the latter for the former, but only insofar as the latter is qualified as referring specifically to the Muslims actively pursuing jihad on the front line, as distinguished from the multitudes of other Muslims who more or less are passively enabling the same global jihad various ways. However, see my update on this: Another asymptotic cacophemism to add to the "-ist" list.
(A while back as reported at Jihad Watch, there emerged reportage about a prominent American think tank that endeavored to educate the defense and military establishment, coming out with a major paper by which they call for the term hirabah to replace jihad (as though the latter were being significantly used anyway, but that’s another matter)—the former term from a word in the Islamic lexicon which is supposedly distinguished from the holy war denoted by jihad by referring to specifically “sinful” or forbidden war. The analysts at Jihad Watch, both Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald, have with their usual skill and luminosity sufficiently destroyed that silly proposal by the National Defense University.)
Conclusion:
There’s a camel in the room. And it’s causing major problems. The ideal rational terminology to use is, of course, Islam and Muslim, without qualification unless merited by sufficient facts—i.e., presuming guilt until innocence is proven. But even if one must continue to use the silly prefixes, suffixes, qualifers and euphemisms, then at least let us also, at the same time, pursue the following questions:
Is Islam itself a significant source for the various acts of violence and intolerance perpetrated by Muslims with increasing frequency around the globe which are being seen by the West—and the Rest (of the World)?
To what degree, and in what manner, is Islam itself a significant source for these various problems?
Without beginning by at least sincerely and diligently pursuing these questions—instead of interdicting them prejudicially from the start—, we will continue to willfully or naively eliminate or tamper with rational interpretations by which to analyze the mountain of disturbing data emanating from the Islamic world, and from the interpenetration of that world in the other worlds that make up our one World.
Posted by Hesperado at June 27, 2006 No comments:
Post-Modern Apocalypticism
A poster at the Jihad Watch website made an observation partially in response to a rather long-running conversation I have been having on a particular thread over there. That poster’s observation helped me to see that I need to modify, slightly, the list on my previous post, The Epochal Sea Change of the West.
In that post, I enumerated a list of twelve factors that denote the manifestations/causes of the epochal sea change of the West. Factor #5 was:
the massive subculture of religious syncretism beginning in the 19th century.
Included in this rather terse and somewhat opaque descriptor is:
a revival of interest in mysticism, spiritualism, supernaturalism, Satanism, multicultural eclecticism, the fabrication of new-fangled sects (pseudo- or quasi-Christian like Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormonism, Christian Science, etc., as well as others with no affiliation with Christianity per se), the proliferation of quack remedies and health techniques, the rise of science fiction, the obsessions in Romanticism with erotic and passionate surrender and self-annihilation to primitivism and ‘Nature’, the rise of modern psychology...
It is likely that I have left out one or more significant features.
One feature I did leave out is apocalypticism, about which the aforementioned poster from Jihad Watch reminded me; and this particular feature might be sufficiently remarkable to deserve a place outside of a list of features within #5.
Of course, apocalypticism as a general sociocultural phenomenon—albeit an amorphous one that has waxed and waned at various periods—dates back to what Voegelin calls the ‘Ecumenic Age’ and what more ensconced scholars in Academe refer to, in somewhat fastidious fashion, as the ‘Inter-Testamental Period’.
Apocalypticism has been a perennial constant—waxing and waning, to be sure—in the West for over two millennia, pre-dating the epiphanies of Jesus Christ. Scholars cannot pinpoint any beginning of apocalypticism, but it seems to have originated with Zoroaster or his followers in Persia approximately over 500 years before Christ, and subsequently influenced certain Judaic circles in Mesopotamia during the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ when most of the influential scribes and priests—i.e., the intellectual ‘elites’ of Israelite culture—were transferred by conquest to Mesopotamian regions heavily influenced by Persian symbolizations. Persian influences, as well as other eschatological tendencies, throughout the vibrantly eclectic syncretism that was rampant throughout the Ecumenic Age colored Greek spirituality and later Roman spirituality in myriad ways. And, of course, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the vast kinesis began whereby all these syncretistic strands and streams coalesced—even as, on the surface, many were proscribed under rational paradigms of orthodoxy—into the grand synthesis of Christendom. Along with the orthodox synthesis there embarked a geographically and sociologically sprawling, rag-tag, semi-incoherent career of various streams of heterodoxy and outright heresy that flourished—or festered—underground for centuries, generating the most bizarre modulations of apocalypticism (most notably the Pseudo-Sybelline Oracles); and, incidentally, providing much pathological nutrition for the rise of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism).
It would therefore be perfectly legitimate to say that apocalypticism has perdured for the last 2,400 years in the West, with a career of complex waxing and waning as well as permutations, but not with any significant breaks. Apocalypticism is an important component of the eschatology which, in turn, is the major feature of the differentiation of consciousness which my previous post explored.
If apocalypticism has been with the West since pretty much the very beginning, what sense, then, does it make to identify it as a feature of the latter part of the epochal sea change of the West which by my definition is delimited by the past 500 years? The only new aspect seems to be the literally global interconnections that have been realized in the last 50 years, and their consequent impacts on psychology and mythology (in a future posting, we will discuss how mythology is not necessarily a false construct). In this context of ‘Globalism’—whether it is good or bad or, more likely, a little of both—apocalypticism has acquired a sufficiently distinct contour by which it may be identified as a discrete factor in the overall epochal sea change of the West.
Post-modern apocalypticism—as we may call it—involves many flavors: revivals of Christian apocalypticism with attention to the increasingly volatile situation in Israel; inspiration from heterodox eschatological texts from history (ranging from Nostradamus to the Aztec calendar); Leftist doom knells about the environment; conspiracy theories about secretly machinating cabals who either already control everything or are trying to control everything or—paradoxically—both; fantasies about alien beings with plans to pleromatically invade the Earth according to some timetable; and probably the most significant—and increasingly perilous—example in our era, the apocalypticism which millions and millions of Muslims believe literally and which has not been significantly modified or suffered much appreciable deterioration socio-psychologically from its pre-modern forms. I include this in my survey because the Islamic apocalypticism and the eschatology of which it is a component were drawn directly from Western mythologoumena; indeed, it seems in many instances Islamic texts (the Qur’an, the Ahadith and the Sira) preserve apocryphal fragments and variants of lore, fables and myths relating to Judaism, Christianity and Gnosticism that may have been otherwise lost.
All of these examples of post-modern apocalypticism tend to share the Gnostic pathos of contemptus mundi as well as its implicit or explicit arrow of eschatology pointing to an end of history and subsequent transfiguration of one sort or another, often involving—as all the classical apocalypses did—mass catastrophes of nature and warfare as death throes of the Cosmos.
Posted by Hesperado at June 27, 2006 No comments:
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The West as equivalent to the Cosmos
‘The West’ is a symbolization. ‘The Cosmos’ is also a symbolization. I am therefore not necessarily comparing or equating apples and oranges.
More focally, I am defining cosmos in terms of the pop anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the pop philosopher Ernest Becker, and the eminent philosopher of history Eric Voegelin (with influences also from Paul Ricoeur, Lévi-Strauss, Thorkild Jacobsen, Henri Frankfort). In Becker’s terms, a cosmos is a ‘canopy of meaning’ which a culture weaves in language around themselves, a canopy that re-presents the reality that is around them, endowing it with significance and utility for them.
On one level, human beings are surrounded by Chaos—the “great blooming and buzzing confusion” of William James who used this phrase to describe what surrounds human infants before they have learned to process and organize the data around them. That same confusion does not, however, vanish as the human infant grows up: it remains around us all the time, on one level. What has changed as we grow up and become (more or less) intelligent and enculturated is our ability to organize the surrounding reality into (more or less) meaningful and useful structures. Another important feature of this tendency to organize chaotic reality into meaningful and useful reality is that it is a process from which society and history are inextricable: it is not, and as far as we know cannot be, done by an individual without social and historical input and cooperation.
Now, let’s dispense summarily with a bit of silly nonsense I can see lurking in the wings: when the growing human proceeds to organize the chaos around him, he is not simply ‘inventing’ a false reality out of whole cloth. This has become a standard conceit of the modern quasi-Gnostic movement some call “post-modernism” and which certainly involves what I have called PC multiculturalism—particularly of its natural science and pop science wings, but also, inexorably, of modern Western culture at large, insofar as PC multiculturalism has become culturally dominant in the modern West. No: The growing human who organizes the chaos around him and thus participates in the cultural project of weaving that ‘canopy of meaning’ Becker wrote about is not simply inventing a false reality—or, for the more radical PC multiculturalist, superimposing one false reality upon another false reality (for, you see, there “is no reality”, only The Matrix...).
No: what the growing human is doing is co-creating reality out of chaos. As some medieval Jewish mystics and certain Christian philosophers of the early modern period speculated, Creation is not simply an act done by God at the beginning of time, once and for all: it is an ongoing process, an ongoing project of cooperation between the divine and the human. One important mythopoetic text in the history of religions that would supply luminosity to this idea is Genesis 2:19-20, where God asks Adam to name the animals: this clearly conveys the idea of divine-human cooperation in organizing, through the gift of language, a previously less organized, in some sense less meaningful reality.
We may say, then, that reality is not simply either Chaos or Cosmos: it is, rather, a paradoxical tension between both. This paradoxical tension, in turn, is not a static system: it is, rather, a dynamic process. Furthermore, this paradoxical tension is not merely the dynamic process which Mircea Eliade studied across various world cultures throughout history—the cycle of coming into being, staying in being precariously through religious rituals, then going back out of being, mirroring the rhythms of nature which the ancient Greeks summarized as genesis-akme-phthora (birth / flourishing life / decline into death).
What Eliade did not quite factor in must be augmented by the analyses of Eric Voegelin. The rhythmic cycle Eliade noticed among cultures all over the world and throughout history belong, according to Voegelin, to a former ‘compact’ level of consciousness that historically has been superseded by a new ‘differentiated’ consciousness. This ‘differentiation’, furthermore, has, according to Voegelin, only occurred maximally in the West. This differentiation of consciousness is a historical process that on one level is quite complex as presented and unpacked by Voegelin. I will attempt to simplify it here.
The differentiation of consciousness changed the orientation of the Western mind from an indefinite participation in the cyclic rhythms of the cosmos to one that disturbed this cyclic rhythm with an irruption from transcendence in the form of revelation (or what Voegelin also terms pneumatic experiences)—an irruption that awoke in humans an eschatological desire for a transfiguration of the cosmos, or salvation from the cosmos.
Why would man need to be saved from the cosmos? Because, as Hesiod noticed (and as any ordinary human can observe—and Hesiod, being a shepherd, was a prototypical ‘everyman’), the cosmos is filled with pain, grief, toil, injustice, disease and death which, when intermingled with our ephemeral pleasures and joys along with deeper experiences of love and the love of the Good, make us long for a world free of these impediments to happiness.
Why didn’t man for all those millennia before the differentiations occurred (roughly beginning in 500 B.C. and unfolding in various ways thereafter) come also to this obvious conclusion—namely, that the traditional participation in the cosmic rhythms is not enough to assuage the deeper longings of the human psyche? This, Voegelin would say, is a mystery, which can be partially alleviated by the reminder that the former ‘compact’ level of consciousness (before the differentiations that paved the way for the various monotheistic revelations with their consequent philosophy and theology replacing or augmenting the former mythology) remains true after the differentiations. The former ‘compact’ level of consciousness is not rendered false by the new truth of the differentiations: it becomes seen as an older perspective on the same truth. I.e., the compact participation in the cyclic cosmic rhythms is a viable way to deal, existentially and socially, with the mystery of existence. Something new, however, has come about in history, and it is worth taking into account. The compact mode of pre-revelation and pre-philosophy religion is not the only way to deal with the mystery of the rhythms of existence, the rhythms of birth-life-death. Nor is it, perhaps, enough for what the soul hungers and thirsts for: an existence of love and happiness beyond the limitations of the body, ultimately beyond the limitations of material existence.
That new response to the mystery of existence was the epochal process of differentiations of consciousness which attended the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece with the noetic experiences of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (and of their precursors, the Pre-Socratics); and further south across the Mediterranean, the birth of Israelite monotheism with the pneumatic experiences of Abraham, Moses and the Prophets—which later unfolded in, among other expressions, the increased illumination of the Israelite revelations with the pneumatic experiences of Jesus and his disciples.
Then came, in later centuries, the magnificent symphony of the grand synthesis of Graeco-Roman Philosophy and Judaeo-Christian Revelation in the civilization known as Christendom. This was the civilization that combined noetic culture with pneumatic culture—Philosophy with Theology. And this is the civilization that has through protracted and complex processes suffered Gnostic deformations and now seems centrally infected such that we can now say the West has in certain senses shifted paradigmatically from being a noetic/pneumatic culture to a Gnostic culture.
All is not as hopeless as my final sentence above might indicate: for one thing, this paradigm shift into a dominance of Gnostic culture involves not so much the robust Gnosticism we saw in the violent outbursts of Nazism and Communism (the former of which, at least, was put down through the determined blood, sweat, tears and ingenuity of the rallying West); but rather a peculiarly bland “Gnosticism Lite”, oddly (and thankfully) intermingled with a rather strong and healthy survival of the noetic culture (strong enough, as we just noted, to generate at least some civilizational “white blood cells” necessary to fight the more virulent forms of Gnosticism in the 20th century).
In our era, we have not been seeing so much a conquest of noetic culture by Gnostic culture, nor a revolution overturning the one for the other, nor some coup d’état of evil “Elites”, so much as a “coup de state of mind”—a shift in worldview by the general society by and large (with exceptions that prove the rule).
One interesting, curious and complex facet to this development of “post-modernity” is its massively concerted voyage into a still uncharted territory of a worldview that has well nigh given up on any transcendent faith, hope and love in any reality beyond the limitations of materialism; instead, with dizzyingly industrious zeal and talent, banking everything on a this-worldly material existence maximized through technology while skirting with glib circumlocutions of various flavors of pop spirituality the deeper existential questions and problems that don't go away just because one has achieved more successful distractions.
Posted by Hesperado at June 25, 2006 No comments:
Saturday, June 24, 2006
The Epochal Sea Change of the West—Part Two
The Gnostic culture I termed PC multiculturalism is the latest manifestation of the epochal sea change of the West. Over the past approximately 50 years (increasing with each passing decade), it has become the dominant sociopolitical paradigm throughout Europe, Great Britain and North America, as well as, to a great extent, throughout the satellite cultures of the West (Australia, Central and South America).
I will now recount, to the best of my ability, all the significant manifestations of this epochal sea change in the history of the modern West (approximate dates are affixed in parentheses):
1) the Protestant Reformation (early 16th century)
2) the Scientific Revolution (16th century)
3) the dissolution of Christendom (16th-17th centuries)
4) the French Enlightenment and French Revolution (late 18th century)
5) the massive subculture of religious syncretism beginning in the 19th century
6) World War I (early 20th century)
7) Communism (1917-1987)
8) German Nazism and other Fascisms (1930s-1945)
9) World War II (1939-1945)
10) the dismantling of Western Colonialism (1940s-1960s)
11) the 60s Cultural Revolution
12) PC multiculturalism (late 1960s-present).
We see with #1 that the epochal sea change began approximately 500 years ago (with an initial marker in the first or second decade of the 16th century with Luther’s disordered epiphany, the so-called Turmerlebnis). Each of the enumerated items is a complex contributing factor to an overall kinesis in history that itself becomes complex by the interrelations of the factors as they combine and overlap. Furthermore, for any one of the single enumerated factors taken into consideration, there can be found precursors and roots that go back in history beyond this 500-year period.
Our enumeration also graphically situates PC multiculturalism as a spearhead of a monumental arc. However, we mustn’t impose a simplistic chronology of process upon the list. It is not merely a uniform process that simply changes costume with each passing century: it is, rather, an overarching complex kinesis that manifests, over time, different expressions, without any necessarily inexorable arrow—either of form, impetus or entelechy.
On the other hand, our enumeration is not merely a collection of otherwise dissimilar entities: there is a common ground unifying them: the movement from a noetic culture to a Gnostic culture. This movement is, of course, less conspicuous and more amorphously diluted in some of the processes listed. Also, some of the items of our list do not so much name an expression of the movement as they identify a major manifestation or symptom that attends the overall epochal arc of that movement in the period we are considering (the last 500 years).
In terms of sheer virulence of expression of this movement, we may now rank the processes, in descending order:
1) German Nazism and other Fascisms (1930s-1945)
2) Communism (1917-1987)
3) the French Enlightenment and French Revolution (late 18th century)
4) PC multiculturalism (late 1960s-present)
5) the Protestant Reformation (early 16th century)
6) the Scientific Revolution (16th century)
7) the massive subculture of religious syncretism beginning in the 19th century
8) the 60s Cultural Revolution
Meanwhile, we rank in descending order of virulence the manifestations or symptoms that have attended this epochal change:
1) the dissolution of Christendom (16th-17th centuries)
2) the dismantling of Western Colonialism (1940s-1960s)
3) World War I (early 20th century)
4) World War II (1939-1945)
Ordinarily, we would rank World War II higher than World War I, but the fact that much of its inherent virulence is already located in our #1 above lessens its weight compared to World War I—which had, incidentally, profound effects upon the collective psyche of the West, laying some of the existential, philosophical and sociopolitical groundwork for the rise of an explicit anti-Westernism in the West. The reader might at this point have noticed that I nowhere locate ‘anti-Westernism’ on my original list of 12. This is because it is already contained in several of the processes—including in PC multiculturalism.
The reader might also have surmised the subtext of the epochal sea change of the West: in its movement from a noetic culture to a Gnostic culture, it is also a movement from Occidentalism to anti-Occidentalism. This, in turn, adverts our attention to another thesis we will unfold in a later post: namely, that on one level, the West is the Cosmos. And since the principal pathos of the Gnostic psyche is a contemptus mundi—i.e., an antipathy to the Cosmos as an overarching existential and ontological ‘prison’ that prevents humans from finding the key to their deepest longing, salvation—that contempt for the world becomes a contemptus Occidentalis, or anti-Westernism. In the Gnostic case, salvation involves either an escape from the Cosmos that imprisons the Gnostic, or a transfiguration or utopianization of the Cosmos into a soteriological structure. The former is the way of the ancient or classical Gnostic; while the latter typifies the modern Gnostic. The modern Gnostic then directs his contemptus mundi appropriately at the mundus (Latin for the Greek cosmos) at hand: the West.
We will not find it necessary to explicate fully the final two points we noted in our previous post, only to restate them now with a dash of amplification:
1) Islam is another example of a Gnostic culture—the most successful and longest-lasting of all, in fact. We shall revisit this in a future post. Suffice it to say that Islam—contrary to what supremacist Muslims and their sugarcoating PC multiculturalist friends might wish to argue—is not a Western phenomenon, and so, it does not properly belong in an analysis of the epochal sea change of the West—with the following crucial exception:
2) PC multiculturalism—the latest manifestation of the epochal sea change of the West—is the principal factor that might ensure the victory of Islam over the West in the coming century. This is so because of two main factors:
a) PC multiculturalism contains comprehensively and intricately anti-Western features, and as such, it weakens the requisite self-defense of the West: why defend something you oppose? (There is a subtle complication to this problematic formula that permits wiggle-room for PC multiculturalists to claim that they are in fact defenders of the West; we shall examine this too in a future post, and we shall find that the ‘wiggle-room’ is tiny indeed and that the argument for it obfuscates untenable, self-contradictory and ultimately self-defeating propositions.)
b) PC multiculturalism—partially but not wholly due to (a) above—involves a widespread, concerted and sociopolitically powerful tendency to sugarcoat and whitewash Islam and thereby to erect a prejudicial wall of protection around it, with a corollary mechanism for surgically detaching all instances of dangerous ideology and behavior on the part of Muslims from Islam proper.
With (a) and (b) as features of the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of the West in the beginning of the 21st century—just as Islam is attempting to revive (after a relatively brief period of quasi-hibernation due to the circumstance of the spectacular rise to global superiority of the West beginning in the 16th century) its former, authentic and original imperative to conquer the world—the West’s capacity for self-defense will be increasingly limited.
Posted by Hesperado at June 24, 2006 No comments:
Friday, June 23, 2006
The Epochal Sea Change of the West
An annoying thing happened on my way to post today’s post: I wrote about half of it, then lost what I had written. I’m confident, nevertheless, that I can make a refreshing glass of lemonade out of that unfortunate lemon.
For one thing, if my memory serves me, I indulged in a preface that was too verbosely circuitous. I rather prefer to get to the nutshell and the punchline from the start. So here goes:
The epochal sea change of the West was a change from being a predominately noetic culture to being a predominately Gnostic culture.
In history, there have been many flavors of Gnostic culture: they have not all been the same, stamped from the same monolithic mold. Like any other phenomena that belong in a category, there will be variations. One Gnostic culture may be more dangerous and deformed, another Gnostic culture may be less so. The Gnostic cultures of Nazi Germany, or of Soviet Communism, for example, were far more dangerous and deformed than is the Gnostic culture of what I shall call ‘PC multiculturalism’.
Usually in history, Gnostic cultures have not been massively successful: they have tended to be subcultures, cults or more amorphous and disparately coherent parasitic malignancies that cling to a larger host culture that is, by degree, less Gnostic and more noetic. (This is mainly because people and societies, particularly societies that last and grow, tend to be healthy rather than diseased.) And most of the examples that could be adduced of massively successful Gnostic cultures tend to exhibit a rather brief and convulsive life-span. The two examples I noted above, Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism, are cases in point (the latter lasting longer than the former, but still with a rather brief career—roughly 70 years—in the view of history).
The usually convulsive nature of otherwise successful Gnostic cultures is directly related to their major project of trying to immanentize the eschaton, or to put it in another way, of trying to utopianize an imperfect reality. By itself, the project of utopianization need not be violent or convulsive, but it can veer off into that kind of disorder when its adherents and master planners are fanatical and invest their intolerance of humans who resist the ‘new order’ with demonization. Demonization of recalcitrant humans, in turn, when it becomes a project within the overarching project of utopianizing reality at the hands of fanatics, often leads to tactics of oppression and mass-murder, which then devolve into wars against other sociopolitical entities who resist, in one way or another, the ‘new order’. These surrounding sociopolitical entities will usually be comparatively healthier, and they—along with comparatively healthy elements within the Gnostically inflamed culture—will not tolerate for long such violent outbreaks and wars, and will eventually work to dismantle the Gnostic culture, more quickly to the extent that the Gnostic culture behaves egregiously and flagrantly (the Gnostic culture of the French Revolution in its final Napoleonic phase would be the most famous example of this).
We noted that the Soviet Gnostic culture lasted longer than the Nazi German Gnostic culture. The other major Gnostic culture of the 20th century, PC multiculturalism, has so far enjoyed a slightly shorter duration—at least in terms of being a successful culture: approximately 50 years, though the determination of its chronology is somewhat more difficult than it is with the aforementioned Gnostic cultures. This difficulty is indirectly related to its relatively less deformed and dangerous nature: PC multiculturalism is more of a process within a culture—that has become dominant within that culture (sort of like a virus making a host body ill), and as such, it never had a clearly defined tumultuous beginning in a political revolution or coup d’état. The distinction is quite fine: German Nazism and Soviet Communism were also like processes within a culture that attacked that culture like a virus. What distinguishes PC multiculturalism from them is that it grew more organically and less tumultuously, notwithstanding the tumult of the 60s Cultural Revolution—and also keeping in mind that other major convulsions that informed it (World War I, World War II, the dismantling of Western Colonialism) were indirect etiological factors, not direct manifestations.
In Part Two, we shall unfold further implications:
1) that PC multiculturalism is subsumed, on one level, under a category of which German Nazism and Soviet Communism are also types—that category being the epochal sea change that is our overarching subject;
2) that PC multiculturalism, while only approximately 50 years old, has deeper historical roots that reach further back over several centuries and which partake of the larger process, the epochal sea change the West has undergone;
3) that Islam is another example of a Gnostic culture—the most successful and longest-lasting of all, in fact;
4) and that, finally, PC multiculturalism—the latest manifestation of the epochal sea change of the West—is the principle factor that might ensure the victory of Islam over the West in the coming century.
Posted by Hesperado at June 23, 2006 No comments:
Thursday, June 22, 2006
The Paradox of the 60s—Part Two
In my initial post about the paradox of the 60s Revolution, I wrote:
The fact that [French pop philosopher Jean-Francois Revel] was virtually alone in concluding this [i.e., in concluding that America was the greatest epicenter of the new cultural revolution] speaks to the pathological myopia of the New Leftism that was born out of the 60s more than it does to Monsieur Revel’s eccentricity. And that pathological myopia of the New Left reflects, in turn, one major characteristic of the paradox I am addressing in my post today.
In yesterday’s post, I never focussed on this particular characteristic, as I had another fish to fry. I’d now like to put this queer little sea creature into the frying pan to see what can be dished up that might shed more light on the 60s Paradox through one of its major mutant offspring, the ‘New Left’. (In a future posting, I intend to revisit this offspring by examining more closely the differences and relations between ‘Liberalism’ and ‘Leftism’.)
I dismiss the ‘New Left’ as a “queer little sea creature”; in reality, it is rather a Leviathan in terms of its sociopolitical hegemony in the modern West—though in terms of its philosophical weight, it really is just a deformed jumbo shrimp.
Let’s take a look at it now, in the context of my statement about Jean-Francois Revel’s epiphany about America:
On the face of it, it would be odd and even self-contradictory for the ‘New Left’—the principal benefactors and purveyors of the cultural revolution—to begrudge Revel’s revelation, since he is celebrating that same cultural revolution, and he is praising America for giving birth to it and for helping it grow.
It shouldn’t take the reader long to hit on the answer: Anti-Americanism. Members of the ‘New Left’, whether Europeans or Americans themselves, are profoundly, irrationally, pathologically anti-American. But this is where the paradox of the 60s—and by extension, the paradox of Leftism—becomes interestingly grotesque in its Möbius torsion: it is not merely a case of New Leftists “biting the hand that feeds them”. Rather, the feeding hand which they are biting is their own hand! I add that spin onto that familiar saw to highlight the intimately organic interrelation between America and the cultural revolution to which she gave birth. Of course, the New Leftist wishes to eradicate that cultural child’s umbilical bonds to the wider culture that gave it—and continues to give it—life. The New Leftist wishes to radically extirpate all connections between America and the cultural revolution, between America and ‘Amerika’. This radical motivation already reveals a pathology afoot.
One could understand—and at least discursively deal with—a philosophical attempt to articulate a paradoxical dissonance between America and the cultural revolution that grew out of the American milieu: an articulation that would note the factors of struggle, dissent and criticism, without, however, losing sight of the paradox that it was, in effect, America struggling and dissenting against itself. Even this articulation, however, would be simplistic and would botch the paradox if it failed to take into account the fact that this same America that became embroiled in an internal and internecine schizophrenia also, at the same time, managed to digest and assimilate and find nourishment in this internecine conflict, without succumbing to anything more crippling than a few bouts of intestinal gas that have become, from the perspective of history, bumps on the road to the overarching progress of which America has always been, and continues to be, the greatest beacon in world history.
But the ideology of New Leftism will have none of this. It cannot tolerate that the cultural revolution—and by extension, the Neo-Gnostic worldview they would locate at its heart—has anything to do with America: their mythologization of this offspring, the cultural revolution, is of a miraculous birth that may have come out of the womb of America, but has utterly nothing to do with her nutritive matrix: it was, and remains, a miraculous freak of nature, an epiphany out of the blue, outside the realm of the dominant culture, outside the real world of the nation-states of the West. As the ancient Gnostic text Thunder: Perfect Mind puts it:
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
This unholy virgin birth in the Leftist Revolutionary mind has its source in some transcendent knowledge of the true utopia of mankind, a knowledge that only a minority throughout history have been specially graced with—all the rebels, heretics, gnostics, underground revolutionaries who fought against the Roman Empire, then against the evil Catholic Church, then against the evil Masonic-Jewish cabal of Capitalist Nation-States that in the West succeeded Christendom, etc. And in America in the 1960s, that special transcendent knowledge burst forth again, having nothing to do with, and nothing to owe, the America out of which it came: a miraculous re-appearance of the knowledge of the perennial Revolution against... against what, exactly?
In future posts, we shall explore more deeply to palpate more precisely the irrational welter of forces against which the Neo-Gnostic fights with such committed passion. It will suffice the limited purview of our post today to conclude that, to the New Leftist, the 60s Revolutionary popped out of the American womb ready to turn around committed to commit matricide—a matricide so radical it would necessitate not merely vituperative repudiation of, and even violence against, its own cultural matrix, but further than that, also a disavowal of any filial connection whatsoever.
So we can see, at least a little more clearly, why New Leftists would dislike Revel’s epiphanic encomium to America: he was, in effect, urging them to love and appreciate their Mother for doing so much for them, when their entire psychological and philosophical system is based upon not merely disliking some of her annoying traits and reasonably criticizing some of her faults, but of positively hating and killing her.
In a later post, we shall spelunk one of the deeper caves of darkness in the depths of the Neo-Gnostic psyche, and shed our miner’s light on one major twisted root of Western anti-Americanism: a literal, existential, ontological self-hatred.
Posted by Hesperado at June 22, 2006 No comments:
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
The Paradox of the 60s
The paradox of the 60s is a microcosm of the larger, truly epochal sea change which the modern West has undergone.
Before I delve into the complexity of the topic, I’ll relieve the reader’s suspense with the punchline in a nutshell:
The paradox of the 60s is this: it was both good and bad at the same time.
That’s the problem with simplifications: they leave a lot of stuff out and often ring silly. But, nevertheless, they usually express the truth of the matter.
Before we continue, however, I’d like to make an elementary point about paradoxes in general that might escape the reader: a process (such as the 60s Revolution) could be both good and bad at the same time, yet not be paradoxical. It would not be paradoxical if the good and bad aspects of the process were separate and not working together, yet bundled together as part of the package of the process. What makes a process paradoxical is if the good and bad aspects are features of the same parts: i.e., if a thing is both good and bad, it is paradoxical. A process is not one thing, usually: it is a system of several things. And if one or more of those parts are, in and of themselves, both good and bad, or if good and bad parts are working synergistically within that system, then we have a paradoxical process. The 60s Revolution, I maintain, is one such paradoxical process.
The famous French pop philosopher Jean-Francois Revel had an epiphany in the late 1960s, while he was visiting San Francisco: he realized that the epicenter of the modern ‘Revolution’ was not occurring in China, or in Cuba, or in the Soviet Union (as his Leftist compeers and comrades were convinced)—it was occurring in the United States of America! He looked around him as he visited America in the late 60s and saw the amazing sociocultural changes that were occurring and concluded the only logical thing. The fact that he was virtually alone in concluding this speaks to the pathological myopia of the New Leftism that was born out of the 60s more than it does to Monsieur Revel’s eccentricity. And that pathological myopia of the New Left reflects, in turn, one major characteristic of the paradox I am addressing in my post today.
What Revel found most revolutionary was the new freedom, insouciance, frankness and irreverence with regard to tradition: he recognized this alone—considered even apart from any concrete legal or political changes—as remarkably significant and powerful. I believe Revel was right, and his implication—that these changes were beneficent—was also right. But it was also wrong. It was both right and wrong: it was paradoxical.
To simplify again, what was right about it was that it represented an insuppressible arrow in the entelechy of Western progress—towards ever more freedom, individuality and openness. By and large, this is a good development, and is part of the larger, ongoing adventure of Mankind as it continues to grow, and grow up, with the freedom God gave. If God created Mankind to grow into maturity and wisdom, then it is not up to any man or society or ideology to declare that it knows when this mysterious adventure has ended: it is only for God to know, and to tell. And so far—with the exception of the pneumopathological visions of certain heretics throughout the centuries, the most spectacularly egregious of them all being that impostor-prophet, Mohammed—God has not told Mankind.
What was wrong about that revolutionary breakthrough in social mores that typified the 60s is well known to most Americans, and began to be articulated most charismatically during the Reagan years. Reagan first expressed the widespread, yet amorphous, feeling that some valuable things had been lost, and sometimes even perverted, by the 60s Revolution: a sense of communal decency; an innate ability to maintain a balanced order in society; a sense of decorum; an understated yet effective code of honor; a respect for tradition; an acceptance of different stations in life that perdure with dignity beyond the obsession for utopian equality; a restraint in the realm of the appetites, not the least of which, the sexual appetite; and so forth.
However, looking back from the vantage point of 2006—after so many ephemeral attempts in the 80s, 90s, and in the years immediately preceding and succeeding the ‘New Millennium’ by pop analysts to digest the amazing tumult of the 60s—the perspicacious observer who does not lose perspective of the forest for the trees sees an overarching strength and stability in the American sociocultural fabric that is truly admirable and wondrous: for the most part—not without significant and sometimes disturbing problems—America has been able to assimilate the good aspects of the 60s Revolution without forgetting what the 60s left behind in its brazen scorn of the past. The America of the 21st century has absorbed its 60s paradox and enfolded it into a higher paradox that seeks a way to restore what the 60s thought it could destroy in its giddy experiment with novelty and freedom. And the good news—evident in subtle, understated, organic evidence that often evades the jittery pop-culture eye—is that a solid common ground of those traditional virtues never truly disappeared from American culture in the wake of the 60s Revolution: they have survived and in many ways have become better and stronger, by learning to accept and in some ways to appreciate—even sometimes to appropriate—the wilder, funnier, and bolder defiance of their younger longhaired sibling.
As with all civilizational paradoxes, the American experiment is a work in progress, and it is imperfect and full of flaws. But it is by far the best thing going, socioculturally, in the world. It is perhaps the most successful and most beneficent sociocultural experiment in history.
I don’t want to leave the reader with the impression that I think the 60s Paradox is a posy of roses: one major, bitter fruit of the 60s Revolution is PC multiculturalism; and while this also is a paradoxical phenomenon, it has tended to exert deleterious effects, not the rosier synergistic dynamism I alluded to above. The most glaring deleterious effect of PC multiculturalism has been the prevalent whitewashing and candycoating of Islam, perversely and obstinately sustained after sufficient data to dismantle it has been available for years now. The pathological inability to condemn Islam is the single most vivid and powerful manifestation of the disease of PC multiculturalism.
In this one major respect, the paradox of the 60s Revolution has failed us, and increasingly threatens our very lives by preventing us from taking rational measures to marginalize, monitor and target a large, broadly disseminating group of people who, though they subscribe to an ideology that is intolerant and dangerously anti-liberal, are nevertheless rendered sacredly inviolable and blameless merely because they emanate predominantly from a mosaic of Third-World and non-white cultures.
For Part Two, click here.
Posted by Hesperado at June 21, 2006 No comments:
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
A Quick Memo to my Readers
The purpose of this memo is to let the readers know that my blog is not meant to be a rigorously informative site where I will be providing copious links and footnotes to my various assertions.
For one thing, the Net is a vast reservoir of information, and the reader can readily determine if some point I make is, or is not backed up by the facts.
More importantly, I have created this blog in order to have an opportunity to write essays that are more meditative in nature and that rest upon years of study but do not belabor the nitty-gritty of statistics and data. The Hesperado is my space to do a little hang-gliding over the issues, and ponder them from a more leisurely and airy perspective—a respite from the countless hours I’ve lucubrated on solid ground.
I hope this style works for the reader. It certainly seems to be working for me, in helping me unfold certain ideas more liberally.
Posted by Hesperado at June 20, 2006 No comments:
The Case of the Asymptotic Cigar: Jihad Watch
Jihad Watch is excellent website for many reasons:
1) it’s like a daily AP news wire of news stories that illustrate the problem of Islam
2) it’s also a daily publication of editorials from various sources about various aspects of the problem of Islam
3) and finally, it functions as a kind of daily ‘town meeting’ for visitors—regulars and newcomers alike—to engage with the site: in the ‘Comments’ section to each official posting, these visitors will put in their two cents worth, or expound either emotionally or intellectually (or both) at greater length, or construct analyses of the news stories and editorials, or offer sometimes important informational addendums and links that amplify the main postings, or engage in discussions or arguments—mostly constructive—with each other. Beyond that, on a more informal level, these visitors (who hail from all parts of the world, from Australia to India to Europe to England to America) will participate in a social atmosphere that is conducive to mutual encouragement in a world that is not only increasingly frightening and dangerous due to the metastatic pullulation of barbaric Muslims, but also a world that is outrageously frustrating in the general failure of comprehension for the direct connection which ‘Jihad Watchers’ see between Islam and terrorism.
In its ‘town meeting’ function, I’ve found Jihad Watch to be—from my observation of it and participation in it over the past three years—remarkably civil, constructive and illuminating.
This is due in great part to the mostly judicious censorship exercized by the Director, Robert Spencer, and his Vice-President, Hugh Fitzgerald, and probably also by others who volunteer as editors. At times, Spencer’s blade errs on being Draconian, and he has cut into living flesh and bone that is part of the humanity of the give-and-take of disagreement, which if allowed to vent can sometimes generate constructive fecundity; but in the final analysis, I forgive him for this, as all worthwhile projects have their collateral damage.
The other reason why the ‘town meeting’ aspect of Jihad Watch is so vibrant and mature is, one must conclude, due to the individuals who participate in it. Spencer and Co. have too often failed to appreciate this unofficial wing that has come to form an integral part of his site (indeed, a couple of times he has threatened to shut the ‘Comments’ section down because of a couple of bad apples; and when he did decide, after all, to retain it, the observer got the distinct impression that he was only begrudgingly tolerating our continued presence there, and that we had better ‘behave’—or else!). This is not to say that Jihad Watchers in the capacity of their town hall have been perfect, day in and day out. There have been some flakes, there have been some simple-minded comments, there have been some distracting degenerations into petty disputes. All in all, though, it is an exemplary social experiment and a valuable outlet for politically frustrated men and women.
But that—as David Letterman likes to say—is not why you called. I am here today to speak to one particular angle of Jihad Watch, which I have termed The Case of the Asymptotic Cigar. The word asymptotic essentially means “coming closer and closer to being complete, but never quite getting there”. There is one interesting level on which the official position of Jihad Watch (as distinct from the unofficial attitudes and moods of its ‘town meeting’ population) exemplifies the familiar metaphor of “close, but no cigar”.
The reason I use the word asymptotic is not merely because I think the word is cool and I like indulging in big words—I plead guilty, on both counts. But more pertinently, I use it because it has been used a few times by the remarkably erudite and perceptive co-contributor at Jihad Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald, whose many essays there over the years have impressed readers with their breadth and depth of historical knowledge and cultural and literary sophistication. It is not so much Mr. Fitzgerald’s mere use of the word asymptotic that is significant; it is the precise context of his use of it. What is asymptotic, according to Mr. Fitzgerald, is the learning curve of mainstream analysts and commentators when they regard the problem of Islam. The best of the lot, Mr. Fitzgerald has noticed, keep seeming to come closer and closer to seeing that the problem is Islam, and not some detachable part leaves Islam blameless. But even the best of the lot never quite get to the logical conclusion.
I find it odd, therefore, that Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Spencer have shown themselves to be guilty of this very same asymptote: in statements they have made within one or another essay—as well as in interchanges they have condescended to have with a couple of members of the hoi polloi in the general population of the ‘town meeting’—they have made clear that they do not wish to condemn Islam qua Islam. Their argument seems to be two-pronged, and the two prongs seem liable to contradiction:
1) Islam considered as a whole contains a few innocuous or even good parts, and therefore, since condemning Islam as a whole would necessarily entail condemning those few innocuous parts—and Heaven forbid that we should do that—we can’t condemn Islam qua Islam;
2) on a more pragmatic level, condemning Islam as a whole would make it even harder (as if it isn’t already hard enough!) for the mission of Jihad Watch to gain traction and attract followers.
I have (under a pseudonym in the Comments section at Jihad Watch) tried to counter-argue my case, which boils down to this:
1) Islam is not merely an inert whole, which can be picked apart, and whose condemnation can submit to a selective cherrypicking process. Islam is an organic whole: a system. As such, all parts that function dynamically in its orbit contribute to the system. They cannot be detached from the system, except in an abstract sense. If a system is founded on corrupt and evil principles—as Messrs. Spencer and Fitzgerald agree Islam is—and if a system is deemed to continue to pursue those corrupt and evil principles—as Messrs. Spencer and Fitzgerald agree characterizes what is going on throughout the Muslim world today—then that system as a whole is the appropriate object of the condemnation, and we do not even bother to make cherrypicking distinctions about parts within that system that may, or may not, be innocuous or even good.
2) On the more pragmatic level, I agree that condemning Islam as a whole would alienate the PC idiots—but their threshhold for becoming alienated is abnormally low and hypersensitive: the slightest indication that a person is reasonably criticizing (not even condemning) a major feature of Islam (and not even Islam as a whole) arouses the warning antennae of the PC idiot, followed by an immediate rejection of that criticism and denigration of it as “Islamophobic” and/or “racist”. Frankly, I wouldn’t allow the pathological hypersensitivity of the PC idiot to determine our articulation of the problem of Islam.
Messrs. Spencer and Fitzgerald seem to be wanting to have their cake (to continue to condemn most of Islam) while eating it too (avoiding the opprobrium of the “Islamophobic” and/or “racist” charge that they are damning all of Islam, and all Muslims).
At the end of the day, however, Messrs. Spencer and Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch are, in their capacity as stewards of a formidable forum (and not just some lone voice) that tackles this paramount problem of Islam, the closest thing to a cigar that exists on the Net—or outside of the Net. And for that I am asymptotically grateful.
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
And if that better day ever comes when we the West will be able to arrive at the consensus that Islam as a whole must be condemned—and not one or another detachable part we have surgically removed in the hopeless project of saving a supposedly healthy body from its cancer—as we collectively come to the conclusion that Islam itself is the cancer and those few Muslims who can escape its totalitarian disease as apostates are the few healthy cells that can be rescued: then, and only then, will I be able to sit back and light up and smoke the whole cigar to celebrate.
Posted by Hesperado at June 20, 2006 3 comments:
Monday, June 19, 2006
Islam Redivivus—Part Three
Although the topic covered by my three-part posting, an “Islam Redivivus”, has many more complexities to unfold beyond what I will accomplish, I have decided to limit myself in the analysis.
Each of the 20 points I listed in Part Two, for example, could be considerably amplified. Also, many other significant points could be interspersed among, or added to, those 20. For instance, the military-imperialistic expansion of Islam, with its kaleidoscopic mosaics of internecine conflicts, is an arc of history of extraordinary complexity.
Nevertheless, the simplicity behind the complexity is, on one level, of equal, if not of a higher, importance: that unifying simplicity being the deformed entelechy of eschatological jihad—a simplicity that continues to inform the diversity of Islam in our day, a distracting diversity which politically correct apologists and pundits, however, find so infinitely comforting in their efforts to stave off, or obfuscate, the uncomfortably unifying factor—which they slyly caricature and then as a simplistic straw man dismiss as “monolithic”—behind the diversity.
At some later date, I may well revisit this three-part analysis and sketch in a little more light and shadow.
For now, I will conclude the analysis by picking up on the questions raised by the final, 20th point of Part Two:
Why is the coordination and unified consciousness of an Islam Redivivus as it stands currently still not as cohesive and crystallized as it could be, in Pan-Islamic terms? What factors militate against such a Pan-Islamic cohesion?
These questions point to the fact that, to put it in colloquial terms, Islam Redivivus is not a done deal. It is, rather, still a process, still a specter, not a full-blown fact. Were Islam Redivivus a full-blown fact, we would see a far worse, more geographically disparate, and far more coordinated concatenation of terrorist commando missions wreaking havoc in various key nerve centers—followed by a vast coalition of actual Muslim armies threatening all-out war against the head of the world’s Infidels, the West (with its crown being the U.S.A.).
We of course don’t see this. We haven’t seen this for years—at least 300 years. Why not? It’s a good question to ask me, since, according to my own assertions in Parts One and Two, Islam has an entelechy to conquer the world that may be characterized by the following adjectives:
a) traditional
b) essential
c) divinely mandated
d) eschatological
e) fanatically pathological
f) voracious.
Each one of these descriptors could be unpacked, but left as they are, they communicate at least a patent conundrum: if an ideology that unifies over one billion people is based upon this entelechy as described by these adjectives, why in the world are they not currently engaged in trying to conquer the world in more blatant, frontal terms? And furthermore, why haven’t they been trying to conquer the world for the last 300 years?
Well, in Part Two, we intimated a couple of cogent explanations. Before we get to those, some may argue that Muslims are, in fact, trying to conquer the world now. This argument, however, is perforce required to offer a new and unprecedented definition of civilizational conquest: one, to wit, where one civilization can, and proceeds to, conquer without using military means. The non-military (and mostly non-physically-violent) tactics purportedly being used by Muslims involve the two prongs of Daw'a (the Islamic equivalent of evangelization, but with Muslims employing a considerable amount of deceptive whitewashing and sugarcoating of their own anti-liberal tenets and violent history), and of population growth both through using their women as “baby factories” and through large-scale immigration into the lands of Infidels. This argument—framed by the neologism Stealth Jihad—would get us into a complicated issue some of whose problems I have dealt with in another essay, "Stealth Jihad" and Violent Jihad.
Suffice it to say that my take on this is that, while I agree this is happening as a semi-conscious project on the part of innumerable Muslims world-wide, it nevertheless suffers from two liabilities:
1) So far, it is being conducted in a largely incoherent, semi-conscious fashion following the amorphous dictates of tradition and culture; not as a coherent, unified “grand plan” with specific tactics apportioned out in terms of direct memos among hundreds of millions of Muslims, even if innumerable Muslims are indeed trying to do so (most notably various alphabet-soup arms of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the West): this doesn’t mean it won’t have great effect; it just means it won’t have as great—and as decisive—an effect as it could.
2) Secondly, no (realistic) amount of Islamic evangelizing and demographic inundation could hope to bring about the actual conquest of the West: Islamic values run so counter to the modern liberal values of the West and are, as such, so vulnerable to inferiorities that hamper and hobble their ability to excel even in their primary goal of hateful enmity, that it will be only a matter of time before the PC idiots who currently dominate Western culture will wake up and recoil at this penetration and presence.
This is not to say that when that day comes (and if no concerted project of bona fide conquest has been undertaken in the meanwhile by Muslims), it will not be a horribly messy situation the West finds itself in, having to extricate Islam from its midst at an egregiously and ridiculously late date, when it could have done so much more easily—and much more humanely (for all those handwringers out there in, and out, of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement)—at an earlier stage. It is rather to say that only an attempt at full-blown conquest—using a combination of terrorism and military invasion—would even begin to be within the general vicinity of the ballpark of standing a chance against a civilization as solid, complex, strong, sophisticated and ethically healthy as is the modern West. Even then, it is not currently conceivable that even if Muslims became far more unified than they now are and marshalled vast armies, they could still stand a chance against the military establishments of a vastly superior West.
Okay, back to the main question which we interrupted with our virtual parenthesis:
Why is Islam not sufficiently Pan-Islamic now, and why is Islam not trying to conquer, in flagrante, the world? We shall now unpack the question using our tried and true method of adumbration:
1) The astonishing rise of Western global superiority, beginning in the 17th century, increasingly, and with a rate thereafter of exponential augmentation, has mortifyingly cramped the style of Islam which, meanwhile, has descended into an abysmally pathetic welter of inferiority on all levels (only cosmetically obscured here and there by its undeserved, and Western-helped, oil wealth).
2) As implied in #1, the force on the world stage of Western superiority became stronger and more extensive with each passing century after the 17th century, and the rate of increase sped up, such that the spectacular and dizzying progress of the West accomplished, by the 19th century, in mere decades what it had taken a full century to do before.
3) This West that has become so superior in global terms—of truly historically unprecedented proportions—is, furthermore, a West that embodies values that are in most ways profoundly inimical to the values of Islam: this makes the superiority of the West a provocation of a ‘clash’ of world-views. If the modern West had values more in synch with Islamic values—say, if Hitler, who admired the militarism, totalitarian intolerance and paranoid xenophobia of Islamic culture, had won World War II and the West were now dominated by a Nazi world-view—then the superiority of the West would not be such a limiting factor on the expanse of Islam: rather, the two civilizations would likely achieve a ready symbiosis (not without some Trotskyitically internecine violence here and there along the way, of course).
4) While the current clash of values between the two world-views of Islam and the modern West is being temporarily obscured in too many ways by the idiocy of political correctness (which, sadly, dominates our culture for now), this ridiculous state of affairs is relatively recent—running the course of perhaps the last 60 years or so. It is the consequence of a cultural sea change in the West that has occurred since the end of World War II (though it has complex roots in our past before that). Prior to World War II, the West had little problem in hampering and hemming in Islam not only for geopolitical and economic reasons, but also for ethical reasons: the British just before First World War went to war against African Muslims (even if ostensibly black, mostly of Arab stock) who refused to give up the practice of slavery against black Africans: a young Churchill accompanied one or more of those military campaigns, and he wrote of his observations of the savage backwardness of Islamic culture at the time. Churchill was not ostracized and excoriated by his fellow Westerners for his ‘Islamophobia’ or his ‘racism’. We are now, sadly, in a political climate where England or its geopolitical successor America would never dream of invading the Sudan—where the divinely mandated Islamic practices of abominable jihad and slavery have been raging for decades now—for the express purpose of putting a stop to a project boldly and clearly identified as ‘Mohammedan’. No, the modern West now, with its ideologically deformed international vehicle the United Nations, must grope around for some politically correct rationale by which to try to put a stop to a religiously motivated project of mass-murder, mass-rape and mass-slavery of black Africans, rather than opting for the sane and humane rationale based on the simple observation that Islam, when put into logical practice and power, results in hideously grotesque crimes against humanity.
5) As the kernel of my fourth point above implies, the West before it became recently crippled by PC Multiculturalism, managed to exert its global superiority in many ways that concretely and consciously (if not always flawlessly) hampered and hobbled Islam.
6) Islam’s intrinsically internecine nature was exacerbated by its unprecedented situation, caused by a surrounding ocean of Western superiority beginning in the 17th century, of being forced to withdraw into itself and hunker down: as a result, Islam became even more internally divided, more corrupt, more toxic and deformed in ways that ate away at its unity.
7) Finally, although there exists in Islam a powerful cultural resistance against succumbing to the influence of Infidel cultures—all of which Muslims consider as evil temptations, but those of the modern West (dominated by evil Jews as they believe it to be) the most evil of all—nevertheless, this past century has seen a remarkable amount of seduction and insinuation of Western ways, styles and values into the hearts and minds of untold numbers of Muslims. Whether this insinuation really penetrates deeply enough to dislodge the powerfully hypnotic totalitarian brainwashing of Islam is open to debate: nevertheless, the many insidious and attractive tentacles of the Western world-view have infiltrated into the Muslim World and Mind, at least sufficiently to exert significantly divisive and disorienting effects—which, at the very least, and to our utilitarian benefit, helps to augment the pathological tendency in Islamic culture and in the Islamic psychology for purist takfir (i.e., the paranoid suspicion that a given Muslim or Muslim group is not sufficiently "pure" Islamically, and so must be considered an enemy) among myriad Muslim groups.
Conclusion:
The militant Muslims of our day in the 21st century are hoping to revive the authentic and mainstream Islam of its glory days, when it was able to strut about militarily without being forced, through weakness, to have to skulk about forming terror cells and otherwise pretending to be "moderate" in order lay stealthy tentacles for future terror attacks in the absence of outright military invasion.
For the reasons intimated by our adumbration above, Muslims are not there yet. Islam Redivivus is not yet a done deal, though it is definitely, and emphatically, a desideratum among them worldwide. It is thus an ongoing project, and even if it never succeeds—and I believe it is very unlikely to succeed, given the historically unprecedented strength and sophistication of the enemy it despises, the modern West—its zealous and fanatical pursuit will likely result, in the years and decades ahead, in the mass-murders of countless innocent people, as well as related physical injuries and mental anguish of survivors, ongoing psychological anxiety and tension of the general populace, social and infrastructure dislocations, and possibly outbreaks of disease if some of the attacks wreak sufficient havoc.
As with most horrible tragedies of history, it is usually not by the successful realization of a twisted idea that people will suffer, but merely by the attempt at realizing that idea. Hitler, Stalin and Mao all failed to realize their vision: but consider the horrific toll they wrought merely in trying, but failing, to succeed.
Let us hope that our current politically correct myopia is dispelled soon enough to at least minimize the unnecessary and tragic casualties that will result. And let us hope that WWIII will have fewer needless casualties than did WWII. Is that too much to hope for?
Posted by Hesperado at June 19, 2006 No comments:
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