| Sunday, February 3, 2002 |
22:23 - Geez, which bases haven't we covered?
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/02/fog0000000260.shtml
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There are lots of semi-acknowledged or non-acknowledged problems in the world, particularly as regards America and our place in it. For the past fifty years at least, we've sort of let those questions go undiscussed, partly because discussion of one aspect of this complex of philosophical issues implies a need for discussion of another aspect and having as a prerequisite a third aspect (as I said yesterday we have avoided openly discussing the nature of American freedom out of fear of appearing too jingoistic or redneck-patriotic), and so we vapor-lock and sort of hope the people who do talk about them lose interest and go away.
But in the post-9/11 blog world, we have people writing online who apparently haven't heard of these limitations on our willingness or ability to philosophize, and they're methodically tackling each issue one at a time until anybody who has been paying attention should have as good a grasp on the role America plays in the world as a White House Cabinet member.
Steven den Beste of USS Clueless has taken on defense of the Constitution, cultural insularity, Palestine and Israel, European anti-Americanism, Islamic anti-Americanism, and the concept of America as an ideal of government and society. And now he tackles "cultural imperialism". You know-- McDonalds and Levi's and Disney.
If people in Cairo wear Levis, if people in Kuala Lumpur wear Nikes, if people in Kabul watch Schwarzenegger movies, if people in Bangalore watch Baywatch, if people in Kinshasa listen to rock music, it's because they like it.
We don't have to actively spread our culture to the world; it is seductive. Cultural competition is darwinian; and one culture can replace another quite easily. It happens because of a billion individual choices by a billion people, not as the acts of a few. We don't have to actively spread our culture, because it is spreading on its own. And so are our political ideals.
Ideas and attitudes are the most dangerous things we humans have ever created. Wars have been fought over them. And the most dangerous ideas in history are secularism, and self determination. The idea that religion should be an individual thing but never a governmental thing, and that individuals should be permitted to decide for themselves how they want to live without asking permission from their neighbors or the local priest, threaten the old order more than guns or bombs.
One way to tell how confident someone is in their ideals is to see whether they're willing to let you hear what their opposition has to say. If one side says "Read both sides" and the other side says "You should only listen to us because their ideas are too dangerous for you to experience", then you can be sure that the second guy knows his idea will lose. Censorship is the intellectual equivalent of protectionism. It uses the law to protect ideas which cannot survive on their own.
The biggest ideological problem, as he goes on to point out, is that if you're a culture that sees life as a series of trials and temptations that lead you away from the True Right Path-- then you're going to consider such concepts as balanced exposure to ideas and openness to outside cultural influences to be in themselves heretical.
And what this leads to is a deep-down question about the Meaning of Life, and something we must understand about the difference between Western egalitarian society and fundamental religious regimes: For us, religion is something you do. For them religion is something you are.
We tend to treat the church/synagogue/mosque as something you go to for one day out of the week, either to appease some internal nagging sense of need for balance and inspiration in your life, or to appease your mother-in-law, or for a variety of reasons with varying sincerity. But to a member of the Taliban-- one who honestly believes that his cause is the True Right Path-- religion is not simply a part of your life. It is your life. Any personal achievement or leisure activities you pursue must occur within the structure of religion. For us, the default state of doing nothing involves sitting on the couch watching TV. For them, it involves prayer. Prayer is their TV.
So the question, the meaning-of-life question, is this: Can we sit back and posit that our way of thinking is "right" simply because it is so obvious that the natural laws of human nature lead to it, that if we present no obstacles to information most people will come to agree with us? Or is that, in itself, the very nature of "temptation"-- the fact that such ideas are natural and compelling and the destination of highest entropy being the basis for a human being's failure to see the Light?
Most religions, like most oppressive governments, advocate self-moderation as a virtue; they consider the submission to "easy" ideas to be a human failing. In an environment of laissez-faire, humans will embrace ideas of openness, tolerance, democracy, and freedom-- and they will also have extramarital sex, do drugs, lean toward anarchy, and flout law and authority.
This is exactly why religions promote self-moderation and can lead to censorship.
So the Big Question really amounts to whether religion is a set of true laws designed to keep humans out of Hell, or whether it is a human invention designed to keep people from rising up against their leaders.
I think I'll just stop right there.
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