samcdkey said:
“Originally Posted by Fraggle Rocker: I am particularly alarmed by the violent, fundamentalist fringe of Islam because they have become textbook cases of clinically sociopathic.”
How?
How??? I think my next two statements make my point. You could hardly come up with a more succinct definition of "sociopathy" than "disdain for life and antipathy toward the very concept of civilization."
“They truly believe that life in what to most of us is the real world is unimportant.”
I doubt that is their motivation, though it does mean that they are not afraid to die.
When it is not willingness to die for the one cause that is instinctive to all social species--defense against a threat to the survival of the extended family group--it becomes
psychopathy. What elevates it almost to the level of
sociopathy is the fact that they also don't care whether
all the rest of us die too. What pushes it over the top into that diagnosis is that they
actively seek death for everyone who does not agree with their worldview--a learned abstraction outside the realm of preprogrammed instincts.
“And they would cheer the downfall of civlization and a return to the Neolithic because people who are obsessed with survival are more easily converted to religion.”
Thats an overstatement, in my opinion.
That's fine. Reasonable people disagree and I'd certainly be relieved to learn that I'm wrong. But everywhere they go they reduce
their own people to the bottom rung of civilization, always on the brink of descending into a Neolithic tribal, village lifestyle.
Take their proscription against socialization with dogs. As I have argued many times here--and never been disputed--our ability to feel kinship and create a community with "people" of an entirely different species with whom we cannot communicate verbally taught us that we might learn to coexist with other tribes. This was the very key to civilization.
And their proscription against music. Music as a formal art, a professional occupation with its own academia and technology, which is now available at any time and any place, is ranked by a huge portion of humanity as one of civilization's greatest gifts, one that enriches the humblest of lives and cheers the most sorrowful of circumstances. It has been said to rival religion in its ability to influence society.
The proscription against images of people. Portraiture as a formal art also goes back to the evolution of Neolithic villages into cities. In a village one sees all of one's family and acquaintances almost every day. In a city one does not. An accurate portrait or photograph of them maintains that link and assuages one of the first and deepest longings that civilization engendered: dislocation.
The proscription against drugs. The division of labor and economy of scale in city life create a substantial surplus. People choose to expend their surplus labor and capital in a variety of ways. Noble pursuits such as art enrich civilization directly. But even hedonistic ones which release the pressure of an "unnatural" lifestyle are safety valves that keep it running smoothly. No one complains about sports because of their salutary effect on physical health. The more or less Buddhism-based culture of Japan recognizes the salutary effect on emotional health of the weekly ritual of drunkenness as a vacation from its stultifying regimentation. Westerners seem less able to keep alcohol in its ceremonial shrine (as do the increasingly Westernized Japanese) but marijuana seems to do the job for many of them. In any case, to rule that "drugs are bad, m'kay" for all drugs for all people in all situations is the arrogance of the priest caste. Especially when caffeine is conveniently not defined as a drug because the priests like it.
These are examples of ways in which I see the lunatic fringe of Islam as running against the very grain of civilization.
Again, I can't exclusively single out Islam. Christianity was just as vile at the same point in its 600-year time-displaced track. Emphasis on afterlife over corporeal life, intolerance and forced conversion or outright genocide for infidels, rejection of many of the essential attributes of civilization such as banking, metaphors as art, and scientific inquiry. Judaism has followed a different course since its lack of an evangelical vector has not caused its ranks to swell so it has never achieved dominance even in a local area. Yet within its wacko fundamentalist wing--such as the Orthodox in Israel and the Hassidim elsewhere--the signs are all there. Militant intolerance, an unshakeable sense that everyone else in the world is wrong, retention of ancient traditions that are no longer necessary like eschewing grain-fed pork or even sensible such as grounding ambulances on Saturday.
Who has been converted by a fundamentalist?
You gotta be joking? If you're an American you must remember the "born again" craze in the late 1970s and early 1980s--that lapse in the national IQ that coincided amusingly with the disco era. Just now we watched the entire State of Kansas install a public school bureaucracy that mandated a thinly disguised version of creationism in its classrooms. Fortunately it was short-lived but it provides a frightening answer to your question.
As for Muslim fundamentalism, that growing network of terrorist training camps from Afghanistan to the Philippines to central Africa, financed by the Saudis, are thinly disguised as Islamic schools for boys, for parents without the money to provide an education anywhere else. The parents may be moderate or even secular, but the kids are converted to fundamentalism and militancy, and ultimately for many of them, to the sociopathy of suicide bombers.
I think you should be more concerned about the circumstances that give power to these fringe elements.
I am. What I see throughout the history of Abrahamism is a faith that inspires people to be noble... during good times, when they need it the least.
But Abrahamism's central flaw is it's binary, one-dimensional model of the human spirit. Everything is rated on a scale between good and evil, and the only two influences in life are a god and a devil. As every cultural expression from the pantheon of the Egyptians and Greeks to the
dramatis personae of Shakespeare's plays to the archetypes of Jung's paradigm has discovered, there are something like 23 components to our spirit and each of us resonates to them in different proportions at different times. Some days we need our hunter or our healer to take over, other days our lover or our king, and they all have to wait their turn and contend for our attention in a healthty, constructive way, with a couple of them achieving general prominence. A paradigm that calls the things that would be wrong to do
today, in a particular situation, evil, is shoving all of that personality down into the darkness of our soul, where it festers and eventually explodes out through the cracks.
When life turns really lousy--a famine, a plague, a depression in our country while some funny-looking booze-drinking foreigners are prospering--it's natural to get angry. That's when a religion is really needed to remind us that this too shall pass and we must remain good people even when we don't want to be good people. Instead, we have that huge well of suppressed spirits inside us to fuel the anger and give it direction. Our warrior becomes a mere soldier, killing everyone in his path. Our king becomes a despot, demanding power over those who have not accepted his authority. Our hunter regards people who aren't like us as animals and hunts them. Our healer and our parent conspire to create a nanny-state of safety-health-fitness-and-sobriety-at-any-cost fascism.
The "circumstances that give power to these fringe elements" are universal and cannot be avoided, because they are nothing more or less than the adversity that the universe throws at us regularly.
If there's anything we can do to disempower the fringe elements of Abrahamism, it's to adopt policies that improve the quality of life for everyone. Fundamentalist Christianity rarely gets a foothold in places where people feel safe, healthy, and prosperous. It took hold in America at exactly the time when we began to feel threatened by the political situation in the Middle East, highlighted by the capture of Americans in our own embassy in the capital city of one of our hitherto most dependable allies. It has now taken root throughout the Muslim Third World, where food, clean water, roofs, medical care, and basic safety are tenuous and people will latch onto any hope, no matter how irrational.
Recommendation and a bit of proselytism:
We all fight the darkness in our own ways. My wife and I do it by devoting our entire charity budget to the Central Asia Project in Bozeman, Montana. A regular feature in
Parade magazine, this organization grew out of the dream of one man who, due to an accident on a mountain-climbing trip, spent several weeks living in an isolated village and getting a crash course in the sociology of the Muslim Third World. He makes the well-acknowledged point that frat-house, KKK-style lunacy is so easily winning converts in Islamic communities because women have almost no voice. His project is resolutely building schools for girls and coed schools that are required to accept girls throughout the region, including hot spots like Afghanistan.
So, with my final quotation of your question about "the circumstances that give power to these fringe elements," I reply with a quotation of my own, from a source whose attribution is long forgotten:
"Educating women is the key to peace."
