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Truth and Tantrums - The Forces Are Joined

The war that we are fighting turns on the question of truth. Is truth for man to discover, or is it only the result of recitation from God? When that question is asked, one must look around and realize that a great many in the West have come to question whether truth can be described and, by extension, be known.

It is this question of truth that has lead both the Islamo-Fascists and the post-modern Ludditry to compromise their "truths" so as to impose them on us. The Islamists that seek to enlighten and indoctrinate the infidel through suffering hold common ground with those generically referred to as "post-modernists" - in advancing their causes, they have perverted them.

Terrorism - debasing the foundations of Islam.

In the case of the Islamo-Fascists, the Qu'uran has explicit prohibitions against suicide and against the killing of innocents, especially women and children, even if they are of the infidel. The military history of Islam is of Jihad "in the path of God." It meant (and means) that the faithful are obliged to fight to advance Islam, presumably to the world. The history is of armies, as we commonly understand them, meeting an enemy on a field of battle. The Islamic armies used the terrain of deserts, which were difficult for their enemies to traverse, let alone navigate, to great effect. There is also a Muslim tradition of immitating the enemy so as to defeat him.

When terrorists combine the instruments of war with the modern tools of mass communications, they might think themselves innovating while using the tools of the infidel against him. But to be effective - to evoke the greatest effect of suffering - they target large groups of random victims - preferably women and children.

That Usama bin Laden took care in his "fatwa" to declare all Americans complicit in the "crimes of their government" and therefore make fair targets doesn't wash with Muslim tradition - When Saladin re-captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, he spared the lives of the captured combatants and their leaders except for one person - a Frenchman (Reynald de Chatillon) who had raided Arab caravans for booty near Mecca. That Usama kills any American (or Jew) regardless of age, ability or complicity violates Islamic tradition and, it would appear, the recitations of the Prophet.

The use of suicide bombers seems to be a double betrayal of the faith, for suicide is forbidden in the Qu'uran as well. The Prophet said that one who kills himself will repeat the crime in hell for eternity. Killing oneself to mitigate one's own suffering, even on a battlefield, is forbidden. Fighting to the death, even certain death, is martyrdom - administering one's own fatal blow is suicide.

In The Crisis Of Islam Bernard Lewis documents this contradiction well, and demonstrates how some Mullah's accommodation of Suicide Bombing is both in conflict with tradition and the majority view of Muslim jurists.

Cultural Relativism - debasing the foundations of rationality and democracy.

Cultural relativism has its roots in the work of Philosopher Jacques Derrida. In setting deconstructionism into motion as acritical tool, Derrida made the point repeatedly that language was intrinsically flawed and cannot fully describe a truth.

Both Cultural Anthropologists and Semanticists have told us for some time that language carries the baggage of the culture that produced it. This is both undeniable and useful. But in advancing deconstructionism in criticism, Derrida did not intend to disprove that truth exists. Yet, when manifest as Cultural Relativism, that is the legacy of his work - that the truth, if it does exist, is malleable - sensed but not described. For each individual, nuanced to suit their own tastes.

In this quote, Derrida caveats the world that deconstruction, taken to its extremes beyond a critical tool, produces dangerous absurdities.

It must not create an inflation of the image, or be used to neutralise every danger by means of what might be called the trap of the trap, the delusion of delusion: a denial of events, by which everything - even violence and suffering, war and death - is said to be constructed and fictive, and constituted by and for the media, so that nothing really ever happens, only images, simulacra, and delusions. The deconstruction of artifactuality should be carried as far as possible, but we must also take every precaution against this kind of critical neo-idealism.

Misunderstood, Just Like the Uncertainty Principle

Derrida is not wholly responsible for how his ideas and critical methods have been applied, no more than Werner Heisenberg is of the application of his Uncertainty Principle. Even if you have never contemplated the atom, you are probably familiar with trite contemplative aphorisms like - "Consider that the batting wings of a Butterfly in China could spawn a tornado in Kansas." The idea is that, at a quantum level, we cannot preclude that possibility. Thus a door is opened to the revival of medieval mysticism.

But Hiesenberg's uncertainty is due to a simple set of rational phenomena - the means of measuring velocity and position of particles affect the things measured, so you cannot measure both with precision. Your measurement of one destroys the accuracy of measuring the other. In order to get a full picture, one is compelled use statistical sampling - conduct sample measurement against a population of events. Position in this set of tests - velocity in this other set.

Statistics require one to account for uncertainty - polling data are offered to you with +/- percentage accuracy. You cannot be 100% sure unless you have measured 100% of the events - not possible in measuring quanta. So one must allow for the improbable.

The common perversion of the Uncertainty Principle is that people use it as physical support for the improbable. In fits of anti-rationality, sophists invoke Heisenberg to support all sorts of activities and improbabilities.

Here, Heisenberg is cited as offering good reason to drop acid. Here he is cited in support of Karma as a physical force in Medicine (of all things). Absurd as these claims are, they are common. Embedded in our cultural fabric are the misunderstandings of a rational consideration of the improbable. Ranging from worm holes to New Age spirituality, the improbables are expressed as the possible available to those with an "open mind."

Rightly, the late Douglas Adams mocked the common misapplication of Heisenberg when he created "improbability drive" that powered space flight in his "Hitchhikers" series. His later introduction of "Bistro Drive" - where space flight was powered by the random, irrational nuances of a French Bistro Action System - completed his Voltarian indictment of anti-rationalism. More pleasing is the fact that his sarcasm escapes most fans of his work - I've met many fans of his that describe themselves as post-modernists.

In the west, the anti-rationalists are just plain lazy. They have no other excuse. And the lazy will take an idea, morph it to meet their aesthetic of what truth should resemble, and start painting their collective minds as if redecorating a room. They confuse and sell such activity as informing and learning. The current rage in fashionable deconstruction are a certain 16 words.

Here is a
link to an essay by an earnest post-modern fellow who confronts Cultural Relativism as it relates to Genital Mutilation (a cultural practice) and asks "In a Relativist world, can there be such things as Human Rights?" Since the upsetting answer is "no", he whips out Nietzsche's "hammer" like a sawed off shotgun and gets on with getting past the "conflict" - in the end, it seems, you simply must force the other culture to submit to your will.

Q.E. Fuckin' D.

It seems "might makes right" only after doing a properly cited Relativist mating dance first. Why not just abandon the Relativist position on the basis of its absurd outcomes? One might ask a relativist how a "war crime" might be defined and then prosecuted in a Relativist context without acquitting the indicted for citing Nietzsche in open court.

That Clausewitz predates Nietzsche, and that the two of them were invoked by Hitler as justification for waging war for liebensraum should inspire some introspection among Relativists. It doesn't.

The same goes for Derrida's caveat.

That Derrida instructed his students to not create a "critical neo-idealism" is fine, but that is precisely what has happened. In a world where the spoken word can be manipulated to indict the speaker, yet where dialogue is held as a paramount value, where can one go?

The relativist forces are left with ascribing motive to the speaker, and when the speaker has power, he is (expo facto) guilty of something. So the parsing mills are fired up and the text deconstructed. At present, we are focused on 16 words. All indicting the US as a power hungry hegemon bent on world domination. That is their truth - the one they are comfortable with, in defiance of the basis of their neo-idealism. Oppose the powerful. Support the oppressed. Parse the words describing events to fit accordingly.

They find critical analysis of a speech far more telling of truth than the destruction of planes, buildings and thousands of lives or of unearthing centrifuges from Rose gardens.

Derrida -

Information can transform and strengthen knowledge, truth and the cause of future democracy, with all the problems associated with them, and it must do so, just as it often has done in the past.

Just as with the Islamo-Fascists, we have a group adapting its ideology to advance itself, to gain power, and to thwart western rationality. Their aim is a global bistro nirvana where I'm OK, you're OK, where everyone plays nice and there is no bill. All very lazy, and in substantive conflict with "truth and the cause of future democracy."

In cause and effect - one and the same

The Islamo-Fascists and the post-modern Ludditry have expansive common ground.

In their tactics they corrupt the quest for "truths" that motivate them. And in both cases, they oppose rationality as an oppressor. Bound and blinded by a common angst against rationality, they express their contempt for rationality and modernity by tantrum (either rhetorical or violent). Both insist on the intrinsic truth of their viewpoint and adopt piety to their orthodoxy in order to reject all rational discourse as intrinsically corrupt.

Given the nature of the enemy, who seeks to impose the truth that it defies on the unwilling, one would think the Relativists would hear Derrida's Caveat. They don't.

Given the nature of the Prophet's revelations, one would think that Islamists would let God's words and the power of tradition and the Qu'uran attract new followers, effecting conversion by example. They don't.

Stated flatly, neither group truly believes in what they are doing. They cannot reconcile their actions with their beliefs. They direct the resulting angst in a simple will to power against rational order.



Adam Sullivan, 15:36 | 0 comments