Hilzoy and Charles discuss Islam

Charles and Hilzoy have a dialogue about Islam:
Charles begins with a post; Hilzoy responds, and later then she expands her point. Thereafter, Charles writes a post grappling with Hilzoy’s inclusion of cultural humiliation as a factor. Hilzoy explains why cultural humiliation is important to understand, then she continues to explain how technological progress does and doesn’t relate to the concept.

Selected quotes for a taste:
(From Charles’s opening post)

In the last few weeks, I’ve been mulling over the idea that Islam is not a religion of peace, but of submission, by its very definition. It is a noble concept for a person to voluntarily submit himself or herself to God and to put into practice the tenets of the faith. But it’s another thing altogether when a person decides that others must also submit. When self-described Muslims decide to militantly force their religious ideology down others’ throats, then we have a War Against Militant Islamism.

While we’ve long heard and read from many on the Left about American imperialism and hegemony, there is also an imperialism problem with large numbers of Muslims throughout history, as documented by Efraim Karsh of the University of London. The history of Islamic imperialism and subjugation neatly play into current events.

(From Hilzoy’s first comment)

[…] So people end up trying to navigate a world that it’s very hard to make sense of, since we use our cultures to make sense of things, and theirs is all bent and broken. Most people I met there love their culture, rightly, and they also see what’s attractive about ours, also rightly, and it’s hard to square those two things. Some people turn their backs on their culture; but some cling to it all the more tightly because it’s under threat.

In general, when people try to cling to something for those sorts of reasons, they often end up with a caricature of what they’re clinging to. (I think the analogy of fundamentalist Christianity is exact here: it is a parody of Christianity itself, created for very similar reasons, in the face of a similar, though less deadly, threat.) And the emotions that animate them have a lot more to do with the need to fight off the threat they see than with what their religion itself dictates.

(The core of Hilzoy’s first clarification)

Relatedly, I probably should have made it clearer that I meant the analogy to fundamentalist Christianity to concern the psychological mechanisms underlying it, and the resulting caricature of a great faith, not anything else. In particular: there are of course violent Christians, clinic bombers, and the like. But the fact of visible onslaughts against Muslims on the news all the time, a history of genuine oppression by horrible governments that we have supported, and the fact of corruption, which makes it the case that for many people, literally everything is rigged against them and they have no hope of getting to a decent life by decent means — all that makes the outcome very different.

I mean, in this country, Bill O’Reilly has to invent things like the supposed War on Christmas to stoke a sense of Christian grievance. Imagine if there were some analog of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, complete with killings; or the invasion of Iraq; or the repression of this entire country under a dictator imposed and supported by, oh, Saudi Arabia. That this is all counterfactual (for Christians) makes an obvious difference.

(Charles wanders in from the outfield with his post on Cultural Humiliation…)

Several terms and phrases have floated across my computer screen the last few days, and I thought I’d dig into a few of them. In a prior post on Muslims, a certain prominent commenter stated that there is a “massive sense of cultural humiliation in the Muslim world.” Perhaps there’s some truth to it, but I can’t help but interpret “cultural humiliation” to mean “we lost and our feelings are hurt!” I don’t believe it’s a sound idea to craft policy based on another group’s emotional state. After all, the saying goes, we can only control our own emotions, not the feelings of others. It also sounds suspiciously like the victim card is being played, with those facing “cultural humiliation” to be the next candidates for interest group status. Approaching psychobabble levels, there’s even a feelings-based community ready to fertilize and generate interdisciplinary research (both intra and interculturally) on macro, meso and micro levels.

(Hilzoy clarifies cultural humiliation and explains why it’s important to understand people you’re dealing with)

As (I think) the person who introduced the phrase ‘cultural humiliation’, I’d like to clarify a few points.

First, I do not, and have never, excused the actions of terrorists on this basis. I do try to understand what makes them tick, for (what strikes me as) the perfectly good reason of wanting our policies to address, or at least not exacerbate, the underlying causes of terrorism. But that’s completely different. (It’s like wanting to know what causes a disease in order to cure it, or at least not make it worse.)

This is, for me, all about achieving concrete results. One’s take on the emotions of other people affects the policies one adopts to achieve a given end. Thus, Rumsfeld seems to have believed that the Iraqis would respond to our invasion with gratitude, and (in part) because of this belief about their emotions, he did not prepare for an insurgency. And this mistake has led to very bad “concrete results”.

The whole thing is interesting… read it all!

UPDATE: John Thullen has an amusing story in the comments…

As for little blame given to various killers and such, could someone with more authority than I possess please issue a statement of requisite blame.

All I can think of is the time my brother (who wasn’t Governor of Florida) and I took a stick and did a really crappy job of whacking a hornet’s nest that was just out of reach in a tree off in the woods that really had nothing to do with my other problems at the time (like the bully who lived down the street). My brother was out for mere fun, whereas I, the earnest, well-intentioned one, took it personally that the bees didn’t organize their society around lower marginal tax rates thereby incentivizing higher revenues for the queen, but never mind that. Big clouds of pissed-off hornets chased us to the house and some of them stung us. A couple even got my sister who was minding her own business, not in a mosque, but in her sandbox.

When my Dad arrived home from work, he heard the story and listened bemused to our expressions of outraged blame-casting on the horrid bees. Then he went out around dusk when things were quieter and went door-to door where the bees lived, who were still hovering around their partially destroyed nest, and took them out. He sawed the smallish limb off the tree and placed the whole mess in a big metal trash can, doused it with gasoline and threw a match in. Even the civilian bees were goners, the little shits.

It was cool. Then my Dad looked at the brothers standing there and asked “Everybody happy now?”