To brighten up our Silly Season, here comes Neocomrade Grand Ayatollah M. Bin Ledeen, provin’ (yet again!) that faith-craziness and merely human politics do not mix well. What a good idea was Mr. Jefferson's Great Wall of Separation!
Form takes precedence over matter, so the triune theological manifesto vouchsafed by His Eminence in, or right after, his third paragraph is of only secondary importance. The student of Kiddie Konservatism should here notice first and foremost the enemies whom H. E. wants to make: Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. F. von Fukuyama and Neocomrade Prof. E. Cohen, who are not exactly enemies to illiberalism (in the Yank journalistic sense) and antidemocracy themselves. ("Strike up the ‘Tertius Gaudens Polka’, wouldya plese, Sam?" And play it again after that!")
So it looks as if icky State Department Persianists and Secretary Clinton and Mr. Obama and President Summers will just have to stand in line and wait for their dressin’s down until His Eminence has cleansed the Wingnut City idol house of heresy and apostasy and nonconformity.
An old tune, that one, amongst the Enthusiastick and the Superstitious.
Shaykh al-’Islám Ibn Taymiyya is perhaps the E&S guy formally nearest to the Rev. Mikey. At any rate, His Eminence of Damascus made a famous distinction in Century VIII/XIV/LI between the "near enemies" and "far enemies" of E&S. A predestinate epigone like His Eminence of JINSA seven centuries later need only insist that near enemies must always be extirpated first, and--hey presto!--that’s the formaliter of Mikey’s scribble.
___
Now as to His Eminence’s tripartite materialiter,
| ... my forthcoming book, Accomplice to Evil, ... identifies many sources of the willful blindness that has long been a central part of the foreign policies of the Western democracies. The three most important factors seem to me to be: –the Enlightenment theory of human nature, according to which “we are all the same, and we are all basically good”; –Beaudelaire’s profound insight, most recently presented in the great movie “The Usual Suspects”: “the greatest trick the devil ever played on mankind was to convince us that he does not exist”; –the terrible costs and risk of failure if we recognize our evil enemies for what they are, and defend ourselves against them. Politicians don’t like that; they’d rather leave it to their successors. |
I’ll admit to a certain degree of perplexity. The first half of Table I of the Binledeenian Neolaw is impeccable: every illiberal and antidemocrat almost without exception gets a big kick out of gettin’ in a kick at the evil Enlightenment. Maybe the topos has become a little shopworn, but apart from that no objection can be raised.
The second half of Table I, however, "we are [not] all basically good," and Table II of the Binledeenian Neolaw in its entirety, look positively alarming to the present keyboard. Has the Grand Ayatollah deliberately committed himself, if not to brand-name Vatican City Ware®, at least to certain flamin’ly un-Hebraïc features of the former Christojudæanity?
Given a little factious zeal and a top-of-the-Herrnstein-Murray-Curve I.Q. [1], neither of which commodities is lackin’ chez Ledeen, one can badmouth the firm of Locke Hume Voltaire Kant LLC easily enough without draggin’ in either peccatum originale or His Highness the Prince of Darkness. Lots of wingutettes and wingnuts no more unintelligent than the Rev. Mikey have managed the trick. [2]
An objecter might object that His Eminence must clamber way out on this shaky religionistical branch in order to make clear what it signifies to anathematise the enemies of his faction as ‘evil’. I respond: it is quite unnecessary to take such trouble. It would be sufficient for purposes of a fifteen hundred word sermonette to define ‘evil’ as "that which Neocomrade M. Bin Ledeen will never, ever, appease."
To be sure, when it’s a matter of the Rev. Mikey scribblin’ that operatin’ definition for himself, it would be wiser to avoid the obviously omphaloscopic, so let’s revise my preliminary formulation to read "Evil is that which should never under any circumstances be appeased." [3]
The Rev. himself would very likely hold out for "which CAN never be appeased," but that version must be pronounced unacceptable, for it introduces an empirical element unpredictable in advance. "How do we know for sure that THEY cannot be appeased till we have tried?," asks poor old Stultus -- but of course Binledeenoid neoterics don’t want any appeasement experiments tried regardless of how they would/might/could/should turn out. [4] "Just say NO!"
Commonterrorisers and weekly standardisers and all the guruettes and gurus of Outer Pajamastán may, if they please, try to bluff their dupes and marks into thinkin’ that such-and-such that they would hate to see happen simply CANNOT happen. Naturally it is the duty of every decent political grown-up to see straight through that factional figleaf and call the bozos’ bluff at once. [5] [6]
Happy days.
___
[1] For victims of wombschoolin’ at Rio Limbaugh or elsewhere: what stands proudly at the apex of the ever-immortal H-M Curve is, loosely speaking, the average value of a set of data points.
[2] To be fair, though, the student should recognize that what is left of the former Christojudæanity as of Century XIV/XXI/LVII is so corrupt and decerebrated as to make it temerarious to assume any resemblance between it and what was originally intended.
Specifically, quite a number of modern wingutettes and wingnuts hold that Erbsünde is not literally pandemic, as the Old Book was taken for centuries to have inculcated, and not unreal either, but more or less confined to the ranks of those who dislike the sentimentality or ‘ideology’ of Wingnut City. Hence the Rev. Neocomrade M. Bin Ledeen could, in principle, have borrowed this trendy neorubbish as a mere bit of cultural bric-à-brac entirely free of mythological implications. My own guess is that His Eminence wanted his ‘evil’ to be numinous and nimbus-equipped, though it is not a case I promise to go to the stake for.
[3] If Father Zeus hated the passive voice as much as certain amateur grammarians do, He would ... I beg your pardon, it would never have been created.
Meanwhile, back on the formaliter front, it seems to be entirely indifferent whether one deduces the Binledeenian ‘appease’ from the Binledeenian ‘evil’ or the other way around. Without endorsing brand-name Pragmatism all across the board, one may venture to claim that it settles little Mikey’s present hash well enough to point out that anybody duped by His Eminence of JINSA will behave exactly the same way in either case.
At the same time, let the student reflect that the Republican Party base ’n’ vile almost invariably prefer to have their snake oil labeled what they would call ‘objectively’. Whether His Eminence is accomplished enough a sophist to exploit this Party brain disease deliberately, I have no idea. (It’s possible that the Rev. suffers from it too.) Anyway, for purposes of appealin’ to marks and dupes at the e-gutter level, there is a lot to be said for presentin’ the evil of the Evil Qommies as a fact about them, not a policy choice made by Neocomrade Grand Ayatollah M. Bin Ledeen. Not a policy choice made ‘subjectively’ by *any* identifiable weekly standardiser or gaggle of weekly standardisers.
But halt! this line of scribble is coming perilously close to real criticism or philosophy. And Father Zeus knows best about Big Management Party brain diseases.
[4] I am tempted to argue that this reflection establishes that the ‘real’ or ‘objective’ locus of the Appeasement-Evil Nexus is the minds, or hormones, of the neocomrades. But epistemology can be tricky, so let us not rush to judgment. Fortunately there is no cheapjack "Faster please!" about deciding this higher-order question.
[5] The ‘subjective’ theory of the Appeasement-Evil Nexus might even hold a certain appeal for the wingnutettes and wingnuts if it were carefully expounded to them. "I, for one, will never appease Islamophalangitarianism!" may be sheer bozodom, but one thing it cannot be is bluff. That fortified Party line is inexpugnable, as far as I can make out.
[6] Oops. I see I never got around to glossing Tablet III of the Binledeenian Neolaw.
Briefly, then, Tablet III appears to be either a category mistake or else only another neocomradely brickbat thrown at liberals and democrats and Democrats. To discover or pretend that some of Wingnut City’s domestic enemies are lazy or reckless has no genuine connection with the Appeasement-Evil Nexus. All it can establish is that errare est humanum. In light of the neorevelation in Tablet I about "we are all [not] the same," there is, I think, some question whether the Rev. Mikey would not be shootin’ himself in His Eminence’s own foot [6a] to appeal to that particular soundbite, bromide though it looks to be.
For example: Speaker Pelosi or Mr. Rahm Emmanuel or President Summers might be too slothful to confront the heartbreak of psoriasis head-on and at the same time wildly irresponsible about fiscal imbalance and unfairness. But it would only be foolish to accuse them of ‘appeasement’ of these evils. Indeed, such problems are not proper Binledeenian evils at all, only some sort of distant lexicographic cousin.
[6a] Cf. http://tinyurl.com/labu9s (p. xlix)
No comments:
Post a Comment