We agree with David Warren about the significance of the cartoon crisis. Its value is enormous as a focal point for understanding our enemies and in fact ourselves. We are working on a piece about art (previously discussed) and metaphor in the Islamic world, sort of a follow-up to the one on patents, that should be pretty interesting if the data pan out.

Few people in the West can empathetically understand the world of our enemies as it exists at street level. Most of us have never lived in a world suffused with religion. All of us have never lived in a world where there existed no alternative whatsoever to a world suffused with religion. In the West you can stop believing. In the West you can move to another town where things are different. In the West you can go Mormon or gay or vegan or Ba’hai or Mennonite or you can have a sex change and go to sleep Tom DeLay and wake up Nancy Pelosi. (The greatest failing of the Bush administration is not to understand fully the significance of a millenium’s difference in mentality.) If you wake up in Saudi Arabia a non-believer, where do you go, what do you do?

What happens in a world where there is no unbelief, as it exists in much of the Islamic world where Islam is the mandatory state religion? What happens in a world where the price of a conversion to unbelief is death? What happens in a world where there exists no next step — economic or psychological — after unbelief? What happens in a world when certain mediating structures of life — science, technology, medicine, or symphonies, sculpture and great literature — are atrophied or non-existent? Art is a metaphor, as are science and technology, that empowers humans to create and be created on a human scale, without obligatory reference to God. This is its essential problem for fundamentalist Islam.

In a world where there exists only belief and literalism and little or nothing in the way of metaphor, excesses are inevitable, and inevitably destructive. We heard Pierre Rehov, filmmaker of Suicide Killers, on Dennis Prager today. We expect that we will get from his film an enhanced empathetic understanding of men who think the 72 virgins is a literal promise, not a metaphor, for their killing of children; the cartoon rioters seem to share some of the same mentality. Their belief: earthly life is one of nasty, brutish literalism; only life in heaven has the metaphors of pleasurable fantasy. Imagine what such people are capable of.

True believers without the benefit of many of the mediating structures of life are very dangerous. True believers, who think that these mediating structures themselves are part of the evil they fight, are among the most mortal enemies of those of us who cherish the modern world.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 9:03 pm and is filed under art, culture, General, Left of Left, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.