The psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers identified it as
the struggle with the unseasonable spirit of the times (Kampf mit dem Ungeist der Zeit;
interview in Die Zeit, 20, February
1958). But in a more literary incarnation it remains the perplexing problem of
‘a rose by any other name….’ The Bard
puts this divisive metaphor of the rose & its scent into the mouth of
Juliet when she realizes that her Beloved Romeo, whose essential perfume has
intoxicated her, has the odious name of Montague—“wherefore art thou Romeo?”
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
[…] O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Building upon the metaphor: no matter what name we give a
thing, the essential perfume of its reality never changes, for good and for
ill. Romeo was a delightfully aromatic essence-of-rose, but bore an
inauspicious, unrose-like name. However, not every scent is a Romeo, a pleasant
fragrance that we may call “but love.” Which is precisely the disturbing
problem presently being fanned about on the wings of Politically Correct Speak
in the cities and nations of Western Europe. Politically Correct Speak, or Newspeak, as was made abundantly clear
in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four, is not interested in expressing truth about things, but rather
in mis-naming and mis-taking things, in controlling words first, in order then to
control the flow of ideas. It is the specific intent of Politically Correct
Speak to create partisan narratives; it is the Will to Lie.
So what happens when our mayors and
governors, our various elected officials and their various appointed
‘creatures’, what happens when a society, as a general rule of thumb, refuses
to call a thing what it is? What happens when we deliberately fail to call the
rose a rose, and instead call the aggressive cancer a summer cold?
A Lesson in Hedging.
Suppose, for example, that a
certain, broadly-conceived faction of religiously inspired individuals begins
radiating out into the world with their weapons, in order to intimidate through
combat, to coerce, to compel, and generally to fill with terror—with the Fear
of the Lord, as one might have said in other times—just normal people who may or
may not be otherwise interested in that particular religion’s ideas, or doctrines,
or cultural attitudes. When our Western societies fail to give ‘the rose’ its
proper name, we fail to recognize and therefore to correctly identify an
essential reality. So we effectively craft a new, other ‘thing’ in the place of the really real; we mask the
real, and ignoring the symbolic (to borrow upon Lacanian phrasing), we invent an
imaginary world where we are magically transformed into the guests at the feast
of Belshazzar
of old. And behold, as in former times, the handwriting shall also
appear on our wall:
the mene, mene, tekel upharsin that tells us that, by our not-seeing,
we must necessarily fail to resolve whatever the real, and very non-magical
‘problems’ are.
This problem of perception, which
is at its core hermeneutical, is general in scope. Whether intentional or
unintentional, the real is replaced by the imaginary; and yet the ‘real’ does
not simply go away, but remains growing like a weed or a cancer under cover of
darkness and ignorance. But such changeling phenomena of the mind are
commonplace. For example, as enthusiastic devotees of the dogmatic scientism
that dominates the modern worldview, we have grown accustomed to speak of
‘addictions’, and have tried every way from Sunday to address the problem of
addiction medically, with a view to relieve, to remedy, and to rectify the ill.
But more recent thinking in the empirical sciences, which is indeed a thinking
and not simply a belief in the epistemological status quo, has begun to resist defining
addiction as a ‘disease’, really not an illness at all; and so our previous
thinking and argument is beginning to disappear down the rabbit-hole in a
flutter and flurry, in order to try to understand the implications of the ‘new’
real that is starting to emerge. Such was the polemic at the heart of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher
Education
“But even as new insights emerge from both the
physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not
addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective
treatment strategies. The "disease model" remains dominant among
medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not
universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh
ideas about how to help people.
"We don’t
have very good science yet, […] and a lot of that has to do with issues of
conceptualization and politics."”
 |
| Cover of CH, January 2016 |
There is impediment, however, from
the world of Politically Correct Speak. For our aggrieved and suffering
societies do not dare to name any particular
religion as somehow significant in the rose-like reality of Religious Fanaticism—suppose
for the sake of the argument that it were Islam—because this would provoke a
hue and cry, and shouts of discrimination, and amalgamation, and profiling
would be heard far and near. And of course members and spokespersons of that specifically
named religious group, who are perhaps less fanatic and certainly differently weaponized,
will take pains to make it clear to All & Sundry that We-the-Secular-People
should pedantically avoid confusing and confounding into some sort of
homogeneity, and thereby creating the amalgam between, those religious fanatics who are (really, they say,)
irreligious, criminal lunatics and terrorists, and true believers who are truthfully and peacefully believers and
holders of the true truth of their religion, and therefore truly religious.
Unfortunately, the spirit of the times seems to have remained
intellectually unseasonable (ungeistig),
and the allure of totalitarianism irresistible. Indeed, it is precisely the
out-of-season nature of the magical or religious spirit that constitutes the
unbridgeable gap between religious authoritarianism, which is aggressively on
the rise and ravenous for new converts, and the Enlightenment foundations of
modern Western democracies. In his 1958 interview Jaspers made clear that “Totalitarianism is neither communism, nor fascism, nor Nazism, but has occurred
in and through all of these configurations. The terrible threat for the future
of mankind, which is universal, is Mass Order, which is a function of the age
and divorced from any particular politic whose existence is determined by principles
grounded in notions of nation, history, constitution, and rules-of-law. (...) Totalitarianism
is like a ghost that drinks the blood of the living and thereby becomes real,
while the victims, like a mass of living corpses, continue on with their
existence.”
[“Der Totalitarismus ist nicht Kommunismus,
nicht Faschismus, nicht Nationalsozialismus, sondern ist in allen diesen
Gestalten aufgetreten. Er ist universal die furchtbare Drohung der Zukunft der
Menschheit in der Massenordnung. Er ist ein Phänomen des Zeitalters, losgelöst
von aller jener Politik, die durch Prinzipien nationalen, geschichtlichen,
verfassungsmäßig-rechtsstaatlichen Daseins bestimmt ist. (...) Der
Totalitarismus ist wie ein Gespenst, das das Blut der Lebenden trinkt und
dadurch wirklich wird, während die Opfer als eine Masse lebender Leichname ihr
Dasein fortsetzen.”]
Jaspers reminds us insightfully that the Spirit of Totalitarianism
precedes its myriad translations into historical happenstance, one form of
which has undeniably been Religion in all of its various permutations. Leaving
the history of the question aside for the nonce, it is more pertinent to our
immediate historical moment, and so to our purpose here, to note that the
Religious Mind has ever been the viper nourishing in the bosom of Enlightenment; and the viper has now turned to strike a
blow for its long-awaited emancipation from enlightened Reason and its return homeward
in the direction of its obscurantist heritage.
At the
philosophical birthing of enlightened democracies, which we may quite arbitrarily
date at 1689 with
the English publication of John
Locke’s Letter
concerning Toleration, he reasons that there needs to be a place for the Religious
Mind in the non-religious, non-theocratic state—the secular state. Hence,
already with the birth of the democratic ideal the obscurantism of the Religious Mind was accepted into the bosom of enlightened secularism. The Religious Mind must
obviously be permitted to continue to thrive, privately, in the secular state, argues
Locke, but any notion of Religion playing an authoritative role in the public
arenas of that state is to be absolutely curtailed. Locke argues for the comprehensive
separation of church authority from civil authority because a civil magistrate
is not qualified, either by his civil office and or by his competencies, to
make meaningful distinctions between competing religious authorities with
competing claims. For example, what possible criteria are there for validating in
civil society one religious denomination as worthy of tax exempt status, and
yet for refusing this status to another denomination? In civil society, what
makes one body of doctrine a religion,
but a different and perhaps competing body of doctrine a cult? And in what way is the American IRS (tax service) educationally
or intellectually qualified to make such distinctions?
In the present historical moment, it is for exactly this
reason that it is impossible not to conclude that the vast number of commentators
and interlocutors on this question of religious
fanaticism and religious terrorism are
talking indefensible, irrational nonsense. We are compelled to say to all of
those who pretend, either from inside the religious context or external observers
of the phenomenon, that it is somehow possible or meaningful not to amalgamate religious fanatics
with co-religionists of lukewarm or indifferent commitment—Stuff & Nonsense.
Here, for example, one reads the
oft-repeated claim, which is not even disguised as a justification, but simply delivered
up as de facto statement of
historical truth, that “the attacks [in Paris’ Bataclan theatre] were not
related in any way to Islam.” And here an essayist seems not to
recognize what John Locke already clearly understood in 1689, which is to say, the
indefensible irrationality behind the litany: “One cannot say it enough:
Islamism, no matter how moderate it is, is not Islam, but a theocratic and
neo-fascist deviant of Islam.” Such sterile and incompetent claims and assertions
are certainly not logical argument, because they contain neither elements of
logic nor of argument, but neither are they meaningful forms of reasoning in
civil society. The realm of philosophy remains inviolate in this present
atmosphere of non-Thought and non-Argument. Locke’s 17th century reasoning,
on the other hand, was sufficiently persuasive for the framers of the American
Constitution to separate the interests of State from the interests of Religion
in the young American republic. And his Thinking remains relevant for us today.
The following are Phrontisterion translations of two of
Riss’ editorials from late summer 2016 editions of Charlie Hebdo. In these editorials Riss develops in his own inimitable
style a line of reasoning that is as old as Enlightenment itself.
A Prayer for
Miscreants
Editorial: Riss
20 July 2016 / Charlie
Hebdo No 1252 / 3
 |
| From this issue of CH |
What can one really say after Nice?
In the year 2015 the French discovered Islamic terrorism. We shall not repeat
here the different commentaries that have pummeled us since January 2015, like
“They will not make us change of way of life,” “They want to destroy our
insouciance,” “Their type of Islam is not true Islam,” “These acts are being
committed by the mentally unstable.” If we were a bit more cynical, we
would add: etc., etc.
After each terrorist
attack, we ask ourselves about the ultimate role of Religion. But then, just as
soon as the notion of Religion is evoked, the specialists show up in the
various television studios, affirming that the killer was not a practicing Muslim,
or even that he was crazy and that Religion had nothing to do with his action.
Just like for the soldier Ryan (TN: Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), we move heaven and earth to get Religion out
of the difficult position that it finds itself in just because of one mindless dumbsh#t.
And even if it should turn out that the killer was radicalized quite quickly,
the specialists will respond that this is not sufficient to make him a true
believer and that his crime therefore cannot be blamed on Religion. Keep moving
along; there is nothing to see here!
And yet the
history of religions is chock full of quick conversions. “Paris is certainly
worth a mass,” used to say the very Protestant Henry IV just before converting
to Catholicism for political gain. So why should paradise not be worth a truck
going 90 km an hour on the Promenade des Anglais on one July 14th
evening? Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in one night just before
the battle on Milvius bridge, which he won by slaughtering hundreds of his
enemies without the help of refrigerator trucks. As for Paul of Tarsus,
prosecutor of the Christians, he converted all at once on the road to Damascus,
and became from one day to the next Saint Paul, illuminated Christian. These
high-speed conversions never shocked anyone; and they have even been repeatedly
recounted for us and marveled at for centuries. So why is it that an inhabitant
of Nice would not have the right to convert to Islam in a couple of days? There
are a lot of them in History, sad-sacks suddenly converted to a religion in
order to give meaning to their pathetic destinies. The case of the killer in
Nice is not in the least bit something new.
What strikes
us when we look at these types of crimes, is that they are committed like they
were prayers. Prayer does not need lots of trappings. Immense cathedrals,
sumptuous mosques, or thousand-year old synagogues are not absolutely necessary
for prayer to take place. It is enough just to believe, and with some Psalms
and verses at the ready, one can pray at the North Pole, in the desert, or on
the summit of Mount Everest. Faith does not have material needs; faith has only
spiritual needs.
It is the
same with these terrorist acts. It is not necessary to master really
complicated weapons, nor war-time techniques learned in Syria or Iraq. A modest
knife, such as in Magnanville, or a common truck will do the trick, like a
simple rug oriented toward Mecca, a little Bible in the pocket, or a rolled-up
Torah are sufficient for prayer. These people kill like they pray, and they
only need a direct connection to God and a handsome new refrigerated truck rented
two days earlier to make it happen.
The police forces
and the military will never be able to stop these attacks if they focus too
much on the technique; because there are no machines that permit one to delve
into souls and minds. It is impossible to know what an individual is hiding in
the deep recesses of his consciousness, which he dissimulates even from those
closest to him. Like deliberate failures or [Freudian] slips that might happen
to reveal something that is slumbering in the unconscious, these terrorist acts
surface unexpectedly and cannot be anticipated. It is this that gives us the
impression that they are committed by crazy people.
No police
force, no army will ever be able to control this. They can act only and
uniquely upon visible things, expressed in conversations transmitted by
portable phones or computers. But they cannot act upon the invisible things of
the mind. The ways of the Lord are mysterious, goes the saying, and therefore
it is difficult for the police to verify their identity. It is the mystery of
Religion that gives to religions all their force, and, if a religion drifts too
far afield from its mystery, and begins clothing itself with the rationalism
that is required by our modern societies, that religion becomes weak and loses
its strength. Mysticism is fundamentally anti-democratic, because it is
incompatible with the balance of powers and the critical spirit that constitute
the foundations of democracy.
So, what
remains for us to do in order to protect ourselves from mysticism? Some
additional barriers across the Promenade des Anglais, an app on our smartphones
called “Attack Alert,” and additional national guard reserves. It is our turn
to have faith.
Summer Reform
Editorial: Riss
10 August 2016 / Charlie
Hebdo No 1255 / 3
 |
| Front page comic |
What an odd idea—to want to reform
Islam! It is the new trend ever since the attack in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
After the assassination of an ecclesiastic from a religion other than Islam by
a killer who claims to represent Islam, the home front is in a panic. Muslims
are in a panic, because they are afraid that they will become targets of
violence. Catholics are in a panic, because they are afraid of a religious war.
Politicians are in a panic, because they already know that their security
measures have reached their limits.
And
then—why reform Islam? We have been told repeatedly, for months, that the
attacks are committed by those who are deranged. But if this were true, it is
not Islam that should be reformed, but the psychiatric hospitals, because they
have been unable to identify these crazed killers and have not been able to
provide effective treatment. Curiously, fifteen days after the attack no one is
framing the story anymore in terms of ‘deranged’. Fifteen days later, everyone
is talking about Islam.
If anyone
knows how to reform a religion, in three weeks if possible, just before the
start of classes, that would be really helpful. Like class dunces who do not do
a stitch of work for the entire academic year, and who think they can make it
all up in the week prior to the final exams, it is only now that ‘they’
acknowledge the existence of tensions between Islam and our democracy: more and
more fundamentalists, more and more veils, more and more beards, more and more
mosques that smell of fire and brimstone. ‘They’ wanted to pacify us by
pretending that the attacks were a psychiatric problem. ‘They’ already wanted
to pacify us in the same way by affirming that the problem with Islam was not
Islam, but secularism [laïcité].
There are the intellectuals, if we can call them that, who continue to tell us
that it is secularism [laïcité]
that needs to be reformed. Every type of manipulation has been attempted by the
charlatans of Islamophobia, as Charb used to call them, in an attempt to keep
Islam from being criticized and Muslims from having to question their religion.
Because
someone is not exempt from asking questions about the faith just because he is a
believer. Quite the opposite. Catholics questioned their faith with Vatican II,
which did not make them bad Catholics. If Muslims would do the same, it would
not make them bad Muslims. To raise questions about Islam and Muslims is not to
stigmatize them; it is the very least one can do when it is a matter of
bringing into the public arena questions that are of concern to everyone.
In a small
city in the suburbs where I was doing a news story, ‘they’ explained under what
conditions the new mosque had been built. The site had been chosen by local
Muslim authorities, and they were adamant that the mosque should be situated
right next to the train station. Strange location for a mosque. The spokesman
explained to me that this location would permit them to observe which Muslims,
when returning home from work, would go straight home without going to the
mosque. With their place of worship only fifty meters from the station, they no
longer had any excuse for not going there. Local politicians were not shocked
by this demand, and accepted it without flinching.
To reform
Islam would first consist in reforming our locally elected politicians. They
believed that Muslims were like any other group, like farmers or hunters. That
all you needed was to be buddies with them and to satisfy their demands in
order to get their vote in the next elections. And because these local
politicians know nothing about Islam, they were persuaded by the spiel of those
Muslims who are the most militant, which is to say, by the claptrap of those
who are the least progressive, because they were convinced that this would be
good for their reelection and for social peace. Result: France is on the verge
of civil war.
The massive
annual street markets and sidewalk sales that take place in Lille each summer,
an event that dates from the Middle Ages and has only ever been interrupted by
the Nazi occupation, was just canceled out of fear of attacks by Islamic
fundamentalists. One less secular [laïque]
festival. On the other hand, even though a priest has just been assassinated,
who would dare cancel for security reasons a religious event like the
processions of August 15 [NT: The Assumption of Mary]? Likewise, who would dare
forbid for security reasons the Muslim Tradeshow or the Muslim Fair, which are
annual events.
How is one
to reform Islam? When we see the speed with which those who are secular [laïcs] have already reformed
their way of life by adapting themselves to fundamentalist terror, while
Muslims have not begun even the slightest bit of work on themselves, we begin
to see that the question has perhaps already been answered.
Related Phrontisterion topics:
- http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2015/02/the-divine-right-of-kings.html
- http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2015/03/enlightenment-and-spirit-of-jihad.html
- http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2013/03/marchs-blog-is-philosophy-waste-of-time.html
- http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2013/06/junes-blogthe-pursuit-of-happiness-and.html
Further reading:
 |
| CH comic |
- http://www.jambands.com/news/2016/07/15/nice-jazz-festival-cancelled-following-deadly-attacks
- http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/05/488860548/centuries-old-flea-market-in-france-canceled-this-year-over-terrorism-fears
- http://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/index/2016/6/16/reasoning-with-insanity
-
http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2016/08/17/manuel-valls-burkini-maires_n_11558804.html?utm_hp_ref=france
- http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37093420
- http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/caroline-fourest/interdiction-burkini-plage_b_11539556.html
- http://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Societe/Google-Map-l-ombre-du-terrorisme-plane-sur-les-fetes-de-l-ete
- http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isis-unveils-first-ever-burqa-clad-female-spokesperson-lure-western-women-caliphate-1576844
- http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/lise-bouvet/le-burkini-estil-le-dernier-attentat-islamiste-en-france_b_11716596.html?utm_hp_ref=france
- http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/daniel-soulez-lariviere/burkini-reel-imaginaire-s_b_11721260.html?utm_hp_ref=france
- ****http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/mezri-haddad/du-voile-au-burkini-la-strategie-subversive-des-islamistes_b_11692830.html?utm_hp_ref=france
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/skye-jethani/is-this-the-end-of-evangelicalism_b_2499253.html
- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/world/asia/india-tourism-women-sexual-assault.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur&_r=1
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-isis-islamic-terrorism-muslims_us_57eceecfe4b082aad9b95394?section=&
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