[MD] Hippies (and Humour) in the Middle East

[ian glendinning]

Arlo,

Your comment on the Zakaira piece includes an important phrase ...

"to completely exterminate any conceivable ..."

I'm no scholar of the internal political histories if these
fundamentalist islamic countries, but this is one fundamentalism we
all share in this mess - as you say we reap what we sow.

The black and white, "at all costs" view of every good / bad issue, is
a topic I've been banging on about in the blogosphere recently. The
simple rational logical-postivist pseudo-objectivist, totalitarian
syllogism...

<if X = bad, and we destroy X, the outcome = good.> = madness

Whereas
<Quality = dynamic differences (always a question of balance)> = reality

Humour is always a good unofficial channel to raise significant
differences, in fact it gives the "authorities" good leverage not to
"condone" and even to outwardly disapprove of and distance from the
contrarians - without actually exterminating them. An enlightened
authority uses all the tools at its disposal - not just the "shipyard
screwdriver".

Ian

On 2/3/06, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Ian wrote]
> Which of course brings us to the quality of comedy and satire - and the
> other raging news-story. The taboo of "blasphemous cartoons" in religious
> fundamentalism.
>
> [Arlo]
> Fareed Zakaria writes in this week's Newsweek, "For decades, the dictators
> who ruled (and rule) the Middle East destroyed all political opposition
> groups. They were particularly aggressive in co-opting or exterminating
> liberal, secular, forward-looking groups because those were seen as most
> threatening. They were often less harsh toward Muslim groups, partly
> because the Islamists were seen as less political. And, of course, you
> cannot ban the mosque in an Islamic country. Rulers like Anwar Sadat and
> Jordan's King Hussein often used Islamic groups to discredit the secular
> opposition. Decades of repression, incompetence and stagnation ensured that
> citizens got increasingly unhappy with their regimes. And the only
> organized, untainted alternative was the Islamic movement. ... Remember
> that in the 1970s, even the United States thought that conservative Islamic
> groups were allies against left-wing revolutionary ones, which is why we
> funded the mujahedin in Afghanistan."
>
> It's that last sentence that harkens so much to "you reap what you sow".
> Out of desire to completely exterminate any conceivable "Marxist" threat,
> we supported hard-right groups would suppress, vilify and finally destroy
> ANY "liberal" or secular resistance to Islam. When they were our allies
> against the Great Red Threat, we funded and supported them, blind to what
> would emerge in a "hippie-less" vacuum. With all their hippies, and
> potential hippies, killed, jailed or worse, the political imbalance was
> ripe for militant right-wing theocratic groups and rulers to seize power.
> With no "love fests" or "love ins" to support their Israeli brothers, with
> no "Tehranstocks" to promote love and universal brotherhood, with no Abdul
> Dylans or Mahmoud Lennons to sing of peace, of love, of "tripping rather
> than killing"...
>
> Pirsig writes, "From World War II until the seventies the intellectuals
> continued to dominate, but with an increasing challenge-call it the "Hippie
> revolution" -which failed. And from the early seventies on there has been a
> slow confused mindless drift back to a kind of pseudo­Victorian moral
> posture accompanied by an unprecedented and unexplained growth in crime. Of
> these periods, the last two seem the most misunderstood. The Hippies have
> been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the period following
> their departure as a "return to values," whatever that means. The
> Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that's backward: the Hippie
> revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the collapse of
> values. The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution
> against both society and intellectuality."
>
> In the Sixties, our Hippie movement took a wrong turn, as Pirsig notes, it
> confused biological quality with Dynamic Quality. But make no mistake, a
> return to Victorianism is not the answer, recapturing that Hippie
> contrarianism and directing towards DQ is. Being a contrarian, Pirsig
> writes, ".. sometimes it's Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the
> static situation is an enemy of life itself. That's what drives the really
> creative people-the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like-the
> feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse somebody has built
> around them, they're going to die. But they're not being contrary in a way
> that is just decadent. They're way too energetic and aggressive to be
> decadent. They're fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static
> patterns. But the Dynamic freedom they're fighting for is a kind of
> morality too. And it's a highly important part of the overall moral
> process. It's often confused with degeneracy but it's actually a form of
> moral regeneration. Without its continual refreshment static patterns would
> simply die of old age."
>
> With the same sentiment, Joseph Campbell writes, "As Professor Arnold J.
> Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and
> disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body
> social, will not be revolved by any scheme of return to the good old days
> (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future
> (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together
> again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the
> birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul,
> within the body social, there must be -- if we are to experience long
> survival -- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify
> the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own
> victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought:
> doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war
> is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare. When our day is come
> for our victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do,
> except be crucified -- and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn."
>
> Hippies, contrarians, those who reject both social and intellectual
> patterns, and pursue Dynamic Quality. These are the people whom
> reinvigorate society, who return from the mountain like Pirsig, or
> Zarathrustra, or Moses, or Buddha (nice grouping, eh?) with a message that
> will dismember and resurrect society. The Brujo was a contrarian, the
> Bohemians were contrarians, the Hippies were contrarians.
>
> Well, the answer is clear. The Middle East needs hippies ... once they get
> these, can a sense of humour, and an animated "South Kandovan" be far behind?
>
> Arlo
>
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