[MD] Manufacturing Nightmare

[david buchanan]

Arlo, Khaled, Platt and all MOQers:

Thanks for turning me on to the "BBC's "Power of Nightmares" series, 
examining the rise of both Neoconservative and Islamist Terror". The Nation 
wrote a darn good article about it in their June 20, 2005 issue, which I had 
overlooked at the time as I was focused on the conference in Liverpool. For 
those who want to see the whole piece, search for "beware the holy war" by 
Peter Bergen. He is critical of the film's main premise, that Al Qaeda is 
mostly a fictional creation, saying, "It may be that Al Qaeda is less 
organized and monolithic than George W. Bush would have us believe, but it 
is a fierce and determined organization that has spawned a global 
ideological movement led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose 
influence and plans we have every reason to be deeply concerned about." And 
its a little spooky that, near the end of this article he re-asserts this 
same notion by saying, "these are not powerful nightmares; they are a 
reality, a view that Curtis (the film's author) may finally come around to 
when a significant terrorist attack is carried out in London, which British 
authorities regard as inevitable." As it turned out, there was a significant 
attack in London just two and a half weeks after the publication date, on 
the day of the conference in Liverpool. (On my way to the conference I was 
in London and had passed through two of the stations that were bombed.) I 
also thought it was interesting that Leo Strauss and other neoconservatives 
came out of the University of Chicago. Anyway, The Nation's reviewer has 
some high praise too. He says it sometimes feels like a "Noam Chomsky 
lecture channeled by Monty Python" but also says its an important and 
rewarding film and that "what Curtis has to say is a helluva lot more 
interesting than what Michael Moore had to say" in Fahrenheit 9/11.

Arlo quoted from the transcript of "Nightmares":
Professor STEPHEN HOLMES, Political Philosopher: The United States would not 
only, according to these—the Straussians, be able to bring good to the 
world, but would be able to overcome the fundamental weaknesses of American 
society, a society that has been suffering, almost rotting, in their 
language, from relativism, liberalism, lack of self-confidence, lack of 
belief in itself. And one of the main political projects of the Straussians 
during the Cold War was to reinforce the self-confidence of Americans, and 
the belief that America was fundamentally the only force for good in the 
world, that had to be supported, otherwise evil would prevail.

dmb says:
American is rotting and the cause is relativism, liberalism and insufficient 
patriotism. Yep, that sounds very, very familiar doesn't it? I would say 
that this is a rather drastic mis-diagnosis of the problem. I think the 
Straussian solution can never really solve the problem and is actually worse 
than the problem it seeks to solve. These neocons fit in quite well with the 
other anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-intellectual types depicted in 
Pirsig's analysis. I mean, this is how the conflict between social and 
intellectual values is presently playing itself out...

Arlo quoted from the transcript:
"VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people 
to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were 
led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the 
shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, 
Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring 
myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were 
necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of 
the nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique 
destiny to battle the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was 
epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program: 
Gunsmoke."

dmb says:
Religion and nationalism as necessary illusions. Man, does that ever nail 
it. I've never seen Gunsmoke, but the myth that animates the current 
administration and their supporters can be seen in the very terms of the 
debate. Evildoers, the Axis of evil, American Exceptionalism, moral 
equivalence, America-haters, America bashers, the blame-america-first crowd, 
and lots of other terms like that are used to paint this idea of the USA as 
the protector of all that is good and right, as the messiah of God's 
freedom. Naturally it can't be regular political freedom as it was concieved 
by the philosophers of the Enlightenment or the lived freedom of the 
American Indian. No way. That would give too much credit to the secular 
liberals and intellectuals who support democratic principles. It has to be 
God's freedom because, as the neocons see it, liberalism and "individual 
freedom" is the disease to be cured. And part of that cure is a 
nationalistic myth that depicts the USA as doing God's work, to assert God's 
will in the world - at gun point. All this makes President Dumbass's use of 
the word "Crusade" look like a Freudian slip of epic proportions, eh?

>From the transcript:
"HOLMES: The Straussians started to create a worldview which is a fiction. 
The world is not divided into good and evil. The battle in which we are 
engaged is not a battle between good and evil. The United States, as anyone 
who observes understands, has done some good and some bad things. It’s like 
any great power. This is the way history is. But they wanted to create a 
world of moral certainties, so therefore they invent 
mythologies—fairytales—describing any force in the world that obstructs the 
United States as somehow Satanic, or associated with evil."

dmb says:
An even stronger version of this myth animates Christian fundamentalists in 
America. For them, evil and the devil and demons and all that are quite 
real. They don't laugh at teenage Goth Satanists the way a normal person 
might. You might not be aware of it, but if you are secular or libertal or 
intellectual or gay or a feminists or a supporter of the United Nations, 
then they hate and fear you. Basically, if you're not with then you're 
against them and they are on the right side in a cosmic battle between God 
and the Devil. They think you are an agent of Satan and their goal is to get 
rid of people like you. Neocons almost look resonable by comparison, but 
they work well together...

>From the transcript:
IRVING KRISTOL , Founder of Neoconservative movement: The notion that a 
purely secular society can cope with all of the terrible pathologies that 
now affect our society, I think has turned out to be false. And that has 
made me culturally conservative. I mean, I really think religion has a role 
now to play in redeeming the country. And liberalism is not prepared to give 
religion a role. Conservatism is, but it doesn’t know how to do it.

dmb says:
I think Arlo is quite right to compare Kristol's "terrible pathologies" to 
Pirsig's analysis of society as "caught in a cross-fire". I think they are 
both talking about the same problem, but Pirsig offers a way forward while 
the neocons are only offering a way backward. As Pirsig points out, the 
problem is not with liberal principles or the intellectual level itself, 
which is an evolutionary advance over the social level, but with the 
metaphysical assumptions upon which they and all other ideologies and 
worldviews are based in the Modern West. And its not too surprizing to learn 
that the ideological godfather of Islamic radicalism is animated by the very 
same "terrible pathologies". Here is a quote from the Nation's review....

"Curtis begins his story in 1949 in the unlikely setting of Greeley, 
Colorado, where the Egyptian literary critic Sayyid Qutb attended graduate 
school. It was Qutb's encounter with the United States that helped turn him 
into the Lenin of the radical Islamists. One summer night, the puritanical 
Qutb went to a dance at a local church hall, where the pastor was playing 
the big-band hit "Baby, It's Cold Outside." (The tune provides the title of 
the documentary's first hour, as well as a constant musical refrain.) The 
idea of a house of worship playing a secular love song crystallized Qutb's 
sense that Americans were deeply corrupt and interested only in 
self-gratification. On his return to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim 
Brotherhood, was arrested on Nasser's orders in 1954 for supposedly plotting 
revolution and was then subjected to the most dreadful tortures. Curtis 
says, "Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful, radicalizing effect on 
his ideas." Writing from his prison cell, Qutb argued that Egypt's secular 
nationalist government was presiding over a country mired in a state of 
pre-Islamic barbarity known as jahiliyyah and, by implication, that the 
government should be overthrown. Qutb was executed in 1966, but he would 
profoundly influence a teenager named Ayman al-Zawahiri, who set up a 
jihadist cell dedicated to the Qutbian theory that Egyptian government 
officials were apostates from Islam and therefore deserved death."

dmb says:
You can see the social values that control biological values quite clearly 
in Qutb's "puritanical" attitudes. I seem to recall that Platt was 
condemning these Islamic extremists as "biological", but this is a pretty 
good example of what Pirsig said about Islam, about how they really resent 
the way Western values let that genie out of the bottle. You know how it is. 
They like to keep their women in bhurkas and sometimes even go so far as to 
permanently, physically destroy their ability to enjoy sexual pleasure 
through genital mulitation. (Sand Creek, anyone?) Like Platt, these guys are 
actually quite upset about "secular love songs". Which reminds me of an old 
joke...

You know why fundamentalists won't have sex while standing? Because somebody 
might think they're dancing.

All of this is really just a preliminary intoduction into why Pirsig's 
analysis is so much better. In fact, I think the neocons and the Islamic 
fundamentalists and their solutions and their opponents are players in the 
social/intellectual conflict. But this post is already too long and it might 
be nice to see what Arlo comes up with first anyway.

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/