"Dogmatism and Complexity"This atomization and polarization have been exacerbated by the decline in the news audience share captured by the three major networks, which for decades at least tested against some standards the accuracy and completeness of the information we received, and which provided a common information template shared by Americans even of divergent views. Today, viewers have been drawn to niche channels, attractive to them precisely because they echo their preconceptions. A common canon of information has been supplanted by an echo chamber in which people pick a particular news source to fit their views, and their views then are validated and reinforced by the new information they receive, information tailored and targeted for them – and untested for its accuracy against any meaningful standard.The general tendencies are reflected in the increasingly impoverished quality of what is said by our political leaders in the public forum. Candidates for public office now relentlessly employ slogans, talking points, simplistic messages and attack ads. We have moved far from the Athenian ideal of participatory, dialogic democracy. This led Fortune’s Matt Miller to write:Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn’t already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy? The signs are not good. Ninety percent of political conversation amounts to dueling “talking points.” Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted. Let’s face it: the purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity or even cash. By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Honoring what’s right in the other side’s argument seems a superfluous thing that can only cause trouble, like an appendix. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
The echo chambers of today...
"Rediger was a good writer.
He was clear and concise, and occasionally humorous, as for example when he derided a colleague--no doubt a rival Muslim intellectual--who had coined the phrase 'imams 2.0' to describe imams who made it their mission to reconvert French you from Muslim immigrant backgrounds. It was time, Rediger countered, to launch imams 3.0: the ones who'd convert the natives. Rediger was never funny for long; he always followed up with an earnest argument. He reserved his bitterest scorn for his Islamo-leftists colleagues: Islamo-leftism, he wrote, was a desparate attempt by moldering, putrefying, brain-dead Marxists to hoist themselves out of the dustbin of history by latching onto the coattails of Islam. Conceptually, he wrote, they'd stolen everything from the so-called Nietzcheans of the left. Rediger was obsessed with Neitzche, but I didn't have much patience for his Neitzchean mode--no doubt I'd read too much Nitzche myself. I knew and understood Neitzche too well to find charming. Bizarrely enough, I found myself more drawn to Rediger's Guénonian side. René Guénon is boring, if you try to read him straight through, but Rediger offered an accessible version-Guénon lite.-Michel Houellebecq, Submission, pgs. 223-4.
"And I don't guess you're really an atheist, either. True atheists are rare."
"You think? On the contrary, I'd have said that most people in the Western world are atheists."
"Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I've ever met were people in revolt. It wasn't enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God--they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: 'Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.' They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don't suppose you recognize yourself in this description."
No, in fact, I didn't; even the word humanism made me want to vomit...-Michel Houellebecq, Submission, p. 204.
Guénon mentioned in Houellebecq's new novel
The two bottom shelves were full of bound photocopies. These were dissertations from various European universities. As I browsed the titles, my eye was drawn to a philosophy dissertation, presented at the Catholic University of Loivain-la-Neuve, entitled "René Guénon: Reader of Nietzche," by Robert Rediger. I was just pulling it from the shelf from Rediger came back into the room. I jumped, as if I'd been caught doing something wrong, and tried to slip it back in place. He walked over to me, smiling. "Don't worry, there are no secrets here. And besides, why shouldn't you be curious about the contents of a bookshelf? For a man like you, that's almost a professional duty."
Coming closer, he saw the title. "Ah, you've found my dissertation." He shook his head. "They gave me my doctorate, but it wasn't much of a thesis. Nothing like yours, anyways. My reading was, as they say, selective. In retrospect, I don't think Guénon was influenced b Nietzche especially. His rejection of the modern world was just as vehement as Nietzche's, but it had radically different sources."-Michel Houellebecq, Submission, pgs. 199-200.
Monday, November 9, 2015
"Chesterton and Belloc and their ideas appear in “Submission” as a kind of secondary sound, a Greek chorus."
Houellebecq takes very seriously the enterprise, in which Huysmans is also implicated, of rejecting Enlightenment modernity in favor of some kind of mystical-spiritual nation reëstablished on a foundation of faith. There is a passage in “Submission”—by Houellebecq’s own account the key scene in the book—in which the narrator goes south to contemplate the Black Madonna of Rocamadour and has a moment of blissful vision, one that he wishes to sustain but can’t. Islam rushes in to fill the absence. Houellebecq makes the entente of Islam and Catholicism attractive. “My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people,” he said in an interview. “Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible.”http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/next-thing
"only religions can fight efficiently against other religions."
Q. Because a novel doesn’t have the power to do that?
A. Yes. People can read all the novels they want. That will never change political opinion. It’s striking. The response to jihadism — it’s a religious sect from start to finish, it’s a variation, a deviation of a religion — it’s never easy to fight against a religious sect. The police are useful, but in principle, only religions can fight efficiently against other religions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/books/the-submission-of-michel-houellebecq.html?_r=0
'To return, though, to Houellebecq.
-Tim Winter, ‘Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s crise de coeur: a response to Koshul and Kepnes,’ in Basit Bilal Koshul and Stephen Kepnes (eds.), Scripture, Reason, and the contemporary Islam-West encounter: studying the ‘Other’, Understanding the ‘Self’ (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 158.For him, self-becoming requires separation from bourgeois false consciousness, and only two such separations are currently available: Islam and idealistic hedonism. His option is for the latter, but only because the former is alien to him. But perhaps in that very alienness lies an authentic Otherness, an option which would enhance our free separation from the monoculture. Another Frenchman, Rene Guenon (1886-1951), who during the period portrayed by Proust had experimented with a range of alternative lifestyles, exercised his own freedom in favor of the Islamic Other. Guenon entered Islam at the hands of an Egyptian Sufi, and spent the remainder of his life writing and praying as a semirecluse in Cairo. [28] In his numerous books, which constitute an absolute apostasy from the modern doctrines of progress and humanism, he advocated Islam as the most appropriate religious choice for Westerners who seek freedom from the monoculture, both because Islam is radically unsecular, and because it is spiritually proximate to the Christian genius which the Enlightenment had suppressed. "This Islamic civilization," he wrote, "with its two aspects, esoteric and exoteric, and with the religious form which the latter is clothed in, comes nearest to being like what a traditional Western civilization would be." [29]
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Be Attentive
Many mistakes in reasoning are explained by the fact that we are not paying sufficient attention to the situation in which we find ourselves. This is especially true in familiar situations. That very familiarity causes us to make careless judgments about facts right before our eyes. We misread a situation because we are skimming it, when what we should be doing is persuing it. Often, we assume that a familiar situation will be but a repeat performance of a similar situation we've experienced before. But, in the strictest sense, there are no repeat performances. Every situation is unique, and we must be alert to its uniqueness.
The phrase 'to pay attention' is telling. It reminds us that attention costs something. Attention demands an attentive, energetic response to every situation, to the persons, places, and things that make up the situation. It is impossible to be truly attentive and passive at the same time. Don't just look, see. Don't just hear, listen. Train yourself to focus on details. The little things are not to be ignored, for it is just the little things that lead us to the big things.-D.Q. McInerny, Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking, p. 3.
We were blessed to read through this book in the first year of the Zaytuna seminary program with Imam Zaid, alhamdullilah.
Good training in logic and critical reasoning is essential to building independent people who think for themselves and are not just 'groupies.' Being critical doesn't have to mean having bad adab.
We should make sure we have spaces in which dissent and disagreement and alternative viewpoints are welcomed, if not at least tolerated.
God help us.
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