TAG:
Fundamentalism
All That Is Rock Melts Into Hope |
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 by Charlie Bertsch, June 20, 2009 |
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Fifteen years ago, the alternative music press was fixated on the idea of “post-rock.”
Whether that label was applied to artists that featured guitar, bass
and drums – like the Chicago band Tortoise, whose excellent new album Beacons of Ancestorship will be released June 23rd – or, more diffusely, to the
sort of computer-enabled sounds that inspired the term “electronica,”
its popularity indicated that the mainstream music industry was already
experiencing a crisis of self-understanding. Labels had enjoyed a lengthy boom in the wake of the massive changes made visible by Billboard’s shift to the SoundScan method of measuring record sales, a development that gave formerly marginalized genres like hip-hop and punk a new legitimacy in the marketplace. While
sales were still strong in the mid-1990s, however, the relentless
search for new products had severed artists from the scenes that had
previously nurtured them, stifling the countercultural energies that
had fueled the rise of self-consciously “alternative” music. 
In the domain of hip-hop, this added up to a commercially savvy, but culturally suspect depoliticization of the genre, reflected in the ascendancy of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs as a major player in the industry. As the sort of content he favored became a staple of the sales charts, rock and roll’s popularity in the marketplace began to slip. Although the renaissance heralded by the surprising success of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day had not ceased entirely, the difficulty major labels were having in finding successors to those bands suggested that their flowering might have been the result of an unexpected autumn heat wave rather than a new spring.
Although none of the artists associated with the idea of post-rock seemed likely to produce platinum records, the attitude they demonstrated towards music seemed to hold more diffuse commercial potential. For one thing, their preference for extended instrumental passages made their music well suited for use in soundtracks and commercials, where vocal-driven rock and roll songs have often proved too distracting. But it was the rejection of rock and roll’s foundational premises that most excited the people promoting a post-rock sensibility. Whereas traditional rock had marginalized other genres of music, artists like Tortoise and Moby seemed intent on dissolving the boundaries that kept those genres apart. The expansion of musical possibilities made possible by this shift was breathtaking.
As an added benefit, post-rock opened up record labels’ extensive back catalogues for a fresh look. Just as hip-hop’s use of sampling had revived interest in funk and soul tracks from the 1960s and 1970s, post-rock’s refusal to reject genres for failing to meet a rock standard encouraged listeners to seek out older material, not in a historicist mode, but as music that was capable, in the right context, of sounding completely contemporary. If the break that Elvis Presley marked in the mid-1950s had made even the popular music of a few years earlier seem irredeemably dated for the younger generation, post-rock seemed poised to usher in an era in which the distinction between pre-rock and rock no longer held much significance.
In the end, though, post-rock did not prove to have the impact that its supporters had hoped. Although it pointed the way towards a new cultural sensibility, its leading lights were too dim to transform the music industry to a meaningful extent. As it turned out, the crisis in self-understanding that post-rock had signalled proved to be a prophecy whose full meaning could not be immediately discerned. In his remarkable 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French thinker Jacques Attali inverts traditional leftist thinking in arguing that changes in music often anticipate changes in the social order rather than merely reflecting them after the fact. While post-rock may not be the sort of music he had in mind, his suggestive comments about the revolutionary potential in free jazz – a major influence on some post-rock luminaries – make it possible, without distorting his ideas egregiously, to claim that the radical structural transformation that we have been witnessing in the music industry was prefigured, both in post-rock’s rejection of traditional notions of genre and in the reluctance to pursue stardom exhibited by most of its practitioners.
That being said, there’s no doubt that the major factor in this structural transformation was the technological progress that made music available on the internet. But it is worth nothing that, long before Napster, MySpace and YouTube came on the scene, astute critics had imagined the future that those services would later make flesh. In his comments on the future of composition, written a number of years before the development of the compact disc became a hot topic, Attali himself proves remarkably prescient. “The consumer, completing the mutation that began with the tape recorder and photography, will thus become a producer and will derive at least as much of his satsisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces.” Interestingly, though Noise is about music, Attali clearly includes the manipulation of images in his conception of composition, a sign that, together with future-oriented media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, he anticipated a world of what Henry Jenkins calls “media convergence.”
This vision of a world in which consumers want to feel like producers of their own content highlights the most profound change that popular music has undergone since being made available on the internet. More and more, even the most devoted music lovers struggle to identify what they are listenting to and, as a consequence, also frequently struggle to identify with it. Despite the fact that today's listeners can carry “their” music around on an iPod or access it from internet sites like LastFM or Blip.fm, they regularly forget what they have in their collection. It used to be that, once you put an LP on the turntable, you were pretty sure of what you were going to be hearing, even if it was your first time listenting to the record. Now it’s common to see people pause to look down at their iPod or up at their screen to remind themselves of the name of a band they’ve heard many times before.
Rock and roll has always been perched, like a mountaineer navigating a breathtakingly precarious defile, between the promise of abandon and the realization that selling music demands the preservation of ties that prevent that promise from being kept. We want to lose ourselves in the music but find, over and over, that anonymity poses such a profound threat to the status quo that its pursuit is only sanctioned in contexts in which we are willing to name our desire. The advent of file-sharing threw the music industry into a crisis it may never escape not only because it let people listen for free – after all, radio had been doing the same thing for decades – but because it permitted them to build vast collections that were not organized by the corporate structures that package music for consumers. Anyone who has spent much time engaged in illegal downloading can attest to the number of tracks out there that are either unlabeled or, worse still, mislabeled. Combine the spread of this sort of entropy with the fragmentation of taste publics promoted by the sheer excess of content, much of it self-produced, that is available online and you have the formula for a catastrophic financial collapse.
The panic inspired by this disorder has given us a corporate counter-reformation in which record labels concentrate on selling people what they already know and, in many cases, already own. Reissue culture, the repackaging of old material with new extras, such as previously unreleased tracks or footage, or in new formats, such as high-grade vinyl, is the most obvious expression of this trend. But it is also reflected in the almost hysterical insistence in the media that consumers pay close attention to the latest product by artists with established careers.
The hype surrounding Bob Dylan’s recent albums, in stark contrast to the indifference and frustration with which much of his work from the 1980s was met in the marketplace, is a prime example of this phenomenon. So are the conservative impulses manifest in contemporary alternative music culture, typified by the fact that the critically lauded 1990s band Pavement has now reissued expanded versions of all but one of its albums, with each one getting reviewed by popular publications like Pitchfork as if it constituted a new release, despite the fact that the band has been defunct for a decade.
While it’s not hard to rationalize such behavior – after all, the artists who receive this treatment have stood the test of time in a way that newer ones have not – it confirms the sense that rock and roll is well on its way to joining jazz as a musical idiom whose liveliness feels like a simulation, like the awkward stumbling of the undead. From another perspective, however this decline could be construed as a positive development, with the potential to destroy once and for all the divide between music that is deemed “contemporary” and that which is identified with the past. In other words, what the idea of post-rock promised fifteen years ago, the current state of the music business has the power to deliver fully. If listening to rock mobilizes the same antiquarian impulses as traditional music from the developing world or, for that matter, the sonatas of Scarlatti, it becomes pointless to restrict the definition of what counts as a living musical language.
Not that people have given up trying, mind you. From the radio stations that still have a traditional rock format to the impulse items on display at your local Starbucks, there are numerous examples of attempts to conserve what was best – in theory, anyway – about the music of the counterculture and its aftershocks. Sometimes the same-old same-old really is the same-old same-old. And sometimes it just sounds like it. But whether the artists are new or old, the way they are marketed reflects nostalgia for a time when rock was what linguists term an “unmarked case,” the default mode for popular music rather than just another narrow channel in the vast river delta of post-internet taste.
As previously noted, this metamorphosis in the music business has had profound consequences for devotees of forms once marginalized for not being commercially viable. Indeed, a major reason why we’ve seen a huge resurgence of interest in traditional ethnic music is that it is now possible for casual listeners to explore the material without feeling like they have entered a nightmarish alternate reality in which they are trapped inside a Renaissance Fair at which everyone but them is wearing historically appropriate costumes. Time is now so out of joint that the only anachronistic attire would be the sort that lacks a touch of anachronism.
The
philosophical implications of this situation are wide-ranging and hold
particular importance for the study and practice of religion. That’s
why the work of prescient twentieth-century thinkers like Walter
Benjamin – not to mention Jacques Attali, whose work shows the
influence of the former’s essay
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – seems more
relevant with each passing year. And it’s also why musing on the health
of rock and roll almost inevitably gives way to meditations on
the meaning of devotion in an era that deprives us of the secure
identities that fidelity seemingly requires. One pledges allegiance
to a name, after all, even if it’s in pursuit of a state of being in
which freedom is identified with namelessness.
Fear is an inevitable byproduct of uncertain times. Just as the penetration of modern thinking throughout the world has inspired panicked attempts to return to a solid foundation – fundamentalism, in other words – the massive changes that have come to the domain of popular music make many people long for sounds with which they are already familiar. To be sure the consequences of reactionary musical taste are not as significant as those derviving from reactionary political or religious taste. Nevertheless, it is worth taking the time to consider Jacques Attali’s thesis from the other side. If new sounds can presage a new socio-economic order, what might the retreat to old sounds foretell?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the state of the contemporary music industry – to be more precise, its increasingly rapid shift from assembly-line production to do-it-yourself craft – is that it presents us with a situation in which the turn to traditional forms of musical expression, those of a folk or religious character, may be a more progressive move than the insistence that “rock and roll will never die.” If musical fundamentalism means the desire to listen to the same Billy Joel and AC/DC songs – and on many classic rock stations, the number of songs in regular rotation is astonishingly small – until one is consigned to a nursing home, then the willingness to seek pleasure further afield, in music that makes punk with a klezmer sound or soul with the sampled burbles of a washing machine, seems far more optimistic about our chance of arriving at a tomorrow better than today. From this perspective, the erosion of rock inspires hope of a new solidarity.
Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same editorial title at Tikkun. Bertsch was also a longtime contributor to the late, great Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.
Primal Scream Therapy with Tortured Authors, Part 1: Allow me to Freudian slip inside you |
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| Beckerman writes to Roth | |
  by Marty Beckerman, Matthue Roth, September 29, 2008 |
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To: Matthue Roth
From: Marty Beckerman
Subject: Allow me to Freudian slip inside you
Matthue,
Writers are not exactly well-adjusted people. Posters of Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson used to hang over my desk, but one day I realized with sudden discomfort that two suicides constantly looked down at me as I worked. I've never read anything by David Foster Wallace -- the Internet and Jack Daniel's have ruined me for any book longer than three hundred pages, let alone a thousand -- but he's another writer who bailed on existence.
And yet, even though we're writers, neither one of us will commit suicide anytime soon. We have different reasons for this -- you're an Orthodox Jew who believes that suicide is murder, and I'm an egomaniac who would never selfishly deprive the human race of his boundless and necessary wisdom, roguish good looks, etc. -- but even well-adjusted writers need to analyze ourselves sometimes. We can't afford psychologists to guide us on our reflective journeys, of course, but at least we have each other.
Despite our aversion to self-destruction, we are pretty goddamned fascinating people. (At least I am; what's your name again?) Nobody understands an author quite like another author, and the public deserves to know the motivations and psychologies of its most gifted citizens. Therefore, Matthue (oh yes, that's your name), it's time for us to explore each other, probe each other... I just want to get inside of you and dig.
You are a self-described religious zealot, although quite different than most. You seem non-judgmental, and lacking in palpable sexual neuroses. Call me a snide coastal elitist, but I immediately associate religious extremism with sexual perversion; it seems as if every week another conservative preacher or politician gets in trouble for allegedly being a totally creepy pervert. I would make a list of all the prominent "people of faith" who have recently landed in hot water -- or, as the case may be, lukewarm lubricant -- for their peculiar interpretations of family values, but we only have a few hundred words per day for this discussion, not a few (hundred) thousand.
Sen. Larry Craig: A fine example of religious devotionIt seems like
common sense that if you repress and vilify normal human sexuality, it's going
to emerge in a warped or self-loathing form. Are ferocious gay-bashers who
happen to love peen (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, etc.) aware of their own hypocrisy, or is it a purely unconscious
phenomenon? Are they sucked (get it?) into religious fundamentalism because
they fear their true selves, or do they become fascinated by the "forbidden
fruit" (get it?) after demonizing the behavior? In other words, which came first:
the chicken, the egg or the giant heathen cock, which might or might not refer
to the aforementioned chicken?
Am I oversimplifying? Am I wrong to presume a direct link between the degree of a person's religiosity -- especially the condemnatory, "shame on everyone but me" variety -- and the degree of his or her (but probably his) sexual weirdness? You are a passionate believer -- you base your entire life around religion -- and yet you strike me as a shockingly well-adjusted person... I mean, I've visited your house and didn't find a hidden dungeon or anything... so are you the exception or the rule? Or did I simply forget to look underneath the rug?
Full disclosure: I probably have a reputation as a "totally creepy pervert" who loves to say "shame on everyone but me" thanks to my past writings, but A) my girlfriend has completely domesticated me -- I'm less edgy these days than a Gillette Venus Vibrance Soothing Vibrations Razor for Women -- and B) I'm a humorist, not a moralist, and I'm obviously not a cleric or spiritual advisor. God help anyone who asks me for advice about... uh... God.
Marty Beckerman, author of Dumbocracy, and Matthue Roth, author of Losers, are blogging together on Jewcy, and they'll be here all week. Stay tuned.
THE CABAL
Idiocy Creep |
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| Religion imitates The Onion | |
 by Daniel Koffler, January 2, 2008 |
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Reductio creep, "the process by which an insane extension of some principle, offered as a reductio ad absurdum of that principle, is soon afterwards realized," is one of the defining characteristics of social and public policy over the last twenty years. When tobacco companies were sued for allegedly marketing their products to children, some of us worried that the door would be open for any manner of frivolous lawsuits and prosecutions. "Ha ha," you reply. "Is the government going to prosecute Hostess for selling Twinkies?" Yeah, maybe.
Likewise, who could ever imagine a world in which political correctness has run so far amok that a man can lose his job for using the word 'niggardly'? What lunatic could envision a world gone so crazy that a DA could arraign middle-schoolers on sex crimes charges for slapping their classmates' butts? A world where, in order to protect the integrity of drug investigations, federal agents would shield murderers from justice? A world where, to end the scourge that is consensual adult gambling, SWAT teams will be deployed to shut down charity poker games? Sensible centrist paternalism could never yield crazy consequences like these (could it?).
When Georg Cantor discovered that some infinities are bigger than others, he realized he would need a new nomenclature for the hierarchies of infinite sets. What applies to infinity, in this case, applies to insanity as well. Reductio creep is what happens when the insane extension of an ostensibly sane idea becomes reality. What do we call an insane extension of an already insane idea? I ask not out of academic curiosity, but because the aleph-one of reductio creep --- that is, to extend my metaphor, an uncountably infinite insanity or idiocy --- has arrived:
The Origin of Speeches [subtitle: Intelligent Design in Language] begins by recapping the history of our views about the source of language. It then debunks the errors that infuse your dictionary, like those about how words in "unrelated" languages could only have identical sound and sense by "coincidence." It does so with both quality and quantity of data. The next chapters give anyone the skills to sleuth out the Edenic origin of any human word. One learns about letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and drop out. We discover how Edenics works much like other natural sciences, such as chemistry and physics. Like-sounding opposite words were certainly programmed, not pragmatically evolved.
"Edenics," in case you were wondering, is the view that " ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel -- which kickstarted multi-national human history."
I always suspected that the entire field of historical linguistics has been nothing more than a centuries-long plot to undermine belief in the inerrant word of God, and now I know for sure. (Fun fact: Did you know that Adam and Eve spoke Jacobean English?)
But linguistics and social science generally, let alone evolutionary biology (that is, biology), are just side-shows to the most insidious, sinister scheme ever devised to weaken our faith and corrupt our morals. I refer, of course, to quantum mechanics:
The backbone of obstructionism is electronic interpretation, the tenet that all physical, chemical, and biological processes result from a change in the electronic structure of the atom which, in turn, can be deciphered through the orderly application of mathematics as outlined in quantum mechanics. The philosophy rejects any divine intervention. Scientific obstructionism is judged on these specifics: electronic interpretation and quantum mechanics. Conversely, the view of separatists that God is both responsible for and rules all the phenomena of the universe will stand or fall when the facts are applied. The view, however, is not tested by the definition of science, as determined by the court, but by the weightier principle of verifiable truths.
In other words, it's not unlike electromagnetic charges that attract bodies, and like charges that repel them. Tosh. God does it all by Himself, and doesn't need electrons to help him, thanks very much.
Bonkers though it is, the view that modern physics must be rejected because it shrinks the role of God in the universe, and therefore undermines belief in God, is really kind of refreshing. It's a tacit recognition that neither the compatibilism of Steven Jay Gould --- religion and science as non-overlapping magisteria and all that --- nor the incompatibilism of Richard Dawkins --- belief in the validity of science implies atheism --- have it quite right. On the one hand, belief in God is very much logically compatible with belief in science; on the other hand, once you have an adequate natural explanation of a phenomenon, positing God just adds needless theoretical complexity without contributing any explanatory power. Why not believe that the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency and to God? Because, as Laplace said to Napoleon, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse --- I have no need of that hypothesis. Quantum mechanics + God doesn't explain any more than quantum mechanics alone.
On the other hand, what's the principle behind proposing that children be taught religious alternatives just to evolutionary theory, but not to every single other consensus of modern science? Every confirmed natural explanation of an observed phenomenon yields another question to which science replaces God as the answer.
Incidentally, if you're curious to figure out today what tomorrow's reductio creep will be, The Onion is your oracle:
Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
So for now, it's only some fringe kooks who want to replace science as a whole (and not just biology) with scripture. That batty idea will never become as mainstream as, say, intelligent design. I mean, it's unthinkable, right?
(Hat tip to PZ Meyers for both the linguistics and the quantum mechanics links.)
DAILY SHVITZ
Lucifer vs. Martha Nussbaum |
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 by Lila Rajiva, June 4, 2007 |
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Lila Rajiva is the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, and the co-author with Bill Bonner of the forthcoming Mobs, Messiahs and Markets. She blogs at http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com. This is her first contribution to the Daily Shvitz.
In an earlier Shvitz post, Rohit Gupta criticized Martha Nussbaum’s latest piece in The Chronicle for Higher Education, in which Nussbaum positions herself as liberal by taking on Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis of clashing civilizations.
Rohit enumerated some of Nussbaum's specific errors, but I would like to dissect her theoretical position, which I think is what enables her to make those errors.
Huntington’s work was widely taken to justify a clash between the Western and the Islamic worlds. Nussbaum relocates the clash. It isn’t between Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese, and the possible ninth, African - (a very loaded ordering in its own right, of course) as Huntington claims. Instead, she says, it’s internal to each culture -- between those who are willing to “live on terms of equal respect with others who are different,” and those who “seek the protection of homogeneity,” who are also (with a leap of logic here) the ones who want to dominate others. All fundamentalists, purists, exceptionalists and even the merely orthodox apparently belong in the Luciferian category, while liberal religions and secular universalists (who see citizenship as premised on political entitlements) are cast in the role of St. Michael.
Here I take the part of Lucifer. “Terms of equal respect” begs the question. What equal respect consists of is what’s at the heart of the dispute. Luciferians feel that their variegated beliefs - are in fact, not equally respected by an evangelical monotheism of “universalism” and “secularism” that seeks to dominate them through the state.
And I don’t believe this throws them suicidally onto the path of the onrushing engine of science either. Nussbaum herself concedes that when she anxiously describes a Hindu devotee, who on one hand claims his guru’s voice comes directly from god, but, on the other still knows how to get fiber optic cable into his temple.
Nonetheless, this “combination of technological sophistication with utter docility” so terrifies her she thinks it can only be remedied by – (drum roll here) -- education in the arts and humanities. Bada-bing!
Still, I take her point. Not knowing history is what frees the revolutionary to break with the past most completely. Turgenev said the same thing in Fathers and Sons. But, set her theory on the ground today and see how it works. Do four years of women’s studies and French psychoanalysis, maybe with a minor in “conflict resolution,” really make non-technical folk “imagine the pain of another human being” better? If so, why did so many people use feminist language and universal human rights to justify invading Iraq? And how balanced are humanistic studies today, anyway? Are we much served by replacing an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills, as she calls it, with an unbalanced emphasis on unprofitable skills?
How much more balanced are the theoretical perspectives that dominate major Western and Indian universities than, say, the Catholic perspective that dominates a Jesuit university? Marxist (or other) approaches to history are just that - approaches. Useful, enriching, plausible, but not inscribed in stone. That is what makes Nussbaum’s argument internally contradictory.
The bait she tempts us with is that technical studies need to be supplemented by the “humanities” (defined as interpretative). But, what she actually gives us is a bit of a sham -- history as pure fact, not interpretation. Nussbaum wants us to believe that facts presented by religious historians are guilty until proven innocent, but facts presented by Marxists historians are prima facie facts. She would have us believe that, since this immaculately conceived history is free of the original sin of hierarchy, it must lead us to a paradise of justice and mercy on earth.
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DAILY SHVITZ
The Ganges Freezes Over? No!: A Response to Martha Nussbaum |
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 by Rohit Gupta, June 1, 2007 |
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This preview from Martha Nussbaum's The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India's Future has generated at least one passionate response in the burgeoning Indian blogosphere. Her essay is a paranoid summary of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and its relationship with 1930s European fascism. She tries to scale up the microcosm of Gujarat, as if it represents the whole mosaic of modern India, and fails miserably. While devoid of any new insights on our predicaments, the preview essay contains strangely amusing notions such as:
Well, for a start, the people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
Even the most liberal Hindu would be offended. This image brings to my mind that great genetic journey we have all made, all the peoples of the world - branching out from the dark heart of Africa, the cradle of Man, the source and origin of all nomadic drift. By Nussbaum's logic the Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims because the Hindu identity as a coherent unit was only established after the arrival of Islam in as a force in the subcontinent, in the same way as the idea of India as a national entity was only conceivable after its assembly within the British Empire. It would be far too laborious to point out the historical errors and faulty assumptions in Nussbaum's story, which would have benefited from a little research.
For anyone looking for the most authoritative guide to post-1947 democratic India, please refer to historian Ramchandra Guha's awesome tome - India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy . The hyperlink will take you to a review of the book by Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian, who describes it thus:
Analog Fundamentalism, Digital Ambiguity
Black-and-white arguments in a world of gray
DIALOGUE: by Kevin Kelly, May 30, 2007
FAITHHACKER
Where’s the Value in Secularism? |
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 by Tamar Fox, March 7, 2007 |
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There’s a popular article in today’s London Times called How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam by Phyllis Chesler, weirdly subtitled ‘Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?’
Phyllis Chesler: Is Angry
The jist of the article is that Islam itself is racist, and sexist, and if Sharia law isn’t taken on directly and altered to fit modern norms then fanatical Islam is going to take over the world. At the end of the article secularism is proscribed as the only safe and acceptable future for Islam. Chesler writes, “Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.” (Emphasis mine).
I have to say, this makes me really uncomfortable. I agree that sexism, racism, and hatred are bad no matter what context they’re in, but I don’t think waging a “secular war” against Islam is realistic or a good plan. Why? Because when you bring the word secular to the table, what most religious people hear is “heathen.”
My Jewish education was filled with pejorative comments about the secular world, and secular Jews. This was obviously a bad strategy, but I think it’s important to recognize that if you come to a religious leader or a member of a religious community and say, “We think it’s safer, better, wiser and truer to the word of God to live by this secular lifestyle,” you’re not going to convince anyone to join your team. Those communities define themselves by NOT being secular. If you use text study, legal analysis, and serious debate you might get somewhere because to religious people these things matter. But secularism? It’s everything they hate and are afraid of.
This is relevant in the Jewish community as much as it is in the Muslim community. While there are, of course, sects and communities that are completely unwilling to change their stances on any issue, most community leaders want to be able to champion a revolutionary new cause. It makes them look good and important, and it guarantees that they go down in history books. And even the most dogmatic communities tend to go along with what their fearless leader proscribes. Consider the Chafetz Chaim, a prominent rabbi who died only 73 years ago, and who went squarely against a Talmudic statement in Sotah 20b R. Eliezer says: Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her obscenity. The Chafetz Chaim explained “Nowadays, in our iniquity, as parental tradition has been seriously weakened and women, moreover, regularly study secular subjects, it is certainly a great mitzvah to teach them Chumash, Prophets and Writings, and rabbinic ethics, such as Pirkei Avot, Menorat Hamaor, and the like, so as to validate our sacred belief; otherwise they may stray totally from G-d's path and transgress the basic tenets of religion, G-d forbid." (I got this translation from a Chabad source, but I think it’s pretty good.)
See, right there the word secular is used AS A BAD THING, even though what’s being promoted is a secular (and good) idea.
If we come charging at the Muslim world saying that they’ve been doing it wrong and the secular lifestyle is the way to go, we’re not going to convince anyone, and we’re going to make people defensive. But if we remind fundamentalists everywhere that the world’s three major religions were based on people coming onto the scene and implementing reforms, and then we find places in their texts and legal documents that can support our humanist claims…then we can get somewhere. Or at least I hope we can.
Phyllis Chesler: Is AngryThe jist of the article is that Islam itself is racist, and sexist, and if Sharia law isn’t taken on directly and altered to fit modern norms then fanatical Islam is going to take over the world. At the end of the article secularism is proscribed as the only safe and acceptable future for Islam. Chesler writes, “Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.” (Emphasis mine).
I have to say, this makes me really uncomfortable. I agree that sexism, racism, and hatred are bad no matter what context they’re in, but I don’t think waging a “secular war” against Islam is realistic or a good plan. Why? Because when you bring the word secular to the table, what most religious people hear is “heathen.”
My Jewish education was filled with pejorative comments about the secular world, and secular Jews. This was obviously a bad strategy, but I think it’s important to recognize that if you come to a religious leader or a member of a religious community and say, “We think it’s safer, better, wiser and truer to the word of God to live by this secular lifestyle,” you’re not going to convince anyone to join your team. Those communities define themselves by NOT being secular. If you use text study, legal analysis, and serious debate you might get somewhere because to religious people these things matter. But secularism? It’s everything they hate and are afraid of.
This is relevant in the Jewish community as much as it is in the Muslim community. While there are, of course, sects and communities that are completely unwilling to change their stances on any issue, most community leaders want to be able to champion a revolutionary new cause. It makes them look good and important, and it guarantees that they go down in history books. And even the most dogmatic communities tend to go along with what their fearless leader proscribes. Consider the Chafetz Chaim, a prominent rabbi who died only 73 years ago, and who went squarely against a Talmudic statement in Sotah 20b R. Eliezer says: Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her obscenity. The Chafetz Chaim explained “Nowadays, in our iniquity, as parental tradition has been seriously weakened and women, moreover, regularly study secular subjects, it is certainly a great mitzvah to teach them Chumash, Prophets and Writings, and rabbinic ethics, such as Pirkei Avot, Menorat Hamaor, and the like, so as to validate our sacred belief; otherwise they may stray totally from G-d's path and transgress the basic tenets of religion, G-d forbid." (I got this translation from a Chabad source, but I think it’s pretty good.)
See, right there the word secular is used AS A BAD THING, even though what’s being promoted is a secular (and good) idea.
If we come charging at the Muslim world saying that they’ve been doing it wrong and the secular lifestyle is the way to go, we’re not going to convince anyone, and we’re going to make people defensive. But if we remind fundamentalists everywhere that the world’s three major religions were based on people coming onto the scene and implementing reforms, and then we find places in their texts and legal documents that can support our humanist claims…then we can get somewhere. Or at least I hope we can.
FEATURE
"The World is Unthinkable" |
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| An experimental poet pines for the elegant absurdities of Dr. Strangelove | |
 by Don Byrd, January 22, 2007 |
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Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I received your letter. It is eloquent and sometimes cogent. Even those who will believe you are grandstanding cannot avoid the contradictions in American policy that you note. You know how to push people’s buttons. It’s the next best thing to having a nuclear arsenal.You address the American people, and I am American by default. I have no Ellis Island stories or
DAILY SHVITZ
Jesus Was a Hipster |
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 by Izzy Grinspan, September 14, 2006 |
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Since the Jesus freaks of the ‘60s, Christianity has seen its share of churchly types who just want to be down. So this Salon article by Lauren Sandler (NB: you might have to sit through an ad) about a fundamentalist hipster church in Seattle seems kind of like old news -- until you start looking at the details. Pastor Mark Driscoll preaches about Snoop Dogg to a congregation of boho types with permanent body art. But his message is deeply old-fashioned: men should be in charge, women should be judged entirely on the fertility of their wombs, and everybody should work as hard as they can to make more Christian babies.
In a way, Driscoll and his flock are pretty savvy about the relationship between their hipster lifestyles and their fundamentalist beliefs. They get that "counterculture" signifiers like tattoos don't actually run counter to any prevailing culture, while following Jesus to the letter genuinely does. But what’s so mind-boggling to me about this scene—I mean, other than the incredibly depressing way that it treats women—is their failure to recognize that they’re using the exact same “tattoos=revolution” fallacy to define their church.
Sandler writes: "The way Driscoll sees it, America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real. It is his edgy Jesus, he says, who best reaches a searching crowd."
So basically, these hipsters are sick of being sold a bill of goods. They’re fed up with MTV telling them that Fall-Out Boy is edgy, with Mountain Dew telling them that Yellow Dye #47 is edgy, with edginess being defined by shelling out $60 for an artist-designed t-shirt. But that Jesus guy? Totally edgy. If he lived today, he’d, like, play bass and wear eye make-up.
In a way, Driscoll and his flock are pretty savvy about the relationship between their hipster lifestyles and their fundamentalist beliefs. They get that "counterculture" signifiers like tattoos don't actually run counter to any prevailing culture, while following Jesus to the letter genuinely does. But what’s so mind-boggling to me about this scene—I mean, other than the incredibly depressing way that it treats women—is their failure to recognize that they’re using the exact same “tattoos=revolution” fallacy to define their church.
Sandler writes: "The way Driscoll sees it, America has been marketed to so constantly and shamelessly that it has produced a generation of jaded cynics desperate for what feels real. It is his edgy Jesus, he says, who best reaches a searching crowd."
So basically, these hipsters are sick of being sold a bill of goods. They’re fed up with MTV telling them that Fall-Out Boy is edgy, with Mountain Dew telling them that Yellow Dye #47 is edgy, with edginess being defined by shelling out $60 for an artist-designed t-shirt. But that Jesus guy? Totally edgy. If he lived today, he’d, like, play bass and wear eye make-up.
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