Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThis stimulus for this piece was a comment to the general effect, "They really believe (such unimaginable stuff) over there!"
Can you believe it?
After reading both of Daniel Everett's books, yes, I can, but here in my own words a slant on the OA&L topic area -- "Conflict, Culture, Language, and Psychology" -- to which it relates.
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All cultures are language machines and all languages develop within commune-level social isolation, specifically geophysical barriers, possibly with the pull of psychological and social affinity. For the west to work with Islam -- or for Islam to have some better influence on what is not Islam -- any civilizing effort involves 1) quelling the opportunism and violence attending great changes in the old barriers and 2) altering behaviors and customs in language and underlying ideation to null out some truly malevolent and maladapted ambitions.
As tools, the languages within which cultures swim and suspend themselves across generations have one helpful flaw, and it's one I think the Islamic-majority states find themselves fighting most: they're held together by symbolic relationships, some more stable than others, but when something changes, and it may be a small thing, everything else may drift around that change.
In the few years in which I've dabbled in "conflict, culture, language, and psychology", I've never found cause to abandon two primary views: it takes detectives (all synonyms apply) to lay out the vines in private relationships that convey one kind of war materiel or another to an end use, and then it takes poets (clerics, scholars, intelligentsia, call them what you want) to refashion and repair language and language-driven interpreting and perceiving behaviors.
That's a little clinical, even for me, but we are yet a wild species.
If made in the "image of God", well that's nice to think and as Jew I enjoy as much, but, really, delve even a little bit into anthropology and linguistics, and you may find a case for the worst of what is possible becoming probable _in comparative isolation_.
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I've only lightly edited the note, adding a couple of words for clarity, splitting a paragraph or two for readability. Be that as it may, in retrospect, the paragraphs look like a critic's takeaway from Lord of the Flies. Indeed, in Goldman's classic, the energies of adolescent boys in isolation lead to the invention of a culture involving the shadows of many societies. Of course, the British Navy arrives to restore the lost boys to their former civilization, but what powers work their way through the adult cultures of the world, only God knows and nature handily provides.
Why not beheading?
Wny not contralatteral amputation?
Why not four wives?
Why not constant, endless, and pointless warfare?
Why not ayatollah, caliphs, dictators, emperors, kings, and other tyrants?
The universe shows no care.
All things, even the least just and most horrific, remain ever possible and, given some neglect by the more comprehending, conscienable, and empathetic of souls, ever more likely to happen.
For those who walked away from Pharaoh but unlike Moses find Pharaoh's army still in pursuit, set your lines, shoulder the burdens of a more benevolent and responsible civilization, and keep up the good work!
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