Now you see it, now you don’t
Monday, November 16th, 2015[ by Charles Cameron — NYT re Paris — curious minds wonder why ]
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In sequence:
Sources:
The Paris attackers communicated with ISIS, officials say Page Not Found
Archive for November, 2015
Sunday surprise: nunchucks and katana
Sunday, November 15th, 2015[ by Charles Cameron — weaponry in advertising and robotics — just some light weekend viewing ]
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You may have seen these already — they go nicely together, I think, though I might be hard pressed to say why.
and:
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Further reading:
The Bruce Lee Ping Pong Video. Cool, But Not Real Samurai Robot Challenges Human Sword Master
Two wrongs make a right or wrong — in theory?
Sunday, November 15th, 2015[ by Charles Cameron — on the (Pythagorean) arithmetic of morals ]
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Sendan Kendatsuba, one of the guardians of Buddhist law, banishing evil, Tokyo National Museum
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What’s right is generally supposed to be positive, while what’s wrong is seen as negative — and as they saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right.
In effect, that’s saying two negatives don’t make a positive. And if you add them, that’s correct.
But if you multiply two negatives, you get a positive — hunh?
So two wrongs can indeed make a right — that’s the mathematics of vengeance — multiplicative:
And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
— Deuteronomy 19.13
And it is also true that two wrongs don’t make a right — that’s a mathematics that denies vengeance — additive.
And then there’s the mathematics of forgiveness :
Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
— Romans 12.21
Patient men, desirous of the Face of their Lord, who perform the prayer, and expend of that We have provided them, secretly and in public, and who avert evil with good — theirs shall be the Ultimate Abode
— Qur’an 13.22
And what’s most interesting to me in all this, is that the mathematical formulations, additive and multiplicative alike, don’t make a feature of time — where as their moral equivalents tend to introduce time into the equation / situation — in each case, it’s the response to evil, real or potential, that is considered.
Is the Islamic State Islamic? The Yes and No of the matter
Sunday, November 15th, 2015[ by Charles Cameron — both answers are true in different contexts — IMO a significant point that previous discussion has tended to overlook ]
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Were (are) the Khawarij Muslim? That’s the question I keep thinking of when discussion of whether IS (or AQ) is Islamic comes up. From a Muslim perspective, they were heretics. Joas Wagemakers identified the central distinctive opinion of the Khawarij thus:
The first of these is the Khawarij’s belief that revolt against Muslim rulers was allowed if they were deemed insufficiently pious. When ‘Ali accepted arbitration with Mu‘awiya, the people later known as Khawarij reportedly shouted ‘judgement is God’s alone’ (la hukm illa li-llah). In the context of that event, this referred to their belief that only God had the authority to arbitrate, not human beings, and that ‘Ali should not have accepted Mu‘awiya’s offer. The slogan later came to represent their broader view that all judgements and rulings should be left to God, thus applying Qur’anic rulings so strictly that they expelled Muslims guilty of major sins from their community and fought them. Because they believed sinful Muslims to be unbelievers (kuffar, singular: kafir), they directly applied passages from the Qur’an pertaining to jihad against non-Muslims to those of their co-religionists who were less than perfectly pious.
From the perspective of what I’m going to call “ongoing Islam” they were heretics — the very name Khawarij indicates those who have gone out, ie left the religion of Islam — and yet their heresy was that of “fundamentalizing” Islam, being, if you like, excessively Islamic.
Consider: according to a hadith reported in Abu Dawud:
The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “There will be dissension and division in my nation and a people will come with beautiful words but evil deeds. They recite the Quran but it will not pass beyond their throats. They will leave the religion as an arrow leaves its target and they will not return until the arrow returns to its notch. They are the worst of the creation. Blessed are those who fight them and are killed by them. They call to the Book of Allah but they have nothing to do with it. Whoever fights them is better to Allah than them.”
As a student of religions might say, their use of the Qur’an marks them as clearly Islamic, and as a Muslim theologian might say, they have clearly departed the religion, in truth “they have nothing to do with it.”
Many contemporary Muslims would say of IS, its leader and members, that they “call to the Book of Allah but they have nothing to do with it” — and they have every right to say that. Those, however, who wish to understand what drives IS do well to understand the theology and eschatology involved, as well as the psychology of the passions they invoke — and also the Islamic context in which IS may well be viewed as having by the very nature of their excesses left the religion..
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This post is copied wholesale from a fascinating conversation among friends (Mark Safranski, J Scott Shipman, Michael J. Lotus, Dan Tdaxp, Joshua Treviño, Lynn Rees and others) in response to Tanner Greer’s post Vox Will Never Understand Islam… Or Any Religion, Really, which is itself a response to a Vox piece by Max Fisher, The perfect response to people who blame Islam for ISIS.
Please share this post if you find it helpful.
On the events in Paris, Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option
Sunday, November 15th, 2015[ by Charles Cameron — contrasting the ideal with “this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world” ]
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A few weeks back I read a piece by Rod Dreher around the concept of a Benedict Option recently, and liked it well enough that it sits in a special folder I have labeled 3 Major Papers, waiting for me to find the time to write it up in detail, offering my own suggested buttresses and side chapels to Dreher’s overall quasi-monastic structure. The Option itself derives from a paragraph in Alasdair MacIntyre‘s book, After Virtue:
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers? they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St Benedict.
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Here’s my koan, as of yesterday, hearing the news of the multiple attacks in Paris and following Twitter to peer and pierce as best I could through the immediate fog towards the kernel of the matter. It takes the form of two tweets, the second in response to the first:
So what of your refugee scheme, #AngelaMerkel? You will see what happened in Paris tonight multiplied massively all over Germany.
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 14, 2015
and:
Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, & did not minister to You? https://t.co/4xtsMIUSyu
— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) November 14, 2015
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My immediate reaction, dismayed at Dreher’s tweet, is to agree with Laura Seay‘s response. And I’m far from alone in this, as a glance at some other responses to Dreher easily confirms:
@roddreher If this ideology is part of the #BenedictOption, I want nothing of it.
— Benjamin Brandenburg (@BenBrandenburg) November 14, 2015
and:
@roddreher I’m quite certain this is not in the Benedictine spirit.
— C (@surefootedllama) November 14, 2015
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So that’s the koan, the paradox — and that’s the way I lean on it.
Except that Dreher in a piece titled Refugees & the Paris Attacks, wrote again, today, and made some points that tip me towards the other side of the koan / coin:
Hesepe, a village of 2,500 that comprises one district of the small town of Bramsche in the state of Lower Saxony, is now hosting some 4,000 asylumseekers, making it a symbol of Germany’s refugee crisis. Locals are still showing a great willingness to help, but the sheer number of refugees is testing them. The German states have reported some 409,000 new arrivals between Sept. 5 and Oct. 15 — more than ever before in a comparable time period — though it remains unclear how many of those include people who have been registered twice.
Six weeks after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s historic decision to open Germany’s borders, there is a shortage of basic supplies in many places in this prosperous nation. Cots, portable housing containers and chemical toilets are largely sold out. There is a shortage of German teachers, social workers and administrative judges. Authorities in many towns are worried about the approaching winter, because thousands of asylum-seekers are still sleeping in tents.
The contrast between the ideal and the real couldn’t be greater: God’s in his heaven — and the devil is in the details.
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As for that “pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world” — WB Yeats in his poem, Blood and the Moon is describing Bishop Berkeley:
that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme…
It amuses me that when I look the phrase “pragmatical pig” up to make sure I quote it accurately, Google wants to correct it to “pragmatic pig” — doesn’t that massive AI know its Yeats well enough at least to have caught on to his marvelous catch-phrase?
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More on Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option as time permits and place allows..
