Finally watched this movie. I had been putting it off, since I knew it would not end well. Frankly, it didn’t even begin well. Yet, the world is what it is, and it is the task of good people to see it as it is, in all its horror and glory.
My main thought was that Islam in most of the world is characterized as what can only be called gender Apartheid. Why is it that the screaming classes, the moaning classes, the feel gooders, and do-gooders have so little to say about the rights of women in Islam?
Really, it’s quite simple: they literally, clinically and very definitionally, have no principles. They reject the Enlightenment. They reject the concept of universal human rights. They reject, really, the rights of women, as a subclass of the more general rejection of human rights. They do not recognize right and wrong.
They only recognize, as I have often commented, legal and illegal. Thus the stoning of Soraya, reprehensible as it was even within the confines of Islam–where women have to prove their innocence, and men have to be proven guilty–was quite acceptable since it involved DUE PROCESS.
It is quite acceptable to try and release guilty mass murderers if, what? If they are tried and the evidence found wanting for ANY REASON.
This is nihilism, pure and simple.
This point is less than obvious. When most people think of nihilists–well, hell, I wonder what they do think of? The Big Lebowski? Nihilists are people who, at the end of the day, believe in–and are willing to fight for–nothing. The people who articulate this doctrine dress fashionably sloppily. They go to yogurt shops and coffee houses. They watch Seinfeld, and Dexter and Modern Family and Dancing with the Stars (or whatever the hell else people watch). They are polite, and tip their waiters at least 15%. They say “cool” a lot.
And they are morally bankrupt, and their ideas have consequences within the REAL WORLD. Real women, in particular, are hurt and killed because they SAY NOTHING about the systematic abuse of women in much of the world.
To be clear, conservatives, by and large, have no desire to express politically a desire to tell other nationsl how to live their lives. We can view Iran as an awful place, which abuses women and genuinely decent people for reasons of sadism and political convenience–a place utterly devoid of the grace of God–and yet not view it as our duty to tell them how their nation should be run, since our goal is in the main the protection of the United States.
Just as consistently, we can view it as morally contemptible–as I do–and call it evil.
Leftists, for their part, are constantly rendering moral judgements, but almost invariably in favor of anyone but the post-Enlightenment West. Chavez is the moral superior of the United States. So is Ahmadinejad. Why? He isn’t a “colonialist”. He is just a sadistic misogynist and anti-Semite. In Leftoworld, that is hardly a strike against him.
Yet real people get hurt. It is one thing not to condemn him. It is another altogether to render a moral judgement in his favor. One does not move us in a positive direction. The other moves us in the direction of countenancing evil.
For my part, I am quite willing to say that God has abandoned Iran, and most of the Islamic world. Their oil–far from being a blessing–is in my view a curse that has caused their social world to remain in a state of inertia which has prevented genuine moral growth.
Even within this film, a sign was rendered from God, which was ignored. God is not silent, in my view. He is simply faced at times with the willfully deaf. There are in my view few sins which are punished. Willful ignorance is one of them.
I am not a huge fan, but I have read one book by Gurdjieff, “Meeting with Remarkable Men”. It was an enjoyable book, in which he was in fact a successful “wiseacre”, as he put it, inserting many covert symbolic narratives in the strangest of places. One point he made, which I have remembered, is that he was successful in infiltrating himself into the Qaaba complex, and found God curiously missing. He found the essence of genuine Islam, on the contrary, in Central Asia.
No doctrine which is immune to perception can be enduringly useful. This is really quite simple. What was true in the 7th Century is not true today. No one who fails to see this can, in the end, be considered a good person, or have any reasonable expectation of realizing paradise.
God curses those who are granted sight, and yet refuse to see. It is impossible for me to say I am not one of those people; yet I can say I do my best daily to trip myself up, and see what happens.
Edit: I thought about this, and decided I am being unfair to Islam. To be clear, I’m not afraid of criticizing the religion in public. I’m pretty sure I have to die some time, and getting shot or blown up by an extremist is as good a way to go as any, and from what I can tell much better than dying of old age (or worse: boredom.)
Rather, I think to Christian history. Take Henry the Eighth. He had more than one woman executed to satisfy his lust (and desire for progeny, as I recall.) Men have beaten women in our world for just as long as they have in the Islamic world. I do think women have less rights in the Muslim world, but for all practical purposes that was the case in our own world until quite recently, say the last 100 years.
I think too to the maxim of Lao Tse to the effect that 3 in ten people are good, 3 in ten are neither good nor bad, and 3 in ten are bad. [I was never clear who the tenth person was, but I suppose we can say he or she plops down randomly in one of the three other categories.]
Why would this not apply to all people in all religious and post-religious environments? In the case of the stoning of Soraya, it was fundamentally the social dynamic of witch burning. It was a combination of a type of avarice, cowardice, stupidity, and a desire to express hatred.
It is true, too, that men from time to time feel the need to persecute women. I suppose it is in our DNA. Women do not process the world the way men do–they are “other”, in some fundamental ways–and we have testosterone and greater physical strength. This has led to much injustice over the ages.
Our task, as I have often argued, is to rise above our biological heritage, in favor of what I have termed “non-statistical coherence”. I view us as beings of light incarnated in what amount to machines. The two are clearly related, and I think at odds with one another.
This is really generic Dualism, with the difference that I believe Spirit can affect matter, in that matter, per se, does not exist outside of spirit. Maybe I am a philosophical Idealist. I don’t know the word.
What I want to see–and I’m getting off topic, but it’s my blog and I don’t have an editor–is an end to philosophizing, and a beginning of empirical data gathering. To what extent can we measure so-called morphogenetic fields? Can we induce them? What is the biological significance of coherent light within our bodies? These are concepts which are simply not being explored.
As I have said often–likely here, but I can’t remember–what I envision as the path forward to a benign future is the incorporation of key religious ideas–such as the continuance of the soul after physical death, and the connectedness of all life–into science; and the utilization of the conception of Goodness (or something like it) within existing religious and cultural narratives to facilitate global, gradual change in the direction of light, peace, and sustainable economic sufficiency.