Dangerous Ideas

There is, let me assure you, nothing more egocentrical than an embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda...(attaching) to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision on everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue.

George Kennan

Remember, not so long ago, when internet enthusiasts were hailing the transformative powers of open source codes and materials that would exponentially expand consciousness and bring humankind closer together because people would care about each other more? Remember, the internet was going to be that Connectivity Machine that would unite all comrades, equalize traditional power bases by empowering virtually everyone on the planet with the same brilliant ideas that were mostly the purview of the privileged classes in the past? Whatever happened to that dream?

Yes, occasionally one stumbles onto a site with public domain sources, no ads and no pleas for contributions, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. Instead, there is a profusion of proprietary sites based much more on exclusivity than democratic inclusion, members-only rather than E Pluribus Unum. And, quite frequently, the most flagrant exclusionists are intellectuals lobbying for their own vested interests and promoting their wares. Cumulatively, it’s rather sad to see so many truly democratic opportunities squandered for the sake of self-promotion and profitability, and more often than not, half-baked philosophies - many of them with severe political implications.

Take for instance, http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_index.html, a site run by the brilliant literary agent, self-proclaimed impresario, indefatigable secularist, and if you believe the hype - a modern day revolutionary changing the world in his own inimitable way - John Brockman. Brockman insists that since the literary culture and its intellectuals have lost their way, scientists are now leading the Third Culture, profoundly shaping society via their empirical discoveries. Sounds cool, huh?

Unfortunately, the promise is far greater than the actual delivery. The site’s main intent, and the core interest of many of Brockman’s clients, is to expansively legitimize Darwinian evolution in order to delegitimize religion and refute the existence of God. To those aiming to keep Church separate from State and diminish the influence of fundamentalists, the objective sounds magnificent. But as knowledgeable as all of those Third Culture intellectuals are, none of them singularly or collectively can disprove the existence of God, certainly not on an empirical basis. Not only do they look foolish in trying to do so, but they’re escalating what should be mainly a private concern, namely the belief in God, into an ideological issue with incendiary ramifications on both domestic and international fronts. Granted, the fundamentalists are doing the same, but should the ideal response involve reactionary ideology that keeps the Culture Wars resonating in the key of shrill?

Rather than fight the Culture Wars based primarily on the premise that Church should be, according to the normative operations of a true democracy, segregate from State - whether there is or is not a God - Brockman’s Brigade chooses to go another step, into full fledged ideology. Call it the ideology of Secularism. Its one of the reasons millions of Muslims despise the West.

In retrospect, what was wrong with the kind of secularism practiced by Jefferson and Franklin, who, despite being a Quaker, at least on paper, entertained many of Voltaire’s doubts and Hume’s Skepticism? To garner their personal views on the belief in God, and many other religious matters, readers must pay more attention to what was between the lines of what they wrote. Today, secularists, more emboldened by the implications of scientific discoveries, are far less willing to hold their pen, as it were. In this kick-ass Grand Theft Auto environment of ours even the intellectuals want to rumble in the jungle.

If they had the goods - the solid irrefutable evidence of there being no God - then let them hold court. But for all their genuine credentials in the empirical trades, they’re no more than second rate philosophers, tooling around in the thicket of ontology, cosmology, and theology when it comes to disproving God. And not one of them, ranging from Stephen Jay Gould (RIP) to Richard Dawkins, from Daniel Dennett to Brockman himself, possesses the exquisite skills of the great secularists through the ages, including Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Karen Armstrong.

That doesn’t mean, however, the site isn’t worth a visit; there is an abundance of brilliance. Too bad much of it’s dedicated to ontological negation rather than to the areas of expertise most of them practice. Biology, after all, is not philosophy, but apparently many of them haven’t gotten that memo. Indeed, for all the bluster about the Third Culture, the simple truth is that many of those scientists aren’t simply content to practice science; they’d rather involve themselves in literature and philosophy - the culture that, supposedly, their science had already eclipsed.

On the http page cited above, the challenge for contributors has been to list ideas they consider dangerous, in honor of Dennett’s book, "Darwin’s Dangerous Idea." Surprisingly, for all the stratospheric IQs, most of the responses have been rather banal. After all, ideologues following along like lemmings don’t usually plum the far reaches of creative potentiality since they’re too busy defending the Pro Darwinian Secularism that will, they hope, lead us to that religionless, godless enlightened world of the future when the only superstition remaining will be architects who still refuse to include a 13th floor into their schematic. It almost sounds like Marxian Communism at times, only without the resdistributive mechanisms to aid the proletariat.

Though no one asked, of course, I have my own suggestion for Dangerous Idea - one currently circulating on left wing blogs: an essay entitled, "The Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency." See - http://72.14.209.104/search
q=cach...

Too bad so much brain power has been dedicated to other, less significant causes, such as Darwinian Secularism than to the deadly, immoral and inexcusable "War on Terror." For instance, consider the essay’s hubristic prescription regarding the war in Iraq: "Our enemies are fighting us as insurgents because they think insurgency is the best chance for victory. We must prove them wrong."

Are the Iraqi revolutionaries who are struggling in an effort to fathom a sense of sovereignty, who are convinced that the occupying force no longer has the legitimacy to be there, actually "our enemies"? And are they actually insurgents? The Oxford dictionary tells us insurgents are rebels and that rebels fight against established authority. Is the U.S. force the established authority? Does it have the authority, either internationally or within the Middle East, and in particular in Iraq, to serve as the ruling authority? No. Strictly speaking because the Iraqi constitution established Shiria as the ruling authority, and thus the U.S. forces are the insurgents against that authority. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it.

Additionally, the neoconservative Administration insists we’ve established a democracy in Iraq; then if that’s true, and most of the people in that country want the U.S. forces out then why not abide by their democratically formed wishes and leave?

Every war, arguably, has its own Catch 22. The following recommendation in the essay succinctly underscores that phenomenon: "Ideological support can be sundered by redressing the grievances that fueled the insurgency." Absurdist playwrights, Are you paying attention?

How are the U.S. forces, ill equipped to handle an alien Islamic culture, going to redress a general hatred, or at least resentment, of the West? How are the U.S. forces going to restore Sunni power, reestablish the Baathist authority and not incite Kurdish and Shia animus? How are the U.S. forces, whose presence fuels grievances, going to stay and make the situation better? How are U.S. forces going to successfully intercede into ancient tribal, sectarian, regional struggles that cannot be resolved in a court of law with foreigners presiding over the cases? Most of all, How are U.S. forces going to go back in time and settle the myriad of conflicts that have resulted from the callous colonial manipulations, including the birth and the boundaries of the nation, performed by the Brits in particular and the West in general? Who’s going to conduct that debate?

The most unsettling predicament regarding the broad spectrum of "experts" ruling our lives, ranging from fundamentalists who listen to God to Darwinian secularists who insist they know God doesn’t exist, from the ideological Neocons who actually knew very little about human nature to the military strategists still designing plays on a blackboard that could never possibly be adapted to the Iraqi quagmire, is that their expertise is exceedingly limited. And somewhere along the line, the collective wisdom of the people - that great democratic, commonsensical understanding Emerson so dearly honored - must be tapped into in order to put these so-called experts in their place and restore the dignity that they’ve robbed from our lives. Until then you’d better get comfortable with that collar around your neck because you’re going to be led wherever they decide to take us.