Your analysis of ‘political Islam’ and its application seems to wholly ignore the overwhelming effects of ‘western’ colonialism in Islamic regions over the past 500 years. Western colonialism is not an ‘underlying cause’ - it is the main driver of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. The history of Islamic lands has been an almost perpetual history of penetration and manipulation by first of all Europe and now Europe and the US. Much of the terrorism they now apply has been learned from the colonisers, and this responsibility can not be shrugged off as a ‘possible’ and mere ‘underlying cause’ - it is a huge presence in Islamic history. (You say yourself that in the case of Lebanon that it is “dominated by the interests of foreign powers”.)
The scenario you describe under ’throwing money at a problem’ is fair as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The real problem with such endeavours is that they are carried out by people who have no real cultural understanding of any particular problem, no education as to what the problem really is, or why their understanding is faulty, and this is very often accompanied by ulterior motives which work against the actual goal. In short, the funds and directionality are held in the hands of outsiders.
Ultimately the ‘underlying problem’! is that much of the money in the world is held, distributed, used and profited from, by the ‘west’ - which too, has been and is warped by this very factor throughout its history.
Further, your dismissal of ‘underlying causes’ is, in my opinion, faulty. To illustrate, using your parable of the bridge, an underlying cause is very clear - the bridge was badly made. Further to that, it could possibly be the case that the bridge was badly made because the manufacturer worked, not in a society where workmanship and honesty were valued, but in one where profits and undercutting were the norm. That completes the analysis - in the case of the bridge there is no real need to go further into the causes of why the society is like that - the particular case is sufficiently described. This principle of ‘sufficient cause’ can be widely applied to prevent an unmanageable regression.
Well, read a history of the crusades, then maybe about the behaviour of the occupying French and English colonial regimes in Algeria, Syria, Iraq, etc. then go on to the war in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. The colonising powers used extreme torture, lack of respect for the lives of the indigenous inhabitants, bombed completely innocent villages from the air, etc. etc. Theirs was a policy of terrorism to keep the subject populations subjected.
Might part of the problem stem from the ambiguity of the word "cause"? In physics and related fields "causality" actully works; it is the basis of the scientific method. In social and political "Sciences", areas infested by the PMC , "SCIENCE" denotes a religion, where "scientific analysis" is a term of power, usually invoked to cancel heresy. Perhaps one solution to the issue is Confucius's “rectification of names”. I doubt this will happen until the first two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs vanish. Then the fun will start.
Actually, not really. Science is based on the idea of perfect causality, which is an idea. It actually does not work perfectly in the real world, but it is wonderful for predictions. This was the revolution in the domain of science, from the 16th and 17th century 😎
Wasn't this at the root of the other scientific revolution, in the 20th century? (the Quantum Mechanical kind?) The Newtonian conception of universe, born of the previous scientific revolution, was perfectly predictable and ran on perfectably traceable causality. The Quantum Mechanical universe is only probabilistically predictable and you can't trace the causes of "everything," or, in other words, we can't know everything. I will say that the unfortunate consequence of the way (some) poststructuralists appropriated quantum mechanical thinking was to turn it into a claim that goes like "we can't know everything, so we don't know anything, thus everything is equally right."
But what IZ is getting at seems to be both a bit different and analogous: causes exist at many levels, with varying degrees of linkages. Some of the causes, even if technically accurate, are bogus for a given purpose. If you are trying to assess responsibility for an auto accident, placing blame on the general human nature of wanting to go places faster or the invention of the internal combustion engine, would be "true" in a sense--without automobiles, no auto accidents, period!--but are absolutely useless for assigning practical responsibility (although, that, in turn, means defining what "practical responsibility" means, and that's ultimately a legal question that depends on social mores and legal logic, for which we don't--and can't--have an objective definition, rather than philosophical logic. "Rectification of names" is ultimately based on the society--we, in society X, decide to call a smerp a rabbit, and that's the way it is. And who is to define what a smerp or a rabbit is, objectively?
While the early pioneers of quantum mechanics seemed to think that it led them in a possibly non-materialist direction, the current exponents seem to believe that it forms a solid basis for their own materialistic beliefs. But as there is at the same time no general agreement as to whether life and consciousness can be explained by materialism, there seems to be no evidence that we can transfer quantum causality, or the lack of it, into the realm of human (or any other) life.
By "rectification of names" I assume you mean assigning clear and unambiguous meanings to words, or at least to weighty terms like "science" or "cause"? But who could actually do that? The French Academy or a similar body could try, I suppose, within the boundaries of one language, but even then I suspect most people will ignore it. I think it may be feasible in a smaller group, but not on a societal level; at most one can temporarily impose one's definitions by making them official.
Mind you, I sympathise, and I've long entertained similar thoughts myself. Many words used in political discourse (to give another example, "socialism", which means a totalitarian planned economy to some and a market economy with a few public utilities and regulations to others) would be much more useful if they had clear, commonly-accepted definitions. But I am not sure how something like that can be done.
Sometimes the hardest thing to admit intellectually is that 'there actually isn't a solution'. But as you point out, we've created a vast network of structures designed to self perpetuate rather than solve the problem that they were supposedly created to deal with. Liberalism seems to be the ultimate self licking ice cream in that it continually sprouts solutions to the problems it has created.
That was a very interesting essay, thank you. I remember reading bin Laden's letter to George Bush but being baffled by the disconnect of “they hate us for our freedoms”. I’m happy that you mentioned “feeling superior” in you last paragraph – that did actually help to set me straight on the position “it’s our own fault” to which I sometimes feel myself drawn. Finally, I’ve always felt comfort in the thought that Universal culture is likely to win over Islamic culture, which you radically changed my view on with the beautifully written phrase “prefer a glorious death in a battle at the End of the World to an uneventful existence as a consumer in a Liberal society”. Now I’m not so sure… Also your insight about decriminalising possession in the Netherlands, leading to a larger market and more gang violence was a an eye-opener.
"But it is also the rhetoric of despair, even if some of those who use it don’t recognise the fact. It is the rhetoric of endless trying, endless funding, endless disappointment, new programmes, programme reviews, more consultants, slightly adapted programmes, more programme reviews and finally the move to a different set of programmes where the same process begins again. It is the rhetoric of endless changes of Country Directors, of desk officers, of two-year deployments. It can continue until the sun goes cold or the money runs out, whichever happens first."
In fairness, what is the alternative to endless trying? Other than abandoning all social goals. I agree that humanity and society are imperfectible, but endless incremental improvements (a reduced crime rate, for instance) are theoretically possible and, other things being equal, desirable. I would certainly think that any government should try to pursue such goals, if it could find effective means that do not cause greater harm than they remove. However, would that not also be "endless trying"?
One could actually try to learn proximate causes and what you can do in the short term with available resources, rather than try to get at the "fundamental causes," which are usually nebulous anyways. I have the hunch that the desire to look for ever shifting "real causes" comes from the attempt to identify who is to blame for X, a product of lawyerly thinking. I think the real problem is that, if the problem is complex enough, everyone has a share of blame if you dig deeply and honestly enough. The best thing to do there is to forget about assigning blame and try to see what can be done to ameliorate the problem as much as possible, but that invites shirking with all manner of excuses--I'm not responsible for X, so I don't want to pay for it, A acted with "malice" that led to X, so A should pay for it, etc, for which the search for the real killer, eh, underlying causes, becomes the MO.
The much (unfairly imho) derided novel "Rising Sun" had this tidbit: one of the main characters had a reputation for having a strange affinity to Japan, somehow being able to figure out "those inscrutable people" based on his solving of the murders of a Japanese couple some years prior that baffled everyone else. His secret: he called the police officials in Osaka to learn about the murder victims. While some of the particulars of the societies/activities/whatever in question are quite that hard to find out--e.g. the Political Islam. Yes, detailed information will be hard to come by without expert knowledge, but the basic outlines are not that hard to learn, I suspect, if one approaches with open mind and genuine curiosity. But instead, we have so many people locked in their "they are inscrutable" mentality, even if it masquerades itself in multiculturalist garbs--we mustn't offend these inscrutable peoples even though we don't really know much about them except the stuff we make up out of our own prejudices. People who contradict them by, figuratively, calling the Osaka police, are "racists" not because of anything against the proverbial Japanese, but because they contradict the "multicultralists" and their conceptions about the Japanese.
Wasn't it AJP Taylor who said something like, in the end, all automobile accidents are caused by the invention of the internal combustion engine and the desire of humans to go places faster? (Yes, with the implication that trying to find "deep underlying causes" for anything is bound to run into problems, even if, or especially, they are technically correct.) Yet, this sort of sophistry, trying to look "deep" by suggesting "deep causes" for whatever that also happens to appeal to the morality of whoever their audience might be, seems never to go away.
"causes", like forces, are always hidden, however, the effects can be brutally visible.
the Universe has only one cause: energy transformation…‽
the hidden "causes" of brutal events has to be explained: GOD, whatever name it takes.
“Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all.”
― Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
“I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."
Your analysis of ‘political Islam’ and its application seems to wholly ignore the overwhelming effects of ‘western’ colonialism in Islamic regions over the past 500 years. Western colonialism is not an ‘underlying cause’ - it is the main driver of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. The history of Islamic lands has been an almost perpetual history of penetration and manipulation by first of all Europe and now Europe and the US. Much of the terrorism they now apply has been learned from the colonisers, and this responsibility can not be shrugged off as a ‘possible’ and mere ‘underlying cause’ - it is a huge presence in Islamic history. (You say yourself that in the case of Lebanon that it is “dominated by the interests of foreign powers”.)
The scenario you describe under ’throwing money at a problem’ is fair as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The real problem with such endeavours is that they are carried out by people who have no real cultural understanding of any particular problem, no education as to what the problem really is, or why their understanding is faulty, and this is very often accompanied by ulterior motives which work against the actual goal. In short, the funds and directionality are held in the hands of outsiders.
Ultimately the ‘underlying problem’! is that much of the money in the world is held, distributed, used and profited from, by the ‘west’ - which too, has been and is warped by this very factor throughout its history.
Further, your dismissal of ‘underlying causes’ is, in my opinion, faulty. To illustrate, using your parable of the bridge, an underlying cause is very clear - the bridge was badly made. Further to that, it could possibly be the case that the bridge was badly made because the manufacturer worked, not in a society where workmanship and honesty were valued, but in one where profits and undercutting were the norm. That completes the analysis - in the case of the bridge there is no real need to go further into the causes of why the society is like that - the particular case is sufficiently described. This principle of ‘sufficient cause’ can be widely applied to prevent an unmanageable regression.
"Much of the terrorism they now apply has been learned from the colonisers"
What do you mean by this?
Well, read a history of the crusades, then maybe about the behaviour of the occupying French and English colonial regimes in Algeria, Syria, Iraq, etc. then go on to the war in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. The colonising powers used extreme torture, lack of respect for the lives of the indigenous inhabitants, bombed completely innocent villages from the air, etc. etc. Theirs was a policy of terrorism to keep the subject populations subjected.
Might part of the problem stem from the ambiguity of the word "cause"? In physics and related fields "causality" actully works; it is the basis of the scientific method. In social and political "Sciences", areas infested by the PMC , "SCIENCE" denotes a religion, where "scientific analysis" is a term of power, usually invoked to cancel heresy. Perhaps one solution to the issue is Confucius's “rectification of names”. I doubt this will happen until the first two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs vanish. Then the fun will start.
Actually, not really. Science is based on the idea of perfect causality, which is an idea. It actually does not work perfectly in the real world, but it is wonderful for predictions. This was the revolution in the domain of science, from the 16th and 17th century 😎
Wasn't this at the root of the other scientific revolution, in the 20th century? (the Quantum Mechanical kind?) The Newtonian conception of universe, born of the previous scientific revolution, was perfectly predictable and ran on perfectably traceable causality. The Quantum Mechanical universe is only probabilistically predictable and you can't trace the causes of "everything," or, in other words, we can't know everything. I will say that the unfortunate consequence of the way (some) poststructuralists appropriated quantum mechanical thinking was to turn it into a claim that goes like "we can't know everything, so we don't know anything, thus everything is equally right."
But what IZ is getting at seems to be both a bit different and analogous: causes exist at many levels, with varying degrees of linkages. Some of the causes, even if technically accurate, are bogus for a given purpose. If you are trying to assess responsibility for an auto accident, placing blame on the general human nature of wanting to go places faster or the invention of the internal combustion engine, would be "true" in a sense--without automobiles, no auto accidents, period!--but are absolutely useless for assigning practical responsibility (although, that, in turn, means defining what "practical responsibility" means, and that's ultimately a legal question that depends on social mores and legal logic, for which we don't--and can't--have an objective definition, rather than philosophical logic. "Rectification of names" is ultimately based on the society--we, in society X, decide to call a smerp a rabbit, and that's the way it is. And who is to define what a smerp or a rabbit is, objectively?
While the early pioneers of quantum mechanics seemed to think that it led them in a possibly non-materialist direction, the current exponents seem to believe that it forms a solid basis for their own materialistic beliefs. But as there is at the same time no general agreement as to whether life and consciousness can be explained by materialism, there seems to be no evidence that we can transfer quantum causality, or the lack of it, into the realm of human (or any other) life.
By "rectification of names" I assume you mean assigning clear and unambiguous meanings to words, or at least to weighty terms like "science" or "cause"? But who could actually do that? The French Academy or a similar body could try, I suppose, within the boundaries of one language, but even then I suspect most people will ignore it. I think it may be feasible in a smaller group, but not on a societal level; at most one can temporarily impose one's definitions by making them official.
Mind you, I sympathise, and I've long entertained similar thoughts myself. Many words used in political discourse (to give another example, "socialism", which means a totalitarian planned economy to some and a market economy with a few public utilities and regulations to others) would be much more useful if they had clear, commonly-accepted definitions. But I am not sure how something like that can be done.
Sometimes the hardest thing to admit intellectually is that 'there actually isn't a solution'. But as you point out, we've created a vast network of structures designed to self perpetuate rather than solve the problem that they were supposedly created to deal with. Liberalism seems to be the ultimate self licking ice cream in that it continually sprouts solutions to the problems it has created.
That was a very interesting essay, thank you. I remember reading bin Laden's letter to George Bush but being baffled by the disconnect of “they hate us for our freedoms”. I’m happy that you mentioned “feeling superior” in you last paragraph – that did actually help to set me straight on the position “it’s our own fault” to which I sometimes feel myself drawn. Finally, I’ve always felt comfort in the thought that Universal culture is likely to win over Islamic culture, which you radically changed my view on with the beautifully written phrase “prefer a glorious death in a battle at the End of the World to an uneventful existence as a consumer in a Liberal society”. Now I’m not so sure… Also your insight about decriminalising possession in the Netherlands, leading to a larger market and more gang violence was a an eye-opener.
"But it is also the rhetoric of despair, even if some of those who use it don’t recognise the fact. It is the rhetoric of endless trying, endless funding, endless disappointment, new programmes, programme reviews, more consultants, slightly adapted programmes, more programme reviews and finally the move to a different set of programmes where the same process begins again. It is the rhetoric of endless changes of Country Directors, of desk officers, of two-year deployments. It can continue until the sun goes cold or the money runs out, whichever happens first."
In fairness, what is the alternative to endless trying? Other than abandoning all social goals. I agree that humanity and society are imperfectible, but endless incremental improvements (a reduced crime rate, for instance) are theoretically possible and, other things being equal, desirable. I would certainly think that any government should try to pursue such goals, if it could find effective means that do not cause greater harm than they remove. However, would that not also be "endless trying"?
One could actually try to learn proximate causes and what you can do in the short term with available resources, rather than try to get at the "fundamental causes," which are usually nebulous anyways. I have the hunch that the desire to look for ever shifting "real causes" comes from the attempt to identify who is to blame for X, a product of lawyerly thinking. I think the real problem is that, if the problem is complex enough, everyone has a share of blame if you dig deeply and honestly enough. The best thing to do there is to forget about assigning blame and try to see what can be done to ameliorate the problem as much as possible, but that invites shirking with all manner of excuses--I'm not responsible for X, so I don't want to pay for it, A acted with "malice" that led to X, so A should pay for it, etc, for which the search for the real killer, eh, underlying causes, becomes the MO.
Thanks. I missed that connection.
The much (unfairly imho) derided novel "Rising Sun" had this tidbit: one of the main characters had a reputation for having a strange affinity to Japan, somehow being able to figure out "those inscrutable people" based on his solving of the murders of a Japanese couple some years prior that baffled everyone else. His secret: he called the police officials in Osaka to learn about the murder victims. While some of the particulars of the societies/activities/whatever in question are quite that hard to find out--e.g. the Political Islam. Yes, detailed information will be hard to come by without expert knowledge, but the basic outlines are not that hard to learn, I suspect, if one approaches with open mind and genuine curiosity. But instead, we have so many people locked in their "they are inscrutable" mentality, even if it masquerades itself in multiculturalist garbs--we mustn't offend these inscrutable peoples even though we don't really know much about them except the stuff we make up out of our own prejudices. People who contradict them by, figuratively, calling the Osaka police, are "racists" not because of anything against the proverbial Japanese, but because they contradict the "multicultralists" and their conceptions about the Japanese.
What is referred to when the author uses the abbreviation, “PMC”?
Professional and Managerial Caste - see end of first paragraph.
Hum... I though it was Politico-Media Complex.
Which might not be that different anyway.
Wasn't it AJP Taylor who said something like, in the end, all automobile accidents are caused by the invention of the internal combustion engine and the desire of humans to go places faster? (Yes, with the implication that trying to find "deep underlying causes" for anything is bound to run into problems, even if, or especially, they are technically correct.) Yet, this sort of sophistry, trying to look "deep" by suggesting "deep causes" for whatever that also happens to appeal to the morality of whoever their audience might be, seems never to go away.
"causes", like forces, are always hidden, however, the effects can be brutally visible.
the Universe has only one cause: energy transformation…‽
the hidden "causes" of brutal events has to be explained: GOD, whatever name it takes.
“Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all.”
― Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
“I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."
—Albert Einstein (1879-1955)