Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 21:28:09 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Post-secular humanity (part 1 of several)




Shooting from the hip, JH (in his prize lecture) says of the 9/11
event "these suicidal murderers...were motivated by religious
convictions" (paragraph 3), as if there's meaning to pathological
criminality that is entitled to understanding, if not obscenely
recognizing their membership in a dialectic of Knowledge and Faith.
"For them, those symbols of globalizing modernism were the embodiment
of the Great Satan" (3). Each to his own, eh? "...[W]e too, ...were
moved to Biblical imagery..." (4), the moved with the moved, in a
Movement of historical coherence.  

But in America, the mourning moved less within "Synagogues, churches
and mosques [being] filled up everywhere, as if the blind attacks had
struck a religious chord deep within the innermost core of secular
society" (though that, too) and more within a sense of shared
nearness in neighborhoods, streets, etc., that wasn't about
secularity but was about an *intimacy* of shared humanity. OH, you
say, *that's* the secularity! But, no, secularity is the abstracted
component of a grand narrative that observes from a distance.  
 
The crime, the pathology is appropriated into "fundamentalism" by JH
(5), but really the crime had NOTHING credibly to do with authentic
religious fundamentalism (as the entire Islamic religious community
insists). To polite society, "What struck us immediately about the
Islamic perpetrators was the imbalance between their ends and their
means" (5) but the perpetration had nothing to do with Islam (or
oppression in Arab societies). JH is *way* off the mark. "[A]n
imbalance that has emerged in the perpetrators' home countries
between culture and society in the wake of an accelerated and radical
modernization" (5) has meaning that is NOT "reflect[ed]" in elitist
criminality fronting as something radically meaningful. 
 
"What under more fortunate conditions might have been considered a
process of creative destruction offers these countries no prospect
that can adequately compensate for the suffering caused by the
collapse of traditional ways" (6). So, JH would assimilate such crime
to some expression of the oppressed (though the "radical" leadership
are narcissistic, well-educated slackers with no connection to their
oppressed brethren). It's just not the case that "these countries
[have] no prospect," etc. "The prospect of improved material living
conditions" comes with the hard work of organization, education,
communication, etc.; it involves confrontations through the UN,
media, media, and media, diplomacy, NGOs, etc.  It is NOT the case
that "What is decisive is that the prospect of spiritual freedom,
which finds its political statement in the separation of church and
state, has been impeded there by feelings of humiliation" (6). No,
what is decisive is that fundamentalist state religion (the Whabbi
movement in Islam) is just as integral to the authority of the Sa'ud
dynasty as it is to the rationalization of jihad. No, you say, it's
so much more complex than this? Indeed! One is *so far* from getting
at what is decisive by assimilating suffering into grand thematics. 
 
"Even in Europe, where centuries have been spent trying to work out a
sensible accommodation with the Janus head of modernity,
'secularization' is still accompanied by highly ambivalent feelings,
as evident in the controversy over biotechnology" (7). Seque as is
convenient. "There are obdurate orthodoxies in the West as well as in
the Middle and Far(ther) East, and among Christians and Jews as well
as Muslims" (7). So true; perhaps the lecture should have begun here,
rather than in a play for relevance.  "Those who wish to avoid a
'clash of civilizations' must therefore keep in mind the
still-unresolved dialectic inherent in our own Western process of
secularization" (8). I DO disagree. I recall the group of U.S.
Muslims who recently embarked on a pilgrimage to Arab regions to show
(with many visual aids) the compatibility of relgions in the U.S. and
the freedom of religion that is commonplace here--highlighting a lack
of understanding and communication and education in the Arab world,
not a conflictual dialectic of inherency. 

Until later,

Gary




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