Obstacles and Solutions

In my previous post I posited that, if one starts with the premise that the long war is predominantly fought in the heart and mind, the enemy we are fighting is human despair, what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death. My thesis is that radical Islamism, nihilism, perhaps even subversive faiths like orientalism and socialism, are all particular manifestations of an underlying cancer. Kierkegaard lays much of the ground work for my thesis in his philosophical treatises on the self, and all I did was extrapolate his dialectical paradigm to cover and explain the current evils and obstacles that humanity now faces in the world.

Kierkegaard writes, "The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to this increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair." I think we must at least look at the possibility that Islamism is in fact a reaction to Islam's reemergence as a globally conscious ideology. Such a global consciousness, such a vivid awareness of how one "fits" into the overall dynamic, must weigh heavily upon one whose first observations, after gaining consciousness, are of failure and defeat. Muslims are especially vulnerable to a heightened "intensity of despair", because they hold in their mind a vision of absolute authority and superiority that is irreconcilable with what they see every day.

Connectivity cuts both ways, and it may be said that with Muslims, both cuts are deeper. This from Theodore Dalrymple:

Even if for no other reason, then (and there are in fact other reasons), young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a “potential space.” A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs.

The other side is represented by Muslims in exile like Salman Rushdie and Hirsi Ali. These Muslims have avoided the pitfall of despair by, ironically, being subject to constant, withering, and sometimes murderous persecution from other Muslims. They have avoided, or rather supplanted, the bedrock identity of "I am Muslim" and the consciousness that attends it. They have walked that final step and embraced the self, embraced the primacy of the self, and in doing so inoculated it against the erosion of despair.

Rushdie and Ali have avoided despair because they do not despair of themselves; they do not will themselves to change. Instead, they will the world to change and keep for themselves a rock-solid identity that is inviolable. Therefore, whatever their trials and tribulations, Muslims like these succeed because they avoid the vicious feedback loop that conquers their contemporaries; by refusing a group identity that, in its current iteration, hawks grievances and victimhood in the present while promising conquest and glory in the future, they have sidestepped most of the radical pathologies.

Nevertheless, anxiety in the face of freedom yields more anxiety, and group-identity Muslims have a considerable amount of anxiety to bring to the table.

Dalrymple demonstrates this anxiety in his essay, particularly in his talk to a would-be suicide bomber:

Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.

Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence were legitimate targets.

I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.

We are his enemies because he is unhappy. We are his enemies because he despairs, and we do not.

This dynamic, the misrelation of the self, is aggravated for another reason. Kierkegaard writes, "Despair is intensified in relation to the consciousness of the self, but the self is intensified in relation to the criterion for the self, infinitely when God is the criterion." The young Muslim sees the world as ungodly, sees his place in it as a farce, or a cruelty, and wills himself to be other than who he is. He rejects his role as an immigrant, as a student, as a lower-middle class, ordinary boy, and becomes something more, and something less. His rejection of himself creates a void where the "idea of being a Muslim" can grow, filling his being and becoming his sole identity. The self subsumed, the world becomes Manichean, grievances become universal, and he takes up the cause of his God. His consciousness of his own despair and his intimate relationship with the infinite God lead the young Westernized Muslim to deny, and then defy, the world as he sees it:

First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself.... In this form of despair, there is a rise in the consciousness of the self, and therefore a greater consciousness of what despair is and that one's state is despair. Here the despair is conscious of itself as an act.... In order to despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self. And this is the self that a person in despair wills to be.

The story of Sayyid Qutb is enlightening:

Qutb's special ability as a writer came from the fact that, as a young boy, he received a traditional Muslim education -- he committed the Koran to memory by the age of 10 -- yet he went on, at a college in Cairo, to receive a modern, secular education. He was born in 1906, and in the 1920's and 30's he took up socialism and literature. He wrote novels, poems and a book that is still said to be well regarded called ''Literary Criticism: Its Principles and Methodology.'' His writings reflected -- here I quote one of his admirers and translators, Hamid Algar of the University of California at Berkeley -- a ''Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions.'' Qutb displayed ''traces of individualism and existentialism.'' He even traveled to the United States in the late 1940's, enrolled at the Colorado State College of Education and earned a master's degree. In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear.

Qutb was the epitome of the Westernized Muslim. His education and experience in Western Culture and dominance forced him to make a choice early on. Either he would subsume his Muslim identity into the self, or his self would be subsumed into his Muslim identity. The former takes much more courage because, in a world of free individuals, failure is one's own fault. The latter's message is quite different, and takes much less bravery.

More on Qutb:

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.

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To deny freedom, to deny the primacy of the individual, is to deny the self, which leads us to a solution.

Muslims must embrace individuality, must embrace the primacy and inviolability of the self for both men and women, if they are to survive this war. As Kierkegaard would say, they must become men of this world, and happy with the self as it relates to it, if they are to avoid despair. Muslims must also develop the bravery to be introspective and self-critical while still accepting and loving the self. It is no accident that cultures and people who have the courage to look inside themselves are the most successful and the least prone to despair.

Freedom, and the concepts of possiblity and necessity that adhere to it, can lead to self-denial, self-guilt, and ultimately to despair. To deal with these currents, the self must rest firmly between the finite and the infinite. It must become the relationship between the two, and then relate that relationship back and forth between the finite world and the infinite. In doing so, the perfection of the infinite and the imperfection of the finite play out their differences through the medium of the self. Happiness can only be found in the interaction between the two. Embracing too fully one at the expense of the other can lead to emptiness, anxiety, and ultimately to despair.

The final question is one of metaphysics, and perhaps theology: what is the infinite? I posit that the infinite is Truth. Part of that Truth, a subset of it, is the answer to the question "How can humans live together and survive?". The answer to that question is morality, or virtue, as the art of living together. But that is truth on the macro scale.

Luckily for us, societal happiness and individual happiness have the same cause. Embracing virtue--a way of behaving, but using it as a way of defining oneself--guards against the sickness of despair. The virtuous man does not will himself to be different, and he interacts in the world confidently, knowing that the world is imperfect, but he less so.

Individuality (enlightened selfishness), freedom, and virtue. That is how we win the war. In other words, we will win when everyone becomes, in their mind, the ideal American.