The following is from Part II, chapter 3 of my book: They’re so Smart cause we’re so Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century. I post in here to help a friend addressing the cognitive egocentrism cum supersessionism of the Anglican Church.
Cognitive Egocentrism
In the late 60s, psychologist David Elkind
published his findings of adolescent boys and what he called their “cognitive
egocentrism,” by which he meant that they assumed that everyone else thought
about the world the same way they did – in this case, they assumed that
everyone was as preoccupied with sex as they were.[1]
This notion of cognitive egocentrism, itself borrowed from Piaget, actually has
an ironic dimension to it: normally the term refers to immature stages of
development – childhood and adolescence – and the more mature one becomes, the
more one learns to empathize with others, the less egocentric one presumably
becomes. Indeed, as one group of researchers put it: cold people (unempathic)
are far more likely to be cognitive egocentrics.[2]
And yet, ironically, paradoxically, in the 21st century, some of the
most determined, even dogmatic cognitive egocentrics come from the most
progressive and empathic circles of thinkers and activists.
Domineering/Hierarchical
Cognitive Egocentrism
The default mode is to project zero-sum. After
all, the more limited the goods – shelter, food, safety – the less generous the
attitude towards others competing for resources. The vast majority of human
history for the vast majority of humans, has taken place under conditions of very
limited resources. For hundreds of millennia, zero-sum notions of the limited
good, of the inevitable clash between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ have dominated even
relations among ‘us.’ Tribes from the Yanomamö to Australian aborigines to the
urban ghettos and suburban ZUS, inhabit a world where we have difficulty
imagining how “prevalent [the] fear of your neighbors, from attacks [to] theft
of your women by neighbors.”[3]
Few moderns appreciate how, even in its least radical interpretation, ‘love thy
neighbor as thyself’ constitutes an immensely difficult commandment.
People who live in a world where one wins only
when another loses, where few dominate and most are subject, where one ascends
through violent challenge and falls by losing, readily project their mentality
upon others, the “dark side of man.”[4]
Eli Sagan called this the paranoid imperative, that is to say, the necessity of
ruling over others lest they do so first: do
onto others before they do onto you.[5]
In both tribal relations with other clans and tribes and international
relations with other nations, the vast majority of human history has featured
this paranoid imperative.[6]
It is the very stuff of warfare until just recently: plunder or be plundered, rule
or be ruled, shame or be shamed, exterminate or be exterminated.
Nietzsche described “slave morality” as those who, while losers, complain bitterly about how unfair life, even as they dream of the power to turn the tables, to take vengeance on the unjust.[7] As the ‘democratic’ imperialist Athenians put it to the Melians:
It has been a law long before us and will be long after: Those who can, do what they will; those who cannot, suffer what they must… knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. ”[8]
Differently put: ‘Everybody thinks in terms of dominion. Everybody plays hard zero-sum games. And those who don’t, are either losers who deserve no respect and have no honor, or deceivers out to cheat you.’
Getting out of this mindset, peeling oneself even in to a limited degree, from the gravitational forces of the limbic emotions, from the urgent projection of hostility onto the other and fear of public failure and ridicule, takes great effort (indeed many people think it cannot be done). And yet, until one does, the other is almost always the foe, not a neighbor, an enemy, not a semblable, fellow citizen.
Indeed, Eli Sagan literally defined democracy (i.e., the implementation of liberal values) as a near-miraculous victory over the deeply imbedded psychological affinity for the dominating imperative:
Paranoia is the problem. The paranoid position is the defense. Democracy is a miracle, considering human psychological disabilities.”[9]
In deep-seated cases, DCE cannot even perceive the possibility of a positive-sum game: whatever the “other” does, no matter how generous it may seem, is a trap, a covert act of hostility in which the other is really jockeying for superior position in a zero-sum game. Hence DCE has strong affinity for conspiracy theories (the other is malevolent evil that must be opposed at all costs).
Liberal
Cognitive Egocentrism
The American decision not to take over the
countries they had occupied in World War II, as much as we in the post-war take
it for granted, actually constitutes a world-changing relationship to war, an
unprecedented and explicit renunciation of dominion through conquest.[10]
It laid the groundwork for the Geneva Conventions and the UN. One of the most
remarkable accomplishments of the post-modern, post-war, world is the
wide-spread consensus that people are basically good, and that the default mode
between strangers is friendly.
If you smile at me, I will understand,
Cause that is something
everybody everywhere does in the same language…[11]
This assumed benevolence is true on all levels of
consideration, from the interpersonal (where it first developed), to the
international (where it has had previously inconceivable success – UN, EU,
global civil society, and the universal declaration of human rights). The
ascension of a kind of beneficent anthropology, in which humans were
instinctively cooperative, gregarious, pacific beings, was not a foregone
conclusion. We, however, tend to take it for granted with little appreciation
of how rare and risky it is. John Tooby, the anthropologist, explains after the
Paris Bataclan attacks in 2015:
Born into a world that has been internally pacified for so long, it is easy (and convenient) to mistake this for the state of nature, and not something maintained by the costly self-sacrifice of some. People raised in cultures that are predominantly organized around cooperative rationality cannot imagine any other rationality: So when people use violence it must be that they are driven to it by desperation or searing injustice, and they will stop when given justice. No one, we think, could possibly prefer war… A cooperator wants to arrive at a win-win covenant among equals. But predators envision instead an I-win-you-lose domination.[12]
In “Wooden Ships,” cited above, two survivors of
an apocalyptic nuclear war, from opposite sides, come together and share
berries that will “probably keep us both alive.” Together, they steer away from
the tragic world of hatred, and turn now, to live, “free and easy, the way it’s
supposed to be.”
Go, take your sister then, by the hand,
lead her away from this foreign land,
Far away, where we might laugh again,
We are leaving – you don’t need us.
Anthem of the 60s.[13]
It was a radically new mindset, utterly different from the kind of us-them
thinking that dominated the previous generation.
John Lennon caught the Zeitgeist in 1971 with Imagine.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man…
This may have been one of the most influential
songs ever written, an “anthem of universal hope,” embraced by spiritual people
and hard-core socialists alike.[14]
German pianist Davide Martello drove four hours to Paris to play it outside the
Bataclan in Paris, after the Jihadi attacks of 2015.[15]
Transferred from the personal or messianic plane over to the realm of political and international relations, the new paradigm called for treating everyone, citizen and foreigner, as brothers and sisters. Starting with the civil rights movement, the justifiable accusation spread that the US and other Western governments were far from living up to their own standards… not only in the way these governments treated their own citizens, but also strangers out there in the increasingly “small” global village. The key to Chomsky’s radical critique of US and Israeli imperialism to this day, is the demand that they treat other nations and peoples with as much consideration as they claim to treat their own. The program the British mastered in the 19th century, of democracy at home, empire abroad, was no longer acceptable.
And underlying these (messianic, impossible)
ideals of dismantling the ‘us/them’ distinction entirely, lay the beneficent
anthropology that categorically rejected of the doctrine of original sin:
a notion some conservative political thinkers have thought so critical to
public order, that to deny it was to destroy the state.[16]
For the new generation, however, to think badly of the others was base, a betrayal
of the cause, a sign of racism, prejudice, a hateful, hostile act.
Discrimination, normally a sign of discernment, became a “bad thing,” and its
opposite, promiscuity (without being so named), became a “good thing.” Everyone
had to be treated equally, every stranger a (potential) friend. And as this new
approach to human relations succeeded on a planetary scale – the Marshall Plan,
the UN, the EU – it encouraged both an educational and intellectual commitment
to making the “old world” of violent zero-sum, literally unthinkable.
Killing, oppressing, bullying, shaming – all
became not only ‘bad,’ but, to a good empathic person, virtually unimaginable.[17]
And since such an approach, when widely adopted, succeeds quite admirably in
proliferating positive-sum interactions, the new mindset “took.” Instead of the
dominating imperative (rule or be ruled), we had not just mutual disengagement
(live and let live), but the empathic imperative (be nice to others and they
will be so to you). It became as difficult for liberals to imagine or
understand the zero-sum mindset as it was for the authoritarians to imagine a
positive-sum mindset.
The problem stems, to some extent, from a
confusion between empathy and sympathy. When one tries to empathize with
someone else, one tries to understand how he or she (or they) experience the
world. Too often, however, we process this as a combination of an egocentric:
“how would I feel if I were in their situation?” and a sympathetic: “they are
basically like me.” This translates into a widely held, improvisational
anthropology about the nature of people:
The vast of majority everywhere want a roof over their heads, to sleep peacefully at night, to enjoy their families, to put food in their bellies and to say good morning to their neighbors.[18]
Or,
For the most part, they want the same things: healthy families, tasty and nutritious food, comfortable shelter, labor-saving tools, leisure time to spend with friefnds and family.[19]
This generous attitude towards the ‘other,’ this projection of sympathy – ‘they’re just like us’ – lies at the heart of civil society’s ability to avoid conflict. It benefits from the hard-earned efforts of centuries to reach such an unprecedented level of a benign consensus, and only in the last two generations has it become axiomatic – a tremendous achievement with an immensely productive payoff.[20] Whatever the discontents of modern life, few would trade them for an age where pain and hunger and violence were common companions.
But this generous projection, this reversal of paranoid projection, is not always accurate. And where mistaken about the other, where engaging people and cultures still playing by zero-sum rules, it can be dangerous. If we assume sameness and cannot self-correct, especially in the face of what should be compelling evidence, then it has become a form of cognitive egocentrism, a form of learned helplessness. Liberal cognitive egocentrists cannot imagine – will not allow themselves to imagine – that other people, other cultures, do not share their values.
When religious figures, or students of religion,
declare that: “No faith teaches people to massacre innocents,” whether they
know it or not, they are playing semantic games by which they define all religion
in terms of their (understanding of their) own.[21]
On the contrary, Rene Girard argues that scapegoat sacrifices of innocents as
solutions to crisis, and the cults they engender, form the basis of most
religious life, for most of the history of mankind.[22]
There is a fundamental difference between human and humane. Sadism is a
uniquely and specifically human
trait, no matter how inhumane.[23]
Thus, projecting humane attitudes onto all humans and their religions only
sometimes succeeds in understanding and/or changing others and elevating
relations to the benefit of all. The rest of the time, it’s operating in a
world of fantastic denial.
Normally we associate this kind of thinking with liberal or progressive, ‘politically correct’ thought. But during the Bush years – widely reviled by opponents as proto-fascist – this kind of thinking dominated the administration’s thinking. In addition to the projection of Western, modern, Judeo-Christian thinking onto Islam discussed in the chapter on 9-11, Bush’s invasion of Iraq invoked this liberal projection: speaking in concert with his neo-conservative advisors, the “right-wing” president, articulated the paradigm of liberal cognitive egocentrism in defense of his Chomskyite foreign policy in Iraq:
Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are “ready” for democracy — as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences. As men and women are showing, from Bangladesh to Botswana, to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy, and every nation can start on this path. It should be clear to all that Islam – the faith of one-fifth of humanity – is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries — in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States of America.[24]
One might argue he did so cynically, but even so,
he addressed a shared Zeitgeist. While there are unquestionably some who
dream of asserting American power imperially, they will avoid any public
admission of such goals. Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, where
here, virtue is liberal values universalized.
The consensus, at least among Westerners, both
liberal and “conservative,” was widespread: democracy was a universal blessing,
which all peoples would, given the chance, embrace. In his Cairo Speech, the
newly elected President Obama articulated this “unyielding belief” as a virtual
doctrine:
that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.[25]
Here we find liberal cognitive egocentrism
elevated to the position of a) a dogmatic belief, and b) a foreign
policy doctrine. As a normally psychologically astute colleague (and
psychotherapist) said after 9-11: “I can’t understand! These terrorists lived
the good life of Western freedom and abundance? How could they commit suicide
to destroy it?”
Such imaginings became, with the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1989, a paradigmatic approach to international relations,
articulated by some of the leading Western political ‘scientists.’
A group of liberal internationalists…. led by Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., postulated that a new era of international cooperation would replace the fierce competitiveness of the bipolar system. These and other liberal internationalists predicted that spreading of democracy, stronger economic ties, and robust international organizations would usher in a more peaceful global environment. Embedded in this analysis was the assumption that national power, hitherto based on military prowess and deterrence capabilities, would be replaced with such “soft power” tools as economic ties and cultural exchange.[26] This victory of liberal values and outlook then offered Middle East specialists hope that now was the most opportune moment to change the conflict-prone region into a democratic one, economically thriving,[27] and others to believe that the newly expanded European Union would “run” the 21st century.[28]
The
Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism
What
happens when liberal and zero-sum cognitive egocentrists interact? Liberals
like to imagine that their empathy and sympathy will win over the zero-sum
players who only cling to their antagonism out of fear, and who, once they
realize they’re not in danger, will change their ways. (In this sense, it is a
secular form of missionizing for positive-sum.) And often enough, it may work.
But when a committed liberal meets a committed dominator, the dynamics work to the
former’s disadvantage.
In this case, the DCEs learn quickly to exploit the good intentions and vulnerabilities that LCEs consider their true strength against them. They speak in precisely the terms that appeal to LCE, insisting that their struggle is for human rights, fairness and justice, even as their notions of these matters differ wildly from those of the liberals to whom they appeal. Liberals find themselves confused, since both genuine moderates and demopaths use the same language.[29] Forced to judge, many liberals, eager to believe anything civil that people might say, prefer to project good faith, taking the protestations of demopaths at face value, becoming their dupes.
As a
result, a dysfunctional relationship between demopaths (DCE) and their dupes
(LCE) has emerged. Under current circumstances, where most liberals cannot even
detect the existence of their own LCE nor imagine the possibility of DCE in
others, this dysfunctional relationship works radically to the advantage of the
demopaths. When Western authorities empower demopaths rather than sincere
moderates, they hurt the forces of civil society and human rights and empower
the forces of dominion and war.
Jytte
Klausen’s book The Islamic
Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe, offers a fine, if garden variety example of LCE, when faced with
demopathy. After two years (2003-2005) of interviewing what she identified as
“the new Muslim elite” in Europe, she asks “how committed are Europe’s Muslim
leaders to liberal values?” She responds with the simple answer to which she
shall return as the definitive answer.
Europe’s Muslim leaders have embraced liberalism by engaging with the institutions of democracy. They invoke human rights to claim equality, or they appeal to the principles of humanist universalism to argue for the “equal worth” of Christianity and Islam. Either way, they draw on varieties of liberalism.30]
She thus offers a form of ‘proof,’ completely unaware of demopathic uses of this discourse which she – and she would have her readers – interprets as sincere. Nor was Klausen alone in this approach. Bruce Bawer makes an extensive case that journalists did everything they could to depict radicals as moderates, from Tariq Ramadan to your local Imam.[31]
It wasn’t as if, when she conducted her interviews, Muslim demopaths like Muhammad Omar Bakri, parading as harmless clowns when necessary, hadn’t already explained the principles explicitly: “We will use your democracy to destroy democracy.”[32] It wasn’t as if at least one of her interviewees didn’t lay out the demopathic plan in “chilling” detail giving her pause in considering the limits of tolerance… But no more than pause: “More often, however, I encountered generous and principled defenses of human rights…” Instead of serious analysis, the reader gets anodyne generalizations and goals. The worrisome trends of malicious intent, the author assures the reader, will lessen “in the face of the weakening of ancestral ethnic ties [which] facilitate integration.” The idea that non-ethnically attached, neo-Islam might replicate the al-wala’ w’al bara’ pattern of Muslim us-them thinking, and use mechanisms of integration for weapons of communitarian mobilization, apparently does not register on her screen.[33]
The book itself is testimony to the ease with which a ‘social scientist’ could then (and still can) produce publishable findings based on a systematically skewed sample – those Muslims who were using democratic means to organize – which had no more serious built-in detector for a critical variable than the author’s own generous judgments. Information professionals predictably welcomed its conclusions.[34]
And of course, the corollary to these reassurances about how “moderate” and democratically minded the new Muslim elite, was the sad but true ‘fact’ that European xenophobia and prejudice were unjustified. Thus, Klausen diagnoses the West as subject to “moral panics” for worrying about the threat to their culture posed by triumphalist Islam, and worries about Western racism and xenophobia, even as the jihadi ideology she dismisses as marginal, openly and repeatedly mobilized around the moral panic of the West’s threat to Islam, often enough staged with fake news.[35]
Opined Stanley Hoffman in the pages of Foreign policy: “By destroying [Islamophobic] bogeymen, Klausen forces us to face rationally and compassionately, sensitive and difficult issues of great importance to Europe’s future.” On the contrary, by dismissing serious threats, Klausen forced us to face, systematically misinformed, sensitive and difficult issues of great importance to Europe’s (and the West’s) future.[36] Their cognitively egocentric, virtue-signaling, empathy blinded them to the very existence of their demopathic, Caliphater, enemy.
Europe may fall to this dysfunctional dynamic, despite the occasional flash of hard questioning to identify demopaths disguising themselves as moderates, revealing the jihadi discourse beneath the demopathic “human rights” rhetoric.[37] Klausen firmly believes the “new Muslim elite” wants “respect and recognition.” She generously imagines that, on the one hand, that will suffice, on the other, that they are prepared to reciprocate respect and recognition to those who treat them as equals. Any evidence to the contrary, that triumphalist Islam does not accept equality with Kuffār, and any outbreak of that collective will to dominance – 7-7, French riots, Danish Cartoon Affair – will not deter her from her predetermined course.[38] ‘The vast majority are like us, they’re just asking for a fair shake.’
Best not
to subject our Muslim friends to uncomfortable tests for demopathy. Best not
make demands for reciprocity. Best not acknowledge the immense resistance to
making any such concession. It’s like a Western liberal asking an Arab to
sympathize with Israel, the way they expect Israel to sympathize with the
Palestinians. An uncomfortable reciprocity which reveals the imbalance and
untwists the Moebius Strip.
To
understand the disparity between how a demopath and a liberal cognitive
egocentrist dream, consider the Jihadi version of “Imagine.”
Imagine there are no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Something to kill and die for
And one religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life under our peace…
The
Caliphater Anthem.
So while Davide Martello drives to France in the wake of the Bataclan massacre (2015), in order to play Imagine, and the HuffPo thinks that he has thereby “united France,” the Jihadis have sunk one more talon into the French body politic. With this unimaginably vicious and sadistic attack, the ‘martyrs’ have created millions more dhimmi who understand whom not to piss off, and gained the admiration of untold (unknown) numbers of Calipathers around the world who burn with ardor to strike a blow.[39] If you want an example of an unequal cogwar battleground, no place better displays a more decisive rout, than among LCE dupes confronting DCE demopaths.
[1] David Elkind, “Egocentrism in Adolescence,” Child Development, 38:4 (December,
1967): 1025-1034.
[2] Ryan L. Boyd, Konrad Bresin, Scott Ode,
Michael D. Robinson, “Cognitive egocentrism differentiates warm and cold
people,” Journal of Research in
Personality, 47:1 (February 2013): 90-96
[3] Napoleon Chagnon to Richard Wrangham talking
about William Buckley’s experience in central Australia in the early 19th
century, with his and the Yanomamö in the late 20th, “Napoleon
Chagnon: Blood is their Argument,” Edge, June 6, 2013.
[4] Ghiglieri, Michael P., The Dark Side of
Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books,
2000); Wrangham, Richard and Peterson, Dale, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1996).
[5] Eli Sagan, Honey and the Hemlock***.
[6] Landes, “The Melian Dialogue, the Protocols, and the Paranoid Imperative,”
The Paranoid Apocalypse, pp. 23-33.
[7] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals ***
[8] Thucydides,
Peloponnesian Wars****
[9] Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock, p.
22. What Sagan refers to as “human psychological disabilities,” I refer to here
as limbic captivity. Rather than seeing that resistance as a disability, it
seems more productive to consider it and its constellation of emotions, a basic
dimension of human existence.
[11]
Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Wooden Ships (1968).
[12] John
Tooby, “A
Message from Paris,” Edge, November 14, 2015.
[13] Sherrylynn70,
has an excellent discussion of this “anthem.”
[14] “Imagine, by John Lennon,” Socialist
Party of Britain (n.d.); Laurie Ulter, “The Life
& Legacy of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’,” Biography, Desember
7, 2015; Josh Magnes, “The Legacy
of John Lennon,” Diamondback, October 11, 2015.
[15]
David Marans, “Pianist
Plays ‘Imagine’ Outside Bataclan, Uniting Parisians in Moment of Peace,”
HuffPost, November 14, 2015.
[16] Carl
Schmitt, the Nazi ideologue, working from the sociological observations of
Troeltsch on (millennialist) religious sects, asserted that “the denial of
original sin destroyed all social order,” and that no state could be founded on
a belief that man was innately good. Schmitt, Concept of the Political
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1932, 2010), p. 65. Or, as one
Presbyterian explained to me why Origen was a heretic for arguing that
everyone, even the devil, will eventually be saved: “without the threat of
eternal damnation there can be no social order.”
[17] The response of the “good people” in Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced to the protagonist, Amir, a (seemingly completely assimilated) Muslim from India/Pakistan when he admits to a twinge of pride when the Twin Towers went down, reflects this mentality. Even though Amir was being honest, the unthinkability of such a sentiment drove his ‘friends’ into deep indignation and eventually destroyed his relationship with his wife. Disgraced, p. 62-3.
[18] Remark of a friend in conversation.
[19] Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion,
Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (NY Penguin, 2013) p. 4. This is a
widespread meme among liberal cognitive egocentrists. See also below, Christian
Amanpour interviewing Yasser Arafat: “But you know that many, many people would
prefer… to have food in their stomachs than talk about slogans…”
[20] This
is the core of Jeremy Rifkin’s argument in The Empathic Civilization: The
Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. The book was written in
2009 with only one (passing) mention of Islamic terrorism and 9-11 (p.488).
[21] President Obama, “…no faith teaches people
to massacre innocents.” Statement
by the President,
August 20, 2014; Pope Francis, “All religions want peace; it is other people
who want war.” Pope
Francis, July 27,
2016.
[22]
Girard, Things Hidden; Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny (NY:
Knopf, 1985).
[23] A
student once criticized Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners)
for “dehumanizing” the Germans by depicting them as sadistic.
[24] George Bush, “Remarks
by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for
Democracy,” United States Chamber of Commerce Washington, D.C.,
11:05 A.M. EST. On the Chomskyite nature of the thinking (the West is to blame
for dictatorships in the rest of the world, if we support their “natural”
democratic instincts, they will get rid of their oppressors), see Landes, “Bush’s
Chomskyite Foreign Policy,” Augean
Stables, February 2, 2006.
[25]
Obama, Cairo Speech, ***; his speech in Berlin in 2008 (while still a
candidate) was a nice example of Lennon’s Imagine. See Landes, ***, Augean
Stables, ***
[26] Ofira Seliktar, Doomed to Failure?: The Politics and Intelligence of the Oslo Peace Process (Boulder CO: Praeger Security International, 2009), p. 27. For a survey, Seliktar recommends Jack Snyder, “One World, Rival Theories,” Foreign Policy 145 (2004); and her critique: Ofira Seliktar, “Realism Is Not Ignorance: A Critique of the Mearsheimer-Walt Thesis,” MERIA Journal (March 2008).
[27] See below, n. 22.
[28] Jeremy
Rifkin, The European Dream: How
Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (NY:
Penguin, 2004); T.R. Reid, The United States of Europe: The New
Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (London: Penguin, 2005); Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (London: Public Affairs,
2006). Rifkin’s work is a testimony to liberal cognitive egocentrism: The Empathic Civilization; The Race to
Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (NY: Penguin, 2009).
[29] See, for example, Daniel Pipes, “Finding Moderate Muslims: Do you believe in modernity,” Jerusalem Post, November 26, 2003.
[30] Jytte Klausen, Islamic Challenge, p. 205.
[31] Bawer, Surrender.
[32] Among the many examples of this widely used expression, see Patrick Goodenough, “Radical Islam: The Enemy in our Midst,” CNS Commentary, October 18, 2000. See also, Hasnain Kazim, “Democracy is for Infidels: Interview with an Islamic State Recruiter,” Speigel, October 28, 2014.
[33] This is not to say that everyone Klausen interviewed was a demopath; but that she had no way of testing whether they were, and therefore drew conclusions straight from rekaB Street.
[34] The quote comes from Stanley Hoffman’s review in Foreign Affairs,
[35] Klausen, Islamic Challenge, p. 128. This has become a major theme of the Islamophobia police: Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West, ed. George Mordan and Scott Poynting (NY: Routledge, 2012). On moral panics in Islam currently see:
[36] I take the allusion to “issues of great importance” as referring to Eurabia, which had come out a year earlier and either energetically denounced as conspiracy theory or not dignified with an explicit mention.
[37] Bruce S. Thornton, “Muslim ‘moderates’ are true to spirit of Islam,” Victor Davis Hanson, Private Papers, July 26, 2005.
[38] See Jytte Klausen’s post 7-7 reiteration of her 2005 conclusions: “Counterterrorism and the Integration of Islam in Europe,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 6, 2006.
[39] On the sadism, see discussion of extended torture on the second floor of the Bataclan; on the limpid response (including the police’s reluctance to intervene during torture sessions), see Louise Mensch, “Knife Torture, Castration and Severed Heads at Bataclan,” Heat Street, July 17, 2016.
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