In a supremely disappointing -- and, for polar bears, life-threatening -- move last Friday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced he would endorse a Bush policy condemning the polar bear to extinction instead of rescinding the rule as requested by Congress. Salazar ignored hundreds of thousands of citizen petitions -- more than 94,000 of them from Center for Biological Diversity supporters -- plus letters from scores of lawmakers, 44 law professors, more than 130 conservation organizations, and more than 1,300 prominent scientists. The rule specifically exempts greenhouse gas emissions from Endangered Species Act review even though global warming is driving the polar bear extinct.
"Salazar's decision today is a gift to Big Oil," declared the Center's Biodiversity Program Director Noah Greenwald. We're already in court fighting the bad polar bear rule and will soon press for an injunction to bar its use.
I can't find the quote online, but if I can trust my memory, it was from a V.S. Naipaul interview. The author was asked how he thought the situation in the Middle East would end, and he said that it would end with "victory for one side and defeat for the other". The interviewer thought this sounded a bit harsh, to which Naipaul replied that he was not condoning the situation, that was simply what he saw.
With the ascent of Obama to office, perhaps the world begins to look different. After all, the closure of the detention facilities at Guantanamo seems a symbolic and practical step towards dismantling entrenched mechanisms of war. However, it is probably still too early to become complacent in one's hope. In London Review of Books, David Bromwich has the following to say:
To judge by the nomination of Hilary Clinton as secretary of state and the likely nomination of Dennis Ross as Middle East envoy, Obama wants to be seen as someone who intends no major change of course. In a televised interview on 11 January, he said he would deal with Israel and Palestine in the manner of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The unhappy message of his recent utterances has been reconciliation without truth; and reconciliation, above all, for Americans. This preference for bringing-together over bringing-to-light is a trait of Obama's political character we are only now coming to see the extent of. It is an element - until lately an unperceived element - of a certain native moderation of temper that is likely to mark his presidency. Yet his silence on Gaza has been startling, even immoderate.
The implication of this passage is that Obama might believe peace possible only through chloroforming the truth. When both or all sides are allowed a voice, according to such a belief, conflict is inevitable. If Obama does, in fact, believe such a thing, then it might be hard to blame him. Historically, almost any kind of difference has been enough to inflame human insecurity to a murderous degree. To pluck one random example from history, Galileo expressed an opinion (now generally accepted as fact) that differed from many of those around him, and was put on trial and forced to recant - in this case the peace being enforced by chloroform.
Such controversies continue. For instance, not long ago. Michel Houellebecq was put on trial for calling Islam "the dumbest religion".
From the article linked to:
The controversial writer is being sued by four Islamic organisations over his comments about his book, Platform, in an interview last year with the literary magazine Lire.
The novel is also cited in the case being brought by the largest mosques in Paris and Lyon, the National Federation of French Muslims (FNMN) and the World Islamic League.
France's Human Rights League has also joined them, saying that Mr Houellebecq's comments amount to "Islamophobia".
The case has become a cause celebre, which, like the Salman Rushdie affair in the UK, raises questions about the appropriate limits, if any, to be placed on freedom of expression.
Houellebecq's position?
"I have never displayed the least contempt for Muslims," he said, but added, "I have as much contempt as ever for Islam".
This seems to be a retort of admirable clarity. There are, of course, differences between Galileo's trial and that of Houellebecq, but there is at least one very worrying similarity.
Mr Houellebecq's lawyer, Emmanuel Pierrat, argues that the case effectively re-establishes the notion of blasphemy, despite the fact that France is a secular state and has no such law.
Had he been found guilty, Houellebecq would have faced "up to a year in prison and a 52,000 euro fine".
Fortunately - I have no qualms in saying that - the suit was eventually dismissed.
Is war inevitable? Is the only way to peace to choloroform into silence the voices on one side?
The monk led him back through the forest of silver towers, to a clearing where he found the little man standing. He was looking at a sculpture resting on a pedestal. It was fashioned in the shape of a young woman, and at its base was a tiny slot with two metal switches. The little man depressed one switch, then the other, then flipped both.
"Well, what does it do?" Richard Dawkins said.
The little man closed his palm and brought it away from the sculpture, then offered it to Richard Dawkins, who held out his own hand. After a moment he felt something slippery and cold. He looked down. A little golden cube sparkled in the reflected light of the towers. As he watched, it melted in the palm of his hand. He held it to his lips and received a faint taste of cinnamon.
"It provides ice cubes," the little man said. "Some of the ice cubes are gold and others are silver, and others are gold and silver at the same time."
"You mean they're mixed. Their colors are mixed."
"No, that would be absurd. The combined cubes are both gold and silver at the same time."
"But the properties," Richard Dawkins said, "The properties are complementary. The gold and silver mix together."
The little man took another cube from the sculpture and popped it into his mouth.
"Ridiculous! Nothing in the world can be complementary. The gold and silver cubes are both exclusively gold and exclusively silver at the same time. Everything is exactly itself and nothing else. The quality of qualities is that they do not merge!"
"But that's impossible," Richard Dawkins said. "Black can't very well be white now, can it?"
"Can't it? Can't it?" the little man was fairly screaming now. "You might just as soon deny that anything exists at all!"
Then, composing himself, he walked away from the sculpture and stood very straight, facing Richard Dawkins.
"Look here Dawkins, you think I am mistaken, and I think you are mistaken. There's nothing left for us to do except fight to the death."
"I think that's overstating the case somewhat," Richard Dawkins said. "Surely we could agree to disagree?"
"Impossible," said the little man. He signalled, and one of the monks walked over, carrying a tray. On it were a number of rubber bands.
"Choose your weapon, Dawkins," said the little man, taking a thin old band of red elastic. He drew it back and aimed it at Richard Dawkins, who had chosen a thicker green band. The two of them moved several feet apart.
"On your mark," intoned the monk. "Get set...go."
The red elastic band zipped past Richard Dawkins' head. Richard Dawkins feinted to the side, then fired the green band at the little man, striking him in the chest. The little man collapsed to the sand.
"You've killed him," the monk said. "You've won."
Several of the other monks descended on the little man and helped him to his feet. He walked to the other side of Richard Dawkins. Then, without a word he took off his shoes. The monks handed him a box tied with a red lace thread.
"Now you must wear the shoes that can never be removed." one of them said.
The little man accepted the box, glared at Richard Dawkins with a look of immortal hatred, and set off back through the desert.
It struck me as very 'true' metaphysically, that as far as pure ideas are concerned, there is nothing to do but fight to the death. It is also interesting that, in this story, the death incurred is not necessarily literal, fatal death, or meaningful at all, but still results in "immortal hatred".
Indeed, Dawkins makes a bold attack on tolerance as it is manifested in society’s permitting people to rear their children in their own religious traditions. He turns an especially cold eye on the Amish:
“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture.”
The fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens this beleaguered planet as little as any to be found in the Western world merits not even a mention.
Yet Dawkins himself has posited not only memes but, since these mind viruses are highly analogous to genes, a meme pool as well. This would imply that there are more than sentimental reasons for valuing the diversity that he derides. Would not the attempt to narrow it only repeat the worst errors of eugenics at the cultural and intellectual level? When the Zeitgeist turns Gorgon, the impulses toward cultural and biological eugenics have proved to be one and the same. It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.
Memes, like genes, fight for evolutionary dominance. We know that biologcial diversity is valuable, and that dominance of the human race is undoing that diversity and threatening to tip us into catastrophe. But what about meme diversity. Theoretically, this is also favoured, by some, in what we call 'multi-culturalism'. And yet, in a way, meme diversity is even harder to keep in healthy balance than biological diversity, because, as portrayed in the Justin Isis tale, all memes are programmed to fight all other memes to the very death - victory for one side and defeat for the other. The only memes that make some - problematical - attempt to do otherwise are such pluralist memes as Daoism, Buddhism and so on, and even these are not yet entirely free from the 'defeat or victory', 'with us or against us' programming of other memes.
Recently, Momus wrote a blog post about this dilemma - how do the pluralist memes embrace the anti-pluralist memes as part of their pluralism? Or, as he put it, "whether, if we support openness, we must remain closed to the things we find closed, thereby contradicting ourselves."
I left some comments under the entry. I quote from one of them:
The essential issue you've written about (how to be open to what is closed, or whether you should be open to it), really is something that occupies a lot of mental space for me. I do find myself taking sides, but this frustrates me. It doesn't seem to get anywhere. It seems like conflict almost for the sake of it in the end, not in order to arrive at a resolution.
I suppose eternal war of this sort is tolerable if no one is playing to win, but only playing to play. But really to wish to vanquish the enemy, to have no more bambastic [sic], climactic art, for instance... Well, in this particular case, such a victory doesn't really appeal to me. I suppose there might be some areas in which I'd like to see such a victory.
Momus's reply was as follows:
Oh, you can take sides without banishing or vanquishing, Quentin! As Cage says, "We can both live".
We can both live. It seems so obvious. And yet, to many, it is not. To whoever killed Theo Van Gogh, for instance, it was not. Religion is a meme, and memes, as much as genes, seem to be about ensuring the immortality of a particular identity. To attack a meme - merely by disagreeing with it, by having a different meme - is to attack the very source of a person's proposed immortality, or so it must appear to them, depending on the meme.
If it's a case of victory and defeat with all memes, then it is war to the last standing, since all memes must vary slightly. Is that the logical conclusion of all this? One meme, just as genetic engineering and other factors would seem to promise that we are on the road to the dominance of one genetic pattern? Can a world even exist with such lack of diversity, or will it inevitably collapse on itself at that point?
Certainly, I don't know. All this is still a dilemma for me, and a serious question that requires the most serious consideration. One thing that seems sure is this, Sharia Law is not multi-culturalism.
We can both live. We can both live, as long as we are happy to see that even when our memes attempt to fight each other to death, our genes, our bodies, still live, and that, perhaps even in the case of meme-death, the death is not fatal, and immortality is ensured through "immortal hatred".
In The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq wrote that language seems almost designed for conflict (the battle of meme vs meme), but that in physical closeness (he was talking about sex, mainly) harmony can be achieved. Make love, not war? As Leonard Cohen might say, "You can still get married"? It's easy to hate someone you've never met, because you've only seen their ideas - their memes. It's usually harder to hate someone in their presence, and the presence of their body (I realise there are exceptions here). Perhaps if I have any hope that the war might ever end, or that it might become a war whose only casualities are the 'playing-to-play-not-to-win' casualties of memes, who pretend to die for a while for the sake of the game, it is in the curious idea that people might begin to listen to their bodies more - bodies that can live and let live, so that we can both live, and bodies that know the harmony that is not in language.
WIDGETIZE