Hi All:
It's always a pleasure to read about current affairs and find an author
supporting the views of the MOQ. An article I happened across today
not only presented a highly interesting and different approach to the war
on terrorism, but used a couple of unmistakable MOQ-like positions to
support the argument. Basically, the author says the West is faced with
a similar situation to the motivations that brought Italy to invade Ethiopia
in the 30's, not for the usual economic or political advantages, but "to
bolster the fascist collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians
as a conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome." Today, the West
faces another aberrant "fantasy ideology" that motivates radical Islam.
The passages that struck me as being right out of the MOQ book are as
follows:
"The allusion to William James's famous essay "The Will to Believe" is
not an accident, for James exercised a profound influence on the two
thinkers essential to understanding both Italian fascism in particular and
fantasy ideology in general - Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel. All
three men begin with the same assumption: If human beings are limited
to acting only on those beliefs that can be logically and scientifically
demonstrated, they could not survive, simply because this degree of
certainty is restricted only to mathematics and the hard sciences -
which, by themselves, are not remotely sufficient to guide us through
the world as it exists. Hence, human beings must have a large set of
beliefs that cannot be demonstrated logically and scientifically - beliefs
that are therefore irrational as judged by the hard sciences."
Sound familiar--scientific intellect ill-equipped to control society?
"There is one decisive advantage to the "evildoer" metaphor, and it is
this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make
treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like
you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers' point of view.
You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with
them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill
them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal
with a fatal epidemic - you try to wipe it out.
So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one that
is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease. The fantasy ideologies
of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus in susceptible
populations: Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart
Mill's marketplace of ideas - fantasy ideologies were not debated and
examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew
and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who
accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They
were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other
competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism
into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will."
Here the connection to the MOQ should be transparent. But for those
who may have forgotten, here's the pertinent quote from LILA, Chap.24:
"Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its ethnic
connection, and limit or destroy destructive biological patterns with
complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys germs, before
those biological patterns destroy civilization itself."
If you would like to read the entire article (which I highly recommend) it
can be found at:
http://www.policyreview.org/AUG02/harris.html
Platt
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