Casting out "evil"

Covenant Zone, having recently been the target of apotropaic gestures (e.g. we're apparently a "sh*t hole") from a certain lefty site that will go unnamed, I want to link today to Lee Harris' new essay at Tech Central Station that shows us what an apotropaic gesture is. Discussing the recent incident in Pakistan where Islamic fundamentalists took over the Red Mosque, and vowed to fight the government to the death, Harris asks why the Western media comes up with all kinds of euphemisms for describing the fanatics in the Red Mosque.

In Islam, fanatical zeal has been looked upon as both the ethical and theological virtue par excellence. Furthermore, it has been the agent by which the religion of Muhammad came to dominate the hearts and minds of so much of the world. Fanatical zeal is not a pathology of Islam; it is the glue that has held it together. It was the agent that created the original community of the faithful, all of whom had first to reject the tribal identities they were born and raised with, in order to accept their radically new identity as followers of the Prophet—a profound psychological transformation that could only be brought up by fanatical commitment to their new way of life.

The same commitment also explains the amazing success with which Islam was spread in the first hundred years of its existence. Indeed, without grasping the vital role that fanaticism has historically played in Islam, neither its successful birth nor its far more spectacular spread would make sense. The religion of the Prophet was not a religion for the lukewarm, the skeptical, the wishy-washy, the moderate, or the reasonable. If it had been, we would never have heard of it, because it would have been almost immediately absorbed back into the tribal milieu that had long dominated every aspect of life in the Arab peninsula.

The same spirit of fanaticism is at the heart of the battle over the Red Mosque. Yet, despite its absolute centrality to the drama, we in the West are largely reluctant even to speak of it as a factor. Reuters and the AP can bring themselves to refer to Ghazi and his "supporters" as "militants," but they go to considerable pains to avoid calling them by the name that alone truly fits them.

For many, there is a simple explanation of this omission. Reuters and AP are trying to be politically correct. But how convincing is this explanation? Why is it that a word like "fanatic" is treated as being politically incorrect in the first place? If fanatics are proud of their fanaticism, if it is their boast and their glory, then why not call them by the proper term?

In my new book, The Suicide of Reason, I offer an explanation of why so many are reluctant to use the word fanatic to denote those, like Ghazi and his "supporters," are behaving precisely in the same way that all fanatics have behaved through history. "The problem with much of the Western response to Islamic fanaticism," I write, "is that our refusal to use the word fanaticism appears to be based on our reluctance to recognize the fact of fanaticism. We avoid the word in order to avoid having to think about the thing, thereby leaving the impression that our resistance to acknowledging fanaticism arises less from our sensitivity to Muslim feelings than from our wish to evade the momentous challenged posed by fanaticism itself."

When we use words like supporter in place of follower, and militant in place of fanatic, we are engaging in verbal apotropaism—a rare, but helpful word that is defined as "the performance of magic ritual or incantatory formulas to avert evil." When people who really believe in the Devil call him by an affectionate term like Old Nick, they are using an apotropaic device. Instead of running the risk of calling the Devil by his right name, and having him suddenly appear with horns and tail, they refer to him by a less threatening title, one that sounds positively endearing. In short, human beings have always used apotropaic rituals and formulas to ward off that which we fear the most; and we in the West are still doing it today.

In The Suicide of Reason I write that in the contemporary West fanatics like Abdul Rashid like Ghazi and his followers have become "incomprehensibly alien to us. They do not conform to our expectation of normal human behavior; indeed, they shatter all such expectations. They fill us with panic and anxiety....To relieve this panic and anxiety we must either ignore them or else force them to fit into a category of human action with which we do feel comfortable—all in an effort to make their uncanniness less threatening to our comfortable vision of the world." Both Reuters and the AP exhibit the second reaction to the fanatic: by using words like supporter and militant both are attempting to make the incomprehensibly alien something that we think we are familiar with. After all, aren't we supporters of one candidate or other. Aren't there many things that we act militantly about? We have causes, too, for which we are prepared to fight: rights for blacks, or women, or gays. So where is the big difference between us? What is there so special about the behavior of Ghazi and his supporters that we should find it inexplicable, much less threatening?

Because we insist on denying what is most obvious and most essential about fanatics, namely, their fanaticism, we blind ourselves to the radical threat they pose to any established and settled order. For example, Pakistan under General Musharraf falls far short of our Western notions of a free and open society, but few in the West would be happy to see his regime replaced with a new Taliban—and one armed with nuclear weapons. Few in the West would be willing to see Pakistan plunged into civil war and/or anarchy. Yet the same cannot be said of the Pakistanis themselves. Abdul Ghazi, his followers, and those who sympathize with his cause throughout Pakistan would no doubt like to impose a Taliban-like government for their nation, as their record makes clear.
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the ultimate outcome of the train of events set off this last week at the Red Mosque is still unknown, though we in the West are perfectly aware that if the spark turns into a conflagration there will be virtually nothing we can do to stop. Again, we can only stand by, and watch. Yet, if we are prepared to take a serious and unflinching look at the challenge posed to us by Islamic fanaticism, then at least we will be able to watch with vigilance and intelligence, and not fall prey to the illusion that we have solutions to a threat that we in the West have as yet barely began to understand.

If there is one thing a Covenant Zone exists to do, it is to see reality clearly, to avoid our need to engage in rituals of casting out evil, without bothering to understand what evil, in all its tortured humanity, is. Only then can a people hope to get the upper hand on the forces of evil through a self-sacrificing love for humanity and our (e.g. national) covenants. Of course, many on the left today will not even recognize the anthropological legitimacy of the term "evil". So they will not be too busy covenanting.

I wanted to link today to a blog post I read yesterday in which was discussed the phenomenon of "Muslim Background Believers"; it was at this url which has presently gone under password protection: http://blog.siena.org/2007/07/wider-window-on-world.html . An "MBB" is someone of Muslim background who has converted to Christianity. Apparently, while unheard of a couple of decades ago, there are now unknown thousands of them in Saudi Arabia, living in a secret culture, in fear for their lives, but nonetheless living a covenant with the help of a few missionary outsiders. Covenants, where we guarantee ourselves, e.g., to support those freedom lovers under the thumb of tyranny, are a way of bringing a new reality into being. And since I have criticized Christians in the past for turning a blind eye to what happens to their co-religionists in Muslim countries, I wanted to link to a Christian who isn't, who has gone for many years now right into one of the most oppressive societies to keep faith with those who desire freedom through Christ.

Given that this blog has apparently stirred up resentments and apotropaic gestures at another, more popular blog here in Vancouver, I cannot guarantee that our meeting tonight, as every Thursday, 7-9pm in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee, will go off without incident. Covenant Zone is committed to free and rational conversation in the name of constructing a new, more open, reality than the one in which many of our co-citizens presently live. We will defend this commitment as best we can so that all who are interested in free and open conversation, without threats, scapegoats, or ritualistic castings out of misrepresented evil, will feel at home in the Covenant Zone.

Covenant against evil

This week finds us dwelling on acts and omens of great evil around the world. But just because evil is always with us, and because there are no final solutions to it, we should not fall into the trap of thinking it is such a great mystery, that it is futile to attempt to understand it in hopes of temporary remedies. Here, for example, is a good definition of evil (Mark Gordon quotes the Orthodox priest, Fr. James Thornton):

…One may define evil as nothingness. Certainly evil never exits by itself but only inside of Goodness. Evil is a pure negation, a privation, a mutilation. But, though evil is a void of nothingness, it is a void which exists, which swallows and devours beings. It has no power to create, but its destructive power is enormous. Evil never ascends, it always descends. The very debasement of being that it produces is frightening. Evil is chaotic, it is a separation, a decomposition constantly in progress, a disorganization of the entire structure of being.

In other words, evil entails the loss of meaningful differences, or creative discriminations, under the force of a resentful mimesis, a burning desire to possess the things and status that some other possesses, to the point where one can no longer base one's sense of identity on a positive affirmation of what makes one different, but only on a negative resentment of those who seemingly alienate one from all that is sacred. When the nightmare of a constantly mimicing and frustrated desire reaches its evil climax, the only apparent "solution" is destruction of those people and their idols that alienate, that victimize, that remove us from what is our due and our right.

In what passes for our public and political life today, we witness an ethic of relativism and of victimary thinking in which an imperative to continually render all people equal in status rules. This entails, for our educational leaders, the deconstruction of meaningful differences, of status inequalities; and so the liberal "order" under which today's young people must try to find their way, often turns out to be a nightmare that sucks us down into nihilism, if the refusal of our desire for a solid sense of purpose and direction may even be figured as a downer. With a lack of ethical differentiations that define shared values and also the different places from which a symmetrical exchange of differences may be organized in shaping and contesting those values, with no particular hierarchy of values into which a young person might be initiated, or merely prepared for membership by the functionaries of our public "education" systems, the individual has to find his or her own ways to find values and ways of initiating himself into membership therein. Religion and good faith save some (not that religion alone solves for anyone the problems that can only be addressed by a political exchange among all stakeholders in a nation or civilization). But faced with such a daunting task, a fragile narcissism that easily takes offense, and just as easily proclaims the greatness of its owner, becomes the prevalent personality type.

Meanwhile, to take a humanities degree in the university - often on the naive presumption that one is there taught the best of what our culture has created and knows - one must today learn how to deny or deconstruct and criticize so much of the tradition by which Westerners formerly found value, meaning, and identity, and to get along in maternal classrooms where every child is special, where "it's all good". Odes to "critical thinking" ("hegemony" bashing) are substituted for real thinking.

So many us fall down in that world; and if we survive and go on, we may come to see how deeply we have become immersed in resentment's chaos and evil. Then, we should realize the need to renew the means by which we must collectively defer the next violent force, the resentment that is presently eroding what is left of the meanings and identities with which we hope to save ourselves, our sense of purpose in a political and ethical existence.

The means for renewing meaning and identity are the promise and the covenant, the two basic ways by which human beings exchange signs (which lays the ground to exchange things) and in so doing find new ways to signify, identify, value, an always re-forming network of exchange.

Every Thursday the Covenant Zone bloggers meet in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, central branch, from 7-9 pm. Consider joining us and helping build up our network for the exchange of political signs, so that we may have a firmer grip on the values and identities that can save us from the seed of evil that is in each of us. We meet under the sign of the blue scarf.