ISIS and the Problem of Pure Belief
When a monster like ISIS arises, I always ask myself, "What kind of monster are we dealing with?" Or, rather, "What kind of monster am I looking at?" Because I'm not really dealing with them... the United States government is.
And, usually, my questions/assessments have brought me to the same conclusion again and again that relates - in some way - to my previous post on Daniel Ashley Pierce. That is, my opinion is usually that I am looking at a set of people for whom their desires are the wheat, their religion is the chaff. That is, when I look at ISIS, I am seeing people whose sole desire is to murder, rape, and cause chaos. And they have found an ideology, twisted a religion, for their desires. They use an ideology or religion out of a need for divine permission, of a way of maintaining a deafness or blindness to their own isolating, twisted desires, and as a way to gain more troops and rally the cause.
I have, however, read something recently that has me rethinking things.
And what has me rethinking things is from Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf. Here is one succinct excerpt: "Recall the outrage when, two years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us enlightened Westerners believe in the divinity of the Buddha, we were outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the 'cultural heritage' of their own country and the entire world. Instead of believing through the other, like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great sensitivity toward the cultural value of the monuments of other religions - to them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not 'cultural treasures.'"
Zizek then, after this excerpt, basically does his Zizekian turnabout (he always likes to claim the exact opposite of what others do). He says that what should be truly surprising to philosophers is NOT that people twist and turn religion - that is, believe inconsistently - because this is the norm, but rather that there are people who actually DO "really believe" and act upon their professed principles.
Westerners, Zizek says, are not really "believing." He says, rather, "we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the 'lifestyle' of the community to which we belong... What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don't believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December?"
I think there is an even better example of the difference between believing and BELIEVING here: http://issuehawk.com/tamar/2014/01/20...
The above article states that the transgender woman Pamela Raintree entered a City Council meeting, placed a stone on the podium and, after quoting Leviticus's demand that homosexuals be stoned to death, said, “I brought the first stone, Mr. Webb, in case that your Bible talk isn’t just a smoke screen for personal prejudices.”
In other words, she brought the first stone, Mr. Webb. What's the problem? The problem is that you do not believe in the sense that the Taliban or ISIS believes, and you know it.
In any case... getting on with it...
This idea that the Taliban and ISIS believe more than Westerners is in direct opposition to what I naturally assume about them.
I tend to take the side that ISIS and the Taliban believe inconsistently in the sense that they don't really have a religion. They have their desires, they coat those desires in a religion, but they are no more a part of that religion than I am. My natural opinion is that they don't BELIEVE anything. They just say they do. Am I wrong?
Maybe. Or maybe there are two ways of looking at the same issue. Two truths.
Are people who join ISIS murderers who excuse themselves with religion? Or are these average human beings who take belief to the highest letter? Who are willing to follow a line like from Leviticus?
Another way of asking the question is, are they overcome with religious zeal, or have they overcome all religious zeal? Have they chosen their obsession, or has their obsession chosen them? Are they deeply entrenched in an illusion, or fully disillusioned?
Are they (in Lacanian terms) perverse or obsessional? And my answer is that they are perverse. And that the perverse really do BELIEVE. That, perhaps, ISIS really does BELIEVE.
Do you remember the Heath Ledger Joker two Batman movies ago? The one who asks, "Do you want to know how I got these scars?" And how the answer doesn't really matter? The story of how he got those scars doesn't matter? It is always in flux, always changing? That is because, for a man like The Joker, the trauma doesn't matter. Whatever the trauma was, The Joker owned it, while others are owned BY their trauma. He has chosen his obsession, his trauma (chaos) among a myriad of options. It now gets him off. Other people - most people - are generally chosen by their obsession (in other words, they didn't get a choice in the matter, the story of their trauma was inscribed on them and chooses their obsession for them). IE Batman. Batman's obsession with hunting criminals was inscribed on him against his will as a child. He didn't choose his trauma. His trauma chose him.
I tend to think of ISIS and the Taliban as the Joker. As the one who points to murder and says, "That's it. That will do it for me. You want to know how I got these scars? I'll give you a million different stories, because it doesn't really matter. Trauma didn't choose me. I choose trauma. All trauma."
Alright, I'm done making the point over and over again of the perverse nature of ISIS. I do, however, want to explore one more question:
"Does the Joker make the best believer?"
If a religion's requirement is to stone homosexuals (or murder infidels), and not out of the heat of the moment, but in stone cold duty, what type of person is required? What kind of believer is required? The person who believes in Santa Clause in the sense that they buy a Christmas tree every year? Or the believer who destroys Buddhist statues?
The Joker could stone homosexuals and murder infidels, if that is what his chosen ideology requires. For The Joker, all options are open. He can act at the drop of a hat.
Should a believer be able to act at the drop of a hat? If God commanded Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham said, "Sure," BOOM, dead, is that not the perfect believer? If God commands you to stone a homosexual, or an adulterer, or your own child to death, and you're like, "Sure," BOOM, dead, is that not the perfect believer?
Is purity, then, just a tad too impure? Have our definitions, divisions, and language failed us?
Of course they have. They always will.
I'm not sure that the greatest being in the world - the alpha and omega - the greater-than-which-ever-existed wants men who, with just a snap of His fingers, willingly slaughter their sons. In this case, there might exist the possibility of believing TOO much. Or, maybe, just maybe, the definition of "belief" and "believer" should change.
Is this not the point of The Clerk's Tale by Chaucer? In this tale, the wife Griselda obeys her husband in all things, even when he pretends to kill her daughter (hides her away for a decade), then her son (hides him, too), and then pretends to remarry, all to - at the very end of everything - say, "Ha! Gotcha! It was all a joke. The past twenty years have been a joke!"
The idea behind The Clerk's Tale is that the Bible commands women to obey their husbands, and Griselda is the perfect believer in that she perfectly obeys her husband. She obeys him as he kills her daughter. She obeys him as he kills her son. She obeys him as he divorces her. Could there exist any other woman who so perfectly obeys? No. Walter of the tale is married to the perfect, God-fearing, husband-obeying wife. And, of course, the point is that there is imperfection in this perfection. The purity looks nothing like one expects. The idea has been taken to its ultimate conclusion to show how ridiculous it is.
The point is that there is something wrong in the "perfect" believer. There are certain rules not actually meant to be purely obeyed.
(And this, as well, runs into Burke's and other philosophical theories about the paradox of purity: That the pure is actually the exact opposite of what one expects: the purest character is no character, the most perfect sound in the world is the most boring.)
Maybe the perfect believer, the man or woman of perfect, systematic obedience is perverse. Perhaps he or she is psychopathic. She shows the fallibility of the law by perfectly following it. She demonstrates the problem of ideology by never, ever mis-stepping.
And, in this sense, Zizek would be right. ISIS BELIEVES. They believe systematically, perversely, psychopathically. We do not. And it is good we do not. It is good we are impure believers, actors, obey-ors. "God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people," says Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. I tend to agree. Time to get drunk.;-)
Pure belief is alluring, isn't it? To say that one has perfectly obeyed, followed, recorded, preserved, presented something is so attractive. As long as you do that, you can withstand your whole world going to hell.
Consider the poem Obedient by Shel Silverstein:
Teacher said, “You don’t obey.
You fidget and twidget
And won’t sit down.
So go stand in the corner now
‘Til I say you can turn around.”
So there I stood ‘til it got dark
Without a whimper or a tear,
‘Til everybody else went home.
I guess that she forgot me here.
And that was Friday, so I stayed
All through the weekend--bein’ good,
And Monday was the first day of
Summer vacation, so I stood
Through hot July and sticky August,
Tryin’ to obey her rule.
Stood right there until September,
When--yikes-- they closed down the school!
Boarded up the doors and windows,
Moved to a new one way ‘cross town.
So here I’ve stood for forty years
In dark and dust and creaky sounds,
Waiting for her to say, “Turn around.”
This might not be just what she meant,
But me--I’m so obedient.
The attraction of getting it perfectly right - of believing perfectly - can sometimes overcome someone. It is almost like a fetish object: As long as I can get THIS right, that's all that matters. As long as I can have THIS, everything will be alright. Of course, though the individual gets obedience perfect, there is something horribly wrong here, isn't there? There is something wrong with "getting it right."
The Joker chooses his requirements; they do not choose him. Just like the boy in the poem Obedient chooses his obedience. Just like Griselda does. She OWNS obedience. The process is not just obeying the law, but of internalizing it, upholding it, living it, breathing it, being it, to the highest letter. Just like ISIS. And what they show us is the problem of true belief and obedience to those beliefs.
Perhaps, then, the purest believer is not the best one, and the only good believer is the heretic. Maybe heaven is filled with heretics.
I don't know.
And, usually, my questions/assessments have brought me to the same conclusion again and again that relates - in some way - to my previous post on Daniel Ashley Pierce. That is, my opinion is usually that I am looking at a set of people for whom their desires are the wheat, their religion is the chaff. That is, when I look at ISIS, I am seeing people whose sole desire is to murder, rape, and cause chaos. And they have found an ideology, twisted a religion, for their desires. They use an ideology or religion out of a need for divine permission, of a way of maintaining a deafness or blindness to their own isolating, twisted desires, and as a way to gain more troops and rally the cause.
I have, however, read something recently that has me rethinking things.
And what has me rethinking things is from Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf. Here is one succinct excerpt: "Recall the outrage when, two years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us enlightened Westerners believe in the divinity of the Buddha, we were outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the 'cultural heritage' of their own country and the entire world. Instead of believing through the other, like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great sensitivity toward the cultural value of the monuments of other religions - to them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not 'cultural treasures.'"
Zizek then, after this excerpt, basically does his Zizekian turnabout (he always likes to claim the exact opposite of what others do). He says that what should be truly surprising to philosophers is NOT that people twist and turn religion - that is, believe inconsistently - because this is the norm, but rather that there are people who actually DO "really believe" and act upon their professed principles.
Westerners, Zizek says, are not really "believing." He says, rather, "we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the 'lifestyle' of the community to which we belong... What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don't believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December?"
I think there is an even better example of the difference between believing and BELIEVING here: http://issuehawk.com/tamar/2014/01/20...
The above article states that the transgender woman Pamela Raintree entered a City Council meeting, placed a stone on the podium and, after quoting Leviticus's demand that homosexuals be stoned to death, said, “I brought the first stone, Mr. Webb, in case that your Bible talk isn’t just a smoke screen for personal prejudices.”
In other words, she brought the first stone, Mr. Webb. What's the problem? The problem is that you do not believe in the sense that the Taliban or ISIS believes, and you know it.
In any case... getting on with it...
This idea that the Taliban and ISIS believe more than Westerners is in direct opposition to what I naturally assume about them.
I tend to take the side that ISIS and the Taliban believe inconsistently in the sense that they don't really have a religion. They have their desires, they coat those desires in a religion, but they are no more a part of that religion than I am. My natural opinion is that they don't BELIEVE anything. They just say they do. Am I wrong?
Maybe. Or maybe there are two ways of looking at the same issue. Two truths.
Are people who join ISIS murderers who excuse themselves with religion? Or are these average human beings who take belief to the highest letter? Who are willing to follow a line like from Leviticus?
Another way of asking the question is, are they overcome with religious zeal, or have they overcome all religious zeal? Have they chosen their obsession, or has their obsession chosen them? Are they deeply entrenched in an illusion, or fully disillusioned?
Are they (in Lacanian terms) perverse or obsessional? And my answer is that they are perverse. And that the perverse really do BELIEVE. That, perhaps, ISIS really does BELIEVE.
Do you remember the Heath Ledger Joker two Batman movies ago? The one who asks, "Do you want to know how I got these scars?" And how the answer doesn't really matter? The story of how he got those scars doesn't matter? It is always in flux, always changing? That is because, for a man like The Joker, the trauma doesn't matter. Whatever the trauma was, The Joker owned it, while others are owned BY their trauma. He has chosen his obsession, his trauma (chaos) among a myriad of options. It now gets him off. Other people - most people - are generally chosen by their obsession (in other words, they didn't get a choice in the matter, the story of their trauma was inscribed on them and chooses their obsession for them). IE Batman. Batman's obsession with hunting criminals was inscribed on him against his will as a child. He didn't choose his trauma. His trauma chose him.
I tend to think of ISIS and the Taliban as the Joker. As the one who points to murder and says, "That's it. That will do it for me. You want to know how I got these scars? I'll give you a million different stories, because it doesn't really matter. Trauma didn't choose me. I choose trauma. All trauma."
Alright, I'm done making the point over and over again of the perverse nature of ISIS. I do, however, want to explore one more question:
"Does the Joker make the best believer?"
If a religion's requirement is to stone homosexuals (or murder infidels), and not out of the heat of the moment, but in stone cold duty, what type of person is required? What kind of believer is required? The person who believes in Santa Clause in the sense that they buy a Christmas tree every year? Or the believer who destroys Buddhist statues?
The Joker could stone homosexuals and murder infidels, if that is what his chosen ideology requires. For The Joker, all options are open. He can act at the drop of a hat.
Should a believer be able to act at the drop of a hat? If God commanded Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham said, "Sure," BOOM, dead, is that not the perfect believer? If God commands you to stone a homosexual, or an adulterer, or your own child to death, and you're like, "Sure," BOOM, dead, is that not the perfect believer?
Is purity, then, just a tad too impure? Have our definitions, divisions, and language failed us?
Of course they have. They always will.
I'm not sure that the greatest being in the world - the alpha and omega - the greater-than-which-ever-existed wants men who, with just a snap of His fingers, willingly slaughter their sons. In this case, there might exist the possibility of believing TOO much. Or, maybe, just maybe, the definition of "belief" and "believer" should change.
Is this not the point of The Clerk's Tale by Chaucer? In this tale, the wife Griselda obeys her husband in all things, even when he pretends to kill her daughter (hides her away for a decade), then her son (hides him, too), and then pretends to remarry, all to - at the very end of everything - say, "Ha! Gotcha! It was all a joke. The past twenty years have been a joke!"
The idea behind The Clerk's Tale is that the Bible commands women to obey their husbands, and Griselda is the perfect believer in that she perfectly obeys her husband. She obeys him as he kills her daughter. She obeys him as he kills her son. She obeys him as he divorces her. Could there exist any other woman who so perfectly obeys? No. Walter of the tale is married to the perfect, God-fearing, husband-obeying wife. And, of course, the point is that there is imperfection in this perfection. The purity looks nothing like one expects. The idea has been taken to its ultimate conclusion to show how ridiculous it is.
The point is that there is something wrong in the "perfect" believer. There are certain rules not actually meant to be purely obeyed.
(And this, as well, runs into Burke's and other philosophical theories about the paradox of purity: That the pure is actually the exact opposite of what one expects: the purest character is no character, the most perfect sound in the world is the most boring.)
Maybe the perfect believer, the man or woman of perfect, systematic obedience is perverse. Perhaps he or she is psychopathic. She shows the fallibility of the law by perfectly following it. She demonstrates the problem of ideology by never, ever mis-stepping.
And, in this sense, Zizek would be right. ISIS BELIEVES. They believe systematically, perversely, psychopathically. We do not. And it is good we do not. It is good we are impure believers, actors, obey-ors. "God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people," says Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. I tend to agree. Time to get drunk.;-)
Pure belief is alluring, isn't it? To say that one has perfectly obeyed, followed, recorded, preserved, presented something is so attractive. As long as you do that, you can withstand your whole world going to hell.
Consider the poem Obedient by Shel Silverstein:
Teacher said, “You don’t obey.
You fidget and twidget
And won’t sit down.
So go stand in the corner now
‘Til I say you can turn around.”
So there I stood ‘til it got dark
Without a whimper or a tear,
‘Til everybody else went home.
I guess that she forgot me here.
And that was Friday, so I stayed
All through the weekend--bein’ good,
And Monday was the first day of
Summer vacation, so I stood
Through hot July and sticky August,
Tryin’ to obey her rule.
Stood right there until September,
When--yikes-- they closed down the school!
Boarded up the doors and windows,
Moved to a new one way ‘cross town.
So here I’ve stood for forty years
In dark and dust and creaky sounds,
Waiting for her to say, “Turn around.”
This might not be just what she meant,
But me--I’m so obedient.
The attraction of getting it perfectly right - of believing perfectly - can sometimes overcome someone. It is almost like a fetish object: As long as I can get THIS right, that's all that matters. As long as I can have THIS, everything will be alright. Of course, though the individual gets obedience perfect, there is something horribly wrong here, isn't there? There is something wrong with "getting it right."
The Joker chooses his requirements; they do not choose him. Just like the boy in the poem Obedient chooses his obedience. Just like Griselda does. She OWNS obedience. The process is not just obeying the law, but of internalizing it, upholding it, living it, breathing it, being it, to the highest letter. Just like ISIS. And what they show us is the problem of true belief and obedience to those beliefs.
Perhaps, then, the purest believer is not the best one, and the only good believer is the heretic. Maybe heaven is filled with heretics.
I don't know.
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