ISIS IN THE NEW WORLD
OF DISORDER – AN EXCHANGE!
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
© September 10, 2014
REFERENCE:
A reader responds to my introductory piece on “Search for
the Real Parents of My Soul,” by making a special reference to ISIS.
A READER WRITES:
Religion is about power and control.
What I find most interesting about current events in the Mid
– East is the dictatorial God in which the ISIS sociopaths believe created Adam and Eve without help, he
destroyed all of mankind with a flood without help, liberated the Israelites
from Egypt without help, did Sodom and Gomorrah without help. Yet currently and from its inception Islam
like Christianity felt and continues to feel that the all powerful God they
believe in cannot do it by himself anymore.
The Christians finally stopped killing each other as well as
non Christians after the 17th century,
but apparently groups like ISIS still believe their all powerful God needs
help. The sad part of what is happening
in the Mid-East is that the United States and Europe do not seem to understand
that the violence of ISIS will not cease until they are eliminated with
violence. If the current approach to
events in the Mid-East had been used to fight Hitler and the Nazis during WWII,
that war would not have ended with an allied victory.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Yes, religion is about power and control. But so is every institution of society. It is the nature of the human group.
Not to wander too far off your point, what has made
Christianity thrive despite this disposition, in my view, is thanks to
democracy or a relative open society in the United States and Europe since the
18th century.
Western society, as you point out, has been relatively
healthy economically since the 17th century, largely due to the Protestant
Reformation of the 16th century.
The Protestant Reformation loosened the juggernaut of Roman
Catholicism on Christianity and led to capitalism, or authoritarian
mercantilism, which we have to this day.
Protestantism shattered the feudalistic system that favored
Catholicism as the universal Christian church.
I don't agree with you that violence or the eradication of
ISIS through violence is the answer.
History suggests otherwise.
The toxic nature of the Middle East has had many Western
authors going back to Alexander the Great, the Romans, the European Crusaders,
and the abysmal mess the architects of WWI and WWII made of the "Cradle of
Civilization."
Religion is power and control because religion is about
politics. Max Weber distinguished
between politics and the administration of institutions, including
religion. Politics, he argued, is the
domain of final ends; but administration is the realm of implementation. We in the West have made a sorry mess of both
over the last two hundred years.
The West, given its predilection for "final ends"
solutions, mucked up the peace of WWI at Versailles, which led to Hitler, and
mucked up the Middle East after WWI and again after WWII with "final
ends" solutions, failing to give much attention to enlightened
implementation. The West put the Shah of
Iran on the throne in Iran, and that led to the Ayatollah. The Shah was a puppet of the West in Iran as
Pinochet was in Chile, and we know how that all worked out.
Implementation of the West, it would seem to me in reading
history with regard to conquered peoples, has been arrogant, righteous,
narcissistic, insensitive and exploitative.
Go back to 1916. It
was determined then by proclamation that a terrorist caliphate existed in the
borderland states of Syria and Iraq justifying the dissolution of those borders
by Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot in their treaty of 1916.
Now, one hundred years later, we have the self-proclaimed
Islamic State under the sun that is bringing that "final ends"
solution to a fiery denouement. The
"sins of our fathers" always finally come to roost.
We are witnessing the decay and dysfunction of our open
Western society as the closed society of the Middle East is raising its ugly
head.
We are seeing that this is now threatening to the stability,
common values and recurring patterns that have previously facilitated our
collective action and security. Samuel Huntington writes about this in
"Political Order in Changing Societies."
To put this into a parochial context, until Democrats and
Republicans recognize that there is an enemy they ought to oppose more than
each other -- the decay and dysfunction of societal order itself -- there will
be no peace in our neighborhood.
ISIS is the extreme of our preoccupation with borders and
the intrusion of the rest of the world with that peace.
The politics of "final ends" is a very slippery
slope, as we continue to use it rather than intelligent regard to proper
administration of what is in our best interests, which I believe is also in the
best interests of the rest of the world, not exclusive to but inclusive
with.
ISIS is also the extreme of a closed society that I attempt
to show in "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul."
The Middle East has not yet found the formula to fracture
this closed status, while paradoxically, Western interventionists have over the
centuries only driven it even deeper into maniacal closeness.
My sense is that culture is relative and any attempt of the
West to eradicate ISIS or its extremism will fall not only far short of
"final ends," but drive the region deeper into radicalism.
ISIS is in the neighborhood of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran,
Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
It is not the God of Mohammed that is driving this but the "god of
oil" under the cover of Islam, and radical exploitation over the last few
hundred years by the West.
God is the abstraction, and religion is the concrete of
power and control. You can believe in
God or not but you cannot exist without religion. Here Christopher Hitchens is
wrong.
Religion is where love and hate, anger and hostility,
revenge and retribution live, as religion attempts to explain our spirituality
to us and channel it for us which is part of our conscience.
Nature has no conscience, but nature has been manipulated by
man, as man continues to manipulate himself to self-interested ends, always
upsetting the balance, not only of nature but that of being human beings.
Religion is family, for believers and non-believers as we
cannot separate ourselves from each other.
That said it doesn't make you more or less religious because you go to
church or don't. Religion is part of the
mindset of our conscience. Fundamentally,
we all have a belief system that chances are a religion has programmed into us
or distorted in our unconscious behavior.
The irony is that religion too often has emphasized our
differences in an interest of power and control, in contradiction to its stated
manifest, when we as human beings are far more alike than different.
I'm not advocating contradiction, but simply pointing out
that contradiction is the consistent pattern of human behavior, whatever the
stated principles.
We in the West are solution driven ("final ends")
always looking for a surgical or strategic way to eradicate a problem, a
problem we have invariably created by commission or omission, but a problem we
have little patience or inclination to define properly or understand thoroughly.
You mention Hitler and Nazism. They were easy to destroy because we
understood the madness of Hitler and Nazism because it came out of our cultural
midst or DNA.
We don't understand the Middle East because we are not of or
from, for the most part, Middle Eastern descent, but from Europe.
If we would accept this fact, if we would attempt to qualify
our deficiency by sharing our openness and looking for ways to rally
Palestinians, Israelis, Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Lebanese,
and Saudi Arabians to the fact that the enemy they fear more than each other is
a cancer in their midst that they, alone, can eradicate. If they do, everything will change.
The West could help the Middle East by being less paranoid
and less hostile to their interests.
ISIS counts on us being otherwise.
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