Thursday, March 20, 2008

Is your mother a slut?   posted by Razib @ 3/20/2008 04:56:00 PM
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If you are a male, and someone says your mother is a slut, how do you respond? I think most non-autistic individuals, even if they are reflexive pussies as many civilized American men raised in urban areas and suburbs tend to be, will feel an urge to react violently. I think we can agree that someone calling your mother a slut does not have obvious material consequences; it isn't inimical to your economic interests, especially if the exchange occurs in a bar and your interlocutor and yourself are drunk. I won't rehash evolutionary psychological arguments for why there's a tendency for most males to react viscerally with rage when someone insults the sexual character of their mother; I simply want to use it to illustrate the power of words and concepts which have no material consequence, and might not even be rooted in fact. A stranger who throws this insult at you usually doesn't even believe in its accuracy, his usage of the phrase is calculated to offend and elicit a reaction. There are certain things which are sacred, certain lines you don't cross. Sometimes these are strongly biased by biological parameters (e.g., I suspect near-family incest taboos is one of these), and sometimes they are not. It is the latter case I was thinking about a few months ago when I read Rome & Jerusalem: A Clash of Ancient Civilizations and God's Rule - Government and Islam.

You see, the ancient Romans and Muslims did not have kings. Kings were tyrants, and the early Roman and Islamic polities rejected such tyranny on principle. So of course, instead of kings, the Roman Empire was headed by an emperor, while the Muslims had caliphs.1 Get it? When Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra the official narrative was that the doughty republican traditions of Rome had bested once more the oriental despotism of the Hellenistic world, with their Greek kings and queens. Similarly, the righteous Abbasids overthrew the despotic Arab Kingdom, the Umayyads. In its place they established a genuine Islamic state which was guided by the traditions of the community as opposed to profane naked autocracy. Right....

As you can see here, the extent of the self-deception and semantic delusion is really humorous. Now, it is true that the early emperors of Rome tended to keep up the illusion that they were simply stewards of the Roman Republic with some verisimilitude.2 Augustus' shtick was that his was a restorationist project; he was no dictator or king, just the First Citizen. Similarly, the early Abbasids were ostensibly bringing the vision of the Islamic community to its true fulfillment (especially the Shia party), whereas the Umayyads had been worldly Arab tribalists more in keeping with the values of the jahiliya. But the reality is that Augustus' Rome was as republican as Constantinople in 1453 was the capital of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the Abbasids resurrected the values of the primitive ummah by way of formulating a more ideologically coherent oriental despotism than the barracks state of the Umayyads. Despite their more effective propaganda the Abbasid caliphs integrated pre-Islamic Sassanid motifs into their court far more than the Umayyads ever had.

But this sort of pro forma packaging mattered a great deal. Muslim soldiers were enraged and shocked when the conqueror of Spain allowed his Visigothic wife to convince him to don a crown and so indicate kingship; they accused him of becoming a Christian. This despite their own fealty to an Umayyad regime which was excoriated later in history by mainstream Muslims as a semi-pagan autocracy! These sorts of issues tie in to events and dynamics we see in the modern world. Muslims, for example, wish to criminalize blasphemous criticism of their prophet, desecration of their holy bookm and disrespect of their religion generally. Obviously they're met with skepticism from non-Muslims, but a number of them analogize their position to that of Europeans who ban Holocaust Denial. Dismissing the details of the analogy and my personal rejection of these Holocaust Denial laws, it is important to state that I think it trivializes the extermination of millions of human men, women and children on an industrial scale to compare this to an insult to an idea, or the desecration of a configuration of ink, paper and binding which results in a Koran. My own perspective is pretty obviously conditioned by the fact that I accept that human beings were tortured and killed en masse 60-70 years ago, while I don't think that the Muslim religion is anything more than a belief system rooted in made up stuff. The only damage is done to feelings, not a One True God. That being said, a billion people have invested a lot of psychological import into these beliefs and they just go insane when you insult those beliefs. Billions of others can empathize on some level because they have other beliefs which are cognate in the broad outlines.

In the West, what I like to think of as the civilized world, there has emerged a consensus that constrains, and almost devalues, sacred lines and the right to take offense. Feelings rooted in immaterial beliefs still matter; if one makes a religious objection to a public norm one is accorded more credibility than if one makes an areligious objection (e.g., prisoners who need a special diet due to religious restrictions vs. those who really hate the taste of the cuisine). But to a large extent the power of religion to defend itself from blasphemy through the arm of state power has been abolished, even if there are blasphemy laws on the books in many jurisdictions. The transgressive assertions of men such as Denis Diderot in the 18th century broke down those barriers, and the reality of religious pluralism in the United States meant that reciprocal blasphemies between Protestants and Catholics occurred which did not elicit the intervention of the state as in the past lest it enflame the conflict furthermore.

In any case, the attempt by Muslims to resurrect in the West the enforcement of pietas by governmental fiat has changed my own opinion as an atheist about the value of religious pluralism. Because I believe that religious sentiment and feeling is normal, and will be dominant in our species barring a reprogramming of the software, I think that one religious tradition is probably easier to manage in terms of negotiating the terms of relating state, religion and the role of the ontologically blasphemous irreligious minority within a society (by ontologically I mean that by the very nature of my atheism & apostasy I offend against Islam, for example). Since the militant secular party is by definition a negative one, objecting to the prescribed social pieties, it is much simpler when one has to face-off with a unified front and one dimensionality of supernaturalism. With the rise of a polycentric supernatural marketplace the act of negation multiplies in complexity as the permutations of absurdity increase ever upward. Diversity has costs, the common norms are essential so that even transgression of those norms can be regularized and tolerated reasonably.

Addendum:
I want to add that I was in rural Bangladesh during the Rushdie Affair. I was called on to translate some photocopies of English pamphlets which in hindsight totally misrepresented the The Satanic Verses (long story short, they made it sound like Muhammad's wives were starring in a novelization of EuroGangBang #69, and it was kind of awkward for me since I didn't know the appropriate words in Bengali for a lot of the stuff). But it was notable that many of the young Muslim men were enraged about something that they barely even comprehended in its accurate details. Feelings....

1 - Minor note before David Ross points this out, but the term imperator did not come to be regularly used by the emperors until the Flavians. Before that they had been only the princips.

2 - The transition from First Citizens of the Julio-Claudian period to the autocrats (of the Byzantine Empire was a gradual one. The Flavians in the late 1st century reiterated the hereditary principle and banished any delusion that a senatorial resurrection was in the offing. Septimius Severus in the early 3rd century crystallized the idea that the law was an expression of imperial will as opposed to senatorial consensus. Diocletian in the early 4th century introduced the proto-medieval regalia which typified Byzantine autocrats, an oriental court and diademed crown.

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