Lawrence Auster points to very long article he has written on Islam where he is criticizing Daniel Pipes’ attitude toward the religion: The Search for Moderate Islam. Auster also links to Pipes’ reply, which he characterizes as nominalist, and in turn Pipes’ terms Auster an essentialist. Pipes says:
…I prefer to call my approach historical and his essentialist. That is, I emphasize that things change over time and he sees them as static….
This is a common and in my opinion respectable position, but my turn from “essentialism” to “nominalism” on this issue has been less driven by historical than cognitive considerations. When I began to encounter research which suggested that reflective, rational and axiomatic thinking plays a far less central role in our day-to-day life than we think I reconsidered the importance of texts as causal factors as opposed to reinterpreted justifications. Additionally, research which suggests that inferences from what might seem clear axioms vary greatly between individuals who are not allowed to communicate suggests to me that social and cultural mediation is crucial to the illusion of “obvious” inferences from texts to practice & belief.
To some extent this is an academic argument, I tend to agree with Auster & Pipes that the norm of Islam as it is practiced in most nations by most individuals is not “moderate” in a Western context. Nevertheless, truth is truth, and a contention that any given belief system is essentialist in its character rather than contextually determined does have some policy implications (there is considerable flexibility of course in how fast you believe change is possible within a belief system to maintain continuity).
The only point that might be added is that believers within the faith might find this attitude fallacious and patronizing, and between point A and Z in time when practice & belief changes a great deal I have no doubt they will find a way to ameliorate cognitive dissonance and explain away contradictions. Minds are clever beasts, and religious minds no less.
Addendum: Let me be clear in that I am expressing skepticism of the interlocking contingency of specific “memes” with “memecomplexes” that we might term religions. Religionists from the inside might breezily assert the “obvious” connections between a, b, c, d and the inference that a excludes !a and so on. I simply don’t think that a, b, c, d and so forth which coalesce to form the mental conception of a given “religion” have such logical relationships with each other, additionally they are often not clear enough as concepts to really imply an obvious negation. This is one reason why my objection to religious “essentialism” is far upstream of historical considerations. I don’t think think that religious ideas, as they are normally conceived of by the layperson, intrinsically have any logical structure which one can deduce from outside of a socially mediated context with imposes the inferences by consensus (eg; it is “obvious” that the New Testament implies a Trinity as elucidated in the Athanasian Creed, or, it is “obvious” by analogy that bans on alcohol must be extended to tobacco).
Addendum II: I just realized something. Pipes’ ends his reply to Auster with obvious confusion and irritation as he does not discern any policy differences in terms of implementation between Auster & himself. In other words, what matters in the argument between essentialism and nominalism on the first order? I think one must consider the background of both individuals. Lawrence Auster is a devout Christian (conservative Episcopalian) who converted from a non-Christian Jewish background, ergo, he espouses the essential tenets of the Christian faith. To my knowledge Daniel Pipes is not an orthodox Jew, and so like many non-Orthodox Jews his attitude toward religion is possibly rather flexible, and oriented toward the manifestations of religion rather than introspective aspects of faith and belief.
Illustration below:
Imagine if you will. You give a sentient alien a King James Bible. You have this alien read this tome front to back.
Now, you explain to the alien that in the United States certain regions believe in the literal truth of this text more than other regions. You stipulate that the “New Testament” is generally considered more important to the majority of individuals in the United States. Additionally, you also explain that there is interregional variation in interpersonal displays of aggression as well as openness to international belligerance.
Would the alien predict that a literal belief in NT correlated with aggression and warlike propensities or not?
You can also stipulate that a minority of the population rejects the NT and hews to the “Old Testament” (the Hebrew Bible), at least nominally. Would the alien predict that these individuals would emphasize interpersonal aggression and warlike tendencies or not?
Posted by razib at 05:23 PM