A few days ago I posted on “Islamic finance,” which to non-Muslim eyes looks an awful lot like an intellectually dishonest “work around.” This sort of thing is not limited to Muslims, at one point the Catholic Church took the ban upon usury seriously, opening up a niche for Jews as moneylenders. But what about financial transactions amongst the Jews themselves? The reality is that Orthodox Judaism is not nearly as friendly toward exploitative financial transactions between Jews, in a manner not dissimilar to Islam, and so naturally “work arounds” emerged which followed the letter of the law if not the spirit. How do believers reconcile these dodges and legalistic gymnastics with an omniscient deity? I don’t personally know in any detail, but I am convinced that the ubiquity of these sorts of practices emerge from the partially encapsulated & fragmented nature of human cognition. In other words, these work arounds not only take advantage of “gaps” in the word of God, they leverage “inefficiencies” in reflective thought which results in imperfect coherency and consistency.
But it isn’t only in the context of religion that I’ve been thinking about the relationship between law and spirit. A friend of mine was telling me the other day about a “blogwar” where a liberal blogger “sicked” his readers on a woman who included a racist post in the feed for her blog aggregation site. Whether this was a conscious inclusion or not, the blogger in question presumed that the woman was condoning racism, so his readers took things in their own hands (eventually leading to her resignation from her workplace). For me the interesting point was that misogynistic insults were including the barrage of emails she received. This doesn’t surprise me, but, what does raise eyebrows is presumably the readers of the original blogger who raised the cry were very liberal and abhorred racism, and so one would assume that concomitantly they would on principle abhor sexist slurs. But of course empirically we know this isn’t how things work out, and to some extent one can rationalize it as a rock-paper-scissors dynamic: it is acceptable to call someone a “whore” and a “bitch” if they are racist. Michelle Malkin knows this well, I recall reading on blogs like Atrios rogue commenters not only mocking her maiden name in a racist fashion, but someone offering up the bizarre scenario of her being gang raped by fat old white conservative males (presumably her fantasy). Doesn’t Michelle Malkin deserve some respect as a human being no matter her politics? Ah, “But she’s Michelle Malkin….”
A few years ago a cousin of mine invited me over to his place and asked me to indulge myself in the pornographic films in his collection of DVDs as I sat under a wall poster of the Kabba on his couch. Later he told me luridly about how he had sex with a woman in his bedroom while our other cousin listened to their grunts. At this point he offered me a beer, and waxed eloquently about how “our women” are not “like that” and are “pure.” He has a daughter now (with one of “our women”), and of course he would fly into a rage if anyone treated her as an object purely of sexual gratification at some point in the future. This sort of behavior is not unknown amongst Muslim males, indulgences in the pleasures of the flesh with “kuffar” women is within the bound of acceptability because questions of honor, shame and virtue are irrelevant when it comes to those outside of Islam. When I was a in high school many of my male friends, Mormons and Baptists, would enter into sexual relationships with the school “sluts.” The purpose of these relationships was not to build a foundation for the future, but to extract sexual favors and accrue experience and points. Of course, at some point in the future these same boys, now men, would marry women who were pure virgins.
We all have principles, and we try to tell ourselves that we’re following them even when we “bend” the rules. Our mental hardware and the software built on top of it is flexible and amenable to these white lies. Religious believers may believe that God knows all, but to our introspection is blinded by the many shadows in the twilight world of our minds which allow us to put aside indiscretions and infidelities away from the glare of our self-criticism. Shame is no consideration within the community agrees that the infidels/mleccha/liberal/conservative/kuffar/gentile/babarian/gaijian/etc. are outside the bounds of respectable treatment. Guilt is not a cross to bear when the mind is a master of self-deceit as a matter of course. What one does not glean within the mind’s eye one does not regret, the unseen sin is no sin.
I was struck by all this while reading The Chinese Experience, a cultural history of the Middle Kingdom from antiquity to the 20th century. While the law is viewed positively in the West, a legacy of Rome, in China it is abhorred. The reason is historical, as the Legalistic camp in ancient China left the nasty legacy of a crushing totalitarianism. After the rebirth of Confucianism in the wake of the collapse of the Chin dynasty and the crystallization of classical Chinese civilization under the Han the law had a dirty name. Rather, the emphasis was on the judgment of morally upright scholar-officials. Cardinal virtues like jen or li served as broad guidelines, but there was no great reverence for divine law. Heaven served as the bulwark and grounding for the decisions and actions of man, but Heaven was not a precise dictator. Certainly Chinese civilization ossified and became overly reliant on precedent and proper forms (li) during its later phases so that the ideal of virtuous gentlemen making the best and most pragmatic decision seems laughable. Nevertheless, do note that East Asian societies have been rather open to making selective changes and modernizing due to the Western challenge. In contrast, Islamic societies have been more resistant as “reformist” streams which reject the West have risen to become extremely popular. I think part of the flexibility of the East is due to the fact there is no specific law sanctioned by God which requires argumentation or marginalization. The Chinese lack of respect for inflexible and blind law has caused problems in the modern context because of the necessity of fixed and predictable legal regimes for a capitalist economy, but in the Islamic case you have a situation where all sorts of ridiculous circumlocutions around the letter of the law (e.g., “Islamic banking”) are necessary to align with the spirit of the age. Similarly, the emphasis on moral character framed by general exhortations toward goodness seems far more practicable than the laundry list of “things to do to be a good person” which some Western religious and cultural traditions embarked upon, simply because the lists are invariably “gamed” to the satisfaction of opportunistic individuals.
Comments are closed.