What are the potential problems associated with interracial relationships?
by Majid83
29-05-12
Relationships between men and women of different ethnic groups have been a controversial subject for many decades, but have now become widely accepted, and anyone who would dare to question whether this increasing trend towards marriage between people of different ethnic groups is a good idea is stigmatized as a right-wing extremist.
In this essay I do not intend to cast a moral judgement on exogamous relationships. I also do not seek to decide for individuals whether they should marry outside of their own ethnicity or not. Instead, I seek to alert people to certain problems that emerge as a result of relationships between different ethnic groups, on an individual scale and for different ethnicities as a whole. I intend to focus on the problems that are not immediately apparent to people, and skipping the more obvious ones.
Exogamous relationships became an increasingly important issue as a result of changes brought about by the industrial revolution, which made migration and communication between different ethnicities increasingly easy. For the centuries before then, endogamy has been the norm. Our increasing trend towards secularisation also helped to remove certain barriers towards exogamous relationships that were created by religious prohibitions. Hence, exogamous relationships have become a controversial issue for communities that have survived as minorities for centuries without being assimilated.
Exogamous relationships lead to religious radicalism
Many feel a responsibility to their ancestors to ensure the survival of their people through the modern era, as opposed to being assimilated into one or more numerically larger ethnic groups. If the ethnic group in question is seen as being a socially dominant ethnic group in our society, those amongst them hesitant to endorse exogamous relationships are decried to be racists.
An example would be the Jewish community, whose more conservative members are seeking to take action to preserve the Jewish community now that it is faced with a 50% intermarriage rate in the United States, of whom two thirds of the children are not raised as Jewish by some estimations.1 Interestingly enough, it could be argued that exogamous marriage will not so much lead to the extinction of the Jewish people, but to a cultural shift towards extremism amongst Jews.
Those Jews who engage in intermarriage with non-Jews tend to be more liberal in their outlook on life, and their families are unlikely to be very Orthodox Jews. On the contrary, amongst Ultra-Orthodox Jews, intermarriage with non-Jews is extremely rare, and hence such Jews are likely to become proportionally more representative for Jewish people as a whole.
The same is likely to happen amongst adherents of other religions, with more liberal Muslims being more likely to marry non-Muslims and hence raising their children as secular. Hence, we can expect exogamous relationships to increase the division between conservative and progressive people, as progressive people become part of a global culture, while conservative people remain part of their own communities.
Like most other aspects of human personality, religious outlooks on life are partly environmentally and partly genetically determined. Part of this environmental factor is the family situation, as growing up in a religious household increases the chance of an individual growing up to be very religious as well.
Hence, it is interesting to note that more fundamentalist members of a religion are now more likely to have a high number of children than more liberal believers, with a prime example being Orthodox Jews. It should be noted that the trend towards exogamous marriage of liberal members of a religion increases this genetic and cultural trend towards religious fundamentalism, as before, liberal and conservative partners in a same-faith relationship were forced to come to a consensus on the number of children they would have.
As an example, we could expect that a liberal woman would be willing to have children, but would insist to her conservative husband that they should wait until she has finished her education, reducing the total number of children in the relationship. Instead, we now see that as a result of exogamous marriages, people of the same religion now tend to marry other orthodox members of the religion. Hence, with no more need to come to a consensus with a liberal partner, fertility of such orthodox religious people can now rapidly increase to whatever level their situation allows.
Black single women, Asian single men
Currently, 70% of black women are unmarried.2 A great reason many black children grow up in single parent households is because black women simply can't find dedicated husbands. Part of the reason for this is because many black men who make good husbands do not marry black women but instead marry outside of their race. Interracial marriage rates are higher for black men than for black women. In black-white marriages, black men and white women are overrepresented. In Black-Asian marriages, the numbers are even further skewed towards Black men and Asian women.
Studies have shown that black men and Asian women are rated as most attractive by the opposite gender, while black women and Asian men are rated as least attractive by the opposite gender. White men and women are seen as intermediate in attractiveness.3 This makes sense when considering that black people tend to have more robust facial features when compared to Asian people, with white facial features being intermediate.
Hence, interracial marriage is leading to black women being forced to raise children on their own, while Asian men find themselves involuntarily remaining bachelors. Before our modern migrations towards other continents, people of every race were forced to marry people of their own race, as they would likely never meet anyone of a different race. Now we are faced with a large problem, that white people are willing to conveniently ignore, as they are intermediate between Asians and sub-Saharan Africans on the scale from femininity to masculinity.
Interracial brain drain
Studies have found that people of Asian and Ashkenazi Jewish background have higher IQ scores on average than people of European background, whom have higher IQ scores on average than every other ethnic group not yet mentioned. This creates the potential for a brain drain, as immigrants from African to Europe are likely to be on average more intelligent than their average countrymen.
A similar effect can be found in the US, where successful Native Americans and African Americans are likely to seek to marry outside of their own race, to escape communities plagued by alcoholism, crime and poverty, despite them being the best hope for these ethnic groups to solve those problems. When most successful Native Americans marry outside of their own race, other Native Americans are left with little choice but to follow suit. The same of course goes for us ex-Muslims. By marrying people who did not grow up in Muslim households, we are ensuring that our ethnic groups will remain Islamic for all of eternity.
Low IQ children
I will readily admit that this is the most sensitive issue discussed in this article, but it has to be discussed, as it may be the most important issue. As mentioned earlier, psychologists agree that ethnic groups differ in their average IQ. Amongst psychologists, opinions differ in regards to the source of the difference, but a significant number of experts in the field believe that at least part of the difference is genetic in origin.
One piece of evidence commonly given by these psychologists is that people of different races have children that regress towards different means. Regression towards the mean means that when measuring an extreme variable, a second measurement will tend to be closer to the mean. In the case of IQ, it means that highly intelligent black parents, are likely to have children with an IQ closer to the average black IQ, while amongst white parents with the same IQ as the black parents mentioned earlier, the IQ would be closer to the white IQ.
What this means in practice is that children born to high IQ black parents, tend to have lower IQ's than children born to low IQ white parents.6 The reason for this is because when someone has an IQ that is far higher than the average for his ethnic group, the chance is far higher for his blessing to have been caused by the environment than by his genetics.
Hence, the implications for people from high IQ ethnicities are that marrying a high IQ individual of a low IQ ethnicity is no guarantee that the child will be as blessed as the parent. Let us take as an example, a Caucasian man with a 100 IQ who marries a black woman with a 105 IQ. The average IQ of their children can be expected to be on average below 100, as the high IQ of the black woman was likely largely caused by her environment, which may be difficult to recreate.
Hence why people used to look not just at the person they wanted to marry, but their family as well to determine whether they would lead to gifted children. If the family of your partner does not have a high IQ as well, be ready to face the issue of raising children that are unable to live up to the expectations you and your partner had for them.
Paternal investment is tied to genetic similarity of the offspring
In nature, men can not be sure of the paternity of their children. Hence, men are genetically programmed to go by people's looks to judge whether they are genetically related to them, and hence should be helped in the form of resources and protection. In the case of children, this means that children who look more like their father receive more resources and more investment from the father. A study in Africa found that the survival chances of a child increase if the child resembles its father more.4
This may be one reason why humans maintain many aesthetic abnormalities that might seem like a net negative. A man with a unique nose or chin that might not flatter his appearance may notice the same abnormality in his children, and hence feel assured of the fact that he is raising a child that is his direct offspring, and if not, at least the offspring of one of his peers. Hence such aesthetic defects are not filtered out of the gene pool, because they help men to determine the paternity of children. It is not uncommon for some families with certain genetic abnormalities (an extra finger for example) to question the paternity of a child born without the abnormality.
Hence, a problem arises with interracial children. Nobody will deny that interracial children tend to look pretty. Their facial features are average, which makes their faces pretty. However, to ensure paternal investment, a child should ideally share the quirks of its father. It tends to be more difficult to identify the similarity between an interracial child and its father.
Besides the difficulty of identifying whether the child is related to its father, the child simply isn't very closely genetically related to its father. In a community with low genetic diversity (the Amish or Ashkenazi Jews for example) a man having a child with a woman of another ethnic group is likely to be genetically closer related to his cousin or his neighbour, than to his own child! Hence, from an evolutionary point of view, should we be surprised that men who have a child with a woman outside their own ethnic group are unlikely to invest a lot of time and resources in the child?
Similar to the problem of the child not resembling its father, in exogamous relationships, the child's personality is unlikely to resemble its father's personality. Personality is at least partly genetically determined, and evidence has shown that, even after accounting for similarity due to gender, race, economic status and common ancestry, patterns of genetic similarity can still be found between close friends.5
Exogamous marriage leads to genetically heterogeneous communities
Through exogamous marriage, the community as a whole becomes genetically heterogeneous. This is obvious, and doesn't have to be explained any further. What does need to be clarified is why this is a problem in a community.
The issue is very similar to the issue in my previous point, but it applies on a communal level, as opposed to an individual level. People are willing to sacrifice their own well being for that of people in their community, if their community shares a lot of genes with themselves. Communities that are genetically homogeneous watch out for their own members, as group-cooperation becomes a very successful survival strategy. In a genetically heterogeneous community (the United States for example) there is little reason from a Darwinian perspective to sacrifice your own well being for your peers.
We notice this in countries where people have recently been force-fed the multicultural experiment. Middle class people increasingly ask themselves why they should pay high taxes to maintain the welfare state. Similarly, people have little incentive to use resources sparingly, because they are taking resources from people who are genetically dissimilar to them, as opposed to people who are similar to them.
From a Darwinian perspective, would you rather rob your brother or your cousin, if forced to choose? This is what goes on in our society today. As communities become less homogeneous, the people in those communities become less supportive towards each other. And hence, as a result, communities do not take care of themselves any more. Solidarity is replaced by insurance companies. Health care has to be formalized, as neighbours become unwilling to ensure the elderly woman living next door doesn't walk around in confusion outside. Society breaks down, and people begin to care about just themselves and their nuclear family.
Conclusion
There are also arguments in favour of exogamous marriage, which I do not seek to deny. As an example, Europe may see exogamous marriage as a solution to their multicultural crisis, by abolishing multiculturalism through assimilation. Furthermore, beneficial genes such as resistance against malaria and HIV and tolerance of high altitudes can spread through the human gene pool through exogamous marriage.
However, we rarely hear the arguments against exogamous marriage, as we as a society have moved towards endorsing exogamous marriage, while the arguments against exogamous marriage in practice tend to exceed those in favour of it.
However, this poses a problem for people who have fallen in love with spouses of different ethnicities. A good solution to this problem is for society as a whole to create the type of conditions in which this dilemma does not emerge to begin with, through nationalism. People of different backgrounds and shared culture and history should seek to live together, as it has many benefits beyond just preventing the problems outlined above.
However, it should be noted that we should move further beyond just nationalism based on race or ethnicity. The problem lies deeper. Humans evolved to marry kin, and live with kin. Society should be tribal in nature, with people holding allegiance to their extended family, and marrying within their extended family.
This is how traditional societies around the world have lived for centuries in peace and stability. Castes have historically not been seen as a source of oppression as they are seen today due to individualist propaganda, but as a source of support. No man is an island, and every man is dependent upon his family to take care of him and defend him. Such a situation is more desirable, and better aligned with our human instincts than a situation in which government and corporations take over tasks that were once reserved to families.
Lastly, I understand that this essay is inevitably offensive, and I have tried to treat this issue in a sensitive manner. I do not wish misery upon any ethnicity or race, nor do I carry ill wishes towards people for any characteristics that they did not choose themselves. Instead I simply seek to live in the type of society in which every family can live in alignment with the type of lifestyle in which the human species evolved and in which I believe it will feel most comfortable.
References
1 - http://articles.latimes.com/2003/sep/11/nation/na-jews11
2 - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903454504576486492588283556.html
3 - http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031703
4 - http://www.anth.uconn.edu/degree_programs/ecolevo/offspring_resemb.pdf
5 - http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110117/full/news.2011.23.html
6 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpmlqtnrec8
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Technology destroys Tradition
Technology destroys Tradition
by Majid83
05 - 05 - 12
The greatest failure of conservatives has always been their inability to connect cause and effect. Conservatives throw temper tantrums against modernity and the erosion of traditional values, and seek to combat the rising tide by attacking the excesses of modernity, but their only successes consist of the delaying of bills that will inevitably pass.
As an example, conservatives will protest abortion clinics, "satanic music", genetic engineering of humans and other organisms, gay marriage and pornography, without seeking to address the causes of these new developments. Hence they are continually wasting their energy attacking symptoms of modernity without understanding the underlying causes.
They fear that gay marriage will lead to the end of the sacred character of marriage. This despite their own political leaders cheating on their partners, with the most shameful example being Newt Gingrich who divorced his wife after she was hospitalized.
Most of the fears and concerns of conservatives are fully justified. Modernity is eroding traditions and values that have existed for hundreds of years. Marriage can no longer provide the certainty it once gave us, and neither can religion, employment, family and neighborhood. All of these would once last you a lifetime, but are now as exchangeable and temporary as the cell phone in your pocket.
Many conservatives react to this widespread uncertainty by reinventing their religion, in an attempt to create an environment and a mindset that can block modernity out of their lives. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Salafism, and Fundamentalist Baptism are modern movements without the historical tradition they claim to posses. Salafists may claim to emulate the rightly guided companions of the Prophet Muhammed, but their leaders derive their intellectual inspiration from a 20th century Egyptian man named Sayyid Qutb.
All three of these religions have in common that they have gone through a constant centuries long evolution. As their environment changed, the religion adopted. As an example, when the Jews found themselves living in Europe, their original tribal religion become a scholarly religion. Similarly, Islam evolved from its barbaric origins, obvious to anyone who is not blinded by personal ideology or belief, into a religion that incorporated an intellectual and metaphysical tradition.
However, with the dawn of the Industrial revolution, the changes demanded of religion by modernity became so large that the actual survival of many religions became threatened. As an example, almost every religion incorporates a creation myth, none of which are fully compatible with the 19th century formulation of evolution, or the scientifically established age of the earth. Similarly, the development of reliable birth control, abortion and treatment for sexually transmittable diseases meant that traditional attitudes towards sex and marriages were no longer as self evident as they were when these attitudes developed.
One logical reaction to this newfound crisis was to proclaim that the apocalypse was upon us. The newfound crisis is a test of faith, and all but the few most devout ones will lose their religion and suffer as a result of it. This leads to such apocalyptic sects as the Jehovah's witnesses, whose track record includes multiple failed predictions of the end.
Others sought to reconcile their faith with the continually increasing demands put upon it by modernity, not realizing that with every step their religion descends further into irrelevance, with their prophet turning into little more than a sockpuppet for the modern ideology of egalitarian humanism who happened to be centuries ahead of his time.
If modern society comes to the conclusion as a result of horrific genocides and the development of nuclear weapons that warfare is no longer a tolerable option, scripture can be quote-mined in search of statements preaching peace and egalitarianism.
The religious concede that God did not create humans 6000 years, but "guided" evolution. Scientists encourage them into this pathway by telling them that religion and evolution are compatible and many Christians believe in Evolution. Eventually, these same Christians who bought the first step are required to profess that organism did not evolve through guided evolution or "intelligent design", but came about by naturalistic Darwinian selection as a result of mutations that were random as opposed to guided. Eventually those same Christians are forced to concede that the first cell was the result of a series of chemical reaction that favored the development of increasingly longer self-replicating molecules that can spontaneously arise, given the right conditions, which existed in many different places in the universe.
They are then forced to concede that humans have an imperfect design that might as well be fixed by scientists in the coming decades through gene-therapy and pre-implantation embryo selection. They went from "Homosexuality is a sin" to "Homosexuality can be treated" to "Homosexuality is an impulse that can can be resisted" to "Gays should not marry" to "Gays should not adopt children". In the coming decades, they will be forced to step over to "Gays should not be allowed to use genetic technology to create a child that has two biological fathers".
Intelligent and honest Christians look ahead, see that the end of the line is Naturalistic Atheism, drop out and intellectually shield themselves from the modern world. Intelligent but dishonest Christians try to remain vague about their religious beliefs to themselves and anyone who questions them about them. Their religious faith is a pillar of certainty that they hold on to, that they do not seek to destabilize by defining it and hence exposing it to scrutiny. It goes without saying that the certainty this pillar delivers is continually shrinking as well. What defines modern Christianity is the continual struggle against personal disbelief, which is an element that played a negligible role until recent times, and hence, technology changes the very nature of what it means to be religious.
Those same conservatives who choose to oppose the concessions demanded of them by modernity have a habit of feeding the very machine that demands these concessions of them. They profess a faith in unlimited economic and technological growth, without ever questioning whether economic and technological growth create the very conditions that erode the values and traditions that they seek to maintain.
As some examples, the car, much favored by modern conservatives, allows people to drive to the supermarket. Hence, local stores receive too few customers to maintain themselves, forcing them to close. Hence, more people are forced to go to the supermarket, and hence, more local stores close. Youth who used to drink in their own local bar now prefer to go to the larger café in the city. Hence, they disappear out of sight of their neighbors, who don't know the local youth anymore and feel threatened by them.
The television leads to neighbors who do not know each other, with the computer going a step further and leading to family members that don't know each other. Conservatives see their marriages fall apart and conclude that a ban on gay marriage may help to turn the rising tide.
Seeing the uncertainty brought about by the end of social class, conservatives encourage their children to go to college in an attempt to secure a higher place in the modern meritocracy. Being highly educated, the children become unwilling to carry out the jobs that society is capable of offering them, as they were promised they could do something they wanted by parents who were desperate to climb the social ladder. Easy communication with the homeland and rapid transportation mean that immigrants can now come in to fulfill the jobs that were once carried out by working class people who are now shoved into offices.
Conservatives see crime rates rise as their neighborhoods become "multicultural". They decide to feed into the machine by demanding stronger law enforcement. Disputes that would once be solved by families now become solved by police, as even loud music or a ball kicked through a window now require the intervention of law enforcement. As a result, loyalty to any family members outside of the direct nuclear family serves no genuine purpose anymore, as families are no longer reliant upon themselves for protection.
Similarly, a demand to an end of nepotism and political dynasties in favor of the merciless competition of the individualist meritocracy helps to eliminate loyalty between family members. Uncles can no longer carry out mutually beneficial favors to their nephews by inviting them into a corporate hierarchy.
Technology is the anathema to everything that is sacred. It is capable of dismantling religion by shredding those very elements of human existence of the transcendental mystery that once made us bow down before a power that is greater than us. Through sex education, birth control, pregnancy tests, hospital births, prenatal ultrasounds, in vitro fertilization and soon "designer babies", it manages to desecrate the miracle of human birth. Through evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, biology, pedagogy and behavioral techniques it is rapidly desecrating the miracle of the human mind.
Is it any wonder that the only people who have managed to keep traditional values intact are those who have kept their traditional lifestyle intact?
The question that conservatives should ask themselves is what price they are willing to pay to maintain the values and traditions that they hold in such high esteem. If you value monogamy and life-long pairing, would you be willing to accept a few cases of syphilitic insanity and disfigurement as the cost to maintain such a life style, or would you prefer to eliminate the "punishments" that promiscuity inflicts? If you value strong family ties, are you willing to keep your children home instead of sending them to elementary school? Are you willing to accept family feuds and nepotism?
The conservatives that realize the difficulty of issues such as these tend to choose for a middle of the road solution, one which is reasonable, although inevitably requiring new concessions on the side of the conservative. Consider for example, the bioconservatives. Bioconservatives oppose the genetic modification in any of the organisms present on our planet.
It is now possible e to screen fertilized eggs for certain genetic variations before their are implanted into the womb. This would allow us to eliminate serious genetic problems from our children, but can just as easily be used to choose characteristics such as hair color, skin colors or facial appearance. Bioconservatives tend to oppose all such procedures.
On some issues, the bioconservative can easily expect majority support of the people. As an example, a bioconservative who opposes allowing parents to choose to have a white skinned child through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis would receive majority support. Bioconservatives who oppose allowing parents to use such procedures to only have children of normal intelligence would have it a little more difficult. Finally, bioconservatives who oppose allowing parents to use such procedures to only have children free of deadly genetic mutations (such as an inherited risk of breast cancer), stand no chance in the public debate.
Yet, every genetic variation that the bioconservative allows parents to consciously choose in their children, inevitably increases demand to allow more genetic tinkering. As an example, if severe intellectual disability (Down syndrome for example) can be eliminated, there will be greater pressure on people whose children suffer mild intellectual disability to prevent their children from being born. Similarly, if Huntington's disease can be eliminated, those with a predisposition to Alzheimer's disease will feel a greater pressure to eliminate those genes from their offspring as well.
Reasons for this increasing pressure include the fact that a spouse with a disposition to Huntington's disease might now be considered the worst possible option for a lifelong relationship. However, when Huntington's disease has been eliminated, those with a genetic disposition to Alzheimer's disease might become the new "worst possible option" for a lifelong relationship.
Similarly, through genetic modification of plants, scientists will be able to announce that they could save millions of lives worldwide, if only it weren't for those "bioluddites" who oppose genetic engineering. Hence, all that the modernists will have to do is shout an increasingly greater death toll which is blamed on those who oppose modernity. This is what happens to be the case with the Trojan Horse of Golden Rice. Bioconservatives are fooled into destroying their own credibility by using the wrong type of arguments when first confronted with Golden Rice, by claiming that Golden Rice is ineffective as it produces too little of the newly introduced nutrient. When the new version comes out, Bioconservatives successfully destroyed their own credibility by having to change their argument.
Although my case study, the bioconservative, is without a doubt a very special subspecies of conservative, his problem can be extrapolated to that of other conservatives as well. He isn't resisting the train of modernity. He is sticking his feet in the sand as he is being dragged along by the train, while progressives shout at him, encouraging him to climb aboard to make his trip less painful for him.
It is for this reason that the definition of a modern conservative is a person who seeks to maintain that which he has already lost.
An effective conservative has to flat out state that he opposes mankind's attempt to reshape his universe in his image. An effective conservative upholds that before humans through the Industrial revolution amplified their power over nature, a self-regulating order existed that was created by nobody (or, alternatively, God), chosen by nobody, but created a certainty and a stability to which humans and other organisms could adjust with a minimum amount of pressure. The Industrial revolution and the societal changes that grew out of it destroyed the equilibrium that existed before it and through the use of psychology and biotechnology is now preparing to wipe away the last remnants of the old order that existed before it.
Conservatives should draw the distinction between the natural spontaneously arising order in the absence of modern technology, and the man-made (though uncontrollable), self-augmenting, self-regulating order that is the product of industrial civilization. Conservatives should firmly ally with the former if they seek to maintain the value pattern and traditions that grew out of it.
by Majid83
05 - 05 - 12
The greatest failure of conservatives has always been their inability to connect cause and effect. Conservatives throw temper tantrums against modernity and the erosion of traditional values, and seek to combat the rising tide by attacking the excesses of modernity, but their only successes consist of the delaying of bills that will inevitably pass.
As an example, conservatives will protest abortion clinics, "satanic music", genetic engineering of humans and other organisms, gay marriage and pornography, without seeking to address the causes of these new developments. Hence they are continually wasting their energy attacking symptoms of modernity without understanding the underlying causes.
They fear that gay marriage will lead to the end of the sacred character of marriage. This despite their own political leaders cheating on their partners, with the most shameful example being Newt Gingrich who divorced his wife after she was hospitalized.
Most of the fears and concerns of conservatives are fully justified. Modernity is eroding traditions and values that have existed for hundreds of years. Marriage can no longer provide the certainty it once gave us, and neither can religion, employment, family and neighborhood. All of these would once last you a lifetime, but are now as exchangeable and temporary as the cell phone in your pocket.
Many conservatives react to this widespread uncertainty by reinventing their religion, in an attempt to create an environment and a mindset that can block modernity out of their lives. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Salafism, and Fundamentalist Baptism are modern movements without the historical tradition they claim to posses. Salafists may claim to emulate the rightly guided companions of the Prophet Muhammed, but their leaders derive their intellectual inspiration from a 20th century Egyptian man named Sayyid Qutb.
All three of these religions have in common that they have gone through a constant centuries long evolution. As their environment changed, the religion adopted. As an example, when the Jews found themselves living in Europe, their original tribal religion become a scholarly religion. Similarly, Islam evolved from its barbaric origins, obvious to anyone who is not blinded by personal ideology or belief, into a religion that incorporated an intellectual and metaphysical tradition.
However, with the dawn of the Industrial revolution, the changes demanded of religion by modernity became so large that the actual survival of many religions became threatened. As an example, almost every religion incorporates a creation myth, none of which are fully compatible with the 19th century formulation of evolution, or the scientifically established age of the earth. Similarly, the development of reliable birth control, abortion and treatment for sexually transmittable diseases meant that traditional attitudes towards sex and marriages were no longer as self evident as they were when these attitudes developed.
One logical reaction to this newfound crisis was to proclaim that the apocalypse was upon us. The newfound crisis is a test of faith, and all but the few most devout ones will lose their religion and suffer as a result of it. This leads to such apocalyptic sects as the Jehovah's witnesses, whose track record includes multiple failed predictions of the end.
Others sought to reconcile their faith with the continually increasing demands put upon it by modernity, not realizing that with every step their religion descends further into irrelevance, with their prophet turning into little more than a sockpuppet for the modern ideology of egalitarian humanism who happened to be centuries ahead of his time.
If modern society comes to the conclusion as a result of horrific genocides and the development of nuclear weapons that warfare is no longer a tolerable option, scripture can be quote-mined in search of statements preaching peace and egalitarianism.
The religious concede that God did not create humans 6000 years, but "guided" evolution. Scientists encourage them into this pathway by telling them that religion and evolution are compatible and many Christians believe in Evolution. Eventually, these same Christians who bought the first step are required to profess that organism did not evolve through guided evolution or "intelligent design", but came about by naturalistic Darwinian selection as a result of mutations that were random as opposed to guided. Eventually those same Christians are forced to concede that the first cell was the result of a series of chemical reaction that favored the development of increasingly longer self-replicating molecules that can spontaneously arise, given the right conditions, which existed in many different places in the universe.
They are then forced to concede that humans have an imperfect design that might as well be fixed by scientists in the coming decades through gene-therapy and pre-implantation embryo selection. They went from "Homosexuality is a sin" to "Homosexuality can be treated" to "Homosexuality is an impulse that can can be resisted" to "Gays should not marry" to "Gays should not adopt children". In the coming decades, they will be forced to step over to "Gays should not be allowed to use genetic technology to create a child that has two biological fathers".
Intelligent and honest Christians look ahead, see that the end of the line is Naturalistic Atheism, drop out and intellectually shield themselves from the modern world. Intelligent but dishonest Christians try to remain vague about their religious beliefs to themselves and anyone who questions them about them. Their religious faith is a pillar of certainty that they hold on to, that they do not seek to destabilize by defining it and hence exposing it to scrutiny. It goes without saying that the certainty this pillar delivers is continually shrinking as well. What defines modern Christianity is the continual struggle against personal disbelief, which is an element that played a negligible role until recent times, and hence, technology changes the very nature of what it means to be religious.
Those same conservatives who choose to oppose the concessions demanded of them by modernity have a habit of feeding the very machine that demands these concessions of them. They profess a faith in unlimited economic and technological growth, without ever questioning whether economic and technological growth create the very conditions that erode the values and traditions that they seek to maintain.
As some examples, the car, much favored by modern conservatives, allows people to drive to the supermarket. Hence, local stores receive too few customers to maintain themselves, forcing them to close. Hence, more people are forced to go to the supermarket, and hence, more local stores close. Youth who used to drink in their own local bar now prefer to go to the larger café in the city. Hence, they disappear out of sight of their neighbors, who don't know the local youth anymore and feel threatened by them.
The television leads to neighbors who do not know each other, with the computer going a step further and leading to family members that don't know each other. Conservatives see their marriages fall apart and conclude that a ban on gay marriage may help to turn the rising tide.
Seeing the uncertainty brought about by the end of social class, conservatives encourage their children to go to college in an attempt to secure a higher place in the modern meritocracy. Being highly educated, the children become unwilling to carry out the jobs that society is capable of offering them, as they were promised they could do something they wanted by parents who were desperate to climb the social ladder. Easy communication with the homeland and rapid transportation mean that immigrants can now come in to fulfill the jobs that were once carried out by working class people who are now shoved into offices.
Conservatives see crime rates rise as their neighborhoods become "multicultural". They decide to feed into the machine by demanding stronger law enforcement. Disputes that would once be solved by families now become solved by police, as even loud music or a ball kicked through a window now require the intervention of law enforcement. As a result, loyalty to any family members outside of the direct nuclear family serves no genuine purpose anymore, as families are no longer reliant upon themselves for protection.
Similarly, a demand to an end of nepotism and political dynasties in favor of the merciless competition of the individualist meritocracy helps to eliminate loyalty between family members. Uncles can no longer carry out mutually beneficial favors to their nephews by inviting them into a corporate hierarchy.
Technology is the anathema to everything that is sacred. It is capable of dismantling religion by shredding those very elements of human existence of the transcendental mystery that once made us bow down before a power that is greater than us. Through sex education, birth control, pregnancy tests, hospital births, prenatal ultrasounds, in vitro fertilization and soon "designer babies", it manages to desecrate the miracle of human birth. Through evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, biology, pedagogy and behavioral techniques it is rapidly desecrating the miracle of the human mind.
Is it any wonder that the only people who have managed to keep traditional values intact are those who have kept their traditional lifestyle intact?
The question that conservatives should ask themselves is what price they are willing to pay to maintain the values and traditions that they hold in such high esteem. If you value monogamy and life-long pairing, would you be willing to accept a few cases of syphilitic insanity and disfigurement as the cost to maintain such a life style, or would you prefer to eliminate the "punishments" that promiscuity inflicts? If you value strong family ties, are you willing to keep your children home instead of sending them to elementary school? Are you willing to accept family feuds and nepotism?
The conservatives that realize the difficulty of issues such as these tend to choose for a middle of the road solution, one which is reasonable, although inevitably requiring new concessions on the side of the conservative. Consider for example, the bioconservatives. Bioconservatives oppose the genetic modification in any of the organisms present on our planet.
It is now possible e to screen fertilized eggs for certain genetic variations before their are implanted into the womb. This would allow us to eliminate serious genetic problems from our children, but can just as easily be used to choose characteristics such as hair color, skin colors or facial appearance. Bioconservatives tend to oppose all such procedures.
On some issues, the bioconservative can easily expect majority support of the people. As an example, a bioconservative who opposes allowing parents to choose to have a white skinned child through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis would receive majority support. Bioconservatives who oppose allowing parents to use such procedures to only have children of normal intelligence would have it a little more difficult. Finally, bioconservatives who oppose allowing parents to use such procedures to only have children free of deadly genetic mutations (such as an inherited risk of breast cancer), stand no chance in the public debate.
Yet, every genetic variation that the bioconservative allows parents to consciously choose in their children, inevitably increases demand to allow more genetic tinkering. As an example, if severe intellectual disability (Down syndrome for example) can be eliminated, there will be greater pressure on people whose children suffer mild intellectual disability to prevent their children from being born. Similarly, if Huntington's disease can be eliminated, those with a predisposition to Alzheimer's disease will feel a greater pressure to eliminate those genes from their offspring as well.
Reasons for this increasing pressure include the fact that a spouse with a disposition to Huntington's disease might now be considered the worst possible option for a lifelong relationship. However, when Huntington's disease has been eliminated, those with a genetic disposition to Alzheimer's disease might become the new "worst possible option" for a lifelong relationship.
Similarly, through genetic modification of plants, scientists will be able to announce that they could save millions of lives worldwide, if only it weren't for those "bioluddites" who oppose genetic engineering. Hence, all that the modernists will have to do is shout an increasingly greater death toll which is blamed on those who oppose modernity. This is what happens to be the case with the Trojan Horse of Golden Rice. Bioconservatives are fooled into destroying their own credibility by using the wrong type of arguments when first confronted with Golden Rice, by claiming that Golden Rice is ineffective as it produces too little of the newly introduced nutrient. When the new version comes out, Bioconservatives successfully destroyed their own credibility by having to change their argument.
Although my case study, the bioconservative, is without a doubt a very special subspecies of conservative, his problem can be extrapolated to that of other conservatives as well. He isn't resisting the train of modernity. He is sticking his feet in the sand as he is being dragged along by the train, while progressives shout at him, encouraging him to climb aboard to make his trip less painful for him.
It is for this reason that the definition of a modern conservative is a person who seeks to maintain that which he has already lost.
An effective conservative has to flat out state that he opposes mankind's attempt to reshape his universe in his image. An effective conservative upholds that before humans through the Industrial revolution amplified their power over nature, a self-regulating order existed that was created by nobody (or, alternatively, God), chosen by nobody, but created a certainty and a stability to which humans and other organisms could adjust with a minimum amount of pressure. The Industrial revolution and the societal changes that grew out of it destroyed the equilibrium that existed before it and through the use of psychology and biotechnology is now preparing to wipe away the last remnants of the old order that existed before it.
Conservatives should draw the distinction between the natural spontaneously arising order in the absence of modern technology, and the man-made (though uncontrollable), self-augmenting, self-regulating order that is the product of industrial civilization. Conservatives should firmly ally with the former if they seek to maintain the value pattern and traditions that grew out of it.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
Why we should oppose all biotechnology out of principle.
A lot of criticism has been aimed at biotechnology, but most of it is ineffective. The people who use this criticism oppose biotechnology, but their arguments are impotent, and only end up strengthening the biotechnology business.
Some examples of bad arguments used by Environmentalists/Anarchists/Conservatives (I consider myself all three of these positions, and I don't consider them to contradict each other) are:
-Biotechnology doesn't work. This is a famous example that was used by Greenpeace to protest the Golden rice project.
Greenpeace wrote back in 2005 for example:
-Biotechnology is dangerous. This is another argument used by opponents of biotechnology. This may very well be true, the idea that biotechnology is dangerous, but what does it matter? Has the danger of something ever stopped us from carrying out a policy?
Nuclear weapons were dangerous, and we detonated them. Fossil fuels are dangerous, and we burn them. Nuclear power plants are dangerous, and we build them. Cell phones are dangerous, and we give them to our children. The argument that GMO's are dangerous will never work, because opponents will simply point out that not using GMO's is dangerous for our health as well. As an example, the blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency is causing massive harm to people.
It is very possible that GM technology will one day create a kind of superweed that will run rampant and spread throughout the environment, but the fact of the matter is that people simply do not care.
Of course, the problem is also that as more studies are done, people may reach the conclusion that GM food is safe. This is of course not necessarily the truth, as the negative health effects may take decades to occur.
Hence, if anti-GMO activists go around predicting cancer and infertility from GMOs, and the cancer and infertility don't happen, people will consider the anti-GMO movement to be the losers of the debate.
-Genetically modified crops centralize power. This is true for now, but it might not be true in the future in the same way it is today. The price of genetic modification is dropping rapidly, and for all we know, 20 years from now, farmers might be able to genetically manipulate their own plants against local pests!
It is also not a very special argument. Every technology centralizes power at the cost of local farmer's autonomy. As an example, the tractor centralizes power, pesticides centralize power, irrigation centralizes power, all of these innovations centralize control. How many people are willing to ban pesticides because they centralize control?
A principal opposition to all biotechnology is required
So, how then should we attack biotechnology, if none of these methods above work? Should we even be critical of biotechnology to begin with, or should we just accept it?
The answer is that yes, we should oppose biotechnology. We should oppose all forms of biotechnology, and we should seek to outlaw all genetic scientific research, whether it can save lives or not.
We should do this, for the following reason:
Biotechnology is an infringement on the dignity of life.
I would explain this argument as following, based on the famous French Christian Anarchist Jacques Ellul's book, "The Technological Society".
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, a new way of thinking has emerged on our planet. This led to the development of a technological society that is rapidly expanding across our globe. Technology is the main determining factor in our modern environment.
The level of technology in a society has the largest impact on the way our we lead our lives, more so than location or culture, or even political system. Your life today is more similar to the life of a man in Saudi Arabia than it is to the life of a man in your own country 200 years ago.
The Technological system functions by rationally analyzing our environment through experiments, and choosing the most efficient pathway by which to carry out an operation, at the cost of everything else.
The great God of the modern technological world is efficiency. Things have to be efficient, and to be efficient they have to be predictable and consistently yield the same result.
Humans suffer from life in a technological environment, as they do not like living predictable lives with predictable jobs. Hence, the technological society inevitably produces an entertainment industry that is meant to keep them pacified and happy.
This is not the result of a conspiracy, it is the result of efficiency, as economies that manage to get people to work an hour extra in exchange for a new iPhone will outperform economies that don't. Hence such economies will dominate other economies, and expand their culture.
Because the technological system functions by rational means, it seeks to find the single most efficient solution to every situation. As an example, whereas people once build their homes of whatever was locally available to them, people now buy building materials, and end up living in very similar homes.
Similarly, education is transformed, and becomes a technique that guides children along their emotional development by the most efficient means it can think of. Hence, diversity is lost, and schools increasingly begin to teach the same lessons to children, through the same methods.
Human life itself becomes technologically transformed, and every person in every part of the planet lives the same basic type of life. A child is born, is sent to certain education institutes, while its parents are forced to work.
When the child is somewhere between 16 and 24, it is finished with its education, and begins to work until it is 67 for a boss, after which it is allowed to spend its last days at home until it is forced to be removed from its environment by being sent to a nursing home.
There are differences, but differences are minor. A black person will wear black style clothing in his free time, and listen to black style music on his way to his job, while a white person will wear white style clothing in his free time and listen to white style music on his way to his job. The differences therefore become differences of superficiality.
In pre-industrial times, differences between areas were larger. In a desert environment people lived nomadic, while in a fertile environment people lived as farmers. In some places people married young, while it others they married at older age. Societies were more autonomous, because there were not that many decisions that had to be made at a central level.
Furthermore, people had more freedom in things that matter, because they were not subjected to technology. As an example, a man could grow whatever food he wanted on his farm, this was his own responsibility. Similarly, parents could raise their children in whatever way they felt like.
Now, what does all of this have to do with biotechnology? The answer is as following:
Technology has homogenized our entire cultures so for. Biotechnology will do what technology did to our cultures, on a genetic level, to all life on our planet.
Instead of being a product of random chance and the environment in which living organisms are born, biotechnology will cause living organisms to become the predictable product of efficiency. Hence, they will have no freedom or dignity left.
Our food has reached a stage at which it no longer resembles anything natural. It is now simply the product of whatever happens to be most efficient. If we can get the taste of vanilla using vanillin, a chemical found in vanilla that can be synthesized in large amounts at a low cost, we will eat ice cream with vanillin instead of vanilla.
Similarly, we use chemical sweeteners in our food, such as Aspartame and HFCS instead of sugar, which itself is already an extract of a plant.
Biotechnology promises to take this process a step further, by turning the last plants that we eat into products instead of lifeforms. Instead of eating a plant as it occurs in nature, we will eat plants in whatever way they can be manufactured to be most efficient.
Do not believe that biotechnology will simply stop at Golden Rice, which is Rice with Beta-Carotene added. The reason is because population growth and environmental destruction will simply be able to continue because of Genetic Modification. If we can feed 500 million more people through GMO crops, the global population will rise by 500 million more people.
Scientists are now planning to increase levels of other micronutrients in rice as well, to artificially add Omega 3 fatty acids to Soy, and to produce new plants that are capable of fixating their own nitrogen from the atmosphere.
The end result will be that life on planet Earth will be transformed into something completely new, the product of efficiency. Golden Rice already doesn't look like rice, and this will be the case for all of our food in the future.
If you pursue Golden Rice, when will you stop? If you can genetically increase yields of Golden Rice and save another 10 million lives, you will be forced to do this as well. If you admit to one modification, you will have no leg to stand on to stop the next modification, because the plants you eat will already be unnatural. With no purity left to save, there is little reason to stop.
Of course the real problem is not the application of biotechnology to food crops. The real problem is the application of biotechnology to human beings, which is already happening.
We are currently eliminating genes that cause inherited genetic problems, such as breast cancer. If a woman had a gene that causes about a 60% chance or so of breast cancer, the gene will be eliminated from her offspring by not implanting any embryo that carries such a gene.
If we can do this with breast cancer genes, there will be little that will stop us from doing the same with dementia genes, heart disease genes, autism genes and just about any other genes. Already tests are being developed that can detect autism in the womb and allow you to abort your autistic child.
The question however is, how can you be sure that the child will grow up to be fully autistic? It is not unthinkable that the child you would have given birth to may have been "on the spectrum" without having classical autism. Similarly, medicine is now being given to some pregnant women that will as a side effect reduce the chance that their daughter will be lesbian.
But aren't all these inventions great? Wouldn't a child be happier if it was not autistic and not lesbian*, and never gets breast cancer?
The answer is, not necessarily. Humans compare themselves to those around them. Hence, if I were 5 foot 6 and lived amongst the Dutch, I would be unhappy, but if I were 5 foot 6 and lived amongst the Indonesians, I would be quite content.
Similarly, a woman does not gain happiness from being beautiful, but from being beautiful enough to be a desirable mate. If all women have braces, the woman will need braces as well, to live up to the new beauty standard. Similarly, if one day all women have breast implants, breast implants will be part of the new standard for women to obey.
This might seem odd to us now, but the fact of the matter is that most of us would not find the average woman who lived 500 years ago attractive. She had crooked teeth, no makeup, greasy hair and sagging breasts. The standard has simply risen.
Similarly, although we may now be content with a life expectancy of 85 years, if it becomes possible in the future to live to 150, we will feel discontent if we only live to be 85 while our friends live to be 150.
Similarly, if it becomes possible through genetic selection to raise the IQ of your child to what is now considered 130, an IQ of 130 will rapidly become required, to be part of the middle class of society. If a boss can choose between two candidates for a job and one has a 130 IQ while the other is at 100, why would he choose for the latter? Similarly, why would a person date someone with a 100 IQ instead of someone with a 130 IQ, or why would a university choose someone with a 100 IQ, whose chance of dropping out would only be much higher?
It may seem nice to be the only one in the street with a child with a 130 IQ, but this will simply cause your child's 130 IQ to soon become the new normal, similar to how a high school diploma was once sufficient to enter the middle class, while you now need a college diploma as a result of everyone going to college.
Similarly, our personality will change as a result of biotechnology. Since we will soon be able to get rid of autistic children before they are even born, we will also eliminate many children who would otherwise have been "mildly autistic". Such children would 60 years ago spend their entire lives not knowing that they are autistic, mostly living normal lives. Today they would be called mildly autistic. And tomorrow they would never even have been born.
Entire generations are now force-fed Ritalin and Prozac and other drugs, to keep them from becoming depressed or mentally ill. What will stop most parents from eliminating the genetic variations that cause these mental illnesses? There will of course be some who will be diagnosed as likely to become mentally ill in the future, who will actually never become mentally ill. Similarly, some diagnosed with Schizophrenia will never grow up to be Schizophrenic, or will actually grow up as good artists due to their Schizophrenia.
However, how many parents are willing to take the 50% chance their child will be schizophrenic, in exchange for the 0.01% chance that the child will become the next rock star? Not too many I would suspect.
Hence, what biotechnology will inevitably do is reduce human biodiversity. Only those humans will be born, whose genetic code causes their body to be the most efficient in our society.
It is likely that the government will intervene and decide what type of genes can be eliminated, and what can't be, as is happening today. As an example, a government may be unwilling to allow parents to remove the gene that causes their child to become depressed or homosexual.
We can hope that our government will use these new abilities responsibly, but what about the governments of Iran, China, North Korea and other countries? When we discover a gene that raises your IQ by five points, the governments of China, Iran and other countries will also read those studies and be able to do with that knowledge whatever they want to do with it.
The inevitable end result therefore becomes that the government will effectively have control over the genetic makeup of its citizens. And we all know that when government gains control over an area of society, it never relinquishes control, because it becomes impossible for government to relinquish control because of the chaos that would emerge.
As an example, we have gone decades without a ban on hunting elephants and whales, but could we one day eliminate this ban again? There is no good chance of ever eliminating this ban again. Similarly, once a new tax is introduced, it becomes impossible to eliminate the tax.
Hence, we can expect that once the government decides which genes we can eliminate from our children and which genes we can not eliminate, the government will permanently become required to gain oversight over our genetic makeup.
Hence, both Anarchists and Conservatives should oppose ALL forms of biotechnology and scientific research into this subject, because it inevitably gives governments new powers that we do not want our government to have.
*I am not suggesting that lesbianism is wrong or undesirable in people. I am simply suggesting that people may argue that children would be happier if they could be heterosexual like most people.
Some examples of bad arguments used by Environmentalists/Anarchists/Conservatives (I consider myself all three of these positions, and I don't consider them to contradict each other) are:
-Biotechnology doesn't work. This is a famous example that was used by Greenpeace to protest the Golden rice project.
Greenpeace wrote back in 2005 for example:
The media hype was more robust than the science, however, and our analysis revealed that people would need to consume 12 times more rice than normal to satisfy the minimum daily adult requirements of Vitamin A. Subsequent studies have questioned the very notion that Golden Rice would be effective in addressing Vitamin A deficiency.Of course the solution to this came very rapidly. Golden rice 2.0 was invented, which produced 23 times more Beta Carotene than the original version, and hence you would get plenty of vitamin A by just consuming a bit of rice. Oops!
-Biotechnology is dangerous. This is another argument used by opponents of biotechnology. This may very well be true, the idea that biotechnology is dangerous, but what does it matter? Has the danger of something ever stopped us from carrying out a policy?
Nuclear weapons were dangerous, and we detonated them. Fossil fuels are dangerous, and we burn them. Nuclear power plants are dangerous, and we build them. Cell phones are dangerous, and we give them to our children. The argument that GMO's are dangerous will never work, because opponents will simply point out that not using GMO's is dangerous for our health as well. As an example, the blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency is causing massive harm to people.
It is very possible that GM technology will one day create a kind of superweed that will run rampant and spread throughout the environment, but the fact of the matter is that people simply do not care.
Of course, the problem is also that as more studies are done, people may reach the conclusion that GM food is safe. This is of course not necessarily the truth, as the negative health effects may take decades to occur.
Hence, if anti-GMO activists go around predicting cancer and infertility from GMOs, and the cancer and infertility don't happen, people will consider the anti-GMO movement to be the losers of the debate.
-Genetically modified crops centralize power. This is true for now, but it might not be true in the future in the same way it is today. The price of genetic modification is dropping rapidly, and for all we know, 20 years from now, farmers might be able to genetically manipulate their own plants against local pests!
It is also not a very special argument. Every technology centralizes power at the cost of local farmer's autonomy. As an example, the tractor centralizes power, pesticides centralize power, irrigation centralizes power, all of these innovations centralize control. How many people are willing to ban pesticides because they centralize control?
A principal opposition to all biotechnology is required
So, how then should we attack biotechnology, if none of these methods above work? Should we even be critical of biotechnology to begin with, or should we just accept it?
The answer is that yes, we should oppose biotechnology. We should oppose all forms of biotechnology, and we should seek to outlaw all genetic scientific research, whether it can save lives or not.
We should do this, for the following reason:
Biotechnology is an infringement on the dignity of life.
I would explain this argument as following, based on the famous French Christian Anarchist Jacques Ellul's book, "The Technological Society".
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, a new way of thinking has emerged on our planet. This led to the development of a technological society that is rapidly expanding across our globe. Technology is the main determining factor in our modern environment.
The level of technology in a society has the largest impact on the way our we lead our lives, more so than location or culture, or even political system. Your life today is more similar to the life of a man in Saudi Arabia than it is to the life of a man in your own country 200 years ago.
The Technological system functions by rationally analyzing our environment through experiments, and choosing the most efficient pathway by which to carry out an operation, at the cost of everything else.
The great God of the modern technological world is efficiency. Things have to be efficient, and to be efficient they have to be predictable and consistently yield the same result.
Humans suffer from life in a technological environment, as they do not like living predictable lives with predictable jobs. Hence, the technological society inevitably produces an entertainment industry that is meant to keep them pacified and happy.
This is not the result of a conspiracy, it is the result of efficiency, as economies that manage to get people to work an hour extra in exchange for a new iPhone will outperform economies that don't. Hence such economies will dominate other economies, and expand their culture.
Because the technological system functions by rational means, it seeks to find the single most efficient solution to every situation. As an example, whereas people once build their homes of whatever was locally available to them, people now buy building materials, and end up living in very similar homes.
Similarly, education is transformed, and becomes a technique that guides children along their emotional development by the most efficient means it can think of. Hence, diversity is lost, and schools increasingly begin to teach the same lessons to children, through the same methods.
Human life itself becomes technologically transformed, and every person in every part of the planet lives the same basic type of life. A child is born, is sent to certain education institutes, while its parents are forced to work.
When the child is somewhere between 16 and 24, it is finished with its education, and begins to work until it is 67 for a boss, after which it is allowed to spend its last days at home until it is forced to be removed from its environment by being sent to a nursing home.
There are differences, but differences are minor. A black person will wear black style clothing in his free time, and listen to black style music on his way to his job, while a white person will wear white style clothing in his free time and listen to white style music on his way to his job. The differences therefore become differences of superficiality.
In pre-industrial times, differences between areas were larger. In a desert environment people lived nomadic, while in a fertile environment people lived as farmers. In some places people married young, while it others they married at older age. Societies were more autonomous, because there were not that many decisions that had to be made at a central level.
Furthermore, people had more freedom in things that matter, because they were not subjected to technology. As an example, a man could grow whatever food he wanted on his farm, this was his own responsibility. Similarly, parents could raise their children in whatever way they felt like.
Now, what does all of this have to do with biotechnology? The answer is as following:
Technology has homogenized our entire cultures so for. Biotechnology will do what technology did to our cultures, on a genetic level, to all life on our planet.
Instead of being a product of random chance and the environment in which living organisms are born, biotechnology will cause living organisms to become the predictable product of efficiency. Hence, they will have no freedom or dignity left.
Our food has reached a stage at which it no longer resembles anything natural. It is now simply the product of whatever happens to be most efficient. If we can get the taste of vanilla using vanillin, a chemical found in vanilla that can be synthesized in large amounts at a low cost, we will eat ice cream with vanillin instead of vanilla.
Similarly, we use chemical sweeteners in our food, such as Aspartame and HFCS instead of sugar, which itself is already an extract of a plant.
Biotechnology promises to take this process a step further, by turning the last plants that we eat into products instead of lifeforms. Instead of eating a plant as it occurs in nature, we will eat plants in whatever way they can be manufactured to be most efficient.
Do not believe that biotechnology will simply stop at Golden Rice, which is Rice with Beta-Carotene added. The reason is because population growth and environmental destruction will simply be able to continue because of Genetic Modification. If we can feed 500 million more people through GMO crops, the global population will rise by 500 million more people.
Scientists are now planning to increase levels of other micronutrients in rice as well, to artificially add Omega 3 fatty acids to Soy, and to produce new plants that are capable of fixating their own nitrogen from the atmosphere.
The end result will be that life on planet Earth will be transformed into something completely new, the product of efficiency. Golden Rice already doesn't look like rice, and this will be the case for all of our food in the future.
If you pursue Golden Rice, when will you stop? If you can genetically increase yields of Golden Rice and save another 10 million lives, you will be forced to do this as well. If you admit to one modification, you will have no leg to stand on to stop the next modification, because the plants you eat will already be unnatural. With no purity left to save, there is little reason to stop.
Of course the real problem is not the application of biotechnology to food crops. The real problem is the application of biotechnology to human beings, which is already happening.
We are currently eliminating genes that cause inherited genetic problems, such as breast cancer. If a woman had a gene that causes about a 60% chance or so of breast cancer, the gene will be eliminated from her offspring by not implanting any embryo that carries such a gene.
If we can do this with breast cancer genes, there will be little that will stop us from doing the same with dementia genes, heart disease genes, autism genes and just about any other genes. Already tests are being developed that can detect autism in the womb and allow you to abort your autistic child.
The question however is, how can you be sure that the child will grow up to be fully autistic? It is not unthinkable that the child you would have given birth to may have been "on the spectrum" without having classical autism. Similarly, medicine is now being given to some pregnant women that will as a side effect reduce the chance that their daughter will be lesbian.
But aren't all these inventions great? Wouldn't a child be happier if it was not autistic and not lesbian*, and never gets breast cancer?
The answer is, not necessarily. Humans compare themselves to those around them. Hence, if I were 5 foot 6 and lived amongst the Dutch, I would be unhappy, but if I were 5 foot 6 and lived amongst the Indonesians, I would be quite content.
Similarly, a woman does not gain happiness from being beautiful, but from being beautiful enough to be a desirable mate. If all women have braces, the woman will need braces as well, to live up to the new beauty standard. Similarly, if one day all women have breast implants, breast implants will be part of the new standard for women to obey.
This might seem odd to us now, but the fact of the matter is that most of us would not find the average woman who lived 500 years ago attractive. She had crooked teeth, no makeup, greasy hair and sagging breasts. The standard has simply risen.
Similarly, although we may now be content with a life expectancy of 85 years, if it becomes possible in the future to live to 150, we will feel discontent if we only live to be 85 while our friends live to be 150.
Similarly, if it becomes possible through genetic selection to raise the IQ of your child to what is now considered 130, an IQ of 130 will rapidly become required, to be part of the middle class of society. If a boss can choose between two candidates for a job and one has a 130 IQ while the other is at 100, why would he choose for the latter? Similarly, why would a person date someone with a 100 IQ instead of someone with a 130 IQ, or why would a university choose someone with a 100 IQ, whose chance of dropping out would only be much higher?
It may seem nice to be the only one in the street with a child with a 130 IQ, but this will simply cause your child's 130 IQ to soon become the new normal, similar to how a high school diploma was once sufficient to enter the middle class, while you now need a college diploma as a result of everyone going to college.
Similarly, our personality will change as a result of biotechnology. Since we will soon be able to get rid of autistic children before they are even born, we will also eliminate many children who would otherwise have been "mildly autistic". Such children would 60 years ago spend their entire lives not knowing that they are autistic, mostly living normal lives. Today they would be called mildly autistic. And tomorrow they would never even have been born.
Entire generations are now force-fed Ritalin and Prozac and other drugs, to keep them from becoming depressed or mentally ill. What will stop most parents from eliminating the genetic variations that cause these mental illnesses? There will of course be some who will be diagnosed as likely to become mentally ill in the future, who will actually never become mentally ill. Similarly, some diagnosed with Schizophrenia will never grow up to be Schizophrenic, or will actually grow up as good artists due to their Schizophrenia.
However, how many parents are willing to take the 50% chance their child will be schizophrenic, in exchange for the 0.01% chance that the child will become the next rock star? Not too many I would suspect.
Hence, what biotechnology will inevitably do is reduce human biodiversity. Only those humans will be born, whose genetic code causes their body to be the most efficient in our society.
It is likely that the government will intervene and decide what type of genes can be eliminated, and what can't be, as is happening today. As an example, a government may be unwilling to allow parents to remove the gene that causes their child to become depressed or homosexual.
We can hope that our government will use these new abilities responsibly, but what about the governments of Iran, China, North Korea and other countries? When we discover a gene that raises your IQ by five points, the governments of China, Iran and other countries will also read those studies and be able to do with that knowledge whatever they want to do with it.
The inevitable end result therefore becomes that the government will effectively have control over the genetic makeup of its citizens. And we all know that when government gains control over an area of society, it never relinquishes control, because it becomes impossible for government to relinquish control because of the chaos that would emerge.
As an example, we have gone decades without a ban on hunting elephants and whales, but could we one day eliminate this ban again? There is no good chance of ever eliminating this ban again. Similarly, once a new tax is introduced, it becomes impossible to eliminate the tax.
Hence, we can expect that once the government decides which genes we can eliminate from our children and which genes we can not eliminate, the government will permanently become required to gain oversight over our genetic makeup.
Hence, both Anarchists and Conservatives should oppose ALL forms of biotechnology and scientific research into this subject, because it inevitably gives governments new powers that we do not want our government to have.
*I am not suggesting that lesbianism is wrong or undesirable in people. I am simply suggesting that people may argue that children would be happier if they could be heterosexual like most people.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
How Peak Oil caused the global financial meltdown
Rick Santorum was recently widely criticized for alleging that high gas prices caused the recession (Newspeak for depression). He alleged that Obama intentionally wants to keep gas prices high for some reason. Of course this is doubtful. Obama does not directly control gas prices after all, nor does he have any interest in raising them. However, the underlying suggestion, that high gas prices caused the financial meltdown, is not far fetched at all. Even the Washington Post admits that 10 out of 11 past recessions were preceded by so called "Oil shocks", times during which the Oil price suddenly spikes.
To examine this idea, we have to look at the direct cause of the financial crisis. The roots of the financial crisis lay in the subprime mortgage crisis. Although economist James Hamilton alleges that the crisis was worsened by high oil prices after the crisis began, the direct cause lays in an epidemic of foreclosures.
However, although economists agree with each other that the mortage crisis caused the economic downturn, there is no consensus about what caused the subprime mortgage crisis. To examine the subprime mortgage crisis, we have to return to 2007. In 2007, a sudden spike began in the number of properties with foreclosure activity:
To understand why people Foreclosed on their homes, we have to examine the people who Foreclosed on their homes. The right wing alleges that the spike in foreclosures was caused by political correctness mandating that poor minorities would be given mortgages as well, because it was seen as unfair that only white people could afford to buy homes.
Although it is true that minorities are overrepresented amongst those who are given subprime mortgages, they are not overrepresented amongst those who default on their mortgage. Hence minorities are not "lousy borrowers", though this does not refute the suggestion that the poor should have never been giving subprime mortgages to begin with.
However, even if we assume that the crisis was caused by the increase in subprime mortgages, this still does not explains why the spike in defaults happened in 2007. The problem lies in the spike in default, as subprime mortgage lending does not have to lead to problems for Mortgage brokers if mortgage brokers can accurately predict the default rate. Mortgage brokers were faced with an increase in defaults beyond what they expected. This increase in defaults in turn, was caused by an increase in costs beyond what the borrowers expected.
One thing that subprime mortgage lenders have in common is a low income. A few things those of us with low income have in common is the fact that basic life neccesities such as food and fuel make up a larger part of our expenses than luxury products. For those with an income between 10.000 and 15.000 dollar, food expenses make up about 37% of total expenses. For those with an income above 70.000, food expenses make up just about 8% of total expenses.
When the rich are faced with growing prices or fear becoming unable to pay their mortgage, they can skip a vacation, sell a car or take some other measure to reduce their costs. If most of your costs consist of interest payments, transportation and food it becomes difficult to cut down on anything. Although Europeans with poor income might be capable of switching over to public transport, for many poor Americans this is not an option. And unfortunately, these basic necessities are most vulnerable to price fluctuations.
For Americans below the poverty line, a rise in gas prices from 2 to 4 dollar means a further 4.3% of income is spent on commuting to work. For Americans above the poverty line, the increase would swallow up just 1.1% of their income. The implication is clear an increase in food and fuel prices is a significant problem to poor Americans, the ones enchained to sub-prime mortgages.
As can be seen in the following graph, food and fuel prices both spiked during 2007:
To examine this idea, we have to look at the direct cause of the financial crisis. The roots of the financial crisis lay in the subprime mortgage crisis. Although economist James Hamilton alleges that the crisis was worsened by high oil prices after the crisis began, the direct cause lays in an epidemic of foreclosures.
However, although economists agree with each other that the mortage crisis caused the economic downturn, there is no consensus about what caused the subprime mortgage crisis. To examine the subprime mortgage crisis, we have to return to 2007. In 2007, a sudden spike began in the number of properties with foreclosure activity:
To understand why people Foreclosed on their homes, we have to examine the people who Foreclosed on their homes. The right wing alleges that the spike in foreclosures was caused by political correctness mandating that poor minorities would be given mortgages as well, because it was seen as unfair that only white people could afford to buy homes.Although it is true that minorities are overrepresented amongst those who are given subprime mortgages, they are not overrepresented amongst those who default on their mortgage. Hence minorities are not "lousy borrowers", though this does not refute the suggestion that the poor should have never been giving subprime mortgages to begin with.
However, even if we assume that the crisis was caused by the increase in subprime mortgages, this still does not explains why the spike in defaults happened in 2007. The problem lies in the spike in default, as subprime mortgage lending does not have to lead to problems for Mortgage brokers if mortgage brokers can accurately predict the default rate. Mortgage brokers were faced with an increase in defaults beyond what they expected. This increase in defaults in turn, was caused by an increase in costs beyond what the borrowers expected.
One thing that subprime mortgage lenders have in common is a low income. A few things those of us with low income have in common is the fact that basic life neccesities such as food and fuel make up a larger part of our expenses than luxury products. For those with an income between 10.000 and 15.000 dollar, food expenses make up about 37% of total expenses. For those with an income above 70.000, food expenses make up just about 8% of total expenses.
When the rich are faced with growing prices or fear becoming unable to pay their mortgage, they can skip a vacation, sell a car or take some other measure to reduce their costs. If most of your costs consist of interest payments, transportation and food it becomes difficult to cut down on anything. Although Europeans with poor income might be capable of switching over to public transport, for many poor Americans this is not an option. And unfortunately, these basic necessities are most vulnerable to price fluctuations.
For Americans below the poverty line, a rise in gas prices from 2 to 4 dollar means a further 4.3% of income is spent on commuting to work. For Americans above the poverty line, the increase would swallow up just 1.1% of their income. The implication is clear an increase in food and fuel prices is a significant problem to poor Americans, the ones enchained to sub-prime mortgages.
As can be seen in the following graph, food and fuel prices both spiked during 2007:
The answer thus becomes clear. Poor Americans became unable to pay their mortgages, because they became unable toafford their basic necessities. Economists and pundits tend to overlook this explanation, because most of them have lived their entire lives in wealth, unaware of the impact that the rise in costs for basic necessities has on the working class.
As shown in the graph above, rises in food prices correlate closely with rises in fuel prices. Another suggestion has been that an increase in land used for biofuels caused the food crisis. Although this is partly true, it does not explain why land is used for biofuels to begin with. The answer to this question is, because biofuel becomes economically valid, because of rising oil prices!
The answer for a sudden increase in defaults amongst the poor can always be found by examining whether their expenses have increased, or their income has declines. In our case, the answer is a sudden increase in expenses. This increase in expenses due to rising prices for basic goods leads to a constant decrease in consumption of luxury goods, as people simply become unable to afford them. Therefore, businesses become unable to function, employment declines, hence causing expenses to continue declining. This chain reaction was set in motion by the rise in oil prices.
The rise in oil prices in turn has been set in motion by our lack of oil and the increased effort required to find oil. Oil that can still be found takes more effort to find, as it is miles deep beneath the earth, in the ocean, or in other remote and difficult to access places. Oil that is found is of lesser quality, hence taking more effort (and thus money) to refine.
Similarly, other resources such as potassium are becoming more expensive, as our civilization has used up all the easily accessible sources. Optimists might argue that this means our problem is of temporary nature, because innovations can be sought that will end our problem as wel always. For example, when we ran out of guano, we began using Potassium rock, and because our equipment had improved, prices did not rise a lot.
The problem however, is that never before, has our civilization entered a time period in which every resource is becoming more expensive to gather. As an example, there is the problem that fresh water is becoming scare. An optimist might argue that we can take salt water from the ocean and desalinize it at a slightly higher price. However, what the optimist forgets is that desalinizing water requires energy. Although this may now be affordable, in the future, energy prices will be higher as we will be unable to use oil.
Similarly, solar panels used for the desalinization plant will be more expensive, as solar panels require Gallium to be produced. Global Gallium extraction peaked in 2000. Our historic solution to problems has been innovation. In most cases, innovation meant moving on from one resource to another. As an example, since mercury production peaked in 1960, we have stopped using Mercury. It's very difficult to buy thermometers that contain mercury these days.
However, our current problem is different, as there simply are no more resources to switch over to. Switching from one resource to another increases demand for the second resource, which 50 years ago would have been no problem, but today is, because the resource we step over to is also being depleted. As an example, an increase in nuclear energy would increase demand for Uranium, which would imply a faster decline in Uranium reserves.
Hence we can conclude that the economic crisis is not a temporary recession, as most economic analysts believe, but an end to our way of life.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Do Moderate Muslims exist?
Amongst the non-Muslim islamophiles there are moderate and extremist varieties. Moderate islamophiles admit that the Quran has nasty elements, that do not fit in a modern society. Extremist Islamophiles instead try to deny the existence of hate-preaching intolerant verses in the Quran and the Hadith. They may claim that these verses are forgeries, are misinterpreted, or are actually alright in the context in which they took place.
As an example, when told that Islam preaches the murder of gays, the moderate Islamophile will respond that this is true. He will then try to trivialize it by responding that the Old Testament teaches the murder of gays as well. He will also go on to say that moderate Muslims nowadays do not take these verses seriously anymore. Essentially he is arguing that the verses are not that relevant anymore.
The extremist Islamophile will use different tactics. The verse may be wrong, it may be misinterpreted, or Muhammed may have been forced to call for the death of gays given the time and circumstances, or murdering gays may actually be alright, at least in this context.
The general difference between moderate and extremist islamophilia therefore comes down to the following: The moderate islamophile tries to defend Muslims, while the extremist islamophile tries to defend Islam.
It should be noted that moderate Islamophilia should not be confused with defending individual Muslims, but should instead be used for the tendency to defend the Muslim community in general. There is after all nothing wrong with defending individual people who happen to be Muslim. The irrational element lies in trying to defend Islamic culture as a whole.
In reality, most Islamophiles fall in between moderate and extremist islamophiles. It's difficult to convince people that there is actually nothing wrong with the Quran, therefore most Islamophiles are leaning more towards the moderate variety.
A good way to recognize a moderate Islamophile is his emphasis on the existence of the mystical and widely heralded "moderate Muslim". The extremist islamophile has no interest in singing hymns in praise of the elusive moderate Muslim, because to do so would mean to acknowledge that Islam has a problem. Instead, the extremist tries to convince people that bin Laden, Boko Haram, Mohammed Bouyeri and others are "unislamic". Unfortunately, as I will go on to explain, the opposite is unfortunately the case. If anyone happens to be unislamic, it's the moderate muslim.
On the other side of the island are the critics of Islam. The critics of Islam of course have a cynical outlook on the moderate Muslim. They have to, because otherwise their criticism of Islam would be irrelevant. It would be comparable to issuing criticism about England because laws exist that allow Scotsmen crossing the border to be killed.
Therefore, critics of Islam have to answer the "moderate muslim argument", the idea that most muslims are tolerant peace loving people, in one way or another. Because critics of Islam differ in their rationality, the counterarguments vary widely. As a critic of Islam I have my own answer of course, which I will give below, but first I want to examine a few different counter arguments to the moderate muslim argument that I do not agree with.
Moderate Muslim is a contradiction in terms
The first argument is that a moderate Muslim can not exist. A moderate Muslim is either lying or stupid according to this argument. It is compared to the idea that a moderate Nazi can't exist. This is a meaningless argument, because words only have the meaning that we give to them. If we decided today to start calling all people who believe in ethnic nationalism, charismatic government leadership and eugenics Nazi's, then the absence of totalitarianism, antisemitism and racial supremacy in their ideas would make them "moderate Nazi's".
The reason these people do not call themselves moderate Nazi's is because the Nazi's carried out horrific acts, and so no reasonable people want to be associated with them, in the same way nobody still calls himself a communist these days. Like Nazi, National Socialism is contaminated as a term as well, and so no government is willing to identify itself as National Socialist, despite some governments arguably applying for the term (Japan and Finland amongst them).
The word Muslim does not carry the immediate negative associations that the word Nazi does, and so it's possible to find people who would agree to being moderate Muslims. The critics of Islam will argue that it's not relevant, because like bin Laden and other Takfiri's (Muslims who declare other Muslims guilty of apostasy), they think that anyone claiming to be a Muslim but contradicting the views of Quran is not a real Muslim.
If we want to argue this, we would have to argue that there are no moderate Jews and Mormons either. Instead, we have to acknowledge that religions are theoretically capable of evolving and improving themselves. The problem with Islam is that it never successfully improved itself, because it has a number of safeguards build into it that prevent widespread modernization of the religion from happening.
It doesn't matter if most Muslims are moderate
This is another counterargument. It is largely self-explanatory. If out of every 100 Muslims immigrating to your country 99 are peace-loving and one kills anyone who criticizes Islam, you become forced to change your treatment of Muslims as a whole, because the single fanatic won't identify himself at the border to you.
This is of course accurate in essence, but the problem is that it applies to everyone, which the Islamophile will readily point out. Most football supporters don't riot, but a tiny minority does. Most Christians don't blow up abortion clinics, but a tiny minority does do. Most environmentalists don't send bombs through the mail, but a few do.
We all instinctively feel that this is not a satisfying answer however, because despite our countries having more environmentalists and Christians than Muslims, Muslims tend to reach the media more than non-Muslims do if the size of their minority is large enough.
There must be something else going on therefore. Which brings us to my answer to the "Moderate Muslim" argument.
Radical Muslims are not the minority, moderate Muslims are
This is the real counterargument to the moderate muslim argument. The problem with the moderate Muslim argument is not that moderate Muslims do not exist. The problem is that most Muslims are not moderates. Most Muslims are somewhere in between moderate and extremist. The reason for this is that scripturally, extremist Islam is far easier to defend than moderate Islam.
Until the last few decades, this was no real problem, because most muslims didn't really know what the Quran and the Hadith exactly teach. Furthermore, the only opinion available to them was the opinion of the local imam. The Quran by itself is a very difficult book to read. It is not put in chronological order, despite newer verses abrogating older Quranic verses. Multiple verses seem to contradict each other, as some verses appear tolerant while others appear like instructions for world conquest.
The spread of mass media made it possible for muslims to go look for themselves. As a result, those Muslims who are genuinely interested in practicing true Islam find themselves looking through the books and figuring out that their local preacher they go to with their parents doesn't really have things by the right end most of the time and perhaps even seems to invent some new things.
In our age of globalism, it has become very easy for converts to look on the Internet what Muhammed really taught, and for governments to spread radical versions of Islam by funding satellite channels and mosques in foreign nations that spread a more fundamentalist and totalitarian version of Islam than evolved domestically. This is exactly what is currently ongoing in Egypt. Unfortunately the same can't be done in reverse with moderate Islam, because upon trying to spread moderate Islam, local leaders can point at their Qurans and the Hadith and show why you are wrong.
For reasons such as these, moderate muslims are a minority. I suspect most of my readers are familiar with the more violence and hatred inspiring verses of the Quran, and therefore I prefer to first examine the evidence that supports my claim, that moderate muslims are a rarity.
A poll done by Pew Research Center asked people for their views on stoning people who commit adultery, whipping people and cutting of the hands of thieves, and carrying out the death penalty on people who leave Islam. The numbers were as following:
We see that most Muslims polled support the death penalty for people who leave Islam, depending on the country polled. We can therefore confidently state that moderate Muslims are the minority. To confirm the accuracy of the poll, we have to look at other polls and whether they show similar results. A poll done in Indonesia found that 43% of Muslims there support stoning adulterers. The PDF file lists the numbers for stoning, which is called "Rajam". Since the numbers are so close, this lends credibility to the survey done by PEW.
It would be a mistake however to assume that the others who disagree with the questions are all "moderate Muslims". As an example, we would consider a Christian man who would disown his son for being gay or believes the Earth is 6000 years old not a moderate Christian. We wouldn't consider him bin Laden, but we would still consider him rather fundamentalist.
If we would set the standard for a moderate Muslim as "a Muslim who doesn't believe in Sharia law punishments", we would have to consider 84% of Turkish Muslims to be moderates. However, if we would set the standard for a moderate Muslim as "a Muslim who doesn't reject the theory of Evolution", just 50% of Turkish Muslims can still be considered moderates, as polls have shown that only about 30% of Turkish people believe in evolution, with about 20% being unsure.
Interestingly enough, another poll reported on in American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks claims that 78% of Turkish people condoned the stoning of women for adultery. Important in this poll is that those aged 15 to 18 had the most fundamentalist outlook, which confirms my own experiences and makes sense considering the spread of fundamentalist Islam.
This overall unfortunately leads us to the following depressing conclusion: What is considered fundamentalist behavior for a Christian in most Christian nations, would be considered moderate behavior for a Muslim in most Islamic nations.
The real moderate Muslims
So who are these mysterious moderate Muslims and where can you find them? The three main Islamic sects that can be considered to be "moderate" are the Ahmadiyya Muslims, the Alevi Muslims of Turkey, and the Alawi Muslims of Syria.
What becomes immediately apparent about these Muslims is that none of them are recognized as true Muslims by the majority of the Islamic population. This is partly justified, because in the case of the Alevi and the Alawi, Christian ideas, practices, and rituals have been incorporated into their belief system. This also bring us to a general rule of fist about moderate Islamic sects: If a moderate Islamic sect is not recognized as Islamic by most Muslims, it is likely a form of "moderate Islam".
The Ahmadiyya Muslims are a modern Islamic sect, founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed to be the Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer in Islam. Largely unique amongst Islamic sects, the Ahmadiyya Muslims believe in evolution. Ahmad rejected violent Jihad and believed that religion should only be propagated by peaceful means. A lot can be said about the Ahmadiyya Muslims, but they are not Jihadists.
The second group are the Alevi Muslims, a Shiite sect. The Alive constitute about 15 million people in Turkey, or 25%. Murdering someone is seen as one of the gravest sins a person can commit. Alevi men and women pray together and women are allowed to wear modern Western clothing. The Alevi are monogamous. The Alevi incorporated local folk customs into their religion, and according to some, gnostic and Christian teachings and elements can be seen as well. The Alevi have a Trinity-like concept, consisting of Allah, Muhammed and Ali.
The high percentage of Alevi Muslims in Turkey may be part of the reason why Turkey is the only Islamic state is the Middle East that has been partly succesful in implementing progressive enlightenment ideas into their government. Most non-Kurdish Alevi Muslims were traditionally strong supporters of Atatürk and his implementation in Islamic society.
The third group are the Alawi of Syria. Alawi and Alevi are essentially the same word, but Alawi is the Arabic version. Like the Alevi of Turkey, the Alawi have incorporated many Christian teachings into their beliefs. The Alawi are Trinitarian, celebrate Christmas, and do not carry out many traditional Islamic practices like fasting, Hajj (the trip to MeccA), and ritual prayer. Because the Alawi were always threatened by their Orthodox Islamic neighbors, the Alawi have a secretive religion.
Unfortunately, it is not quite sure what has happened to the Alawi. The President of Syria is an Alawi Muslim, whose reign is continually threatened by the Sunni Muslim majority. Some claim that Assad has sacrificed much of Alawi teachings and culture, in an effort to keep the Sunni population docile and acceptant of the fact that they are ruled by a religious minority. Some authors claim that the Alawi religion has essentially gone extinct. What is known however, is that the Christians in Syria largely support the rule of the Alawi minority, as they protect them against the Sunnis.
Overall, these are the three sects of Islam that can truly be called moderate. What should be noted however is that the Ahmadiyya Muslims are not accept as Muslims by all the other Muslims, that many Alevi Muslims do not really consider themselves religious anymore and instead simply consider Alevism a lifestyle, and that the Alawi appear to be going instinct, being assimilated by mainstream Sunni Islamic culture which is intolerant of the unislamic elements of the Alawi religion. However, the point still stands. Not all of the Islamic world lives in darkness and hatred.
It may be interesting to note that some theories suggest that the Alevi and the Alawi are the result of Muslims interacting with the crusaders. If this is the case, it is additional evidence that the crusades had a lasting positive impact upon the Middle East, as offensive as this suggestion may be to some people. It would mean that in addition to delaying the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades paved the path for the reformation of Islam.
Europeans are taught to be ashamed of their history and their culture, and although there is a lot to be ashamed about, Europeans tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. On the other side of the extreme are most Islamic countries, which are not ashamed of anything. It's time for a middle of the road approach.
Are these the only moderate Muslims on the planet then? No, of course not. Local practices of a religion always evolve gradually, incorporating different elements and changing their views on different ideas. A local variety of Islam may evolve to be more tolerant. Furthermore, as a society evolves, religion begins to play an increasingly smaller role in people's lives. People don't feel the need to go to the mosque for every prayer, people don't pray five times a day, and eventually people live a relatively secular lifestyle.
Most people are simply not religiously devout in nature, but are more interested in worldly matters. Religiousness after all is largely a personality trait. The same people who are called "Militant Atheists" in our society would have been Puritans in the 16th century, and would have been Salafists in Egypt. The difference however is that Militant Atheism and Christian Puritanism only makes you annoying, whereas militant Islam makes you a potential suicide bomber.
However, the unfortunate truth is that militant and fundamentalist Islam are extremely viral compared to these local forms of Islam. After all, militant Islam is very easy to spread, as it is well founded in the Quran, which moderate Islam of course isn't, as moderate Islam is a mutation of Islam. Saudi oil money pays for fundamentalist television channels, fundamentalist hate-palaces and fundamentalist political parties in Egypt and many other countries. As we speak, Saudi Arabia is reversing every little bit of progress that Islamic countries have attempted to make towards modernity.
There is another type of "moderate Muslim". I call them "Liberation Theology Muslims", as they are the Muslim equivalent of Liberation theology Christians. These Muslims base their worldview not on Islamic culture, but on Western ideas and philosophies that they have learned about. Since they have grown up in Islamic countries, they try to fuse their Western ideas with their Islamic religion, and convince the world and themselves that the two go perfectly together.
An example is Muammar Gadaffi. This might shock you, and I should have warned you beforehand, that this blog is not your standard neoconservative anti-Islam blog. The truth is always far more complex than can be caught by any simply ideology or gut reaction towards a phenomenon.
Muammar Gadaffi is a socialist first, and a Muslim second. His behavior is typical of a socialist, not of a Muslim. He encourages sub-Saharan immigration to his nation, wants to end racism, opposes anti-Semitism, tries to emancipate women, and is continually at odds with religious leaders. The fact that the opposition to his regime consists of religious fundamentalists like Al Qaeda indicates that Gadaffi does not fit the archetypal Muslim image.
Conservatives should be wiser than to fall for liberal dreams of a democratic and secular enlightened Middle East. Liberals are idealists, while conservatives are realists. Conservatives could see from far away that the overthrowing of Mubarak would lead to the election of the Muslim Brotherhood, because the Islamists are the only real opposition in the Middle East.
The reason that conservatives like McCain cheered on the overthrowing and barbaric torture and execution of Muammar Gadaffi is that most conservatives are old men whose mind got stuck before the fall of the wall. They remember Gadaffi as the eccentric socialist threat to the 1st world, who allied himself with communists.
In recent years however, Gadaffi gave up his weapons of mass destruction program and sought to improve ties to the Western world. Gadaffi was an old man, whose Western educated son Saif al Islam could have easily implemented reforms with Western encouragement, that would have opened Libyan society to the world and would promote increased civil rights and democratic reforms. Instead, the Gadaffi family was shown that the West can not be trusted. The same people who tapped your shoulder at the cocktail parties in London are now cheering for the torture and death of your father in Sirte.
The betrayal he faced by the West will only discourage other regimes from trying to improve relations with the West. A regime like in North Korea, Iran, or Burma is shown by the actions in Libya that it can not choose a middle ground.
We now live in the 21st century, in which the threat of communism is a threat of the past. Conservatives should have seen moderate autocracies like those of Libya, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia as the only hope for the Middle East, since the alternative is Islamism.
The sad truth is as following: When Westerners encounter their mythologized and fetishized moderate Islam, they fail to recognize it, and stab it in the back. It is difficult to tell whether this is the result of evil, (intellectual) cowardice, or ignorance. I suspect it is a combination of all three.
As an example, when told that Islam preaches the murder of gays, the moderate Islamophile will respond that this is true. He will then try to trivialize it by responding that the Old Testament teaches the murder of gays as well. He will also go on to say that moderate Muslims nowadays do not take these verses seriously anymore. Essentially he is arguing that the verses are not that relevant anymore.
The extremist Islamophile will use different tactics. The verse may be wrong, it may be misinterpreted, or Muhammed may have been forced to call for the death of gays given the time and circumstances, or murdering gays may actually be alright, at least in this context.
The general difference between moderate and extremist islamophilia therefore comes down to the following: The moderate islamophile tries to defend Muslims, while the extremist islamophile tries to defend Islam.
It should be noted that moderate Islamophilia should not be confused with defending individual Muslims, but should instead be used for the tendency to defend the Muslim community in general. There is after all nothing wrong with defending individual people who happen to be Muslim. The irrational element lies in trying to defend Islamic culture as a whole.
In reality, most Islamophiles fall in between moderate and extremist islamophiles. It's difficult to convince people that there is actually nothing wrong with the Quran, therefore most Islamophiles are leaning more towards the moderate variety.
A good way to recognize a moderate Islamophile is his emphasis on the existence of the mystical and widely heralded "moderate Muslim". The extremist islamophile has no interest in singing hymns in praise of the elusive moderate Muslim, because to do so would mean to acknowledge that Islam has a problem. Instead, the extremist tries to convince people that bin Laden, Boko Haram, Mohammed Bouyeri and others are "unislamic". Unfortunately, as I will go on to explain, the opposite is unfortunately the case. If anyone happens to be unislamic, it's the moderate muslim.
On the other side of the island are the critics of Islam. The critics of Islam of course have a cynical outlook on the moderate Muslim. They have to, because otherwise their criticism of Islam would be irrelevant. It would be comparable to issuing criticism about England because laws exist that allow Scotsmen crossing the border to be killed.
Therefore, critics of Islam have to answer the "moderate muslim argument", the idea that most muslims are tolerant peace loving people, in one way or another. Because critics of Islam differ in their rationality, the counterarguments vary widely. As a critic of Islam I have my own answer of course, which I will give below, but first I want to examine a few different counter arguments to the moderate muslim argument that I do not agree with.
Moderate Muslim is a contradiction in terms
The first argument is that a moderate Muslim can not exist. A moderate Muslim is either lying or stupid according to this argument. It is compared to the idea that a moderate Nazi can't exist. This is a meaningless argument, because words only have the meaning that we give to them. If we decided today to start calling all people who believe in ethnic nationalism, charismatic government leadership and eugenics Nazi's, then the absence of totalitarianism, antisemitism and racial supremacy in their ideas would make them "moderate Nazi's".
The reason these people do not call themselves moderate Nazi's is because the Nazi's carried out horrific acts, and so no reasonable people want to be associated with them, in the same way nobody still calls himself a communist these days. Like Nazi, National Socialism is contaminated as a term as well, and so no government is willing to identify itself as National Socialist, despite some governments arguably applying for the term (Japan and Finland amongst them).
The word Muslim does not carry the immediate negative associations that the word Nazi does, and so it's possible to find people who would agree to being moderate Muslims. The critics of Islam will argue that it's not relevant, because like bin Laden and other Takfiri's (Muslims who declare other Muslims guilty of apostasy), they think that anyone claiming to be a Muslim but contradicting the views of Quran is not a real Muslim.
If we want to argue this, we would have to argue that there are no moderate Jews and Mormons either. Instead, we have to acknowledge that religions are theoretically capable of evolving and improving themselves. The problem with Islam is that it never successfully improved itself, because it has a number of safeguards build into it that prevent widespread modernization of the religion from happening.
It doesn't matter if most Muslims are moderate
This is another counterargument. It is largely self-explanatory. If out of every 100 Muslims immigrating to your country 99 are peace-loving and one kills anyone who criticizes Islam, you become forced to change your treatment of Muslims as a whole, because the single fanatic won't identify himself at the border to you.
This is of course accurate in essence, but the problem is that it applies to everyone, which the Islamophile will readily point out. Most football supporters don't riot, but a tiny minority does. Most Christians don't blow up abortion clinics, but a tiny minority does do. Most environmentalists don't send bombs through the mail, but a few do.
We all instinctively feel that this is not a satisfying answer however, because despite our countries having more environmentalists and Christians than Muslims, Muslims tend to reach the media more than non-Muslims do if the size of their minority is large enough.
There must be something else going on therefore. Which brings us to my answer to the "Moderate Muslim" argument.
Radical Muslims are not the minority, moderate Muslims are
This is the real counterargument to the moderate muslim argument. The problem with the moderate Muslim argument is not that moderate Muslims do not exist. The problem is that most Muslims are not moderates. Most Muslims are somewhere in between moderate and extremist. The reason for this is that scripturally, extremist Islam is far easier to defend than moderate Islam.
Until the last few decades, this was no real problem, because most muslims didn't really know what the Quran and the Hadith exactly teach. Furthermore, the only opinion available to them was the opinion of the local imam. The Quran by itself is a very difficult book to read. It is not put in chronological order, despite newer verses abrogating older Quranic verses. Multiple verses seem to contradict each other, as some verses appear tolerant while others appear like instructions for world conquest.
The spread of mass media made it possible for muslims to go look for themselves. As a result, those Muslims who are genuinely interested in practicing true Islam find themselves looking through the books and figuring out that their local preacher they go to with their parents doesn't really have things by the right end most of the time and perhaps even seems to invent some new things.
In our age of globalism, it has become very easy for converts to look on the Internet what Muhammed really taught, and for governments to spread radical versions of Islam by funding satellite channels and mosques in foreign nations that spread a more fundamentalist and totalitarian version of Islam than evolved domestically. This is exactly what is currently ongoing in Egypt. Unfortunately the same can't be done in reverse with moderate Islam, because upon trying to spread moderate Islam, local leaders can point at their Qurans and the Hadith and show why you are wrong.
For reasons such as these, moderate muslims are a minority. I suspect most of my readers are familiar with the more violence and hatred inspiring verses of the Quran, and therefore I prefer to first examine the evidence that supports my claim, that moderate muslims are a rarity.
A poll done by Pew Research Center asked people for their views on stoning people who commit adultery, whipping people and cutting of the hands of thieves, and carrying out the death penalty on people who leave Islam. The numbers were as following:
We see that most Muslims polled support the death penalty for people who leave Islam, depending on the country polled. We can therefore confidently state that moderate Muslims are the minority. To confirm the accuracy of the poll, we have to look at other polls and whether they show similar results. A poll done in Indonesia found that 43% of Muslims there support stoning adulterers. The PDF file lists the numbers for stoning, which is called "Rajam". Since the numbers are so close, this lends credibility to the survey done by PEW.
It would be a mistake however to assume that the others who disagree with the questions are all "moderate Muslims". As an example, we would consider a Christian man who would disown his son for being gay or believes the Earth is 6000 years old not a moderate Christian. We wouldn't consider him bin Laden, but we would still consider him rather fundamentalist.
If we would set the standard for a moderate Muslim as "a Muslim who doesn't believe in Sharia law punishments", we would have to consider 84% of Turkish Muslims to be moderates. However, if we would set the standard for a moderate Muslim as "a Muslim who doesn't reject the theory of Evolution", just 50% of Turkish Muslims can still be considered moderates, as polls have shown that only about 30% of Turkish people believe in evolution, with about 20% being unsure.
Interestingly enough, another poll reported on in American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks claims that 78% of Turkish people condoned the stoning of women for adultery. Important in this poll is that those aged 15 to 18 had the most fundamentalist outlook, which confirms my own experiences and makes sense considering the spread of fundamentalist Islam.
This overall unfortunately leads us to the following depressing conclusion: What is considered fundamentalist behavior for a Christian in most Christian nations, would be considered moderate behavior for a Muslim in most Islamic nations.
The real moderate Muslims
So who are these mysterious moderate Muslims and where can you find them? The three main Islamic sects that can be considered to be "moderate" are the Ahmadiyya Muslims, the Alevi Muslims of Turkey, and the Alawi Muslims of Syria.
What becomes immediately apparent about these Muslims is that none of them are recognized as true Muslims by the majority of the Islamic population. This is partly justified, because in the case of the Alevi and the Alawi, Christian ideas, practices, and rituals have been incorporated into their belief system. This also bring us to a general rule of fist about moderate Islamic sects: If a moderate Islamic sect is not recognized as Islamic by most Muslims, it is likely a form of "moderate Islam".
The Ahmadiyya Muslims are a modern Islamic sect, founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed to be the Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer in Islam. Largely unique amongst Islamic sects, the Ahmadiyya Muslims believe in evolution. Ahmad rejected violent Jihad and believed that religion should only be propagated by peaceful means. A lot can be said about the Ahmadiyya Muslims, but they are not Jihadists.
The second group are the Alevi Muslims, a Shiite sect. The Alive constitute about 15 million people in Turkey, or 25%. Murdering someone is seen as one of the gravest sins a person can commit. Alevi men and women pray together and women are allowed to wear modern Western clothing. The Alevi are monogamous. The Alevi incorporated local folk customs into their religion, and according to some, gnostic and Christian teachings and elements can be seen as well. The Alevi have a Trinity-like concept, consisting of Allah, Muhammed and Ali.
The high percentage of Alevi Muslims in Turkey may be part of the reason why Turkey is the only Islamic state is the Middle East that has been partly succesful in implementing progressive enlightenment ideas into their government. Most non-Kurdish Alevi Muslims were traditionally strong supporters of Atatürk and his implementation in Islamic society.
The third group are the Alawi of Syria. Alawi and Alevi are essentially the same word, but Alawi is the Arabic version. Like the Alevi of Turkey, the Alawi have incorporated many Christian teachings into their beliefs. The Alawi are Trinitarian, celebrate Christmas, and do not carry out many traditional Islamic practices like fasting, Hajj (the trip to MeccA), and ritual prayer. Because the Alawi were always threatened by their Orthodox Islamic neighbors, the Alawi have a secretive religion.
Unfortunately, it is not quite sure what has happened to the Alawi. The President of Syria is an Alawi Muslim, whose reign is continually threatened by the Sunni Muslim majority. Some claim that Assad has sacrificed much of Alawi teachings and culture, in an effort to keep the Sunni population docile and acceptant of the fact that they are ruled by a religious minority. Some authors claim that the Alawi religion has essentially gone extinct. What is known however, is that the Christians in Syria largely support the rule of the Alawi minority, as they protect them against the Sunnis.
Overall, these are the three sects of Islam that can truly be called moderate. What should be noted however is that the Ahmadiyya Muslims are not accept as Muslims by all the other Muslims, that many Alevi Muslims do not really consider themselves religious anymore and instead simply consider Alevism a lifestyle, and that the Alawi appear to be going instinct, being assimilated by mainstream Sunni Islamic culture which is intolerant of the unislamic elements of the Alawi religion. However, the point still stands. Not all of the Islamic world lives in darkness and hatred.
It may be interesting to note that some theories suggest that the Alevi and the Alawi are the result of Muslims interacting with the crusaders. If this is the case, it is additional evidence that the crusades had a lasting positive impact upon the Middle East, as offensive as this suggestion may be to some people. It would mean that in addition to delaying the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades paved the path for the reformation of Islam.
Europeans are taught to be ashamed of their history and their culture, and although there is a lot to be ashamed about, Europeans tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. On the other side of the extreme are most Islamic countries, which are not ashamed of anything. It's time for a middle of the road approach.
Are these the only moderate Muslims on the planet then? No, of course not. Local practices of a religion always evolve gradually, incorporating different elements and changing their views on different ideas. A local variety of Islam may evolve to be more tolerant. Furthermore, as a society evolves, religion begins to play an increasingly smaller role in people's lives. People don't feel the need to go to the mosque for every prayer, people don't pray five times a day, and eventually people live a relatively secular lifestyle.
Most people are simply not religiously devout in nature, but are more interested in worldly matters. Religiousness after all is largely a personality trait. The same people who are called "Militant Atheists" in our society would have been Puritans in the 16th century, and would have been Salafists in Egypt. The difference however is that Militant Atheism and Christian Puritanism only makes you annoying, whereas militant Islam makes you a potential suicide bomber.
However, the unfortunate truth is that militant and fundamentalist Islam are extremely viral compared to these local forms of Islam. After all, militant Islam is very easy to spread, as it is well founded in the Quran, which moderate Islam of course isn't, as moderate Islam is a mutation of Islam. Saudi oil money pays for fundamentalist television channels, fundamentalist hate-palaces and fundamentalist political parties in Egypt and many other countries. As we speak, Saudi Arabia is reversing every little bit of progress that Islamic countries have attempted to make towards modernity.
There is another type of "moderate Muslim". I call them "Liberation Theology Muslims", as they are the Muslim equivalent of Liberation theology Christians. These Muslims base their worldview not on Islamic culture, but on Western ideas and philosophies that they have learned about. Since they have grown up in Islamic countries, they try to fuse their Western ideas with their Islamic religion, and convince the world and themselves that the two go perfectly together.
An example is Muammar Gadaffi. This might shock you, and I should have warned you beforehand, that this blog is not your standard neoconservative anti-Islam blog. The truth is always far more complex than can be caught by any simply ideology or gut reaction towards a phenomenon.
Muammar Gadaffi is a socialist first, and a Muslim second. His behavior is typical of a socialist, not of a Muslim. He encourages sub-Saharan immigration to his nation, wants to end racism, opposes anti-Semitism, tries to emancipate women, and is continually at odds with religious leaders. The fact that the opposition to his regime consists of religious fundamentalists like Al Qaeda indicates that Gadaffi does not fit the archetypal Muslim image.
Conservatives should be wiser than to fall for liberal dreams of a democratic and secular enlightened Middle East. Liberals are idealists, while conservatives are realists. Conservatives could see from far away that the overthrowing of Mubarak would lead to the election of the Muslim Brotherhood, because the Islamists are the only real opposition in the Middle East.
The reason that conservatives like McCain cheered on the overthrowing and barbaric torture and execution of Muammar Gadaffi is that most conservatives are old men whose mind got stuck before the fall of the wall. They remember Gadaffi as the eccentric socialist threat to the 1st world, who allied himself with communists.
In recent years however, Gadaffi gave up his weapons of mass destruction program and sought to improve ties to the Western world. Gadaffi was an old man, whose Western educated son Saif al Islam could have easily implemented reforms with Western encouragement, that would have opened Libyan society to the world and would promote increased civil rights and democratic reforms. Instead, the Gadaffi family was shown that the West can not be trusted. The same people who tapped your shoulder at the cocktail parties in London are now cheering for the torture and death of your father in Sirte.
The betrayal he faced by the West will only discourage other regimes from trying to improve relations with the West. A regime like in North Korea, Iran, or Burma is shown by the actions in Libya that it can not choose a middle ground.
We now live in the 21st century, in which the threat of communism is a threat of the past. Conservatives should have seen moderate autocracies like those of Libya, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia as the only hope for the Middle East, since the alternative is Islamism.
The sad truth is as following: When Westerners encounter their mythologized and fetishized moderate Islam, they fail to recognize it, and stab it in the back. It is difficult to tell whether this is the result of evil, (intellectual) cowardice, or ignorance. I suspect it is a combination of all three.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Why some people refuse to issue criticism about Islam
Non-native English speakers occasionally find themselves confronted by the difficulty that some words have no adequate synonym in English. A good example of such a word in Dutch is the term "salonfähig", which was borrowed from German.
The word salonfähig refers to a topic that can be discussed in polite society. In Dutch society, it is currently not salonfähig to criticize Islam. It would be an exaggeration however to say that criticism of Islam is taboo amongst the Dutch, hence illustrating the need for a separate term in the English language.
Depending on the company you are with in the Netherlands, you can be critical of Islam. Interestingly enough, people who actually interact with Muslims on a day to day basis tend to be more open to criticism of Islam, than people who don't, who also tend to be the demographic for whom the word "salonfähig" was invented.
It's easiest to paint a psychological profile of the people who are unwilling to consider the suggestion that Islam may pose a genuine danger to Dutch society, because the people who are critical of Islam come from all walks of life, whereas the non-Muslim Islamophiles tend to be a relatively homogeneous bunch.
Islamophiles tend to be people from an upper or middle class background. More often than not they are young, and politically believe in some version of socialism, with varying amounts of liberalism added to the mixture. They dislike Israel, and feel a certain sense of shame about their own success. Most of them are not very intellectually brave, and hold few if any controversial opinions. However, they do get very upset when people voice controversial opinions. They have a habit of debating their opponents by using ad hominem attacks and simple insults.
We could imagine an axis with Realism on one side and Idealism on the other. If we were to put the Islamophiles somewhere along this axis, most of them tend to score well into Idealist territory.
Like the Muslims to whose propaganda they listen, they do not really tend to know very much about the teachings of Islam. If I were to ask them what they know about Islam, my suspicion is that most of them would answer by telling me about the traditional Dichotomy between Shia Islam and Sunni Islam, and the five pillars of Islam, the conversation would not go far beyond that.
Interestingly enough, Islamophiles are disproportionately often Atheists, as self-contradictory as this may seem. Please note that this is not an attack on Atheism, as I am essentially an Atheist myself. It is simply an observation that has puzzled me.
Many Atheist Islamophiles have a Marxist outlook on religion, dismissing it as a simple element of culture, a series of rituals and superstitions that keep people occupied and happy. Being Atheists, and often having grown up in Atheist households, Christianity, Judaism and other Western religions are often as foreign to them as Islam is to them, and hence they consider these religions to be interchangeable.
When these Atheist Islamophiles are forced to speak their mind on religion they tend to pay lip service to the problem of Islam. Instead, their philosophical objections towards Theism and supernatural beliefs in general are extended to Islam. Believing in a God is silly, therefore, Christians are silly, and because Muslims happen to believe in a God as well, Muslims are just as silly. This is about as far as the Atheist criticism of Islam generally goes.
These Atheists can rightly be considered Islamophiles, because upon being exposed to genuine criticism of the fundamental unique teachings of Islam, these Atheists tend to respond by attacking the messenger. To them Islam is not a genuine danger as a political ideology, it is simply silly and the messenger is reminded that he is equally silly, because he believes in a God as well.
This is what truly separates the Islamophile from the rest of the world. When faced with evidence to the contrary, the Islamophile insists on believing that Islam is not in any way unique, but exhibits flaws that are universal to Theistic belief systems in general.
Four types of Islamophiles
It is not very difficult to demonstrate that the flaws inherent to the Islamic religion are unique to Islam and not found in most other major world religions. This is why it is all the more baffling that Islamophiles are unwilling to consider this possibility.
There are different explanations for this phenomenon. It is unlikely that a single explanation applies to all Islamophiles. I will consider a few possible explanations below.
1. I don't care whether Islam means peace or not, religion is stupid anyway!
The first explanation is that the Islamophile is unwilling to differentiate between Islam and other religions, because Atheism is fundamental to his self-perception. The Islamophile considers his Atheism to be an important part of what makes him unique and better than the people around him. The Islamophile likes to keep it simple, and has no desire to study every religious system that he chooses to reject individually. To this Islamophile, the individual teachings of different religions simply distract from his greater issue with religion.
2. If Islam means peace, it also means that I am right!
The second explanation is that the Islamophile does not truly love Islam, but feels the need to defend Islam, because others are using their fear of Islam as an argument to support policies that the Islamophile does not agree with. As an example, a man may support war with Iran, because Iran is trying to spread the Shiite religion around the Middle East, and upon gaining nuclear weapons Iran may become unstoppable. The second man, who is actually against war with Iran, now feels forced to borrow arguments from Islamophiles and Muslims, to argue against war with Iran. This man only becomes an Islamophile out of necessity, to enable him to continue to hold another view that he has. Islamophilia is a tool that he simply uses to maintain an internally coherent world-view.
These type of Islamophiles tend to be the least enthusiastic about Islam, and if their political views happened to change, they might betray Islam altogether. Many of them are American libertarians opposed to the invasion of their privacy and the expensive American foreign military adventures. Their Islamophilia is generally not very deeply rooted, and may seem out of character for them.
3. Islam has to mean peace, because I would have a big problem otherwise!
The third explanation is that the Islamophile is unwilling to consider the idea that something may be uniquely wrong about Islam, because of the implications of such a conclusion. This is likely the most common form of Islamophilia, and the phrase "Sticking your head in the sand" only applies to this explanation. The implications of Islam being a dangerous religion can be big. It can mean that multiculturalism in Europe will inevitably fail, that democracy in the Middle East is more dangerous that dictatorship, and that the spread of Islam may be accompanied by a decline in personal liberty.
These are disturbing conclusions, and so it may be easier to believe that a Clash of Civilizations is simply a secret Zionist plan than the result of a religion that preaches the conquest of the world by the sword. Alternatively, it may be a comfortable thought that Muslim fundamentalists commit suicide bombings, not because they believe this will result in 72 virgins in paradise, but because they became outraged upon reading on the BBC website that sanctions in Iraq killed a million people. No, it was not their high libido that motivated these adolescent males, but their desire for social justice!
A different variety of this type of Islamophile is the Islamophile who realizes that having a dissenting opinion on Islam in his peer group could lead to social ostracization, with the effects varying from no longer being invited on TV for our celebrities, to no longer being invited to parties for our youth. Whether or not this person truly qualifies as an Islamophile depends upon whether he is just deceiving the outside world, or himself as well.
4. Islam doesn't mean peace, that's what makes it so great!
The above three are relatively innocent forms of Islamophilia. The fourth explanation is more worrisome, as the fourth category of Islamophiles do not share the innocence that the previous three categories have. The fourth explanation is that the Islamophile either consciously or subconsciously considers Islam to be an ally in a greater struggle that the Islamophile is engaged in. In this case the Islamophile can be right-wing as well as left wing. There are multiple examples to think of. As an historical example, the Islamophile may be very opposed to communism, and comes to see Islam as an allied ideology that is equally hostile against communism. This is how a right wing man like Ronald Reagan comes to declare the Taliban as the "moral equivalent of America's founding fathers".
As another example, the Islamophile may have a great hatred of Jews or Homosexuals, and sees the Muslim as a useful idiot, or even a respectable ally, in this greater struggle. This is very common amongst white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists. Some examples are the late Ahmed Huber, and many other white supremacists, many of whom in an ironic twist of fate actually end up becoming in favor of Muslim immigration to Europe. Although I am convinced that these types of Islamophiles are without a doubt a more interesting variety to have a 15 minute conversation with than the types cited above, they are the only type of Islamophile with hostile intentions.
How to talk with an Islamophile
By no means do I claim that these are the only four types of Islamophilia that can be found in our society. There may be other sources of Islamophilia that I am unaware of. However, I think I can state with reasonable certainty that the four causes outlined above play a role in the majority of cases of Islamophilia that I have encountered.
It is important to understand the source of Islamophilia, because the method of addressing Islamophilia differs, depending upon the root cause of the Islamophilia.
1. I don't care whether Islam means peace or not, religion is stupid anyway!
The first case of Islamophilia will require asking certain fundamental questions that expose the difference between Islam and, the religion against which the Atheist is rebelling, which is generally Christianity. The difference between the two religions has to be made clear to the Atheist.
As an example, it is true that there are certain problems with Christianity, which should be expected with any religion that is thousands of years old. However, it should be pointed out to the Atheist that despite the actions of many Christians being reprehensible, they do not pose a genuine threat.
As an example, the election of the most fundamentalist variety of Christianity in the United States would mean discrimination against homosexuals, when it comes to marriage, access to children, and serving in certain public functions. However, even these Christians are still taught to "hate the sin but love the sinner".
In contrary to this, the election of the most fundamentalist variety of Islam would mean that homosexuals that are caught can be put to death.
It should be pointed out to the Atheist that the difference between these two religious philosophies can be narrowed down to scriptural differences in the respective holy books of these two religions. Jesus is credited in the Bible with encouraging those who are without sin to cast the first stone at a woman accused of adultery.
The Hadith on the other hand records Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim Caliph as stating:
Most importantly, it should be pointed out to the Atheist that Christianity is relatively open to reform and innovation, whereas Islam is not. The concept of Bid'ah should be explained, which refers to any form of innovation in the religion that Muhammed brought.
2. If Islam means peace, it also means that I am right!
The second type of Islamophile uses Islamophilia as a tool to make sense of the world. If Islam does not mean peace, his concept of right and wrong becomes distorted.
In some cases, it may be sufficient to introduce this man to a new argument, that fills the void that would emerge in his thinking if Islam no longer means peace. To return to the example of the man who does not want Iran to be bombed, because he opposes foreign military intervention in principle. It is possible to hold both the idea that Iran is a threat to the Middle East, and that Iran should not be bombed. The man could be informed for example that bombing Iran could radicalize many Iranians and or could actually help increase support for the regime due to a threat from outside, as happened in the United States after 9/11.
This is of course a bit of a dishonest method. A better method would be to remind the man that there is no shame in adjusting your opinion when faced with new information. As an example, the man may be introduced to the idea that foreign military intervention does not necessarily have to be bad, or may have benefits that outweigh the negative effects. In the case of the Sudanese civil war for example, military intervention might have been an effective method to protect Christian and Animist Southern Sudanese civilians against the Muslim Arabs that form the backbone of the government, and thereby helped save some of the 2 million lives that were lost.
3. Islam has to mean peace, because I would have a big problem otherwise!
The type of people who are unwilling to consider the possibility that Islam poses a threat because of the implications of such a problem tend to be the most difficult to wake up from their spell. In large part, this is because these are idealistic people, who are generally little moved by facts that do not fit into their desired image of reality.
The first main tactic that is effective is to explain to this type of Islamophile that his other ideals may be irreconcilable with his Islamophilic ideal. As an example, the Islamophile may be very attached to the multicultural society. The Islamophile should be explained that Jewish people are being bullied, and many feel forced to flee Europe, because of rising anti-Semitism that is coming from second or third generation Muslim immigrants to Europe. The Islamophile should be explained that this does not necessarily mean his multicultural ideal is impossible. It simply means that certain groups that have a deep rooted hostility towards other groups may have difficulty adjusting to the multicultural environment as a result of the religion they adhere to.
Another ideal that is under threat is the sexual freedom of women. Women are increasingly harassed by men who consider modern Western style clothing to be an invitation for sex. This is because Islamic culture treats women as the property of a man, of whom he may have four at once as wives. The Islamophile should be asked: If you are forced to choose, do you choose to be tolerant of a religion that preaches intolerance, or do you choose for tolerance of the minorities in our society that do not seek to impose their values and lifestyle upon others (Jews, Homosexuals etcetera)?
The second tactic is to point out to this type of Islamophile that criticism of Islam would not make him the first in his particular ideology that he happens to identify with to be critical of this religion. Critics of Islam come from all walks of life, and include many former Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but also enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, socialist intellectuals such as Bernard Russell, and great leaders such as the Turkish Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Peer pressure will still be high for many in left-wing environments to pretend as if Islam is a religion like any other. The Islamophile should tell his peer group that by criticizing Islam, he is doing a favor to those people in Islamic culture who suffer as a result of growing up under Islam. Examples include homosexual youth, women and those who find themselves incapable of swallowing the ridiculous stories a Muslim is expected to believe.
4. Islam doesn't mean peace, that's what makes it so great!
The fourth category of Islamophile is of course the most difficult to talk sense into, as they generally have a higher goal that their Islamophilia serves. As an example, Muslims may help counteract the "moral decay" that is caused by binge drinking and premarital sex, may be a welcome ally in the fight against the "gay agenda", or the Islamic world may be the last remaining region that is not under "Zionist control". Or, in the case of Marxists, Islam emancipates the third world against capitalist neoliberal corporate domination, apparently by forcing women to wear Burqas instead of designer labels.
The first solution here would of course be to consider whether the imagined threat that Islam helps combat truly exists. Is there really a Jewish conspiracy, or a gay conspiracy? Or do these groups simply happen to have certain cultural values that make it easy for them to play a prominent visible role in our society?
In many cases it is very difficult to talk sense into these people, as they have an irrational hatred of a certain group, or strongly believe in an ideology and think they can use Islam as a useful idiot to help combat opposing ideologies.
In these cases, it may be helpful to explain that living under Islamic yoke does not have to be any better than under the yoke of their particular enemy. They should also be reminded that although they may look at Islam as a useful idiot for their own objective, Islam may very well look at them as a useful idiot for its own objective as well.
How much worse can life under the tyranny of the "gay agenda" truly be than life in Somalia or Yemen? Is life in "Zionist" Israel and America really worse than life in "free" Iran?
Conclusion
We have examined the reasons why some people are unwilling to utter criticism about Islam. Hopefully this helps us open the debate about Islam and the impact it has upon the lives of billions of people around the world.
Afterword
Having grown up and gone to school in the Netherlands, I have seen what the impact of Islam and Islamophilia have on our culture. Amongst the Moroccans in my class, the consensus was that the Holocaust had not occurred. My left-wing indigenous Dutch classmate, polite as always, attempted to reach a middle ground between me and the Moroccans by suggesting that the Holocaust did occur, but that only a few people were killed, as opposed to the official death toll of Six million. Keep in mind that I went to a good school, and my classmates were amongst the upper 20% or so of Dutch youth from an academic perspective.
Our Turkish classmates had different interests. Their main interest was in boasting about the greatness of the genocidal Ottoman empire. Creationism is gaining a foothold as well in Turkey, and apparently amongst Turkish teenagers in the Netherlands as well, as one classmate sought to explain to the girls in my class that humans could not have evolved from apes, "because there are still apes around, and they are not evolving into apes at the moment".
I fear for this country's future.
The word salonfähig refers to a topic that can be discussed in polite society. In Dutch society, it is currently not salonfähig to criticize Islam. It would be an exaggeration however to say that criticism of Islam is taboo amongst the Dutch, hence illustrating the need for a separate term in the English language.
Depending on the company you are with in the Netherlands, you can be critical of Islam. Interestingly enough, people who actually interact with Muslims on a day to day basis tend to be more open to criticism of Islam, than people who don't, who also tend to be the demographic for whom the word "salonfähig" was invented.
It's easiest to paint a psychological profile of the people who are unwilling to consider the suggestion that Islam may pose a genuine danger to Dutch society, because the people who are critical of Islam come from all walks of life, whereas the non-Muslim Islamophiles tend to be a relatively homogeneous bunch.
Islamophiles tend to be people from an upper or middle class background. More often than not they are young, and politically believe in some version of socialism, with varying amounts of liberalism added to the mixture. They dislike Israel, and feel a certain sense of shame about their own success. Most of them are not very intellectually brave, and hold few if any controversial opinions. However, they do get very upset when people voice controversial opinions. They have a habit of debating their opponents by using ad hominem attacks and simple insults.
We could imagine an axis with Realism on one side and Idealism on the other. If we were to put the Islamophiles somewhere along this axis, most of them tend to score well into Idealist territory.
Like the Muslims to whose propaganda they listen, they do not really tend to know very much about the teachings of Islam. If I were to ask them what they know about Islam, my suspicion is that most of them would answer by telling me about the traditional Dichotomy between Shia Islam and Sunni Islam, and the five pillars of Islam, the conversation would not go far beyond that.
Interestingly enough, Islamophiles are disproportionately often Atheists, as self-contradictory as this may seem. Please note that this is not an attack on Atheism, as I am essentially an Atheist myself. It is simply an observation that has puzzled me.
Many Atheist Islamophiles have a Marxist outlook on religion, dismissing it as a simple element of culture, a series of rituals and superstitions that keep people occupied and happy. Being Atheists, and often having grown up in Atheist households, Christianity, Judaism and other Western religions are often as foreign to them as Islam is to them, and hence they consider these religions to be interchangeable.
When these Atheist Islamophiles are forced to speak their mind on religion they tend to pay lip service to the problem of Islam. Instead, their philosophical objections towards Theism and supernatural beliefs in general are extended to Islam. Believing in a God is silly, therefore, Christians are silly, and because Muslims happen to believe in a God as well, Muslims are just as silly. This is about as far as the Atheist criticism of Islam generally goes.
These Atheists can rightly be considered Islamophiles, because upon being exposed to genuine criticism of the fundamental unique teachings of Islam, these Atheists tend to respond by attacking the messenger. To them Islam is not a genuine danger as a political ideology, it is simply silly and the messenger is reminded that he is equally silly, because he believes in a God as well.
This is what truly separates the Islamophile from the rest of the world. When faced with evidence to the contrary, the Islamophile insists on believing that Islam is not in any way unique, but exhibits flaws that are universal to Theistic belief systems in general.
Four types of Islamophiles
It is not very difficult to demonstrate that the flaws inherent to the Islamic religion are unique to Islam and not found in most other major world religions. This is why it is all the more baffling that Islamophiles are unwilling to consider this possibility.
There are different explanations for this phenomenon. It is unlikely that a single explanation applies to all Islamophiles. I will consider a few possible explanations below.
1. I don't care whether Islam means peace or not, religion is stupid anyway!
The first explanation is that the Islamophile is unwilling to differentiate between Islam and other religions, because Atheism is fundamental to his self-perception. The Islamophile considers his Atheism to be an important part of what makes him unique and better than the people around him. The Islamophile likes to keep it simple, and has no desire to study every religious system that he chooses to reject individually. To this Islamophile, the individual teachings of different religions simply distract from his greater issue with religion.
2. If Islam means peace, it also means that I am right!
The second explanation is that the Islamophile does not truly love Islam, but feels the need to defend Islam, because others are using their fear of Islam as an argument to support policies that the Islamophile does not agree with. As an example, a man may support war with Iran, because Iran is trying to spread the Shiite religion around the Middle East, and upon gaining nuclear weapons Iran may become unstoppable. The second man, who is actually against war with Iran, now feels forced to borrow arguments from Islamophiles and Muslims, to argue against war with Iran. This man only becomes an Islamophile out of necessity, to enable him to continue to hold another view that he has. Islamophilia is a tool that he simply uses to maintain an internally coherent world-view.
These type of Islamophiles tend to be the least enthusiastic about Islam, and if their political views happened to change, they might betray Islam altogether. Many of them are American libertarians opposed to the invasion of their privacy and the expensive American foreign military adventures. Their Islamophilia is generally not very deeply rooted, and may seem out of character for them.
3. Islam has to mean peace, because I would have a big problem otherwise!
The third explanation is that the Islamophile is unwilling to consider the idea that something may be uniquely wrong about Islam, because of the implications of such a conclusion. This is likely the most common form of Islamophilia, and the phrase "Sticking your head in the sand" only applies to this explanation. The implications of Islam being a dangerous religion can be big. It can mean that multiculturalism in Europe will inevitably fail, that democracy in the Middle East is more dangerous that dictatorship, and that the spread of Islam may be accompanied by a decline in personal liberty.
These are disturbing conclusions, and so it may be easier to believe that a Clash of Civilizations is simply a secret Zionist plan than the result of a religion that preaches the conquest of the world by the sword. Alternatively, it may be a comfortable thought that Muslim fundamentalists commit suicide bombings, not because they believe this will result in 72 virgins in paradise, but because they became outraged upon reading on the BBC website that sanctions in Iraq killed a million people. No, it was not their high libido that motivated these adolescent males, but their desire for social justice!
A different variety of this type of Islamophile is the Islamophile who realizes that having a dissenting opinion on Islam in his peer group could lead to social ostracization, with the effects varying from no longer being invited on TV for our celebrities, to no longer being invited to parties for our youth. Whether or not this person truly qualifies as an Islamophile depends upon whether he is just deceiving the outside world, or himself as well.
4. Islam doesn't mean peace, that's what makes it so great!
The above three are relatively innocent forms of Islamophilia. The fourth explanation is more worrisome, as the fourth category of Islamophiles do not share the innocence that the previous three categories have. The fourth explanation is that the Islamophile either consciously or subconsciously considers Islam to be an ally in a greater struggle that the Islamophile is engaged in. In this case the Islamophile can be right-wing as well as left wing. There are multiple examples to think of. As an historical example, the Islamophile may be very opposed to communism, and comes to see Islam as an allied ideology that is equally hostile against communism. This is how a right wing man like Ronald Reagan comes to declare the Taliban as the "moral equivalent of America's founding fathers".
As another example, the Islamophile may have a great hatred of Jews or Homosexuals, and sees the Muslim as a useful idiot, or even a respectable ally, in this greater struggle. This is very common amongst white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists. Some examples are the late Ahmed Huber, and many other white supremacists, many of whom in an ironic twist of fate actually end up becoming in favor of Muslim immigration to Europe. Although I am convinced that these types of Islamophiles are without a doubt a more interesting variety to have a 15 minute conversation with than the types cited above, they are the only type of Islamophile with hostile intentions.
How to talk with an Islamophile
By no means do I claim that these are the only four types of Islamophilia that can be found in our society. There may be other sources of Islamophilia that I am unaware of. However, I think I can state with reasonable certainty that the four causes outlined above play a role in the majority of cases of Islamophilia that I have encountered.
It is important to understand the source of Islamophilia, because the method of addressing Islamophilia differs, depending upon the root cause of the Islamophilia.
1. I don't care whether Islam means peace or not, religion is stupid anyway!
The first case of Islamophilia will require asking certain fundamental questions that expose the difference between Islam and, the religion against which the Atheist is rebelling, which is generally Christianity. The difference between the two religions has to be made clear to the Atheist.
As an example, it is true that there are certain problems with Christianity, which should be expected with any religion that is thousands of years old. However, it should be pointed out to the Atheist that despite the actions of many Christians being reprehensible, they do not pose a genuine threat.
As an example, the election of the most fundamentalist variety of Christianity in the United States would mean discrimination against homosexuals, when it comes to marriage, access to children, and serving in certain public functions. However, even these Christians are still taught to "hate the sin but love the sinner".
In contrary to this, the election of the most fundamentalist variety of Islam would mean that homosexuals that are caught can be put to death.
It should be pointed out to the Atheist that the difference between these two religious philosophies can be narrowed down to scriptural differences in the respective holy books of these two religions. Jesus is credited in the Bible with encouraging those who are without sin to cast the first stone at a woman accused of adultery.
The Hadith on the other hand records Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim Caliph as stating:
Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) awarded the punishment of stoning to death (to the married adulterer and adulteress) and, after him, we also awarded the punishment of stoning, I am afraid that with the lapse of time, the people (may forget it) and may say: We do not find the punishment of stoning in the Book of Allah, and thus go astray by abandoning this duty prescribed by Allah. Stoning is a duty laid down in Allah's Book for married men and women who commit adultery when proof is established, or it there is pregnancy, or a confession.Similarly, it is indisputable that the Bible does not teach Christians to spread the faith by the sword, whereas the Quran does. In fact, it was not until the apostle Paul that the decision was made that non-Jews could be converted to Christianity.
Most importantly, it should be pointed out to the Atheist that Christianity is relatively open to reform and innovation, whereas Islam is not. The concept of Bid'ah should be explained, which refers to any form of innovation in the religion that Muhammed brought.
2. If Islam means peace, it also means that I am right!
The second type of Islamophile uses Islamophilia as a tool to make sense of the world. If Islam does not mean peace, his concept of right and wrong becomes distorted.
In some cases, it may be sufficient to introduce this man to a new argument, that fills the void that would emerge in his thinking if Islam no longer means peace. To return to the example of the man who does not want Iran to be bombed, because he opposes foreign military intervention in principle. It is possible to hold both the idea that Iran is a threat to the Middle East, and that Iran should not be bombed. The man could be informed for example that bombing Iran could radicalize many Iranians and or could actually help increase support for the regime due to a threat from outside, as happened in the United States after 9/11.
This is of course a bit of a dishonest method. A better method would be to remind the man that there is no shame in adjusting your opinion when faced with new information. As an example, the man may be introduced to the idea that foreign military intervention does not necessarily have to be bad, or may have benefits that outweigh the negative effects. In the case of the Sudanese civil war for example, military intervention might have been an effective method to protect Christian and Animist Southern Sudanese civilians against the Muslim Arabs that form the backbone of the government, and thereby helped save some of the 2 million lives that were lost.
3. Islam has to mean peace, because I would have a big problem otherwise!
The type of people who are unwilling to consider the possibility that Islam poses a threat because of the implications of such a problem tend to be the most difficult to wake up from their spell. In large part, this is because these are idealistic people, who are generally little moved by facts that do not fit into their desired image of reality.
The first main tactic that is effective is to explain to this type of Islamophile that his other ideals may be irreconcilable with his Islamophilic ideal. As an example, the Islamophile may be very attached to the multicultural society. The Islamophile should be explained that Jewish people are being bullied, and many feel forced to flee Europe, because of rising anti-Semitism that is coming from second or third generation Muslim immigrants to Europe. The Islamophile should be explained that this does not necessarily mean his multicultural ideal is impossible. It simply means that certain groups that have a deep rooted hostility towards other groups may have difficulty adjusting to the multicultural environment as a result of the religion they adhere to.
Another ideal that is under threat is the sexual freedom of women. Women are increasingly harassed by men who consider modern Western style clothing to be an invitation for sex. This is because Islamic culture treats women as the property of a man, of whom he may have four at once as wives. The Islamophile should be asked: If you are forced to choose, do you choose to be tolerant of a religion that preaches intolerance, or do you choose for tolerance of the minorities in our society that do not seek to impose their values and lifestyle upon others (Jews, Homosexuals etcetera)?
The second tactic is to point out to this type of Islamophile that criticism of Islam would not make him the first in his particular ideology that he happens to identify with to be critical of this religion. Critics of Islam come from all walks of life, and include many former Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but also enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, socialist intellectuals such as Bernard Russell, and great leaders such as the Turkish Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Peer pressure will still be high for many in left-wing environments to pretend as if Islam is a religion like any other. The Islamophile should tell his peer group that by criticizing Islam, he is doing a favor to those people in Islamic culture who suffer as a result of growing up under Islam. Examples include homosexual youth, women and those who find themselves incapable of swallowing the ridiculous stories a Muslim is expected to believe.
4. Islam doesn't mean peace, that's what makes it so great!
The fourth category of Islamophile is of course the most difficult to talk sense into, as they generally have a higher goal that their Islamophilia serves. As an example, Muslims may help counteract the "moral decay" that is caused by binge drinking and premarital sex, may be a welcome ally in the fight against the "gay agenda", or the Islamic world may be the last remaining region that is not under "Zionist control". Or, in the case of Marxists, Islam emancipates the third world against capitalist neoliberal corporate domination, apparently by forcing women to wear Burqas instead of designer labels.
The first solution here would of course be to consider whether the imagined threat that Islam helps combat truly exists. Is there really a Jewish conspiracy, or a gay conspiracy? Or do these groups simply happen to have certain cultural values that make it easy for them to play a prominent visible role in our society?
In many cases it is very difficult to talk sense into these people, as they have an irrational hatred of a certain group, or strongly believe in an ideology and think they can use Islam as a useful idiot to help combat opposing ideologies.
In these cases, it may be helpful to explain that living under Islamic yoke does not have to be any better than under the yoke of their particular enemy. They should also be reminded that although they may look at Islam as a useful idiot for their own objective, Islam may very well look at them as a useful idiot for its own objective as well.
How much worse can life under the tyranny of the "gay agenda" truly be than life in Somalia or Yemen? Is life in "Zionist" Israel and America really worse than life in "free" Iran?
Conclusion
We have examined the reasons why some people are unwilling to utter criticism about Islam. Hopefully this helps us open the debate about Islam and the impact it has upon the lives of billions of people around the world.
Afterword
Having grown up and gone to school in the Netherlands, I have seen what the impact of Islam and Islamophilia have on our culture. Amongst the Moroccans in my class, the consensus was that the Holocaust had not occurred. My left-wing indigenous Dutch classmate, polite as always, attempted to reach a middle ground between me and the Moroccans by suggesting that the Holocaust did occur, but that only a few people were killed, as opposed to the official death toll of Six million. Keep in mind that I went to a good school, and my classmates were amongst the upper 20% or so of Dutch youth from an academic perspective.
Our Turkish classmates had different interests. Their main interest was in boasting about the greatness of the genocidal Ottoman empire. Creationism is gaining a foothold as well in Turkey, and apparently amongst Turkish teenagers in the Netherlands as well, as one classmate sought to explain to the girls in my class that humans could not have evolved from apes, "because there are still apes around, and they are not evolving into apes at the moment".
I fear for this country's future.
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