The Fiore vs. Berlatsky kerfuffle was so much fun other folks threw some punches as well. I thought I’d do a brief roundup of some of the more entertaining/enlightening blows.
Mike Hunter, in a comment over at the mainpage, did an extensive fisking of R. Fiore’s fisking of me. Here’s the first bit:
R. Fiore:
The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency. It is one of the greatest achievements of human history.
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Indeed a great achievement! But what we need here are more qualifiers, such as “The reasonableness of the West in this area“; for, does the West not indeed support the most corrupt and exploitative dictatorships for the most cynical of reasons?
That there are plenty of tyrants trampling their people without our aid hardly excuses our keeping others in power.
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R. Fiore:
The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing.
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(?????!!!!) The Jyllands-Posten is a right-wing publication which wanted to show what a bunch of berserk nutsos all Muslims were by doing a deliberately provocative action which it knew perfectly well Fundamentalist members of the faith world predictably go apeshit over.
Caro, to no one’s surprise, had a really insightful take.
It seems to me the most telling sentence in the second piece is this: “The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency.”
This idea that social problems are ever “solved” is, at the risk of melodrama, dangerous. They go dormant, conditions obtain at a given period of time when the are less of a problem, but that doesn’t mean they are solved, like some utopian science fiction novel.
This is precisely where Fiore’s “cultural materialism” is insufficient: you might be able to explain the past in cultural materialist terms, but you will not be able to imagine how the past might “return” to inform the future, because by denying the dialectic you leave yourself no mechanism for examining how that past is immanent in the present.
Maybe the errors of fact arise from this too: how would the families of the victims of Srebrenica feel about the notion that the West has solved the problem of religious violence, or even that Europe and “the Muslim world” have diverged in the first place? (His use of the word “Europe” to mean “Western Europe” is really irritating.) Or the European religious philosophers of the 17th century feel about secular pluralism as the cause for the advancements of Western civilization, since it ignores the religious pluralism on which secular pluralism is based? (I want to include the statement “Radical…Islam is not a remedy” here but I can’t figure out what he’s saying it’s not a remedy for…)
Fiore thinks in terms of cause and effect rather than in terms of “conditions of possibility” and I think that’s why Fiore’s essay feels so wrong to us: he treats history as something completed, a riddle to be explained, rather than as a powerful immanent presence that we have to engage with. His inability to perceive religion as anything other than an adaptation is probably why he can’t perceive History in this way: immanence was originally a religious concept, and if you take a strict materialist approach to religion it’s hard to exhibit the forms of mind necessary for imagining things that are temporally infinite. Fiore, imagining history as as series of finite cause and effects rather than an ongoing process that he is part of, sets himself outside history. I guess that’s the binary that I see informing this piece the most.
And in what I think is the closest thing we’ve gotten to a defense of Fiore, Andrei Molotiu chastised me for my second response to Fiore.
Noah, whatever one might think of Fiore, this is not a response, it’s a trolling post. It makes you sound like JF Ronan in his prime. It’s the kind of post that makes me not want to check HU as often anymore.
I think Fiore may well be sick of the back and forth, so this may be the end of the brouhaha. Thanks to all those who read and commented…and to R. Fiore himself, for engaging as long as he did. I hope we’ll get a chance to fight again soon.
“what we need here are more qualifiers, such as ‘The reasonableness of the West in this area’; for, does the West not indeed support the most corrupt and exploitative dictatorships for the most cynical of reasons?”
Someone tell Mike that reasonableness and cynicism are not opposed qualities.
I’d just responded to this last remark back in the “Fisking Berlatsky” thread. For those who may not look back that far:
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Tom Crippen says:
[Mike Hunter quote] “what we need here are more qualifiers, such as ‘The reasonableness of the West in this area’; for, does the West not indeed support the most corrupt and exploitative dictatorships for the most cynical of reasons?”
Mike, reasonableness and cynicism are not opposed qualities.
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Clearly not! In which way was the argument made that they were??
My point was instead that, if R. Fiore wishes to merit getting skewered for naively sunny-sounding remarks, such as:
“The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing. …”
-From “South Park Versus the Mob”
or,
“The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. …”
-From “Fisking Berlatsky”
(So, if a country is relatively free from religious warfare, it’s thus shown to be “reasonable”? Three cheers for North Korea and sundry other dictatorships!)
Thus, my recommendation of qualifiers, or as a Fantagraphics wit once called ’em on the TCJ message board, “cover-your-ass caveats.”
That the West (or North Korea) can be reasonable in the area of religious tolerance does not exclude that they can be profoundly unreasonable, even insanely self-destructive, in others.
Looking once more at “Fisking Berlatsky,” found s’more to jab at…
Fiore quotes:
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Berlatsky wrote:
The Mafia analogy carefully obscures the clear conclusion — Muslims have little if any way to address their political grievances to the foreign powers that repetitively kick them in the teeth. Terrorism is largely, as Fiore quite rightly notes, useless. So when you can’t do anything about the big insults, you naturally focus on the small ones. Surely segments of the Muslim world sees depictions of the prophet by the infidels not as the first insult, or the fifth or the 200th, but rather as part of one, long, sustained insult by a bully who has kept his foot on their throat for half a century plus.
Threats against newspaper publishers or television networks are petty and stupid and despicable, obviously — but they’re neither incomprehensible nor evidence of some sort of disconnect between religious thinking and rationality. Given the relationship between the west and the Middle East, the threats are, on the contrary, entirely comprehensible. That doesn’t mean that they should be condoned. In the first place, as Fiore points out, the whole brouhaha definitely makes things worse, not better, for Muslims worldwide. Moreover, while it isn’t as bad as the Taliban’s systematic oppression of women or al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, threatening to kill innocents for drawing pictures does seem to me to be a fair definition of evil. Still, we can take comfort in the thought that we’ll go tit for tat or better in the near future, whenever the next American drone strike takes out the next Afghani wedding party. …
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To which he responds:
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Fiore wrote:
This is what I think of as the Poor Darlings argument: The Poor Darlings have suffered so much that they can’t be held responsible for their actions. The trouble with this argument is that it treats the actions of the most fanatical faction of the Muslim world as if it were representative of the whole. These fanatics cause exponentially more violence and destruction in the Muslim world than they do in the West. I quote Samuel Johnson: “If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.” Of course, imperial expansion and domination is something only evil people like Europeans engage in. You’d never see Muslims spreading their faith by force and creating an empire that spans three continents.
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So we see that while Berlatsky carefully qualified his comment as “…Surely segments of the Muslim world sees [sic] depictions of the prophet by the infidels not as the first insult…” (Emphasis added)
…which Fiore transmogrifies into “…The trouble with this argument is that it treats the actions of the most fanatical faction of the Muslim world as if it were representative of the whole.”
Moreover, Fiore makes the worthy-of-Fox-News argument that Berlatsky is saying, re Muslims, that “The Poor Darlings have suffered so much that they can’t be held responsible for their actions.”
Pah! To explain the reasons why some in a group react violently to insults and exploitation is not to say that they are unreasoning animals, incapable of doing otherwise, nor does it excuse their actions.
Even more Fox News-ish is Fiore’s…
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Of course, imperial expansion and domination is something only evil people like Europeans engage in. You’d never see Muslims spreading their faith by force and creating an empire that spans three continents.
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Now, how does pointing out that a certain group has suffered from oppression equal calling that group innocent, morally pure and righteous?
Instead, in the statement quoted by Fiore, we read these clear-cut condemnations:
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Berlatsky writes:
…Threats against newspaper publishers or television networks are petty and stupid and despicable, obviously…Given the relationship between the west and the Middle East, the threats are, on the contrary, entirely comprehensible. That doesn’t mean that they should be condoned. In the first place, as Fiore points out, the whole brouhaha definitely makes things worse, not better, for Muslims worldwide. Moreover, while it isn’t as bad as the Taliban’s systematic oppression of women or al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, threatening to kill innocents for drawing pictures does seem to me to be a fair definition of evil…
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At least Fiore gets Brownie Points for not going the whole Fox News route and simply editing out those statements…
(…I guess I’m being Karmically driven here to compensate for all the times I’ve trashed Noah’s essays…)
Hey Mike! I’m sure you’ll have a chance to go back and reright the cosmic balance in the near future by trashing something I’ve written.
Your points are basically why I didn’t feel, contra Andrei, that Fiore merited an especially respectful response. Caricaturing the other guys’ argument is certainly entertaining…but it doesn’t seem fair that he should get to have all the fun.
I’d not checked out your “second response to Fiore” before now. Can’t say I’m offended by it, especially the last part, which was clearly intended to be in a playfully mocking schoolyard “Nyah, nyah, yah mudder wears army boots” (or whatever kids in this century are saying) tone.
Anyway, it’s not like you hadn’t earlier given Fiore’s comments a more “proper” response…