Posted on 08/08/2002 5:23:02 AM PDT by SJackson
Not that I have anything against the Greeks. It was the Athenians who coined the word “idiotis” to define a citizen who “takes no interest in public affairs,” and the most celebrated Athenian of them all, good old Socrates, to add the correlative to that definition by stating that the “unexamined life” is not worth living.
Ancient Greek thought is not the kind of subject that readily comes to mind on a sweltering hot afternoon in downtown Washington. But there you have it — you never know when what those sprightly Athenians had to say about human nature and conduct will hit on you on the head.
It all started with a phone call from a young Palestinian called Ibrahim, whose surname (you will soon realize why) I’ve decided to withhold. Ibrahim tells me that, well over a decade ago, when he was in his mid-teens, I was an overnight guest at his parents’ house in Los Angeles as I made a stop at UCLA to give a lecture. Moreover, he claims to have read all my books and admired them all.
Fine. A feather in my cap. But to what do I owe the honor of this call?
Ibrahim has a story to tell, and would I care to hear it? Perhaps even, since it is already neatly typed, to take the trouble to read it?
You can’t say no to a fan, especially one whose family had offered you hospitality in their California home — though heaven knows that when you’re on a lecture tour, living out of a suitcase, you are not likely to remember who had and who had not offered you hospitality while on a 12-city junket around the country — a decade ago, to boot.
We meet downtown at Cosi, a modest restaurant near Dupont Circle, and choose our lunch at the salad bar. Ibrahim is now obviously in his mid-twenties and, given the fact that he had grown up in the US, spoke accent-free American English. He’s a graduate student (“call me an activist, too”) at Amherst College and currently visiting Washington “to hang out with friends” for the summer break.
So what is all this about?
It appears Ibrahim has written a 16-page, single-spaced piece purporting to prove that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 carnage were not Arabs from Al-Qaeda, or Jews from Mossad, or Serbs from Balkans, or whatever, but — drum roll, please — a cabal of conspirators, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, operating directly from the Defense Department. “From right here in Washington, DC,” he says, his clawed hands rending the air with rightful indignation in the direction of the Pentagon. He cites the French “writer”, Thierry Meyssan, a charlatan whose book “Leffroyable Imposture,” or “The Horrifying Fraud,” advanced similar loony ideas, to support his claim.
And here’s the clincher: he tells me that this view is held by all his Palestinian and other Arab friends on campus. Would I be interested in going over his opus and giving him my feedback on it? He slides a manila folder across the table.
Is it possible? Has even this seemingly educated generation had its hold on reality so destroyed that they accept the substandard, nebulous jargon of conspiracy theories? They too? Have they lost the faculty of saying anything clear and rational? Is the exhaustion of the age so heavy that it has even settled in the marrow of the sensibility of young Arabs?
Why, you ask, am I making this insignificant incident, involving one mighty confused young man, the subject of this column today?
The reason I’m doing that is because this young man, along with his friends at Amherst and those in Washington he had come to the city “to hang out with” this summer, is the rule, not the exception.
Each generation has a temporal signature that defines its rhythm, its perception of the history that enfolds it. Every age has a tone and those living through it become affected by it.
Arabs of our grandfathers’ generation, for example, were marked forever by the Nahda struggle against Ottoman rule, when patriots were being hanged every other day in the downtown squares of Damascus and Beirut on orders from semiliterate Turkish functionaries. Then there was the wrenching experiences of our fathers’ generation in their own struggle for independence against British and French colonial overlords, and their shared trauma of seeing Palestine dismembered right before their eyes.
And our own generation in the late 1950s gave rise to a collective Arab psyche whose quest for meaning was anchored in the call for an Arab world united by one ideology within a single territorial homeland — only to become indelibly seared by the June War.
Do we have the heart to tell Ibrahim that he does not “have” a generation? Certainly not a generation to speak of, or to belong to?
And there he is, sitting across from me, letting slip words like praxis, post-modernism and hermeneutics, deconstructing Webber and Jung, and calling Freud and Levi-Strauss linear thinkers, in one breath, and telling me, in the other, that Donald Rumsfeld, the American secretary of defense, was behind Sept. 11!
If Ibrahim belongs to a generation at all, it is at best a lost one, split as it is between being traditionalist Arab on the inside and modernist American on the outside. He not only confirms but amplifies the truth of the “efficiency model” in psychology, that purports to see a “personality type” through those complex mechanisms relating appearance, behavior, emotion and thought. For despite his “with it” fashion statement, his ease with the idiom of research and his soon-to be-acquired doctorate, Ibrahim still comes across as a man with a pedestrian mind, a man so thoroughly nondescript and colorless you would overlook him on a desert island.
Is this the generation that will determine the destiny of Arab society in the first half of the 21st century?
Human communities are living organisms imbued with a life force that enables them to absorb, grow and transform. But living organisms that are denied proper sustenance decay and die. A social system shows that germ of dissolution when actions of the mind within it cease to be spontaneous and inquisitive; when language grows ambiguous and discourse ponderous; when imported ideas (from innovative education to technology, architecture to music, fashion to cuisine, automation to electronics) are not absorbed, truly absorbed, into the bloodstream of the culture, but are merely swallowed and remain an alien intrusion; when politics is pomp and mystification; and when socialization drills into young Arabs not free form but rigid formality, not style but rhetoric.
We wonder if the springs of life in modern Arab society have run dry, we wonder if these young Arabs will ever find the clearing, there to create for themselves and for their yet to-be-born children a social and political reality where the word is matched to the fact, and the fact to the dignity of man.
I wrote back to Ibrahim to tell him that his opus was bunk, and in the name of reason, to get a grip. And, yes, I also berated him for not picking up the tab at the salad bar. If he and his cohorts want to degrade our reverence for the life of the mind, that’s bad enough, but I’ll be damned if I let him tamper with our sacrosanct tradition of hospitality. Not on my watch, fellow.
Affirmative Action: your tax dollars at work.
Thought this article kind of tied in to this one of yours...
and I found this quote about mental illness:
Symptoms of chronic/serious mental illness:
Acute, "positive" symptoms (at least one of these usually present, at least during an exacerbation of illness):
Distorted perceptions; loss of contact with reality;
Delusions.
Hallucinations.
Disordered, disorganized and confused thinking.
Unstable and inappropriate emotions.
Bizarre behavior; impaired judgment.
Sounds like Islam promotes an epidemic of mental illness with its 'victim status' teachings.
It certainly does. Maybe it's all the sun.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.