Islamofascist vs Kosher fascist

Fascism was best defined by a mid-20th Century German philospher (his name is in one of my posts last year) as "resistance to transcendence." That is the one principle held in common by the original fascisti of Italy, the National Socialists of the Third Reich, and the current extremist faction of the larger community of Islamists. Fascists are apprehensive about what they perceive as the trend of individual communities such as nations being transcended by their assimilation into larger communities such as what at the time was merely an economically interdependent Western Europe, but now includes the EU and the UN, and can be predicted as a fully integrated Global Civilization.

I'm not familiar with the politics of Italy between the World Wars, but the Germans felt that their dismal fate during the Great Depression was the result of machinations by a larger cabal of foreign communities, banks and governments. And in particular the Jews, who in spite of or perhaps as a defense against centuries of discrimination can arguably be held up as the Poster Children for Transcendence.

Today's Islamic fundamentalists have the same outlook. From their perspective, everywhere they turn they see the influence of Global Civilization pushing back against the qualities that define their own society and make them who they are.

Yes of course, in the even more extreme fringe of fundamentalism we see one of those qualities being the duty to convert the entire human race to Islam, by deadly force if necessary. So that's not something about which we can say, "Well let's just leave these poor folks to themselves with their quaint beliefs, decorate our homes with their charming folk crafts, and go on building our nifty Global Civilization around their borders as we do with the Eskimos and the people in New Guinea."

But those are the high-profile Muslims who get our attention and seem to define the movement. The less militant people are the ones who want to practice their own beliefs inside their own countries and don't spend a lot of time worrying about what foreigners do inside their own countries. Their concerns have been elevated by conditions and events such as coexistence with Israel, the manipulations of the Soviets and Americans during the Cold War, and the recent military activities, which make them feel like the West is not leaving them in peace to live the way they want to.

(Whether those feelings or the events that trigger them are legitimate is a discussion for another forum so let's resist the temptation to get into it here, ok?)

The point is, their perception of the pressure of transcendence is real. Their kids want to date and dance, their women want jobs and drivers' licenses, their minorities want respect, and their poor want a minimal standard of living. And they all feel that these things are within their grasp because Global Civilization sends unblockable images of them into their homes.

Some of the connotations of the word "fascism" don't apply here. As it's been practiced in Europe and, arguably and recently, in the USA, fascism includes wholesale submission to the authority of the state. Islam by its nature is a tribal religion that discourages even the first baby step of transcendence, from tribes into nations. (Read up on the tribulations involved in the creation of Saudi Arabia, the first true Muslim nation, for more on this issue.) Islam means "submission," to the will of God and God alone, not political leaders.

Nonetheless the crisis that excuses that surrender of rights in the minds of fascists is the threat of transcendence. Americans feel the pressure of the Global Civilization too, as other countries begin to dominate industries we thought were our own, foreigners live among us and practice their own customs, and we can no longer command the obsequience of Europe by rescuing them from the Germans. Many Americans want to close our minds and our borders and hang onto our 20th-Century American dream of baseball, pizza, 4000-pound cars, and assembly-line jobs paying middle-class wages. That's fascism.

If we can see a whole lot of Muslims feeling the same way about analogous conditions--although perhaps an 8th-Century Islamic Dream--we can understand the term "Islamofascism."

It's not about terrorism, it's about resistance to transcendence.

 

Transcendence by definition implies universality. Applied to mankind it means the transcending of our many cultures into an ever smaller number of ever larger ones, mixing both the motifs and the people.

This is a perfect illustration of civilization as an organism unto itself, which transcends the individual people and the individual cultures that create and sustain it. Civilization has proven to be an incredibly robust creation that has survived countless threats and endured long periods without being nurtured.

Of the six independent "civilizations" whose discrete creation we know of, three (Egypt, Aztec and Inca) were actually destroyed by one of the others (Mesopotamian, at least its Arab and Greco-Roman offshoots). These determined assaults continued, as Mongol barbarians tried to take down the former and Germanic barbarians made an earlier attempt to "Vandal-ize" the latter, and they all ended up not just assimilated but becoming important contributors: The Mongols became the Ottomans and took over the Arab empire; and the Germans need no introduction, except to point out their own ill-conceived attempt to conquer Greco-Roman civilization which resulted in the destruction of much of it, which was quickly rebuilt stronger than ever.

A whimsical economic system starved much of civilization for the surplus wealth that feeds its growth for decades, and the discovery of nuclear energy held it hostage for almost as long, yet still it runs along with barely a hiccup.

It's obvious that civilization transcends us. The greatest phenomenon of our period of residence on this planet is the creation of something that we have not just proven unable to destroy, but that we can't even slow down.

The answer to your question is that civilization itself supports transcendence. We seem to have built it that way so that's the way it works.

There's a ratchet effect at work here. Our unconscious efforts to promote transcendence are more effective than our conscious attempts to restrain it. Some Americans (and for the record it's just a loud minority of us) may think that they're holding off the assimilation of our melting-pot nation (what irony) into the Global Civilization, yet it's we who provided that civilization with some of its most incredibly powerful tools of transcendence, such as the internet, and before that rock and roll, which united the youth of many nations. The irony is just as rich in Islam: the largest Muslim country is Indonesia, where the influence of the Greco-Roman, Chinese and Indian civilizations is rampant.

 

The word "transcend" is used many ways in many disciplines, e.g. transcendental meditation. But it also has a perfectly ordinary meaning, "to exceed usual limits."

What I'm referring to is the reiterative achievement of higher levels of civilization, by unplanned, unconscious and often unrecognized means, especially the achievement of increasingly larger communities. I appreciated the use of the word "transcendence" for this, since it has a touch of the spiritual about it, in the uniquely reversed sense of man creating something greater than himself rather than being created by it.

But it's the phenomenon I'm talking about. The choice of word is not the issue.

 

That's fine. So pick a better word.

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