Can't We Talk About This?

John Keane, The Death of Theo Van Gogh (2007)

www.johnkeaneart.com

In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh was brutally slaughtered on an Amsterdam street for his part in the making of a short film entitled Submission; a film which, primarily, examined the relationship that exists between Muslims and their God and asks how necessary reform of Islam might be possible when Allah demands absolute obedience to his laws, with no room for doubt or critical dissent amongst his worshipers.   

Having shot his victim multiple times, Van Gogh's devout assailant then cut his throat and attempted to decapitate him in front of horrified witnesses, before finally plunging the knife deep into the dead man's chest. Apparently, among the last words spoken by Van Gogh to his killer were: Can't we talk about this?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Van Gogh's friend and collaborator on Submission - writes: 

"It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent. Theo must have thought there was some kind of misunderstanding that could be worked out. He couldn't see that his killer was caught in a wholly different worldview. Nothing Theo could have said to him would have made any difference."

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, (Pocket Books, 2008), p. 321   

I recount this deeply depressing incident by way of a response to a presentation recently given by John Holroyd on the topic of Islam.

Holroyd, a Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens hating crypto-theologian, teaches philosophy and religious studies at a London college and is a man for whom these subjects are perfectly compatible, if not, indeed, one and the same thing. His paper, in essence, called for still greater dialogue between the West and the militant forces of Islamic extremism, thereby strangely echoing Van Gogh's naivety in the face of those who hate us, hate all that we love and hold dear, and mean to do us mortal harm.

Now, whilst I concede that it might be good to talk - and that loving one's enemies might be the Christian thing to do - sometimes, unfortunately, there's really nothing further to discuss and inasmuch as this loving of enemies can lead to a reluctance to actively combat the forces of murderous and reactionary violence, then Jesus's teaching might be said to result in immorality and risk the triumph of evil.   

Thus, rather than listen to Jesus, I'd sooner heed Michel Foucault who argued that fascism - whether it be political or religious in nature and whether found in the hearts and minds of others or, indeed, in our own acts and pleasures - must be vigorously resisted as an essential aspect of living an ethical life.

  

La tyrannie de la pénitence

Princeton University Press (2010)

Described by Douglas Murray as one of the landmark books of our time, Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt develops a line of argument that he first advanced two decades earlier in The Tears of the White Man. Namely, that the Western world has spent the last sixty years so consumed by remorse for its own history that it is now on the verge of apologizing itself out of existence.    

Our self-hatred and self-contempt is matched only by our sentimental insistence on the innocence and innate moral goodness of those peoples upon whom we once imposed our imperial values and the evils of slavery, racism, and genocide; evils which, mistakenly, the West now believes it invented and have a monopoly on.

Nietzsche describes this pathology of guilt, shame, and self-division as bad conscience and whilst Bruckner doesn't refer directly to the second essay of the Genealogy, he acknowledges that Nietzsche understood better than most how the internalization of cruelty, practiced so remorselessly within Judeo-Christian culture, was continuing within secular liberal society; intensifying the pain and creating a duty of repentance.       

Bruckner seeks to understand this phenomenon and how it unfolds in the world today. And, importantly, he attempts to counter it by offering us some theoretical tools of opposition. Of course, to his enemies - and he has many - this attempt at a revaluation of values within the West is seen as reactionary and ethnocentric. He is accused in France of neo-conservatism and Islamophobia due to his opposition to multiculturalism, his staunch defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and his admiration for the United States. 

But accusations such as this are as tiresome and as trite as they are predictable. Bruckner may not get everything right, but he deserves to be read and taken seriously. The Tyranny of Guilt is a brave, lucid, and provocative text that challenges readers not only to think - but to care and be concerned about the world in which they live. 

 
Note: Pascal Bruckner studied under Roland Barthes and belongs to that generation of French intellectuals who emerged during the 1970s known as les nouveaux philosophes. He is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Lunes de fiel (1981), which was made into a little remembered film, Bitter Moon (1992), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Designer Tribalism and the Racism of Low Expectations

Romantic primitivism in all forms is absurd and deserves to be ridiculed. But when it emerges out of multiculturalism as a designer tribalism that incorporates superstition, violence, corruption, and misogyny - when it effectively keeps people locked into poverty and failure by perpetuating the soft racism of low expectations - then it demands serious critical examination.

White liberals with their touchy-feely morality and political correctness are always overly keen to show how sensitive they are to racial and religious difference. They believe it's crucial that immigrants arriving in Europe from Asia and Africa are allowed to keep their own beliefs, traditions, and practices in order to maintain their identities and self-esteem. It follows from this that they should therefore be allowed to have their own schools, places of worship, community centres, shops, newspapers, radio stations, and, perhaps, even their own legal systems.    

Ayaan Hirsi Ali ruthlessly tears this well-intentioned but profoundly misguided and ultimately disastrous way of thinking to shreds. She writes: "The idea that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion promotes the perception of them as victim groups requiring ... an industry of special facilities and assistance" and results in the creation of ghettos.  

In other words, the ideal of cultural diversity is one that ends in social failure. Rather than producing "a rich mosaic of colourful and proud peoples interacting peacefully ... it translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse."

Immigrants might preserve their arts and crafts, be able to eat the foods they like and wear traditional styles of dress, but this comes at a tremendous cost. For they are effectively complicit in a system which preserves them in the same manner it preserves endangered wild life; they are patronised and encouraged to remain loyal to a way of life which is untenable, inappropriate, and often in direct conflict with the society around them.

If this means their children do badly at school, can't find employment, and drift into crime, well, that's just too bad. Members of the liberal establishment overlook this just as they turn a blind-eye to the those unfortunate cultural practices such as honour killing and female genital mutilation. Their determined celebration of exotic otherness allows them to demonstrate just how tolerant and understanding they can be - and that's what they care about; atoning for the sins of their imperialist forefathers and exorcising their own guilt.

One is grateful to Hirsi Ali for speaking up and speaking out on this topic with her customary intelligence and integrity. 


Note: lines quoted from Ayaan Hirsi Ali can be found in Nomad, (Simon and Schuster UK Ltd., 2011), pp. 212 and 213.  

On the Joy of Flirting and the Experience of Beauty

 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

 

Flirting is one of the great joys of life, which, regardless of intent, is always an innocent form of sexual play at the level of language and gesture; by this, I mean it lacks the consciously cruel and manipulative aspects of teasing.  

People who do not know how to flirt are like those who do not know how to laugh; they lack that insouciance which is so lovely in wild animals and flowering plants and in men and women who intuitively understand the mystery of beauty.

 

For beauty, ultimately, is the key thing: when we flirt, we communicate the happiness that arises out of an experience of beauty. We find others sexy and appealing when we find them beautiful. But, as Lawrence rightly argues, living beauty is not a fixed pattern or a conventional look which comes ready-made or photoshopped. This is why even the most skilled cosmetic surgeons fail to produce a truly beautiful face, despite an almost perfect arrangement of features. And this is why there's nothing flirtatious about a sex doll.

Because beauty is something felt and something which can be shared with others, even the plainest person can be beautiful and flirt successfully. On the other hand, even the most attractive person in the room can seem ugly and undesirable when they lack the warm glow of beauty and don't know how to communicate joy. Only when the sex-glow is missing, writes Lawrence, do people move in ugly coldness like "one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world ... and whom everybody wants to avoid".

Today, it takes a rare woman to genuinely rouse a sense of loveliness; and a rare man to have the courage to respond to her loveliness and to flirt in a spirit that is neither lewd nor crude, but generous and playfully tender, with perhaps just a touch of irony. Luckily, however, there is an example of such to be found on YouTube and involves a very touching and amusing public encounter between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christopher Hitchens; he full of old school charm and she smiling and giggling in an almost coquettish manner.

Perhaps, as well as everything else, flirting is an important sign of freedom ...

Notes: 

Readers interested in viewing the encounter between Hitch and the very beautiful Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, on Feb 13 2007, should click here.

The line quoted from D. H. Lawrence can be found in the article 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.