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Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Devils
November 23, 2003
We humans are a difficult bunch to please. Deny us what we want, and we immediately fly off the handle. Worse, we blame our troubles on everything around us. Everything but ourselves, that is.
People have been pretty creative about their blame-shifting. Once it was “the gods,” “the stars,” or “fate.” Truth be told, those are still popular villains today, though the terminology has morphed a bit ("the patriarchal hierarchies of post-capitalist society"). But much odium is now directed at some group: racial, ethnic, religious, lifestyle, whatever.
What’s that? You thought this was the Age of Inclusion, where tolerance is the rule and individuals are allowed their various identifications and creeds without rancor? Sorry. Depending on where you’re situated in space and circumstance, there are “in” groups and “out” groups, and no gray zones between them. Adhere to the wrong kind, and you’ll find yourself spending a lot of your time explaining why you’re not responsible for other people’s poverty, fatherlessness, drug addiction, AIDS, or sexual hangups.
The most interesting cases of demonization are those of religious groups. One might say this is a traditional inter-faith pastime. It has a long pedigree and includes virtually every religious group one might name. Tom Lehrer pinned it nicely in his 1964 hit “National Brotherhood Week”:
All the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants.
All the Hindus hate all the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
When a faith imbeds the hatred of other faiths as a doctrinal component—serious hatred, the kind that seeks expression in action—things can get very messy, as we’ve seen in world Islam’s recent actings-out in the Middle East and elsewhere. But there are enough pundits discussing particulars. Your Curmudgeon is here to talk about the power of belief.
Belief is intimately linked with desire. That which is objectively, irrefutably demonstrable is indifferent to our desires, nor can our desires set aside the requirement that we accept it. Those convictions we cannot demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt—what we believe without conclusive proof, which is the definition of faith—are what we want to be true.
Among historians, the attempt to blame a malign figure or group for the ills of a nation or the world is called a devil theory. The purest such, a monocausal devil theory, will imply that all evil, all unhappiness, and all deprivation can be traced to its chosen devils. The best-known modern promoter of a devil theory, Adolf Hitler, explicitly blamed all of Weimar Germany’s many problems on the Jews. Whether Hitler himself believed this is irrelevant, for he sold it magnificently well.
Hitler was able to sell his devil theory because Germans were ready for one. Indeed, they demanded one. They were desperate to believe that their humiliation in World War I and the chaos flooding over the Weimar Republic could be traced to a delimitable source of malevolence. For once the source had been identified and isolated, it could be expunged. The great irony there, of course, was that the accelerating disorder in the Weimar Republic, from which the Germans turned to the Nazis to save them, was mostly the work of the Nazis themselves, unwittingly aided by Germany’s Communists and anarcho-syndicalists.
Devil theories are becoming more important every day. Apparently, the failed cultures and ideologies of the world—Islam; Marxian socialism; social-welfare fascism—need to see their failure as someone else’s fault, just as inter-war Germans did. There’s no hiding their failures. No exertion of wishful thinking could convince Middle Eastern Muslims that they’ve seized the brass ring of human progress. Socialists cannot abide the suggestion that there was some error in their theories about state control of the means of production; the theory was too appealing, too elaborate, too perfect. American social-welfare fascists—a.k.a. left-liberals—cannot be dissuaded that, once the government has made everything either compulsory or forbidden and bludgeoned everyone into accepting their definition of “tolerance,” there’ll be full employment, wide-screen HDTV, and copious disease-free orgasms for everyone.
So all these groups are looking for someone to blame.
The socialists, especially in Europe, have decided to blame America. America makes an appealing devil: distant, powerful, and radically at odds with socialist doctrines. If they can persuade themselves that American cultural, economic and military “imperialism” is the cause of their failures—and they really want to—they can evade the blame for the horrors socialism has inflicted on its victims.
American left-liberals want equally desperately to believe in the corrupting power of the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Considering the mountains of ridicule they’ve heaped upon right-wing conspiratorialists, you’d think they’d be alive to the dangers of such a position, but never mind. Thoroughgoing government regulation of everything from interracial and inter-gender relations to the smallest details of the national marketplace simply had to succeed. Evil forces must have been at work.
Of Islam, there’s not much new to say. The world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are the most squalid, backward, unfree peoples in the world. How could this be? They’ve been perfectly faithful to the dictates of the Prophet. They were promised dominion in this world and Paradise in the next. What went wrong? Allah’s enemies must have plotted against them! The Jews! The Christians! Wipe them out, institute universal shari’a, and surely all will thereafter be well!
Seldom has so much human folly been available for inspection all at once.
Your Curmudgeon is, despite his moniker, by nature an optimist about the future. However, he understands “emotional potential wells,” including the desire for a devil to blame for one’s thwarted aspirations. Like all instances of wishful thinking, these obstruct the clarity of perception and thought required for human advance. Yet they’re all around us; the evidence is too abundant, and too stark.
With half of humanity needing to believe that its failures are someone else’s fault, the prospects for near-term remediation of the ills that beset us are bleak. Even the long-term outlook is clouded. At each report of a fresh liberal calumny against conservatives or Republicans, a new leftist demonstration against America, or a new Islam-powered atrocity against one of their devil-groups, it grows harder to see the shape of a rational future, one that truly instantiates the tolerance and diversity our multiculturalists have promised for so long.
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