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Monday, 7 April, 2003
 
At the corner of Jihad and MacWorld

I always look to see whats playing at the bijou, by which I mean the web site All Consuming. This is a site which identifies links to online book retailers found in syndicating weblogs and displays them on its page as a glimpse into the reading habits of the blogsphere. Which I hear is a world superpower now. A lot of it is fairly predictible: wide eyed books on the new worlds technology is creating out of a mob of small bits however loosely joined (and smarter for it). Or the latest book by William Gibson or Neil Stephenson. Every so often the mood changes and this is one of those times. George Orwells 1984 popped in to the list yesterday, Today Jihad vs. MacWorld appeared. I set down my copy of Nicholas Negrepontes' Soft Architecture Machine and took a closer look, sure enough. That book came out in 1995 I thought, what's this about?

Benjamin Barber, the author, teaches in my department at Maryland. I say my department technically this is true, I have seven credits to go on a degree in Government and Politics, its largely a hobby, mainly I work at the University of Maryland for a living. I am a clerk; a clerk of a type they call a copy cataloger. It seems to involve books, MARC bibliographic records, and barcodes. I'd love to say it is skilled and exacting work but I'm reasonably certain I could train a goose to do it. Barber came over and gave a lecture at the library a little over a year ago. Part of a lecture/discussion series the flacks from the upper stories of McKeldin had organised. (I hold to the general, though not fixed, belief that the higher you go in any building the less real work gets done.) The discussion was multiculturism.

People were a little taken aback when Barber came in and stated that multiculturalism was not an all purpose un-alloyed good, but rather one that was arrayed in tension and considerable opposition with other goods that people will try to hold and pledge allegiance to simultaneously - the longing for the relationships and sense of belonging of a "thick" society in the midst of the ordered, legal and contractual relations of western "thin" society. He spent some time discussing how this works at the workplace level and while the gathered were still trying to decide how they felt about that - segued into a broader discussion of cultural approaches to modernism along the lines of his book. The Arabic world has a complex relationship with modernism and a tendency, somewhat justified, in seeing modernism as a synonym for westernism. The west provides the primary example of modernism, but it is not in essence solely a western phenomenon. Modernism is a transformation of culture under the aegeis of technological change. In the mass cultures that exist today this process lies somewhere between adaptive and forced; under the sword as much as the shield. That the west has "done" modernism well and the islamic world not well may not be the story that is actually being told. There was a period about the time Dr. Barber gave this talk (afterwards he was off on book tour) when it briefly seemed a real dialogue was shaping up to understand what had happened on 11 September 2001. How the Islamic world had produced such extremism in its culture. A small and clearly political reaction forming, which none-the-less in its facist retrenchment spoke with what was/is taken as moral authority. Much was written, and there was a lot of food for thought on the table. Then it all seemed to die out - there were those that that seemed to feel that the entire project to understand - which is the natural inclination of most writers, teachers, and researchers - was just not getting us there fast enough or was even just completely wrongheaded from the start. So the more direct [B]omb 'em back to the stone age approach was adopted in its stead. I recently heard the Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al coterie described as intellectuals for the extent and daring of their grand experiment in social engineering - building a truly Great Society in the Arab world. Maybe, I say. But this war policy will not be what proves that. I spent four years in the Navy two of them working in the Pentagon in the Naval Operations Center. I know a kill them all - let God sort them out strategy when I see it; however nuanced martial techne can make it. I heard it often enough during those four years and I know it doesn't take much thought to get there, and you don't get any real answers out of it. It's just not that type of thing. It's as likely as not that all anyone gets out of this is another fragile authoritarian regime albeit one that will keep Dick Cheney's picture on its walls rather than Saddam Hussien's. Frankly in some ways I think we were closer a year ago and much further away now.
11:53:49 PM    comment [];




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