Bombs Away

    "Beautiful people have more daughters."  Hey, Michael and Lorri, how does THAT make you feel?  Ten days ago I reconnected with an internet site called Arts & Letters Daily, aldaily.com .  Once part of my daily routine on the computer, it somehow in a crash or a move or something, fell off my own screen.  So I'm back with this site, which provides three columns of article teasers on all sorts of topics.  The quote above comes from Psychology Today.  In one wicked article called "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature," the authors maintain also that suicide bombing, while being 99% or more done by people who purport to follow Islam, is about polygamy.  Their theory goes that in a culture where wealthy men can have multiple wives, and where extramarital sex is forbidden, young men are faced with the strong possibility of never marrying and never experiencing sex.  Thomas P.M. Barnett picked this up on his weblog and got hammered for repeating such a thing.  How DOES that explain younger children and women?  It doesn't, but it may well explain why some young men see this as an option.  Consider what the successful suicide bomber leaves behind:  a family with a hero, a video to be played for recruitment, and in the Saddam days, $25,000 payment to the family.   What he doesn't leave behind:  a dependent wife and children.  What he gains:  seventy virgins in an afterlife.
    As Tom Barnett might say, a cause and a reward are the magic lures for young men with few options.  Opening up options for young men and women is a key to global connectivity and thriving for everyone.  A job, a spouse, a family - are they too much to ask?  Connectivity makes for peace.  Cultural systems that throw up insurmountable obstacles to job, spouse, family - could they be those principalities and powers Paul talked about??
    More can be written about the most prominent way in which youth are disenfranchised - POVERTY.  For now let me lift up a social/cultural system using religion once again to help the few benefit while others salivate.  Mimetically it is less and less possible for the disenfranchised to desire and then to settle for what the powerful say they must desire.  Hope for all is in there somewhere.
    On another front, there is a reason North Korean leaders are fierce in their isolation.  MIMESIS?!

Mary McKinney
    on the way to visit with the Archdeacon
        who is now home from hospital and rehab!

Comments

[teresa]

Mary, I like your point about Korean isolation as a reaction against the power of mimesis. It’s the same thing abusers do with their victims – isolate them, allow them no models of something different. You’ve pointed out one of the good aspects of mimesis!

You call that Psychology Today article “wicked” and I totally agree, but I also want to question the rationale supplied by these dubious authors (one of whom died before publication) for every point they make, not least about suicide bombers. The first thought that comes to mind is the Japanese kamikaze in WWII, who volunteered for nationalistic honor, religious fervor, family aid, or were simply coerced. In just over a year, they carried out 2800 attacks.

A loss of hope for appropriate sexual consummation doesn’t have to drive a man to an existential consummation. (More likely these days it drives him to the internet and naive 13-year olds.) Besides, the bombers have taken efforts lately to show the married men and grandmothers they have been recruiting. The authors’ linking of this frightening terrorist tactic to religion, gender, and sex seems suspiciously supportive of our western patriarchal agenda. Not to mention the utter failure of evolutionary theorists to simplify human behavior to animal models, despite forty years of trying. Evolutionary psychology is just our modern-day phrenology.

At the risk of an ad hominem argument, I’ll point out the living author of the PT article is controversial, and not just for his assertion that Africans are poorer and in worse health because they’re not as smart as us ( http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1939891,00.html ).

[Mary]

Thank you, teresa, for your response and the link to an article on those consciously or unconsciously linking themselves to eugenics. Diane Sawyer's visit to Camden, NJ, along with Lesley Wicks' presentations on homelessness note a poverty of experience in the poor 9THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN). Intelligence tests are about our experiences, and when a four year old's primary experience is survival and misery. how would we expect her/him to score?

[teresa]

Yes, this leaves me wondering a chicken-and-egg argument, too: poor because they're not smart or not smart because they're poor. Even more, I thought IQ tests were discredited decades ago as meaningful measures of anything but enculturation. I was surprised to see the authors use IQ to contrast "intelligence" (whatever that is) -- and across cultures no less!

As they state: "The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct."

But not questioning one's own foundational myths (this time, academic), leaves one open to scapegoating, which is all the PT article seems to be doing to women (mostly) in the authoritative guise of "science." They attempt to make cultural violence sound like wisdom, not the disenfranchisement it is. Despite the science-speak, they're saying God is on their side, fighting for the "natural" order of old, wealthy men using nubile women as sex receptacles. I mean, if we could just hand out enough of these receptacles, we'd have no more suicide bombers.