I recently remarked in a perfunctory blog post that, “Sometimes epiphanies are only confusions. Time is required to decide which is occurring.”  The idea was a gloss of a then-present discombobulation, or a personal aside, but now I am beginning to think that it describes what is currently happening in the world.  The title of the post in which the comment appeared, Searching Phatic Communion, seems ironically prescient, since the term utilized for my blog’s title refers to communication which has a social purpose rather than an informative purpose —

“Spoken language used for social reasons rather than to communicate ideas or facts, its main purpose being to maintain a rapport between people. It includes many conventional greetings such as hello, and statements or observations about the weather such as Isn’t it a nice day?” [Allwords.com]

— and trying to isolate “what is currently happening in the world” via published blog entries, news reports, and the analysis in professional journals requires going beyond the presentation of ideas and facts to the currents floating through the information:  most communications, perhaps all, have a social motivation behind them, since we seek to connect by utilizing language. At the very least, these communications also have a social component; even a bare presentation of facts is meant to promote a common understanding and thus, a common channel for deploying powers.  There are those who insist on the actual observation of material objects for an understanding of the world — we should not rate too highly second-hand information — but while I agree that such observation is important, I’m also of the opinion that my own experiences and sensory perceptions are quite limited.

What becomes increasingly difficult in the pursuit of “what is currently happening in the world” is the way in which seemingly disparate considerations begin to flow together.  This may lead to magical thinking or various other cognitive distortions; but at the same time, I find that answering such a broad question requires an understanding of the confluence of disparate considerations.  The pursuit reminds me of pointillism: various observations may appear to be disparate when viewed up close with too-narrow a focus, but from a distance they form a total picture.  In actuality, the points remain forever apart. [They may appear to be perpetually disparate, especially when considering the observations of warring polemicists or warring ideologues.]

The two words in the title of this post are pointillist when considered together.  Confusion comes from the Latin for “mixed together,” and epiphany comes from the Greek for “to show forth.”  I suppose that we are confused when we continue to see the parts as parts — everything seems mixed-up — and that we have epiphanies when we begin to distinguish forms and lose sight of the individual parts.  In my own life, epiphanies have often been frustrating, simply because I came to realize that my leaps of insight were extraordinarily delayed: the truth had been flapping at my face for a long time before I “saw” it.  Unfortunately and ironically, the periods in my life which were least confusing were periods in which I saw whole forms and few warring points: i.e., being so focused on a point, I thought I was seeing the whole picture.  Thankfully, however, some large part of my being has always grown extremely bored in those least-confusing periods; I craved epiphany.

A blogfriend once inspired me to think of “end-time thought” as a modern desire for Ragnarok.  In that linked post, I quoted Dryden:

All, all of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new. 

I.e., perhaps we humans have an innate desire for the destruction of paradigms — or, call it a desire for learning, the creation of new paradigms — which makes us perpetually dissatisfied with our present condition(s), and we secretly hope for a destruction of the world which has helped to shape our current paradigm:

Is it not a singular evidence of our imperfection that we cannot establish our contentment in any one thing, and that even in desire and imagination it is beyond our power to choose what we need?  A good proof of this is the great dispute that has always gone on between the philosophers over the sovereign good of man, and that still goes on and will go on eternally, without solution and without agreement:

        Lacking the thing we want, it seems more grave
Than anything; that got, there's something else we crave,
Consumed with equal thirst.

                                          LUCRETIUS

Everything, no matter what it is, that falls within our knowledge and enjoyment, we find unsatisfactory; and we go gaping after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as things present do not satiate us.

[Montaigne, Of a saying of Caesar’s]

A recent blog post at The Useless Tree looks at China, Marx, and the Tao Te Ching for a similar conclusion:

When discussing reasons for discontent, the law of diminishing utility is relevant. Following this logic, insatiable desires are to blame.

It makes sense: When you have everything you need for a decent life, and more of the things you want, you may want more.

Forget about “diminishing utility,” Marx tells us that capitalism encourages and requires a never-ending destruction of old “needs” and the creation of ever more new “needs.”  The logic of consumption demands that we always need and buy more.

But if our perpetual dissatisfaction is innate or a result of our biology (i.e., has evolved), then capitalism might be a natural result, a correspondence of biology with ideology.

I have just displayed “the way in which seemingly disparate considerations begin to flow together” in my combination of these things.  I have managed to conflate Ragnarok (in which the old gods die) and capitalism and evolution.  In truth, we might wonder at the unspoken assumptions behind each of these ideas — or, are they unspoken awarenesses? — and question the movement from one to another, especially if we are perpetually unsatisfied as Montaigne suggested.  But there is more.  I was inspired to write this blog post by an incredible essay on the Armed Forces Journal, in which the stunning point is made, 

Despite all the aberrations that can be cited, the development and tenacity of organized religion is evolution at its purest and fiercest.

The essay was written by Ralph Peters and is titled Survival Strategy: Middle Eastern Islam, Darwin and terrorism.  In essence, Ralph Peters begins by suggesting that religion is an evolutionary force which helps to ensure the survival of human collectives:

Once a human collective expands beyond the family, clan and tribe, decisive unity demands a higher organizing principle sufficiently powerful to entice the individual to sacrifice himself for the common good of a group whose identity is no longer defined by blood ties. A man or woman will die for the child of his or her flesh, but how can the broader collective inspire one stranger to volunteer his life to guarantee the survival of a stranger whose only tie is one of abstract identity?

But he goes on to suggest that secular security analysts need to realize the existence of this evolutionary force or their analyses will continue to exist within a vacuum: their analyses will be vacuous, otherwise:

Merely recognizing the problem isn’t enough. Overwhelmingly, analysts active in the intelligence community or in Washington think tanks (to say nothing of those bizarre mental prisons, university campuses) face a terrible challenge in adjusting to the intellectual demands posed by Islamist terrorism. Approaching the problem with a maximum of integrity would mean discarding virtually every theory they have been taught. Understanding the rhapsodic violence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or even the seductive rhetoric of Osama bin Laden requires us to jettison the crippling heritage of the Enlightenment and much of the rationalist tradition.

I.e., to summarize savagely, rational thought which cannot see the evolutionary — and very real — role of religion is irrational; or, to put it in terms I’ve used when debating Objectivists, we must view subjectivities objectively, because subjectivity exists.  In fact, there is a blurring of subjectivity with objectivity in the essay, since Ralph Peters has linked our normal concept of evolution with the less-understood evolution of memes.  Even “rationalism” is a religion, like secularism or atheism or Marxism or any other limited and limiting philosophy; but Peters, though making such a claim, does not consider how these other ideologies may also serve to make secure a human collective.

This conflation of religion with evolution may lead to confusion for ME analysts who perpetually separate religious thought from rational thought: the points are forever viewed separately by them, as diametrically opposed and exclusive approaches.  Peters writes that Western analysts do not like considering the “devils” of ME Islamic thought: “The Western intellect simply cannot bear to see them.”  He might have called them dervishes. Insofar as Western rationalist thinking is linear, non-linear thought will seem like a spinning devil, and will make the alignment of motivation with activity quite difficult to imagine.  Unfortunately, Peters has failed to include in his analysis the very real and mutually shared “shrinking world” dynamic: if religion has evolved as a survival mechanism, it must include a consideration of the material world which also bears on survivability or it will become a failed survival mechanism —

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.  [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

While the dynamic described by Peters might hold for the short term, in the long term religions [and -isms] must continue to evolve.  Peters seems to think that evolution has already led to the ultimate forms of religious thought — except, in the conclusion to his essay, he suggests a further evolution without giving the final result of the conflict of ideologies:

The latter issue [the biological purpose of religion] demands that we set aside our personal beliefs — a very tall order — and attempt to grasp three things: why human beings appear to be hard-wired for faith; the circumstances under which faiths inevitably turn violent; and the functions of religion in a Darwinian system of human ecology.

The answers we are likely to get will satisfy neither secular commissars nor their religious counterparts, neither scientists schooled to the last century’s reductionist thinking nor those who insist on teaching our children that the bogeyman made the dinosaurs.  We are at the dawn of a new and deadly age in which entire civilizations are threatened by the dominance of others.

Can any description of the current state of affairs be better?  Early in the essay, Peters mentions the domestic conflict between evolutionists and supporters of “intelligent design.”  We might look at any other conflict of seemingly opposing and exclusive ideologies which is ramping up domestically or globally.  Peters prophesies a final battle in which one civilization may utterly destroy another — or, one ideology may come to dominate, through destruction of its opponent — and this is a clear prediction of Ragnarok, in which some gods [idols]  must die.   I recently explored the subject of idolatry, with a general focus on both Christian and Muslim idolatries in the West and East but in which I also added toward the end a consideration similar to Peters’:

The extremist critics of Islam — the exceptionalists in America and Europe — are right to say that the current controversy is an important turning point in the global debate, but they are wrong to hold a myopic p.o.v. about the controversy.  I have long thought that the overt hostility exhibited by devout Muslims is merely the open play of emotions and superstitions which are held by many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in America.

Much has been made of the “clash of civilizations,” and believers on both sides (assuming for a moment that there are only two sides) urge a commencement of the Final Battle.  I, on the other hand, remarked in that post that gods which need defending by humans — whether Christian gods or Muslim prophets — must be petty gods indeed, or untenable idolatries.  I suspect that our dissatisfaction with present knowledge may often force us to put that knowledge to the test; it is as if the extremists suspect the pettiness of their ideologies and wish to prove their suspicions wrong. “[F]aiths are never more ferocious than when they’re cornered….Threatened faiths lash out,” as Peters wrote in his essay.  If his other assertion is correct, that biology and religion are intertwined as a result of evolutionary survival processes, then individual humans may quite easily see the destruction of their faith as a destruction of themselves.  If extremists have doubts about the efficacy of their gods, or idols, they may have doubts about their future prospects for survival.  Some commentators believe there is no imminent clash of civilizations but only a clash within civilizations; this, too, may lead to calls for Ragnarok —

I only want to point out the need for a sense of security and the corresponding need to define power so that we can see far enough into the future and judge our chances for security.  If I may trackback — er, backtrack — a bit to the discussion concerning Folk, Kin, and Trade:  members of our tribe are far more dependable, because we have some ability to judge their future activity; we share modus operandi. (This includes ways of making and doing as well as motivations, histories, knowledge, ideologies, superstitions, you name it.)  When these groupings become ambiguous, we suffer more trepidation. [Phatic Communion, White Power]

But we are seeing the conflicts arise everywhere, not only between the West and Islam, but within nations in nearly every corner of the globe.  Intranational gaps in fact are leading to a confusion between the parts that constitute each, “the West” and “Islam.”  The channels of power are changing, no longer formed by the rock bed of the family structure or even, quite often, the banks of national structure, as globalism increases interdependency and codependency and leads to an increase in immigration and emigration and communications which do not follow the traditional structures; the traditional channels for power are weakening.  If a largely subconscious awareness of shifting power lines creates feelings of insecurity and personal inadequacy, the connection between religion (and -isms) and biology may work in an opposite direction than previously described: we may feel that our religion, already evolved to operate within traditional power relationships, is being weakened.  If these other structures are threatened, our religion which is built upon them — or which has evolved with them — may appear threatened, and, thus, we may feel that we are personally threatened.

A narrow vision can only hold the particular in view for so long before other particulars intrude on our sight.  We are faced with the decision: do we destroy conflicting points, create an insularity which may become All through destruction of every other point, or do we include these other points in our theory?  If we are not up to either task, we are doomed to perpetual confusion, perpetual conflict, and perpetual fear.

———

[HT to Alan Sullivan  for the link to Ralph Peters’ essay.  HT to Mark Safranski of ZenPundit for the link on “a clash within civilizations”.]