They Don't Think Like Us

[xoxoxoBruce]

From Maggie's Farm.

1) They don't think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO. Yes, yes, I know we are all human and share the same human nature (perhaps the most disastrous mistake of Marxism was the denial of this elementary fact). But within the scope of that shared human nature, there are a lot of different ways to be human. We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings and sometimes forget this. Combined with the fact that most Americans are linguistic idiots, we tend to assume that anyone who learns to speak English learns to think like us.

2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect - as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect. From their nomadic heritage they have a tradition of generosity and hospitality to guests that warms the heart. Arab shopkeepers have a talent for making you feel guilty that you didn't buy anything (once you get past a dislike of having them lay hands on you). Haggling is a social grace with them and when you ask the price, and agree to the first one quoted, they will often come down on the price just out of pity for your social ineptness. This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

These are the first two of twelve points he makes. Here is the last.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it. Can the subjugation of women coexist with Western Civilization with Western media ubiquitous throughout the world? Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by Islamic law? Can a modern economy exist where interest is forbidden and many forms of business risk-taking are considered gambling, and thus forbidden? Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God wills it)? To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves - and they know this.

Worth reading them all, as it is a well reasoned view, even if you disagree.

[Happy Monkey]

Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by [religious] law? ... gambling, and thus forbidden? Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is ... (As God wills it)?

That mindset isn't as foreign as I would like; it's just taken to the [il]logical extreme.

[DanaC]

Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God wills it)? To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves - and they know this.

As far as I know they only teach Theological subjects that way. There are plenty of Middle and Near Eastern students over in the Uk doing postgrads and stuff. They have their equivalent technical and medical experts. The Mullahs might not be much for the technical revolution and some regions and countries are less well developed...but let's not start homogenizing them. Look how different America and England is, and yet we share a language, a basic religious philosphy, a large amount of our political philosophy (democratic institutions etc) capitalist intentions and mechanisms, historical orgins and both cultures are underpinned with Anglo-Saxon, individualist sensibilities and similar lawsets.

If we can share all that and yet be so different, why not the same for Eastern cultures?

[Cicero]

Who's to say all Americans have the same values? Bah- that's just wierd racist stuff- 'nuff said.

[DanaC]

Good point Cicero. We can't even say with any confidence that all people in a single country share the same beliefs and value systems. Hell we can't even say that people always share beliefs and value systems with their nearest and dearest.

I have a very different cultural outlook than many people born south of the Watford Gap. I certainly have a different cultural perspective to the Scottish. If the length of Britain can contain difference how can we expect homogenised societies elsewhere.

[queequeger]

... I can't help myself. This is one of those articles that defines what a lot of people think. Now, most of my experience with arab culture is Iraqi, my knowledge of other arab cultures is more based on a few people I have met here and there. BUT!

...upposing that these people are basically Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless.

They do think vastly differently, no one can argue that. My favorite example is the rationale behind the attempt to bomb JFK airport, which was that because we americans loved Kennedy so much, we would become incensed with rage at seeing his namesake destroyed. While this would be true at bombing a mosque of your enemy's hero, we in the US don't really care that much.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization.

"We should hammer them to stop them from messing with our civilization." Sounds kind of like some other people's beliefs...

This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

This of course, is identical across cultures. Was this guy mad that his friend chose his immediate and extended family over him? We do the same things...

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY.
~snip~
Without honorable work, romantic love or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion.
~snip~
On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member - if you convert to the One True Religion.

To say that their system of morals is phony because it's not yours... Here's the deal, Arabs don't assign much value to their work, it's a means to living. I think that's fucking fantastic. Arabs DO enjoy a romantic love, especially the Lebanese and Syrians... They can be as crazy about it as any Italian. Not all marriages are arranged, and this might come as a shock to you, but the arranged couples almost always fall in love with a bond just as strong as any westerner. They just go about it a different way.

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either.

This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, "If God wills it." A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, "It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah." Or, "I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah." (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, "You are all going to pass the exam, right?" "Inshallah teacher." "No, no!" I shouted, "No inshallah. Study!"

Ok, they have a hard time adapting to an infrastructure, just like any other 3rd world country. No shit, they can't figure out how to effectively maintain brand new and pretty much unintelligible equipment!? Crazy.

Oh, and it was at this point that I lost respect for the author entirely. Inshahallah does NOT fucking mean that. The palestinian was JOKING, and it's a very COMMON joke. Inshahallah is almost exclusively a way to signify future tense. I admit, it does take an ear for the language to discern when a person saying "I will meet you tomorrow Inshahallah" is simply saying he will meet you tomorrow, or if he's actually showing some amount of uncertainty. Of course, an Iraqi will always say "maybe" if it's uncertain.

This assclown started his article saying that all americans are linguistic idiots, and he makes the most common and idiotic mistake himself.

6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.

I call bullshit. Like I said, I have less knowledge of the Saudis, but I know the Iraqis and Levant Arabs have the philosophy of "If you think he's going to fight you, throw the first punch for the advantage."

7) In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.

This is the first thing in the article that's completely true. The language and culture has so much more extremeism. This was evident when American forces started rounding up clerics by the dozens for speaking about violence against the US. What they didn't understand is that no one in the mosque, including the Mullah, had any expectations of anyone doing anything.

8) They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, and they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

...like "there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you."

Absurd is in the eye of the beholder.

10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days. There was a time when cultural transmission between Islam and the West went overwhelmingly from them to us. (Note the recent discoveries of Sufi symbols engraved on the structural members of European cathedrals.) Now the situation is reversed, and it is humiliating for them.

Hallelujah! Someone finally gets it. Maybe the fact that their culture is under constant attack (whether intentional or not) from western media and Ideals... maybe THAT'S what's frustrating those using violence, and they're using Islam as a justification.

11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

In the West, and America more than anyplace else, we have internalized the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that said opinion is perfectly valid for them. When we meet a people who think that that idea is insane and evil, we are sometimes left in the absurd position of defending their idea as "perfectly valid for them". Doesn't work that way for them; God's Truth is laid out in some detail in the Koran, and not to believe it is a sin. I know, I know, in America you can find lots of Christian Fundamentalists who believe that God will cast you into hell for holding the wrong opinions about Him, but even those who would make their religion into an established church seldom desire the level of enforcement in such detail as the Kingdom does or the Taliban did.

So closing liquor stores on sundays, trying to get prayer in schools, etc. What he's not realizing here is that most Arabs DON'T want to control others. Most of the population of Saudi Arabia hates the religious police, and wants it gone. The only difference is that a) there is a larger number of religious nut jobs in the Arab world than in the western. If we had an increase of, say, 10% of the evangelicals in the US they would be so close to the majority our rights would start sliding out the window.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

I'll use Happy Monkey's views to summarize that section!

I realize this was super long, so if you read the whole thing... wow.
I would have avoided making such a long post, but these views are held by a very large number of people. Those people will go on thinking the same things, and say that I'm not a source to be trusted, but just maybe if they only needed one more drop of water to burst their dam....

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by queequeger

This assclown started his article saying that all americans are linguistic idiots, and he makes the most common and idiotic mistake himself.

He didn't say all, he said most. I thought this was a pretty common opinion, especially in Europe? At least I've heard it repeated often.

...like "there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you."

Absurd is in the eye of the beholder.

I didn't get the impression he was talking about their religious beliefs when he said they would "routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity".

[queequeger]

I'm not disagreeing with the idea that most Americans are linguistically challenged, barely knowing a language, but I was pointing out that after disparaging others for their lack of knowledge, he made a huge mistake. It's like saying "You have the worstest grammer and speling evr."

The example he uses for his 'absurd ideas' that Arabs believe is the Djinn, and that's part of the Islamic myth. They play a part in many stories in the Quran. Besides, it doesn't matter, I could use examples that many many Americans believe in angels, or that global warming doesn't exist, or that people with different skin colors have different genetic dispositions. The key line is that absurd is in the eye of the beholder.

[9th Engineer]

The sorry fact that many people in this world, Western or European, display the competence and aptitude of a pile of sod is not really relevant here. The whole list boiled down to a pretty simple conclusion, that our existence is being perceived as an attack, and there are people in power who refuse to be convinced otherwise. Their culture is being consumed and amalgamated in the same process that all civilizations undergo once they have long past their zenith.

If they choose to cast their eyes to the ground in bitterness when modern culture and technology crack open the dry husk of nearly 1500 years of habitude, then so be it. Survival means the inclusion of new ideas and realities. I refuse to rationalize the damage done by the final malignant thrashings of a minority so unwilling to compromise, that they would rather doom their own then allow them to mingle with outsiders.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

What the opposition does not get is that leaving the Gap and becoming increasingly integrated into the economic Core does not equal an abolition of identity. America and Europe are in the Old Core. Are Americans indistinguishable from Europeans? So it shall be with the integration of Araby.

[queequeger]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

The whole list boiled down to a pretty simple conclusion, that our existence is being perceived as an attack, and there are people in power who refuse to be convinced otherwise.

...sounds kind of like the communists. And the terrorists. By that I mean, we say THEY are attacking OUR way of life. In truth, I'm much more inclined to believe that the emotions and conceptions of the majority of the world's people have been, since the dawn of humanity, hijacked by those in power with the foresight and lack of morals to manipulate them.

It is true that most Arab people truly believe that their society is under attack by the west. All but the smallest percentages think this, and then continue on with their lives without doing any violence.
Let's do some simple word replacement.
It is true that most Americans truly believe that their society is under attack by Terrorism. All but the smallest percentages think this, and then continue on with their lives without doing any violence.

In every society we've ever seen, there have been a few educated folks that knew what was up, a few folks that took up a sword for whatever cause consumed their world, and the vast majority of folks who just ate, drank, and were merry with their families.

The cycles of history are so rigid, and seemingly unchangeable, that it makes me tired. We are better than Them. These are the reasons. They are trying to destroy Us. This is because of Their nature. We must, with great regret, kill Them.

[DanaC]

Queeq I thought your response made a lot of sense.

Not all marriages are arranged, and this might come as a shock to you, but the arranged couples almost always fall in love with a bond just as strong as any westerner. They just go about it a different way.

Anecdote: my friend N was born in Pakistan (he's now in his early fifties) and at the age of 16 was married to a girl from a neighbouring village by an arrengent which was actually made when he was 14 and she was 12. They had a few difficulties at first as they got used to being a couple. Their families helped mediate when they fell out (he tells a story of an argument they had when she walked out and went back to her family's house. They split up for five days. Then he went to the house and waited outside for her to come back from collecting water and they made up.

She died this New Year past, a few minutes to midnight, after a long and debilitating illness (massive stroke, after massive stroke) she was 50 years old. N had spent nearly ten years taking care of her, with the help of a couple of nieces and their two sons. They were totally devoted to each other.

After she died, a couple of months later, N, myself and another friend L, whose husband had died a month after N's wife, were sat talking and the subject of remarriage came up. N was saying it was too soon, but friends and relatives were encouraging him to find another wife as he isn't the kind of person who suits being alone. He listed some criteria as to the circumstances and kind of woman he'd consider (including that she not be young enough to have more children) when the time came. He didn't mention love.

L pointed that out to him in gentle humour and he said.

"Oh no. R was my love."

That's a single anecdote about a single couple. I have many friends and contacts amongst the Asian parts of our community and have known some arrangements which have led to love and some which have been disatrous...at roughly the same percentages as my white friends' love-match marriages. I have also known people who fell in love after the arrangement then fell out of love. It happens.

N's eldest son was married at 18 by arrengement (like most arrangements both parties had right to say no and once each party had agreed that this was the suitor they were most interested in arrangements were made. It didn't work out. They stayed together for four and a half years had a daughter and then got divorced (bear in mind this is a fairly traditional community in terms of faith, respect for parental authority, dress codes and many assumptions and gender roles.) now she lives across the road from N, with her daughter, N's son lives with him and his second wife and little girl. They all are in and out of each others houses and seem to get along quite well. She chose not to remarry, despite the fact that a divorcee from another family was interested.

Just because we can't understand the way others do things, means that we automatically superimpose our own value system onto their decisions and this can lead to a gross misreading of the situation.

We tend to think of the forced marriage when we are really talking just of arrangement. We tend to think of force and coercion where often it is merely cultural pressure, something which we are also subject to in different ways. When they look at our way of doing things, I wonder if they have in mind the aggressive violent male and the passive and disrespected female that characterises a view of an abusive marriage. The numbers are there. An outsider could easily make a case for the danger of love matches just by looking at the massive problem of spousal abuse in our culture.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I wonder if they have in mind the aggressive violent male and the passive and disrespected female that characterises a view of an abusive marriage.

That characterizes one view of an abusive marriage. There are different types of abusive marriages.

[queequeger]

... I don't follow. What are you saying, bruce?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Not all abusive marriages are comprised of an "aggressive violent male and the passive and disrespected female". That's only one of the possible combinations/circumstances.