Re: Catchup voting results

Gerry wrote in reply to my

> > Have you read the Lucifer Principle? In his chapter on "Are there
> > Killer Cultures?" He says Islamic cultures are barbaric, training
> > future generations to be killers. He claims that according to the
> > Koran the man who fails to make wide slaughter in the land of the
> > infidels is committing a sin. Sounds like anti-Islamic racism to

me.

> > Or should we say that a country that had a Manifest Destiny to
> > exterminate the Indians was a "Killer Culture"

> Yes, I've read Bloom's _Lucifer Principle_. And what he is saying is
> actually "factually" correct but politically incorrect.

I don't think PC has much to do with it. It is possible to portray two
different models from a single "factual" source - particularly
something as diverse as Islam. For instance we have the "gentle Jesus
meek and mild" and Jesus the social revolutionary who says "I don't
come in peace but with a sword" - from the same biblical source. It is
all in the selection and the emphasis, particularly when we take things
drastically out of context. Edward Said in his book "Orientalism"
explains how this falls within a deep rooted Western view of Islam.

> However, for
> him to have said the opposite would have been, shall we say,
> *politically correct*. This argument isn't only true of Bloom but is
> also true for Rushton's *Race, Evolution & Behavior*.

I don't know Rushton, we don't seem to have got him here Down Under!
I'll check it out via amazon.

> IMO, what we have
> set up here is a true dichotomy with Rushton & Bloom at one end of the
> broomstick and those Politically Correct folks at the other end.

You say "politically correct" here again, but I don't see it as a
matter of PC at all, but a question of the honesty with which one views
the complexity of such issues. It is easy to play a superficial
jingoism and display cultural chauvinism based upon "us against them"
simplicities. Such attempts usually result in violence in which our
future gets tailored to fit someone else's short-sighted simplistic
theory. To label people who search for the truth that makes sense as
PC doesn't help matters at all.

> One thing we can possibly do is to ask both groups to scooch over

closer

> to the center; however, I'm afraid that there would be no takers from
> either side. Another option is to apply Critical Hermeneutics (Ian
> Hodder) and try to attain a simultaneous fusion and separation of

those

> (Race) Realists on one side and those Politically Correct folks on the
> other.

Hmm... I know nothing of Hodder's Critical Hermeneutics. I know of the
conventional Hermeneutical tradition coming through from the
Renaissance "re-discovery" of Hermes Trismagestus, but I presume you
are not talking of that. Please tell me more.

> Actually this is what we're trying to do on the hbe-l list. Someone
> suggested that we begin by listing specific factors which need to be
> melded. Do you have any items with which you'd like to begin?

Do you know of the approach of "multual co-arising" as seen within
General Systems Theory? This suggests that the oppositive sides on
such issues "mutually cause" each other. Thus Capitalism and Communism
are mutually co-arising approaches, created out of the experience of
19th century industrialisation. Is this what you mean?

Regards

John