Saturday, March 18, 2006
Roger Simon has a very good short post in reaction to that essay published by the Kennedy School (see: Kennedy School: It's All AIPAC's Fault). His point, that secular-oriented people tend to forget that the religious often have motivations that go beyond physical comforts, is one that can be widely applied, especially in the Middle East: The Protocols of the Elders of Harvard:
...it's very hard for the secular mind - I know this well from my own experience - to identify with and understand societies deeply bound in faith and tradition. These societies' behavior must be explained by material conditions - and perhaps they can be, but not nearly as simply, and ultimately dismissively, as these professors do. The Harvard men do not really believe bin Laden and his cohorts when they talk about the Caliphate. It is to us secularists, after all, mythological. So when the Madrid Atocha Station is blown up - at the very heart of Al Andaluz - it must be as a result of the US Israeli policy and not the continuation of a war that has been going on for over a thousand years...
"...it's very hard for the secular mind - I know this well from my own experience - to identify with and understand societies deeply bound in faith and tradition. "
For what it's worth, some time last year Israel's channel 10 interviewed an Israeli who had been employed in the States in a very well paid hi-tec job.
Asked why he came back to start up anew here he said that in Israel, he can think and has the peace of mind to imagine and create.
Mearsheimer's and Walt's original sendup is a piece of presumptuous petulance which wouldn't be given a second thought (in terms of what it purports to analyze) if it weren't for the combination of their ivy strewn bona fides (which allows them to speak as authorities rather than in more substantially explicated terms) and aspects of the general zeitgeist which presumes a great deal and treats received opinion as Holy Writ. I.e., a boorishly superficial and soporific sendup passing as serious analysis.
Similarly - and in large part because they are presuming to speak as authorities rather than in more substantial and thoughtfully paced terms - there is something of an analog with Mark Twain's observation that "a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." To fully respond to Mearsheimer and Walt one might need to write volume or two on subjects ranging from the philosophical (e.g., epistemology, onto-theology) to the social/political, historical, etc. That is the advantage someone like a Mearsheimer has when intoning as presumptive authority rather than in more transparent and better informed terms.
What Mearsheimer and Walt invoke is a rhetoric which attempts to ply force and power, not historical elucidation and transparent critique. Not uncommon.