Rape is Not a Part of Islam

 

Islam is getting a bum rap in the UK grooming gang scandal. Islam does not enable or endorse the behaviour of these young men. That is the reverse of the truth. It is culture shock.

Coming from a culture with strict rules for the separation of the sexes, severe punishments for rape, strict traditions for female dress, the typical Muslim view of the West is that here, by contrast, everything is permitted. My Pakistani friends used to refer proverbially to “the wicked West.”

We always think this way of proximate foreign cultures: to England, France is always synonymous with sexual license. In Barcelona, a strip joint is named “Baghdad,” and nude dancers are called “exotic.” The most famous stripper in Montreal once had the stage name “Fawzia Amir.” In early Canada, sex fantasies centred around the Indians. No surprise if Muslims think the same about us: in the West, all women are available and everything is permitted.

This is a common expression of culture shock. Finding in some new culture that many familiar norms do not apply, you can easily assume that here there are no norms at all, and everyone is free to do as he pleases.

The initial reaction is to act out your fantasies, here where nobody knows you. The second reaction is to despise these immoral and crazy people, and feel righteous in doing them harm.

This sense is that much more severe when coming from a culture with strict social norms.

So young Muslim immigrants are a bad risk for violence and sexual predation, criminal behavior, and mental illness.

And we are making the same mistake they are, by imagining that such outrageous behaviour is endorsed by and part of Islam.

The fault is in our governments, who are blind or deliberately blind to the importance of culture and cultural difference. And this has nothing to do with racism: race is not culture, and those who suppose they are the same are the most profound racists.

It is callous folly to let in large groups of immigrants from quite different cultures. There will be social breakdown and immense suffering, not least for the immigrants themselves.

We should, in all sanity, prioritize immigrants from cultures with social norms most similar to Canada’s. That means we should give absolute preference to Christians, Jews, Americans in the broad sense of that term, and Europeans.

Failing that, we should give preference to those who have a strong religious commitment. That is, just the opposite of our current thinking, that the problem has something to do with religious “extremism.” A strong faith anchor inoculates against culture shock, and ensures the individual does not act out selfish desires. If these Muslim men in Rotherham and other British cities were good Muslims, they would not behave this way despite temptation.

The Ghost of Future's Past

 

Had occasion in the course of my teaching to watch a video of the Futurama ride at the GM pavilion, New York Worlds’ Fair, 1964-5. I was there at the time, in 64; I remembered some of it. But this time I was struck by how our attitude towards the future then was so different from today. GM was confident the future would be abundant, thanks to improvements in technology. Progress marches on! Roads through the tropical jungles, bringing goods to market! Submersibles reaping the limitless harvest of the seas! Vast cities of light.

Nowadays, rather than celebrate technology, we fear it as the enemy. Even though technology has indeed brought us many marvels since 1964: the Internet, the smart phone, longer lifespans, abundance of food from the green revolution. So why did we sour on it?

Granted, the GM exhibit might not have been fully representative of all the voices of 1964. Or rather, 1962 or so, when the exhibit was presumably designed. This was big business talking. But the ride was highly popular during the fair, a reprise of one of the most popular pavilions of the 1939 Fair, and did not get any pushback at the time for overplaying the wonders of technology. It seemed to express the broad consensus. Science conquers all.

I have long thought that western civ lost its nerve in the carnage of the First World War. I think of Eliot’s “The Waste-Land” emerging at about that time. Or W.B. Yeats’s discovery that “We are but weasels fighting in a hole.” 

But watching this video, I had another thought. It seems to be our view of technology in particular that has changed. This seems to be the pivot. 

Perhaps the underlying cause, even the cause of WWI in the first place, is what Alvin Toffler called future shock. Since about the second half of the 19th century, and especially with the personal computer revolution beginning circa 1980, things have been changing rapidly due to technology. In effect, none of us lives any longer in the land or in the culture we were born into. This can cause, and perhaps has caused, a general trauma, a sense that we are losing control of our lives. “Stop the world; I want to get off!” Perhaps this is seen in Kipling’s 1897 lines:

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard

Already, to him, technology is the enemy.

Toffler’s “future shock” is based on the known phenomenon of culture shock.

I know a little bit about culture shock. Alarmingly, governments and medical establishments seem not to. I have lived through culture shock more than once. It is no trivial thing. 

For the first little while in a radically new culture, say the first three months, you are on vacation. Everything is new and wonderful. What you feel the most is that all the old constraints of daily life back home are gone. All the weary chains of habit and social convention that we secretly resent are gone, and we want to run naked in the woods. We want to hook up. First of all, nobody knows you, so you need not worry about your reputation. Screw up, and you just take the plane home. And the first impression when faced with new rules is that there are no rules. You can go ahead and just do as you want; as you always wanted.

This crazy optimism somewhat describes, in cultural terms, the Fin de Siecle, the Edwardian period, the period just preceding the First World War. The automobile, the airplane, the moving picture, the phonograph, were rapidly transforming individual lives. In politics, “progressivism” was born: the application of science and technology to society would solve everything.

For another good representation of this state, see Margaret Meade’s “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Any old foreign hand should have seen she was in the first stage of culture shock. But for decades, it was taken as solid anthropological work. Yeah, everyone In Samoa just had sex whenever they wanted. None of our Western hangups.

This is also why “exotic dancer” is a synonym for “erotic dancer”: the nearest foreign country is usually imagined to allow free love. Absurdly, this was the reputation of the Muslim Middle East in the Victorian Era. Those guys with the women in abayas. Even in my youth, the most famous stripper in Montreal went by the name “Fawzia Amir.” 

Ironically, the same culture shock leads young Muslim men coming to northern Europe to think it is okay to rape young local women. After all, here in the “Wicked West,” anything goes.

In England, syphilis was long known euphemistically as the “French pox.” In France, it was called “the English malady.”

And so it goes, as Billy Pilgrim would say.

An expat can get themself in a lot of trouble during this stage. 

Now imagine a government that welcomes large numbers all at once from a quite different culture. What do you think might happen? But I digress….

But the next stage is worse. After about three months, in the usual course of expat life, you come to the impression that the rules no longer apply both ways. These foreigners have no morals; and they are insane. Nothing here makes sense. And this is not a vacation; you realize you cannot go home again. You are stuck here.

At this point, a large proportion of expats sink into a state of depression, and never recover. They cannot bear to go out in the street. They want to stay in their apartment, the only place they feel safe. Or they begin to haunt the expat bars, where they sit there all evening getting drunk and complaining to other drunken expats about this godforsaken hellhole. Every foreign station has such an expat bar. 

A college I worked in, transported virtually wholesale from Canada, after a few months redesigned the “learning centre” to look like Fort Apache, with the foreign teachers on raised platforms behind high counters. This was all psychological; there was no threat of violence or threat on campus. It was soon all “us” and “them.”

And this may explain the First World War, and the Second. They were nativist outbreaks, nationalist outbreaks of paranoia at how their distinctive culture was threatened by this rapid change.

Similarly, Darwin chronicled in “The Descent of Man” how, whenever European adventurers encountered some primitive people, the primitives seemed to stop working and reproducing. They started to drink heavily, and their numbers rapidly declined. Everyone was experiencing culture shock at once’ everyone was depressed. And for groups like the Canadian “First Nations” or the Australian aborigines, this state of culture shock and depression has continued to this day, for centuries. One might suggest that the same culture shock lingers among American blacks, their ancestors suddenly uprooted from tribal cultures in Africa. That’s how severe culture shock can be, if the cultures are sufficiently different.

Now imagine again what might happen if you rapidly introduce into your country large groups of people from a widely different culture.

A not insignificant proportion of expats undergoing culture shock have a psychotic break. When nothing around you makes sense anymore, almost anything you imagine might seem true. I have experienced this myself briefly once or twice. In some it seems to be more serious, and last longer. And some may act out their fantasies in dangerous ways. There are stories in every expat enclave of how old Tom or Bertha went off, and did something like take all their clothes off in front of the class. Or decide that their daughter was the current incarnation of a Bodhisattva.

And this is what we may be seeing now throughout Western society. Nobody can count on the old verities any more: marriage, children, the female role, the male role; even the accepted meaning of words; even the meaning of such words as pronouns. A growing proportion of us get depressed and want to retreat to some “safe space,” or start acting in destructive ways,  becoming violent; treating neighbours as deadly enemies. A certain proportion take to alcohol and drugs. Others, in fear , retreat to group think, become NPCs, increasingly afraid of any new ideas. A certain proportion imagines that now everything is permitted, “conventional morality” no longer applies, and they can do whatever they want. And almost all of us now sit around complaining about technology and imagine it is destroying the world. It’s causing pollution! It’s using up all available resources, and soon we will starve in the dark! It’s causing climate change! Climate change will soon kill us all!

Rather than being able to manage matters and reassure, those in charge are the most fully culture shocked and hysterical. They are most threatened by the earth moving unpredictably beneath them. Their status depends on the status quo. This explains why governments and big corporations are rapidly getting oppressive and controlling: wanting censorship, wanting to arrest development with more and more regulation, imagining bogeys under every bed.

How do we escape this? Faith.

The Postmodern Iceberg

Given how dangerous postmodernism is, what is to become of us all? How bad is it going to get?

For postmodernism seems essentially the same virus that once infected Nazi Germany.

Luckily, if I’m right, postmodernism is most likely to destroy postmodernism before it becomes strong enough to destroy society as a whole.

For under its current multiculti principles, its proponents are the ones first coming into close contact with incompatible world views.

The left now has Muslims marching alongside Marxist atheists, feminists, transgender activists, black activists, Hispanic immigration activists, and gays. Some of these world views are anathema to one another.

And they certainly are not united in embracing cultural relativism. There is no way Islam works into that equation. The groups being pulled together here are really united only in a shared hatred of one particular world view: “Western civilization,” or more honestly, Judeo-Christian ethics. That is not likely to be sustainable. These groups actually have less in common with one another, in their principles and beliefs, than each does with this “mainstream” culture. Tolerance is a very Christian value.

They are bound to become aware of the incompatibility. There is bound to be culture shock.

This multiculti approach is very different from Fascism. It pitched its appeal to one large group, based on its vaunted supposed homogeneity, and scapegoated a small minority, perhaps 6%. Postmodernism’s current strategy is a good cover for the fact that underlying it is the same philosophy, but given that philosophy, it is less logical, and looks less sustainable. It is pitching its appeal to a variety of smaller groups, each of them stressing homogeneity and purity within themselves, and each incompatible with the others. And it is scapegoating what is still a large minority, “cisgendered heterosexual white males,” perhaps 33% of the population. It is only too likely that their victim will be able to resist. French Canadians, at only 24% of the Canadian population, have been able to do a pretty good job of protecting their interests.

If things have been able to go as far as they have, it is because this large chunk of the electorate have been complacent, busy with their own affairs and not very aware of what is going on. Aided, of course, by a steady diet of postmodernist propaganda in the media and the academy.

But surely we can already see this is changing. Trump is in power in the US. Brexit passed. Macron faces rioting in the streets. Doug Ford just won in Ontario. This kraken is waking up. Not that long ago, you did not hear dissenting voices in the media. Then came Rush Limbaugh. Then came Fox News. Then came social media. Then the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, subverting the academic monolith. Now there are two sides being heard all over the place. There is a growing YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter genre of people declaring themselves “woke,” “red pilled” or “just walking away.” Postmodernism may already have peaked; and the peak of evident craziness it seems to have reached may itself be a sign of desperation. It is in the angry tantrum stage, over not getting its will.

And this is even aside from the extreme potential disunity within their own ranks. Islam is, among all the major world religions, the most absolutist, the most perfectly antithetical to relativism and postmodernism. The prime reason the 9/11 bombers flew airliners into the Twin Towers was to protest Western feminism and gay rights. The postmoderns, in trying to embrace and digest it, were perhaps already showing desperation. A few years ago, the left themselves were foremost in demanding military intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East to end the hijab, end the supposed subjugation of women, end female genital mutilation. They seem to have swallowed a poison pill; and maybe there is divine justice in that.

And the closer the jihadists get to those holding such relativist ideologies in the flesh, to feminists and gays and atheists and transgenders, the angrier and more violent they are likely to get. Any minute now …

Even apart from Islam, other incompatibilities are becoming obvious. The doctrine of transgenderism is incompatible with feminism. If being male or female is a matter of choice, any question of either oppression or new privileges for women is off the table. Set up an affirmative action program, and men can just declare themselves women and get the same advantage. Bar this, and you are discriminating against them as transgenders. Even demanding they identify themselves as either male or female is now discriminatory, so any affirmative action scheme based on sex is discriminatory in its very premise. If biological men are allowed to compete as women in sports, to cite only one trivial but visible example, Title IX requirements that women’s sports be equally funded become moot, and only an extravagant waste of money. “Genetic” women are not going to win any medals. And women purportedly no longer have a right to the safety of separate bathrooms. Any man can just declare himself a woman, and walk in. It was just this concern that killed the old Equal Rights Amendment, back in the day.

And, of course, if transgenders have this right, what is the justification for denying it to cisgenders? Isn’t that discriminatory in just the same way? In other words, if any man can enter any washroom he likes by declaring himself a transgendered female, it must hold that any man declaring himself a cisgendered male must also have that right. Or else you are discriminating against cisgenders.

Transgenderism is also incompatible with all demands based on racial identity; with either Hispanic, or black, or Native American activism. For if sex is a matter of choice, why not race? Race is a far more dubious and ambiguous classification in biological terms. And what about gay rights: if sex is a matter of choice, why not sexual orientation? The whole basis of gay rights is that nobody can choose to be gay. Lesbians are starting to notice, and openly oppose transgender rights.

Transgenderism seems another poison pill.

And what about immigration activists calling for more and more open immigration? Every new immigrant is potentially a job taken away from a struggling black already here. Or theoretically lowers their wages. Sooner or later, blacks are going to notice.

Nor are recent Hispanic immigrants likely to be big fans of postmodernism and relativism, feminism, gay rights, or Marxism. A lot of them are going to be Catholics. Within their own group, in their own families, they are traditionalist and conservative. Only a shallow cadre of Marxist intellectuals within this group are on board with the postmodernist program: probably a smaller, shallower, less connected cadre than with Anglo whites, now rebelling against the self-appointed experts. As this group becomes better able to connect individually, thanks to social media, the authority of such leaders cannot last.

And the same is true for American Indians/First Nations. The average Indian is pretty conservative in his views. He likes hockey, the military, Christianity, and country and western music. He has almost nothing in common with the handful of people claiming to speak for him. And he may not forever remain idle.

It looks as though the reality began to seep through in the most recent Women’s March. Many state organizations and former leaders, including the founder of the first Women’s March, pulled out, declaring of the current organizers, “they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform.” This seems largely the clash of the Muslim groups with some of the others. It’s only the tip of the iceberg; but little more sank the Titanic.

It does not seem probable that the postmodern delusion can hold together much longer.

A lot of what is holding it together is peer pressure. It is just as Andersen describes it in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Most people are moral cowards and will just go along with whatever they hear those around them say. The postmodernists have grabbed and long held control of all the megaphones.

That’s the sort of situation that can collapse very suddenly.

The single worst mistake those who oppose postmodernism could make, however, is to fail to make their own coalitions. It would be fatal to begin to demonize Hispanics, or Muslims, or gays, or Indians.

Not to mention, it would be directly against the principles of Judeo-Christian civilization itself, which is what they presumably seek to defend. It makes no sense to fight postmodernism and relativism by becoming a postmodern relativist.

Culture Shock

Do not drop from a great height.

I have lamented recently here the dangers of postmodernism.

But there is another pressing problem we are facing, probably more important, and it just recently occurs to me that it is far too little noticed and too little understood.

Culture Shock.

In fact, postmodernism may only be an expression of culture shock.

People who have not had the experience of living in a different culture are often not aware that it even exists. But it is very real, and very powerful. More real than most things most people have ever in their lives experienced.

I have lived as an expat for perhaps more than twenty years, in eight different countries around the globe. I have felt it very personally, and I have seen it in others. It is the routine thing.

We all rely to a great extent, more than we ever realize, in our general perceptions of life, the universe, and everything, on a lot of assumptions that we never examine. We just take them for truth, reality, the way things are supposed to be. We do not even know, usually, that they are no more than assumptions, or at least that they are open to debate. We don’t know why we think these things. It has just always been so.

A tiny example: pedestrians in Korea pass on the left. In North America, on the right. Newcomers to Korea are always shocked at how rude and hostile the Korean are, always deliberately walking in to them on the street.

I have learned to always hang back until I see which direction the other person will go.

And I was berated for this, by another Canadian, recently arrived in Qatar. Don’t I know you’re supposed to pass on the right?

You often cannot win, when two cultures collide.

Others are amazed at how stupid the local Koreans are. You ask them whether ducks can fly, and they all insist they cannot.

There are no wild ducks in Korea.

Do not suppose for a moment that Koreans have fewer unexamined assumptions. I once was asked if I knew any Korean, and I answered with “sarang hayo.” Meaning “I love you.” A girl was in earshot, even though it was not she who had asked, but a man, and I was later berated a typical evil foreigner when it became clear that I was not romantically interested in her. I had apparently been toying with her affections.

Another time I was berated as filthy for taking my unsuitable dress shoes off to dance in a large auditorium. They do not know about sock hops.

And so often, when we encounter another culture, or when we encounter an individual from another culture, we discover with a shock that they do not share our assumptions. And this is profoundly disorienting. Suddenly nothing makes sense. Are they crazy, or am I?

It throws many people, I think most people, soon after moving to a new country, at the point when they realize they are not just tourists, into at least a period of depression. It throws a significant number into straight psychosis. In any posting I have been in, there were stories about this. There were always recent memories of someone who had gone mad at that workplace.

Another very common reaction, perhaps worse, is for people to decide that there are no rules here, since the rules they knew clearly do not apply, and begin to act outrageously. All is permitted! One guy at one school suddenly stripped to his underwear in front of his class. They share the closed-circuit video there as a bit of local folklore. Others, of course, get into drugs, and fistfights, and alcohol, and lots of casual sex.

Many sink into a permanent depression. They stick around expat bars, staying drunk and complaining about how the locals are all stupid, or insane, or evil. Welcome to the enterprise of empire!

Violence is always a possibility. Less so for a lone individual in a new culture; more so for a larger group, or for the majority against a culturally different minority. When your basic assumptions are challenged, a kind of mental auto-immune system kicks in. Your thinking shuts down, you mentally batten the hatches, and all your emotions rush to battle stations. You can feel as though you are personally under siege, because your self-image can be involved. The natural self-protective strategy seems to be to redefine the newcomer or newly met as radically other, with whom you may have nothing in common, and whom, for your own safety—really your sanity, your mental safety, but you may feel this is your physical safety—you must shun or worse. From this immune response you can develop weird suspicions that those blacks are raping all the local women, say, or planning to, or the Jews are poisoning the wells. It’s delusional, classically delusional; but this is where it comes from.

This is an issue that must be considered if we are going to have globalization. As we inevitably must. Even leaving aside the matter of mass immigration.

It is probably just such culture shock that has led over the centuries to pogroms and anti-Semitism and spasms of ethnic cleansing. The problem with the Jews is that they patently do not share certain assumptions that are so fundamental to the Christian majority population of Europe, or the Muslim majority population of the Middle East, that it is shocking if you are not prepared for it. It looks like being in league with the Devil. I recall with remorse my own childhood fistfight with Bobby Steinberg, who had shocked me by saying, generously, that Jesus was as great a prophet as Moses. And so it goes.

I think the First World War as well as the second were probably mostly prompted by culture shock at globalization. Nazism was a nativist reaction, championing traditional German culture against the sinister forces of globalization. We tend not to be aware of it, but some at the time were warning of the same nativist tendency in Germany before the First World War. It was certainly involved in Turkey’s participation in that conflict. More generally, this is what was being expressed by the growing nationalist sentiments across Europe. I suspect the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars probably sprang in large part from the same roots, even though this is rarely supposed. And the Russian Revolution too. Each came just about as that given culture was opening up to the world, and can be explained as a nativist, fear-based reaction to the process.

Bad news: China is now at about that same point.

And this is not the worst that culture shock can do. When he wrote The Descent of Man, Darwin remarked on the strange fact that, when a much less developed culture came in contact with the more developed European culture, the native population tended to collapse. He could only speculate as to why.

Now, of course, we are much wiser. We know that it was because of the spread of new European diseases.

Or was it? More recent research has shown that tuberculosis, the second greatest killer of the Native American population, was present in the Americas all along. Even more recent research has concluded that the first definite outbreak of smallpox in Europe happened well after Columbus. Europeans should have been just as vulnerable as native Americans; but it was the latter who died in droves—supposedly a fatality rate of 90%.

Darwin noted that, in fact, the rate of reproduction always plummeted after first contact. And he had figures.

That is not physical disease. That is depression. That is culture shock. Because the cultures were so dissimilar, it was usually fatal. And many native people have not recovered and adjusted even today, centuries later.

The current problem with Islamic terrorism looks like exactly the same thing. The Iranian revolution was the same thing. It is a fear response to globalization as a perceived threat to fundamental local assumptions about right and wrong, what is real and what is not.

Note that, contrary to the media narrative, those who join ISIS or blow up churches are not Muslim “extremists.” They are always Westernized, secularized Muslims. It is not Islam that has made them crazy, hate-filled, and violent, but culture shock, from the conflicting demands of two cultures.

In fact, again contrary to common prejudice, it is exactly those who are best-grounded in their own religious traditions who suffer the least from such culture shock and such violent reactions. Missionaries, for example, travel and integrate exceptionally well. It is the secular sorts who go mad. This is because it is the religious who have consciously examined, and are aware of, their own assumptions. They know what they believe, and why they believe it.

At the same time, you see culture shock emerging in the majority cultures of America, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, all over Europe, now, as a result of globalization and, more specifically, mass immigration.

It is wrong to demonize these people. This is not to say, either, that current fears of new immigrants in very large numbers are unjustified. One dangerous mistake we seem to make is to think that only white people ever experience culture shock. That the only problem is to get the local whites to accept the newcomers. Or that culture shock is just a case of stupid prejudice, easily fixed by a few facile slogans about respect and inclusivity. It is a real mental health issue, and not an easy one to deal with. Many of the new immigrants are indeed going to go crazy and become violent. Just as Europeans or Canadians do when thrown into their culture. Yet we make no allowance for that whatsoever.

This is not a great threat to the existing population if numbers are small. But if the incoming groups are large enough, they may feel more able to act out their culture shock against the locals.

Here’s a match. Here’s some nice kindling. Hmm—I wonder what’s going to happen if I put them together?

I have read somewhere that the rate of mental illness is much higher in immigrant families than in the general population. There it is again: culture shock. What Mom and Dad say at home simply does not mesh with what you hear at school, from the media, from your friends.

A Somali living next to us in Windsor one summer snapped and spent each evening going up and down the block breaking everybody’s windows. Culture shock.

We are generally not aware of, and do not think of, culture shock, because most of us do not realize that much of what we think is only arbitrary assumptions we have not ourselves examined. And so we are not aware of the danger. And this lack of awareness increases the danger, both for society as a whole and for ourselves.

Postmodernism and multiculturalism may be good-faith attempts to allow for the friendly mixing of people from disparate cultures. But they are painfully naïve. If all cultures are equal, on what basis can we share any values at all? On what basis can we even have any values? That is not a solution to the problem: that simply describes the disease. Now your life has no meaning, no direction, you have nothing in common with your countrymen, and there is no right or wrong constraining your or their actions. Why not just rape and kill?

All. Hell. Breaks. Loose.

What we urgently need instead is genuine study by all of us, or at least by those with any important social responsibilities, of all cultures. If we are going to have a lot of new Asian neighbours or business partners, we had better all be basically cognizant of what Confucius taught. We had better know the shariah law, the Laws of Manu, the Dhammapada. Instead, those who advocate multiculturalism or postmodernism themselves never seem to go back before Mao, or Marx. They have no interest in either Western or any other cultures. Their agenda is to ignore or even reject culture generally. That is the madness, not the cure.

We need to be working not toward multiculturalism, but to an emerging integrated world culture. Not postmodernism, meaning no culture, and not a retreat to “Western culture.” And it is a matter of life and death to do so before more go mad and die.