A Few Shiny Pebbles

This is Part Two of a multi-part consideration of the World at War.

In “World at War: In Depth Part One”, I pointed out my belief that we are engaged in an ideological World War being fought by several ideologies against each other, and that this is the first time that a war on this scale, literally involving the entire world, could take place. There were indications in one form or another before this that these forces were building, but like most other people I didn’t recognize it.

Since 9/11, I have tried to think of ways to picture this, but analogies and metaphors are tricky and I wanted to catch as much correspondence as I could between what is happening and what it means. As destructive forces, natural disasters come to mind, tornadoes and hurricanes and such, but these don’t capture the long-lived lead-up to the battles we have ahead of us. Since the “War on Terror” is an ideological, philosophical war as much as the “Cultural War” is, I turned to some thoughts about the Culture War that I had earlier.

As I wrote in an earlier post, “Notes from a Culture War Battlefield”,

Throughout history, there have been people deeply interested in the human condition, and they have designed systems that were meant to deal with the deepest questions of society and power and religion. Each philosophy [or ideology] gives forth a view of Life—a vision of what mankind is, and what it needs to live. A vision that seeks embodiment in reality. These philosophies deal with fundamental questions of life and existence.

Just as humans explore the physical world and its inhabitants, they also explore ideas, those insubstantial worlds created by the mysteries of mind and spirit. These explorations take place in words, in writing, in reading, in the education of the classroom, the lecture halls of the university, in the office and shop, in conversations on the street, in the home, and so on. People live, run their lives, have their lives run, and even die because of words on a piece of paper, because of complex and difficult arguments in books and in classrooms and in dimly lit rooms late at night in obscure government office buildings. Words on paper guide people when they fight wars and make peace, build bombs and jet planes and medical operating rooms, send people to prisons and to gulags and to death camps, when they do any of the billions of purposeful, skilled, and structured activities of the human world.

These words find themselves combining and becoming forces in religion, philosophy, law, government, music, art, literature, education, science, technology, hobbies, recreation, social usage, vows and curses and every other activity the human brain and body gets involved with. There are “territorial wars” in these arenas, too. We need to recognize the fact that the world is a vast battleground in which great philosophies struggle for the minds and souls of men.

Right now, in a vast worldwide war, America is battling ideologies ranging from secular collectivists such as communists and socialists through to theological warriors such as Islamofascists. This warfare has long historical roots in humankind’s search for meaning, and covers in all of its proposed solutions all of the categories mentioned above. Over time, basic categories of life have developed into a group of viewpoints, and these ideologies have gathered now into well-identified major movements of adherents. These movements are on the march.

Now, I live near the Pacific Ocean. Normally, if you look out over the Pacific Ocean on a clear, calm day, all you will see is the slightly rippling surface. In a country like America, our Western Industrial Civilization has lulled most of us into a sense that life is like this surface of the ocean. There are waves at times, but is little hint of the life-and-death struggles going on beneath that calm surface, no way to judge the raw power of the ocean that can easily reach up to destroy the largest ship or pull the strongest swimmer into the depths. Filled with dangerous reefs and icebergs, undertow currents, tidal waves, sharks, volcanic explosions powerful enough to create vast islands, earthquake ridges, unimaginable depths, the ocean is a secret universe of danger and destruction, desperation and death. But the surface of the ocean speaks of none of this. It stretches out lazily in the sunlight, monotonously caressing the coastline, lulling the observer into a sense of false security. The ocean seems serene, comforting.

But if you picture what’s going on below the surface of the ocean, it’s an excellent metaphor for what is happening in the realms of human meaning and processes. We can view these intellectual forces as currents in the ocean of life. Some of these currents came out of prehistoric times and are as old as humankind, some were and are newly born in a sudden eddy or whirlpool as a new intellectual or technological movement comes into the world, some become bolder or larger or faster, and some lose their power and disappear in the smaller tributaries of the sea. They are like giant freeways or expressways or railroad tracks or sky lanes, all underwater, all roiling and tumbling and growing, often coalescing or dissipating. They carry the intelligence and knowledge and methodologies of humankind, and some carry our hearts and our allegiance.

Ideas are born, philosophies are created, huge intellectual armies are recruited, and most of the time it is happening out of the awareness of those not directly involved. For an ocean current to exist, it must be propagated, it must be taught or read about or heard of. As soon as an idea or creation is spoken of or written down or diagramed or artistically embodied, it enters this ocean. The Old and New Testaments, the Koran, Isaac Newton’s Principia, the Baghavad Gita, Mao and Marx, the 1812 Overture, triple bypass surgery, the Rules of Rugby, Michelangelo’s David, Gourmet Cook Books, and Huckleberry Finn are all part of the ocean. Sometimes these currents grow stronger over time. Sometimes things that have dwindled to a trickle can be resurrected by a Rosetta Stone or a native speaker. Sometimes it ceases to exist and is unrecoverable.

We need to remember that ideas can become diffuse, impotent, and even cease to exist. There was a library in Alexandria city in Egypt over a thousand years ago that had hundreds of thousands of papyrus books in it. It was burned to the ground. All of the books that were destroyed had ideas in them, many written by the great writers of Greece and the Roman Empire. No one has ever found copies of most of the hundreds of thousands of the books that we know existed. What were once major currents in human thought are barely trickles, fragments of a handful of works that only go to show us the majesty and wonder of what was destroyed. The ideas in those books are gone forever. In order to live, ideas must live inside of living people. In order to act on the future, ideas must act through living people, they must become living currents in the ocean of human thought. Those ideas that survive and flourish are the ones that convince people to act for them; the ideas that become tenuous and dissipate are those that people forget or take for granted, believing that others will act for them. There is no idea that is capable of achievement on its own. These currents are carried over time by individual people, or they are not carried at all.

While we live, we are engulfed by an ocean of physical reality, and become aware of its problems and dangers when we bump up against them, facing injury, illness, and even death. We must be in physical contact with this reality to be affected by it bodily, but as humans we are affected by another content and way of being, in our minds. There is a second ocean, the vast ocean of our mental existence, the one created by our thoughts and consciousness. Usually we wade through it, coming into contact with only a small portion of it, feeling its influence as we enter the mental world by reading or listening, by practicing a method of doing something or by voting for someone because of the ideas surrounding the candidate, or by some other mental interaction with reality. The more we learn and the more we practice methods, the deeper we wade. Yet we are always interacting with but a small portion at the shore, and this ocean’s impact on the physical world is limited to influencing and acting through us as individuals. The broad surface of the ocean of human mental existence stretches out before us, unparalleled in its potential for good and evil.

But people are influenced by words, and through their actions based on those words, ideas and ideological currents can reach into the physical world and catch and destroy people, just as surely as the Tsunami of 2004 did. Stalin followed a philosophy when he ordered the starvation of millions of Russian farmers; Hitler wrote and followed a philosophy when he caused the direct murder of millions of people and the murder by war of tens of millions of others; the Red Guard in Maoist China was following the words in a book when they slaughtered millions; the Khmer Rouge was following a philosophy when they emptied whole cities of people, slaughtering anyone who even remotely seemed educated or skilled. It is imperative to remember that even these Cambodian “killing fields” murders, which seemed uncontrolled savagery, were carried out under the imprimatur of a specific ideology. In a discussion of a hero, “Dith Pran: Cambodian Holocaust Survivor”, it is pointed out that:

The overturn by the communist Khmer Rouge on April 12, 1975 changed Pran's destiny forever. The U.S. supported Ron Noll's government fell into the hand of Maoist leader Pot Pot. [. . . ] The philosophy of the Khmer Rouge, symbolized by the word of 'Angka,' was to return the Cambodian society to a primitive community. All towns and cities were emptied and all hospitals and schools were closed. They propagated their philosophy as "Angka is taking us back to year zero."

All of these philosophies still exist and have their adherents, and they are not the ignorant barbarians of the past, sweeping across some ancient plains to torch and pillage a village of our ancestors, intent on booty or land. Instead, they all exist to spread their ideologies.

Every one of the ideological currents that are fighting America, from the most vicious terrorist or armed rebel to those who are fighting through established societal channels, are the direct result of philosophies carefully written and communicated to inspired followers and all are fighting to establish their ideology on the lands and minds they conquer. Revolutionaries follow philosophies that justify their barbarian or other methods by their Utopian goals, and mean to impose that Utopia on the conquered lands and peoples. Because this is their goal, they are not interested in negotiation except to gain time or win a smaller temporary goal, the same way that Hitler took small steps on his way to total war, or the way the Fabian Socialists have taken their time gradually building their interests into the fabric of British society, or the ACLU has slowly increased the Politically Correct canon’s reach into legal rulings.

The communists, socialists, and other collectivists are still on the march throughout the world. The Islamofascists are no different, with a presence on every continent on Earth and in the majority of countries, spreading their influence by fear and terrorist acts, following jihadist, radical interpretations of the ideology of the Koran.

What is imperative to recognize is that these currents travel through time just as ocean currents do. We usually become aware of them when they break the surface of our consciousness, and they do that by coming into contact with opposing ideologies or ideas. Usually this contact, this breaking of the surface into our awareness, is a warning of the long existence and strength of the intellectual construct, a warning such as the verdict and reaction to it in the OJ Simpson trial, or Oklahoma City, or 9/11, or the embassy attacks in Africa, or a loss of livelihoods or name because of PC strictures, or the Kelo verdict by the US Supreme Court. These warnings, these surface disruptions, must be taken seriously, because the day a movement makes contact with an opposition but it no longer breaks through the surface and to warn us is the day the danger has passed because one side has been conquered or silenced by the ideology of the other.

On Wednesday, World at War: In Depth Part Three: Point Joe Warnings

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