UPDATED (12/8/2023): Monopolizers And Flyters (November 23, 2005)

Culture, English, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Media, The Zeitgeist

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On the flyting that flew between the two, Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway

Who monopolizes the market place of ideas in the Guardian’s view? The answer is assorted activists, liberal-leftists, statists, feminists, and other lightweights. Read the paper’s top 100 intellectuals and tell me it doesn’t distress.

I don’t profess to have heard of all the characters on the list. Far from it. But of those I recognize, I guess I’d go with German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. This is not to say I endorse his views or all his influences (the unlovely Theodor Adorno comes to mind). But this is not about agreeing with a thinker, only acknowledging his place on this list.

I’d also go with Pope Benedict XVI, and the marvelous Australian art critic Robert Hughes whose profundity, knowledge, and critical faculties are a credit to his Jesuit teachers.

I see Newsweek‘s wishy-washy Fareed Zakaria is considered an intellectual giant. Woe is me! Amos Oz is a popular writer (and not a good one when compared with Meir Shalev or Shy Agnon), but hardly one of the top intellectuals around. But if one is of the Left, one has an advantage in the selection process.

Now hold your horses, will you, because I also admire Christopher Hitchens as a stylist, conversationalist, and an extraordinary flyter. What is flyting, you ask? It’s an ancient Scottish form of invective, a true master of which is the MP George Galloway. I don’t care for his or Hitchens’ ever-shifting views, but I loved the flyting that flew between the two. Galloway called Hitchens a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Hitchens responded over the pages of an august publication by likening the lickspittle praise Galloway once bestowed on him to spittle flung in place of argument. Later on, the two dueled deliciously on C-Span, where, I’m afraid, Hitchens proved his uncontested superiority in this spontaneous rhetorical art.

Neoconservatives, Reality, And Religious Relativism

Islam, Neoconservatism, Religion

In Get With The Global Program, Gaul, I mention a book with which a number of prominent neoconservatives seem enthralled. Olivier Roy, the author of Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, draws parallels between radical Islamists and the broader movement of born-again Christians. You heard me. If that makes you shake in your boots (I’m being cynical, of course. Would that the asinine analogy held; we’d be safe), thank your lucky stars. The author believes these Islamic revivalists are doomed to become “a remote, detached community, like the Hasidic Jews and the Exclusive Brethren.” If only the comparison worked. If I were able to wave a magic wand so that born-again Christians and Exclusive Brethren usurped Islamists in the world, I’d do it in a heart beat. Islamism, sadly, is said to have hundreds of millions of active adherents, who do not come in peace. Still. at least two of the neoconservatives I cite in the column dig the book’s religious relativism. Is that significant?
The author, Roy, also sees Islamic radicalism as a revolt against—and a sign of—rapid acculturation, triggered by contact with the West. Islam, apparently, is in the throes of modernization; its atavism is actually advancement in disguise. Neoconservatives don’t care for reality, and they are anything but uncreative when it comes to subverting it. Thus they are in agreement when evidence against a theory is cast as evidence for a theory, as it is in this book. Like magpies to trash, they are also (at least these two) drawn to superficially clever ideas which are not truly insightful because their relationship to reality is at best tangential.

It's Those Seventy Chippendale Dancers That Await in Hell

Iraq

Driven or exploited? Depending on which story you hear, failed Iraqi suicide bomber Sajida Rishawi is either a pawn of a patriarchal society or a criminal who conned herself into a corner as tight as the corset of explosives she failed to detonate. Books that belabor the “Three P’s”—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness—to varying degrees abound. There’s Christoph Reuter’s My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, Barbara Victor’s Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers, and Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God, and more. It’s a growth industry. Murray N. Rothbard got it right in “Hutus vs. Tutsis: “In dealing with crime, he wrote, “liberals are concentrating on the wrong root causes. That is, on ‘poverty’ or ‘child abuse’ instead of a rotten immoral character.

It’s Those Seventy Chippendale Dancers That Await in Hell

Iraq

Driven or exploited? Depending on which story you hear, failed Iraqi suicide bomber Sajida Rishawi is either a pawn of a patriarchal society or a criminal who conned herself into a corner as tight as the corset of explosives she failed to detonate. Books that belabor the “Three P’s”—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness—to varying degrees abound. There’s Christoph Reuter’s My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, Barbara Victor’s Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers, and Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God, and more. It’s a growth industry. Murray N. Rothbard got it right in “Hutus vs. Tutsis: “In dealing with crime, he wrote, “liberals are concentrating on the wrong root causes. That is, on ‘poverty’ or ‘child abuse’ instead of a rotten immoral character.