john kerry on isis, or islamism: "we face a medieval and modern fascism, both at once." feel clearer now? man, it is amazing how people try to think about history, or time, or ideology. i'm trying to picture what is happening in kerry's head as he stirs up a formulation like that, or what process of thought something like that is a trace of. it's like trying to imagine what it would be like to be a bat. no, on the contrary, what we face now is a sci-fi falangism from the seventh millennium and a stone-age marxism, both at once.
well, let's retrace the steps. the first thing is that on the informal metaphysics of your average mediocre yalie, peoples and persons, all of whom exist contemporaneously, are to be understood as each located at different times: you've got stone-age people in the amazon jungle, natives lingering in africa, medieval talibans up in the hills, quaint brits from early in the twentieth century, white trash left over from the depression, and then super-progressive people from the future, like the extremely dead steve jobs. guess what? this conceptuality of time is insane, and invariably self-serving, and just a metaphysical colonialism, even or especially in its 'progressive' forms. perhaps the mediocre yalie has given up thinking that yalies are the peak of human evolution; now he just thinks he is the furthest along on a progressive timeline, that he's won the race to the future, though all the while time is grinding on all of us at just the same rate. there's nothing there but preening and incoherence. i heard tom ridge and several others this morning "the barbarians are at the gates. the barbarians are inside."
ok, so, anyway, people like kerry have been calling islamists medieval for decades now, and feeling like that explained something. it's only an insult. but then: they're all over social media! they have a shitload of c4! thus the 'modern and medieval both at once.' as to 'fascist'; oh man, that is just slapping an irrelevant insulting ideological label on someone. i do think that this degree of incomprehension leads to bad policy, as well as being a farrago of obvious jive. it cannot but represent a total and self-serving incomprehension of what you are dealing with; you understand them by fitting them into your a priori structure, and become insensible to actual information. and then the a priori structure is utterly confused, and you make terrible mistakes. the structure of thought is like a super-half-assed hegelianism or something. and yet teasing someone like kerry out of it would require erasing his brain and starting again.
