This was originally meant to be a Community Post for my YouTube channel, but it ran long. It’s a good deal shorter than the usual essay-length post reserved for Extensive Arguments, and though I have two unfinished Sequence Trilogies that have been pending for eons, and embarrassingly so, I’ll publish this too-long-for-the-community piece over here anyway.
The post being moved here started out as a Poll soliciting answers to a deceivingly simple question. As with my other polls, I added a few short lines to explain the broader context of the query, only to then catch myself snowballing the explanations in order to make doubly sure that no one downplays the gravity of what's being queried. So much for that.
Motivation for the Poll: The string of murders in
The
intended poll:
Non-muslims
familiar with the Qur’an are correct to rank-order Muslims in the following way,
morally speaking:
Cultural
Muslims > Moderate Muslims > Devout Muslims > Islamists > Jihadists
A: Agree
B: Disagree
C: Agree in theory, but this specific ranking is wrong
D: Ambivalent (on non-empirical grounds / i.e. the value of non-judgmentalism)
E: Indecisive
(because we lack some pertinent facts / still pro-judgmentalism)
To answer contextually, you will need to keep reading. (Sorry)
Preemptive clarifications: Here ‘cultural’ can be a stand-in for ‘non-practicing’ where any affinities to the faith are completely non-epistemic (aesthetic, social, familial, etc) and are not about to be given up by the proud non-practitioner. The same non-practitioner may sometimes take to using nominal as their preferred prefix denoting the same category. Whereas ‘moderate’ is a stand-in for ‘fair-weather practicing’ Muslim, which carries significantly more epistemic import. The moderate subgroup's failure or unwillingness to comply doctrinally — to the degree that the devout, Islamist and Jihadist subgroups are ready to — includes everything from weakness of will, to interpretive or hermeneutical or doxastic sloppiness, but also to some non-sloppy disagreements over how to solve enduring puzzles in the Philosophy Of Religion. Those intra-theological disputes cover contents in monotheistic as well as non-monotheistic religions.
In the event that some of those moderates — Muslim or other — are on to something with their meta-level takes on religion, my saying “failure to comply doctrinally” is just me stacking the deck against them. I'm not overly worried about this being the case, but I don't rule it out entirely, so it's worth a mention. Filed under throw a dog a bone.
The devout subgroup should be called ‘merely devout’ or ‘nonviolent but devout’ as it unquestionably dovetails with the last two (worst ranked) subgroups.
And I would hope that the makeup of, and threat posed by, the remaining two is self-explanatory and needs no elaboration.
Islamo-Hybridism
For certain Muslims, there are no clear boundaries carving out the subgroups through which my proposed directional moral continuum is meant to operate. A random Muslim might think or behave like a devout adherer during the month of Ramadan, or in the days and weeks and months approaching that holiest of months. The same Muslim slips out of devoutness and into the galls of moderateness, and does so seamlessly. His gradual shift to moderation unfolds the further removed the calendar is from precious Ramadan. The pattern turns entrenched, playing out on a yearly basis in seesaw fashion, but remains unnoticeable to local observers, and indeed, even to the faithful themselves.
To those paying attention, this type of believer cannot be tidily divided into a moderate or a devout adherer of Islam. The other three categories don’t fit either; each of them are off the mark even further.
Is
this type of believer unique? Let’s table that for now and ask: Must this
believer go without a prefix, or without an explicit moniker altogether? Neither. I submit
that this believer should be thought of as a hybrid Muslim.
Hybridists
rarely see themselves for what they are. They have a terrible time noticing
that they are wildly flexible here
and doggedly inflexible there,
cross-denominational here and
singularly denominational there, universalistic
here and particularistic there. My armchair psychological
explanation for the tidal-waves of dissonance hones in on people who are brought
up in religious households, taking note of how such an upbringing leaves an
imprint and sees them recall feeling proud of their faith as kids. Viscerally
proud. As adults, it occurs to them that their early pride no longer comes effortlessly,
and this stings a bit. It stings that much more when the pride plummets wholeheartedly. Why would it plummet? No one warned them that it would. To resuscitate the
faith-derived esteem they were trained to feel, or simply organically felt as kids and youths, they
hybridize their faith.
To
hybridize is not to moderate. Rather,
it is to swing back and forth between two or more points along the faith’s
axis. Any points.
What’s at stake, motivationally speaking, doesn’t have to reduce to pride or to any similarly positive feelings. People may also guard against the destabilization of a once stable self-schema,
which at its core can be prideful, humble, self-belittling, or worse. The older
a person gets, the more outmoded their earlier self-conception becomes. Many
are implicitly or explicitly rattled by this, but devour enough social
science and philosophy exposing the indeterminacy of irreducible personal identity,
and the wobbliness or falseness of your idealized self-schema is unlikely to be so bothersome (even
on the first-person level).
But few are aware of — let alone engaged with — such texts. So majorities come to be threatened by the erratic changes in beliefs, relations, obligations or projects that adulthood mercilessly thrusts upon them. With me, it was the routine of full-time employment. Since day one, I have been a fan of certain types of routines, but formal scheduled ones were always excluded from that list. To enjoy a routine, I must choose it volitionally. After somehow convincing myself that I would never stay employed full-time unless the alternative spelled poverty, I habituated my psyche to standard forty hour work weeks. I settled on it, even though the alternative was never destitution or starvation or humiliation or what have you. This was a process, starting and ending with me aged eighteen through twenty. It caused a stir; one that I no longer feel, but one I'll never forget or take lightly. That’s how important having a non-scheduled lifestyle was to me at the time, and to my fixed notion of my own personal identity. I grew out of it not because I ended up preferring full-time work, but because I got over myself and the attendant meta-analysis of my life, couched in ill-advised narrativist questions like “Is this it?” and “Where is my life going?”.
With
religious hybridists, the seesaw is less a product of the choices of atomized
individuals and is more often and more easily explained by modernistic societal
pressures. These are avowedly secular pressures. Opposite them are the tireless reformations of a
notionally fixed selfhood, constructed and protracted through belief or habit or deed, or even
ritualistic role-plays. Other religions, spiritual belief-systems and
irreligious ideologies have their share of hybridists who individually deny being
impacted by similar fluxes and inconsistencies, even though they clearly give
in to them. In reality, they are Y with a dash of X sprinkled with some Z. In their delusive minds,
they are strictly Y. The box stays closed and unsoiled, their imagination reassuringly whispers to them.
This
post focuses on Muslims because their chosen or semi-chosen (socially mandated
or mediated) hybridity is less pardonable, given the streamlined and
relatively coherent structure of their holy texts. It’s also about Muslims
because of the dastardly events taking place in
Lifelong submission and gleeful obedience to Allah are considered to be the utmost virtues one cultivates in life, according to Islamized Divine Law. This type of conviction is bound to make a splash dispositionally. With virtually all of the ideologically-heated non-Muslims I’m familiar with, there is
no core text that is understood to be as action-guiding, morally motivating, and even
psychologically motivating, and that proffers as many unambiguous directives that
should, if absorbed honestly, close followers off to hybridity. Anyone’s scriptural
interpretations could be mistaken, as could mine when it comes
to the Qur'an. If you feel certain of that, you are welcome to explore it with me in
the comments.
For an example of a public figure who captures hybridity on this front, or used to anyway, consider Maajid Nawaz. He is well past any transformation stage now, but he underwent a prolonged hybrid phase in his radicalized days. In the 2010s, his post-hybrid thinking culminated in an out-and-out embrace of secularism, but there’s no need to tell the happier part of the story in detail. I’ll outline the early days, much of it from 2001 to 2006, which is the period that saw him serving time in an Egyptian prison for his repeated incitements to violence and appetite for Arabic revanchism. Actually, rather than relay a detailed account of that period, I’ll direct you to his own words. Get to know the guy’s story and you’ll see that Islamic hybridity wasn’t stagnant in his case; it clawed in a progressively moral direction from Islamism to devoutness, to moderateness, to nominal appreciation of the faith. Maajid eventually settled on being a Cultural Muslim. I suspect, as many do, that he went no further in an attempt to have his anti-extremist messaging be all the more palpable to the non-Cultural Muslims who might be willing to listen (all the more closely) to a speaker who is their brethren, even if in name only.
I don’t know if this is the best example of a public figure who held wobbly and even contradictory views on Islam over such a lengthy period, because, as I said, the Maajid memoir has a clear-cut progression woven to it, and so eclipses the predictable seesaw that’s probably more common with the majority of hybrid Muslims. I’m trying to think of another public figure who espouses a belief in Islam to one or another degree, and is similarly inconsistent in thought or word or deed. I appear to be drawing blanks. This does not show that there are no inconsistent Muslims in the public eye; it suggests that too few Muslims have been upfront and autobiographical in the way Maajid has. We have no access to what’s behind closed doors, for those who take the non-upfront privacy-friendly path.
Returning
to the moderate-and-devout seesaw case; the seamlessness of religious flexibility
doesn’t imply that religious hybridists are morally unanalyzable, even when the
outsider’s moral scrutiny takes aim exclusively at their faith, all-too-hybrid though
it is. What it does show is that every individual Muslim who operates like this
cannot easily be lumped into “least worst” versus “runner-up to the least
worst” moral categories sketched out above.
So
we have to adjust the picture:
Cultural
Muslims > Moderate Muslims > Devout Muslims > Islamists > Jihadists
Hybrid
Muslims 1 >< Hybrid Muslims 2 >< Hybrid Muslims 3 >< Hybrid
Muslims 4
For
those at home in the newly added row, the moral continuum of the first row is hardly
precise enough to be up to the task of designating and figuring everything out morally.
It’s worth reiterating that imperfect rigor across the rows does not imply that
the non-Muslim outsider is groundless in judging, say, the Islamist-to-Jihadist
seesaw case as being morally inferior to the cultural-to-moderate seesaw case. Those
moral judgments are appropriate and remain unscathed. The two rows are only meant
to illustrate the moral-procedural limits of ranking delineated Muslims simpliciter. Usually when you see ‘simpliciter’ invoked at any stage in these discussions,
it’s done to emphasize the absence of categorization and to scold the
critical outsider’s indulgences in various attribution biases (i.e. group attribution
error). But here the categories are themselves subject to a worrying
simpliciter. The overeager judgmental outsider errs when omitting to take, or
refusing to take, the inter-row limitations into account.
It
should nonetheless be recognized that, for an undisclosed percent of the
world’s Muslim population, there really are clear boundaries between the five
strands of ‘Muslim’ laid bare in the first row. What’s more, the dividing lines
must apply to some, or many, of these adherers across their entire adult-lifespan. These are the individuals the
moral continuum actually targets. It is no good to complain about the judgy continuum
when you’re talking to someone who understands that some (or many) Muslims
cannot be seated in the first row’s neatly delineated spots. Hanging on it begs
the question; what about those who can?
What’s
the total number of individual Muslims who do
belong to the first row? Unclear. Grant this much and the total number of individual
Muslims belonging to the second row is likewise unclear. If I were in the
business of steelmanning “Muslim Apologetics”, this is what I’d make endless
hay of. Nothing else, and certainly not the alleged fact that “The vast majority of Muslims worldwide are
kindhearted, open-minded, tolerant, West-loving, politically pluralistic people
who just want to live in peace with disbelievers/kaffirs”. The sane,
respectable defense coldly brings attention to the undeniable fact that
oft-ignored but important stats tallying hybrid and non-hybrid Muslim individuals
are disclosed absolutely nowhere. And that they haven’t been disclosed anywhere
because they are unknown.
They’re
not unknowable, but they are unknown at this time. These gaps carry moral
implications that (vocal) Western chauvinists and nativists roundly ignore. Even
some otherwise stellar critics of Islam have issues with admitting an inability
to make these empirical tallies, opting instead to posture their way into undue
knowledge of them. For instance, if the cultural-to-moderate seesaw count
swamps the moderate-to-devout seesaw count, and if the moderate-to-devout
seesaw count swamps the devout-to-Islamist seesaw count, then anxieties
surrounding “Muslim hoards overtaking
Western Nation X” are at least somewhat overblown. The easiest workaround
to this, for those motivated to work around it, is a plain dismissal of the
seesaw effect in general and a stubborn commitment to viewing every Muslim as
someone to situate into the five moral boxes. The cruder the commentator, the
fewer options they’ll present to their audiences, and/or posit privately to
themselves, as possible boxes that Muslims can occupy in the first place.
I
don’t know of anyone who reduces the number of boxes all the way down to One, but Pamela Gellar sure does flirt with
it. A number of co-critics named here
indulge the same mindset. This crowd is nowhere near ready to follow along to
the hybrid vs. non-hybrid concerns raised here. And though not in the same
company as Gellar and pals, Ayaan Hirsi Ali circa 2020 also merits a nod, as
she’s willing to vote “Orange Man Better” and urges all lovers of Western Civ
to do the same, stopping a hair-trigger short of calling it a litmus test.
Because the alternative ticket, the Biden/Harris ticket, is unprepared or
unable to keep us safe from the ruinous
inclusivity championed by larger and larger segments of Team Blue, according to Ayaan.
The
hasty under-categorization that follows from the inability or unwillingness to
reckon with our lacking knowledge of the hybrid vs. non-hybrid counts, is spotted
most easily in debates over immigration. I was about to write “restrictivists argue” and won’t because
that term would be misleading in this context. When it comes to Muslims
emigrating westward, the restrictivists of pre-2015 are no more. We now contend
with unswerving abolitionists. I know this because I continue to favor a loose
restrictivism, notably for countries that have done their share in shouldering
the burden of the 2015 migrant crisis, and especially for those that went
beyond the call of duty, like
If
I were to guess, I would go with “45% of
the world’s Muslims are marked by clear boundaries over their adult-lifespan”.
So with a gun to my head, I say that just under half of the adult Muslim population can be
situated in the ordinal five-grouped register. This however is an uneducated
guess. If someone knows how we might go about making an educated one, or how first-rate statisticians might go about doing it, do share
it.
With
all that said: Is this a defensible moral continuum? Would it prompt familiar “You are negatively judging a religion with
1.8 billion people, so you are bigoted” non-rejoinders?
I
have no idea what the mass public response would be, but I think the continuum is
justified once the caveats are in place such that it’s not susceptible to
overuse/abuse.
No?
How’s this for a general rule:
Cultural
Christian > Moderate Christian > Devout Christian > Theocratic
Christian
I
doubt any disbelieving reader would find fault with this moral ranking. The
same cautionary rules observant of hybrid vs. non-hybrid facts and estimates
would apply to the Christians, just as they do with Muslims.
If we suppose that the two faiths are non-identical (scripturally or temporally) in their hostility to secularism and pluralism or any other ‘Open Society’ norms, with Islam lagging behind (for reasons we can probe later), then the ex-Muslim can be roughly equivalent to the cultural Christian, the cultural Muslim to the moderate Christian, the moderate Muslim to the devout Christian, and the devout Muslim to the overzealous theocratic Christian.
I say this is workable.
It's not an example of an Out-group Homogeneity
Effect, because the perceiver and ranker understands the out-group to
be a large tent. Followers of the Islamic (or Christian) faith are judged as
individuals first and foremost whenever access to the relevant information
about them as individuals makes such judgments possible. But under some conditions, whenever informational supplies run low, heuristics have to be applied
and non-individuated judgments of people carrying out harmful acts in a
grouped effort kick in. This holds when the group-derived harm is brought about directly as well as indirectly.
The
ranker can blankly condemn the nineteen al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists who
orchestrated and participated in the 9/11 attacks. Each hijacker can be treated
as “just as bad as” the other eighteen for the actions they carried out on that day. But turning to their moral
scores as individuals, how should
they have been judged in the aftermath, on September 12th or 13th
or 14th? I believe they should have been judged identically as well,
because their individual backgrounds were still not known, certainly to the
public, at that stage. All we knew about them is that they were responsible for
the attacks. The more we learn about the history of each terrorist, the less
justified we are in believing that one successful Jihadist who murdered
2,977 civilians on 9/11 is identically abhorrent as the other eighteen
successful Jihadists who murdered 2,977 civilians on 9/11.
This
point doesn't rest on any variation in degrees to which one hijacker ends
up being more instrumental in pulling off the attack compared to their co-hijackers.
Even if eighteen of them are backseat-drivers who do little more than provide threat insurance by way of armaments displays, they are equally implicated on the act
front. As terrorists, the hijackers could act in literal unison from the
first step to the last, and their respective backgrounds, assuming they are
robustly dissimilar, would suffice in rendering some of them perfectly culpable or unforgivable, and others less so and closer to excusable. Since far-reaching minutia of their backgrounds is never known, I spare myself the trouble and condemn them evenly. But I also advertise that this should be done in the name of practical moral reasoning, once theoretical moral reasoning reaches its limits.
And what of all the
nonreligious, secular-friendly moral contributions at the hands of the
religious?
That’s simple: If you know about it, you include it in the moral tabulation. If you are merely speculating, nothing changes. A theocratic Christian might be a philanthropist who never goes public with their philanthropy; whose donations reduce harm and produce heaps of unalloyed intrinsic goods. The same can be said of an Islamist or a Jihadist. It’s unlikely, but not impossible. This beneficence, when it is truly without drawbacks, should be morally admissible no matter how odious the donor is the rest of the time or every time we catch a glimpse of his inner-character and quality of will. The leftovers must count.
Consider:
Verbal Sexual Harassers > Sexual Offenders > Rapists
Who is prepared to argue that this rank-order is indefensible because rape is a single act? The rapist might have an otherwise deep moral life that precedes or follows their offenses. The rapist is potentially a self-sacrificing, marginal utility down-leveling philanthropist in private. And? Moral analysts in practice are unjustified in omitting the possibility? Absolutely not; analysts and ordinary people alike are justified in operating as if the outlier is rare, because it is rare; the philanthropist is rare. The highly impactful philanthropist is even rarer. With that out of the way, we assume nothing else of the rapist, other than our having obtained hard evidence that the accused is guilty of having raped someone. We would also not assume anything else, extraordinarily good or bad, when it comes to the non-raping vocal harasser and the non-raping physical offender, as individuals.
But once there’s actual evidence of the rapist’s philanthropy — or the vocal harasser's, or the physical offender's — it would be asinine to discount their positive contributions as genuinely moral contributions; to have none of their provably good deeds accrue to them as persons qua persons, on account of them also having committed extremely immoral acts and act-types in the past.
This intrapersonal offsetting between good and bad deeds, or between highly beneficent and unspeakably monstrous acts, is a lot more complex than the above gloss of it lets on. A comprehensive defense of moral offsetting is beyond the scope of this post (now dated 2020-11-29, just doing the finishing touches), but its breadth does cover all moral agents, meaning it must include Islamists and Jihadists. A moral theory that permits or encourages moral offsetting but insists on excluding some moral agents, construed here as reflective deliberators, from its free-wheeling quantification of offsets — weighing acts, intentions, quality of will, etc... across a lifetime — is a theory that loses the moral plot on pain of incoherence.
When dealing in offsetting, there are no parameters; no irreversible moral disqualifications of anyone in principle. If you are a psychopath who creates a literal hell for kicks and giggles, you can be morally absolved by destroying or preventing the existence of two or more hells, presumably after consuming a pill that cures you of your psychopathy. To be sure, you would only be fully absolved if the hell-destroying or hell-preventing acts you've performed come at a great personal cost to you, and, arguably, if the occupants of the hell you chose to create while in the throws of psychopathy have been dislodged from it by your game-saving rebound. Assuming you are only able to destroy one hell per day, you wouldn't be fully absolved by flipping a coin in deciding which hell to destroy first; the one you're responsible for or one of the other ones you had no hand in creating. You would know to start with the hell you made. Just as individuals aren't fungible in the abstract, neither are the individual victims and persons you've wronged. Denying the moral force of the doing/allowing distinction doesn't lead to a nullification of individuation and basic desert.
Update: About the Poll, the answer I explore and ultimately side with is "A: Agree". All this stuff about information over a lifetime and offsetting towards the end has to do with "E: Indecisive" presenting a strong alternative to A.
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