Two Kinds of People

The old adage that "there are two kinds of people" applies in many ways, concerning different issues. The two kinds I refer to here today concern first of all Westerners (and their assimilated partners in the non-West), divided into those who get the problem of Islam, and those who don't.

The latter are clearly still the majority throughout the West, though the situation isn't static: One can discern indications of a growth of the former -- a growing learning curve, but one beset by two problems:  1) an achingly glacial rate of expansion; and 2) a tendency to proceed in a framework that paradoxically inhibits, or hobbles, the progress of one's education about the horror of Islam.

But this reflects a further complication of what I have called "the problem of the problem" (where the primary problem is Islam, and the problem of it reflects Westerners grappling inadequately with that primary problem), which I've dealt with at length in many previous essays on this blog and on my former blog (The Hesperado) -- see particularly this essay -- additional wrinkles to the problem that will only clutter up what I want to examine here today, so I'll skip it.

There may be many factors differentiating these two types of people -- those who get the problem of Islam, and those who don't.  One factor often touted as relevant turns out to be based on faulty reasoning. For example, the simplistic distinction that those who don't get the problem of Islam are all "Leftists", while those who do get it are not "Leftists".  I once held this view, but over the years, I kept hitting my head against the data of countless Non-Leftists who were pretty much as myopic to the problem of Islam as any Leftist is, and eventually, on this particular subtopic, I went through that strange process called "changing my mind".

This brings me to a factor that sheds light on how these two types approach the problem differently. Their different approaches reflect two different epistemologies, what I'd like to call the Casuistic and the Axiomatic.  The ones who get the problem of Islam approach it casuistically; the ones who don't get it approach it axiomatically.

What is the casuistic approach? The word comes from the Latin for "case", and this approach proceeds on a case-by-case basis. This means that the casuistic approach is responsive to data -- not only to an existing pool of data, but also to new data.  Most problems -- particularly a complex sociopolitical problem like Islam -- do not have a static pool of data, but are dynamic, involving new data.  With this particular problem, one of the most important types of new data is, to put it bluntly, yet another Muslim (or, more often, Muslims in the plural) trying to kill us.  And this type of data is not only happening regularly and often, it is -- if you pay attention to it -- metastasizing (i.e., getting worse, both in quality and in quantity).

The casuistic approach isn't responsive to data merely in the sense of exclusively reacting to it; this approach also tries to make sense of the data and, if the data are regular, frequent, and metastasizing -- as the data concerning the problem of Islam in fact are -- the casuistic person will study more to make sense of this dynamic. As time goes along in his study, he will note different frameworks have been developed by different people providing some overall sense to this disturbing dynamic exhibited by the data.  And he will eventually realize that the different frameworks fall into one of two categories, reflecting our binary division between Casuist and Axiomatic.

Now, what is this Axiomatic approach? And how does it differ from the Casuistic approach?  The axiomatic approach brings an abstract principle, an axiom, to the table, before even assessing any data.  With this axiom in place, the axiomatic person then takes a look at the data; but if the data seems to indicate that his axiom isn't correct or needs to be adjusted, the axiomatic person won't budge.  He will try to figure out ways to explain why the data seems to be challenging the usefulness of his axiomatic framework -- ways which will leave his axiomatic framework intact (when, that is, such a kind of person does not just pretty much ignore the data, after giving lip service to its existence.)  So with these people who don't get the problem of Islam, it's not always a matter of them ignorant of the data or avoiding the data; oftentimes (especially in the social media realm of punditry and podcasting think tank "experts") it's a matter of form-fitting the data into their pre-fab axiomatic paradigms.

So, what got me to thinking about this was a headline today from Jihad Watch:

Muslim convicted of plotting jihad massacres at UN, FBI offices and NYC landmarks deported to Sudan

With the (even) more disturbing details in the story:

A Sudanese national convicted in 1996 with nine others as part a large-scale terrorism plot against the U.S.... the conspiracy headed by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman to target the United Nations, FBI offices and other New York City landmarks.

The funny thing about this ("funny" in a grimly black humor sense) is that for all of the years I've been reading about Islam since 911, I never knew about this major terror plot to mass-murder Americans in New York City in the 90s. One more datum to add to the mountain of data out there indicating the horrific proportions of this problem.  And I thought about all the Westerners (still a majority, sadly) whose view on the problem of Islam wouldn't change at all -- even after they learn about this story.  They would either just forget it 15 minutes after they read about it in the New York Times; or, if pressed, they would find a way to make its grotesquely alarming appendages fit into their box without disturbing the rigid presuppositions of their axiom that:

"the only problem is a Tiny Minority of Extremists, and meanwhile mainstream Islam is just a religion like any other, and the Vast Majority of Muslims Just Wanna Have a Sandwich".