To live, it seems, is to devour the young.

Saturn devours his son in this painting by Francisco Goya. It depicts the Greek myth of the god, who, fearing that his children would supplant him, ate each one upon their birth.

Although a liberal, I for one do believe that abortion is, as a friend of mine recently put it, “baby murdering,” or to be more precise, the killing of a potential human life. Nevertheless, I support the legality of abortion in the belief that from death comes life.

As it happens, it would seem both the pro- and anti-abortion camps seem to agree with this principle of “from death comes life.” Where they disagree is on the question of who is dying, who is living, and in what ways.

Conservatives say that society exists for its children, and that a woman should be willing to expend her career and even her life if necessary. After all, this is what we are called to do as biological beings and children of God.

Liberals, however, point out that a society which exists only to breed is not much of a society at all. There are issues of aspirations and happiness for adults in general and women in particular that have been overlooked for far too long in history. After all, a civilization in which half the species is consigned to the bedchamber is losing out on half its potential to produce the artists and intellectuals who raise the human being above the animal.

So you can see why the two camps are at loggerheads — conservatives focus on the future, liberals on the present; conservatives focus on the general species, liberals on the individual creature; conservatives call for self-sacrifice, liberals call for self-fulfillment.

The Super-Tribe and the City of Gods: Post-Human Christianity and Primitive Islam — the Real Clash of Civilizations?

Is the real clash of civilizations not really about civilization at all, but the past and future?

Since the World Wars, our species has been repeatedly confronted with the horrible visage of our increasingly godlike power. It grins at all of us from behind the emaciated ribs of starved Jews, Cambodians, and Darfurians, with the glare of Hiroshima shimmering across its jagged teeth. Now, what began as a severe crisis of faith in the Europe of the 1920s and 40s has quickly rippled out to encompass every culture and civilization, whether they realize it or not. Confucian and Buddhist peoples have laicized with shocking zeal, not to mention Jews, while Christianity and Hinduism have become hypercapitalist and contradict themselves. Mindbogglingly, all this has happened in the name of progress, virtue, and, most ironically of all, “family values” and cultural self-defense.

Let down as it has been by modernization and globalization, and severely betrayed by its own leadership, few in or out of the Muslim community would dispute that Islam has been particularly hit hard by the ever-expanding spiritual abyss. After all, is not most of the Third World Muslim? And in the few countries where Muslims have been able to prosper somewhat, it has either been in a position of dependency vis-à-vis the West (and now China), such as the bloated rentier states of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia; via dehumanizing authoritarianism, as in Egypt, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, and Malaysia; or in the form of a stuttering ascendancy fraught with ethnic strife, as in the fractious republics of Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Indonesia. If it is true that Islam has “bloody borders,” this condition is at least as much a result of the seepage of vitality from Islamic principles, like blood from a slit vein, as it is due to Muslims’ persistent failure to co-exist with kafirs.

I’m no fan of Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahab but he did have a crucial insight, namely, that the most important concept of Islam is tawhid توحيد (unity). Could it not be that in a sense Islam may point toward our species’ animal past while Christianity may point toward our post-human future? Existence for our primitive tribal ancestors was experienced as a unitary whole in which sacred and secular were one, the same, and visceral. But for sedentarized homo sapiens, existence is an experience filtered through instrumental consciousness, cookie-cut into categories and concepts. Hence the reason why Islam, the marauding super-tribe, and Christianity, the staid city of man-deities, have been historic rivals.

Could it be that as our species barrels toward a future so inundated with technology that not only the body but the very soul could become genetically alterable, the image of the resurrected Christ—more human than human—begins to seems very prophetic, and Islam, for all its brutality, may actually be calling us to remember where we came from and that we should be careful about lunging so quickly toward the Kingdom of Heaven?

The Lagrangian point

Without a doubt, I’m now deep within that hurried phase of every Master’s thesis, the fifth Lagrangian point between research and preparation, and submission and defense, during which the questing student spends his days furiously typing the ever-more monstrous essay, and his nights speed-reading the books he should have read months ago.

Once completed, submitted, and graded, I will be posting a PDF version of my thesis paper in a specially dedicated webpage which you may preview by clicking on the above picture.

Also, I’ve been trying to find a server to store my interview with Mr. Grady. The *.wav files are enormous. I may have to resort to a *.wav editor to shorten them into excerpts. So, stay tuned.

In the meantime, I’d like to call everyone’s attention Everyone Has Human Rights Awards‘ human rights media contest. Also, check out this blurb about CyberChaikhana for Transitions Online’s June 2008 issue of Open Society Education News.