30 June 2007

Seriously, now it's just getting silly. Do these terrorists actually have any tangible demands?

"Extremists should never be dismissed simply as evil," said the report. "Trying to engage in a competition with religious extremists over who can offer a simpler answer to complex problems will be a losing proposition every time."
- 'Towards a Common Response: New Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization', EastWest Institute.

Yeah, not evil. Jokers.

3 comments:

  1. "Trying to engage in a competition with religious extremists over who can offer a simpler answer to complex problems will be a losing proposition every time."

    Yeah, but saying "It's really much more complicated than that" doesn't amount to giving a sophisticated answer.

    Hi Douglas, I'm sorry I missed your call. If you have time, try again today.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agreed.

    I think the point being made here is that in the face of less complex representations of the world, it's counter-productive to respond by propounding a similarly simple world view; although it might be attractive to do so.

    So, when you bandy about the charge of "evil" as rhetoric, you serve to perpetuate the impoverishment of ideological discourse. Which is a part of the problem, right?

    (And I don't mean you Peter, even though you claim that Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are evil.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree with the general claim that when confronted with an overly simple view of the world it's unhelpful to respond with another simplifying picture, but then who would disagree with that?

    Where I differ is that I don't think the language of evil is necessarily an indicator of such a simple world view, in part because I think the primary purpose of the word evil is to evaluate a person's behavior, not to explain how they came to behave in that way. I think it is sometimes used as a pseudo-explanation and that's a bad thing, but a lot of concepts can be misused to give the illusion of comprehension.

    (Easy example: I can say that Jack the Ripper was evil without thinking that I have any special insight into why he committed such terrible crimes.)

    My suspicion is that the "It's really much more complicated than that crowd" are usually not objecting to simplicity as such, but rather to the particular content of the views they are criticizing.

    ReplyDelete