We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us

Matt McIntosh makes some very cogent and worthwhile observations on the “Islam vs. everybody else” meme so popular these days. I’ve picked out some especially salient points below, but I urge you to go and read the whole thing.

[T]he “Muslim problem” is just a special case of the “human problem.” Human psychology is pretty constant across cultures and has remained pretty much the same throughout history, and anyone who believes for a second that Westerners are intrinsically above these sorts of shenanigans is kidding themselves. Every age and every society has always had its peculiar heresies. And there is no better way to disabuse oneself of the notion that Muslims are somehow special in their capacity for savagery than to simply study history—life through much of human history has been nasty, brutish and short, and it is only in the last few centuries that we have begun to pull ourselves out of the proverbial muck. The past century alone has witnessed enough bloody wars and shameful predations against minorities even among “civilized” nations that it renders risible the very notion that “those people” are somehow intrinsically different from us.

…[W]hile the behavior exhibited by many Muslims today is unacceptable by our civilized standards, the psychological substrate that governs these behaviors is fairly uniform across cultures. Chalking their behaviour up to some sort of essential Islamicness and viewing them as barbarians at the gates may well be gratifying to some, but isn’t helpful. Psychologically, “we” are not half so different from “them” as many of us would like to believe, and we have barbarians in our own midst. We are not monkeys anymore, but our neanderthal legacy lingers beneath the cognitive surface and can be seen poking through every now and again. It’s our system of rules (both implicit and explicit), evolved painstakingly over many centuries to co-opt and restrain our baser aspects, that makes all the difference.

…[C]asting this as Islam versus modernity works against that goal by polarizing the field, in addition to missing the point—the continual struggle between the open society and the closed encompasses all of humanity, and is lost or won within the human brain. We’re in a race to connect the rest of the world up to our level before the bin Ladens of the world can bring us back down to theirs. That was the purpose of Iraq, and no matter how one felt about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the Bush administration’s choices, we can all hope that the Iraqis will succeed, insh’allah. The future bodes ill if they don’t.