March 31, 2002
Finished Volume 3 of A History of Religious Ideas, by Mircea Eliade. Also blazed through Wittgenstein's Poker, which I didn't enjoy as much as I had hoped I would. Still reading The Metaphysical Club, which I am enjoying, and Among the Believers, which it would be hard to describe as fun, but which is a fantastic book. I can see why Islamic folks protested their protrayal by Naipaul, though. He's pretty harsh, essentially blaming Islam for the backwards nature of Islamic countries, though it's difficult to argue with his conclusions. Any time you turn away from a reality that displeases you in favor of one which you posit simply for the sake of hiding your own failures, whether it's based on a centuries-old book or science fiction, you're bound to have trouble making the factory work, or dealing with modern banking, or any of a number of other things that make wealth and help people grow. But to be fair, Naipaul does a good job of representing Islam as a most attractive (if vague) ideology to someone wishing for a return to the calm of the village before modernization. His most damning comments seem to come when he suggests that for the people of Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, civilization and wealth just somehow happen, and that they fail to grasp the causal nature of hard work, materialism, and wealth. I'm sure it's common for many people, not just in those countries, to assume that the TV just happens, that gasoline comes from gas stations, and bread from the supermarket. But it's far more frightening when people who believe such also want to destroy the mechanisms and infrastructure required in order that they might have those things, and damn the entire process on which that infrastructure was built. There's a fundamental disconnect and an ignorance that Naipaul suggests will never be righted precisely because Islam (as practiced in those countries, anyway) is so closed to the truth of science and logic and everything that has happened in the West since the Renaissance. Anyway, thought-provoking book.
Posted by schampeo at 03:33 PM