IMPOSSIBLE HISTORIES
[ given the de rigueur stereotyped views of the Arab and Muslim world that dominate here, it's not exactly surprising that the locals eat up Lewis and sneer at Said. That's life. Personally, I find it a bit ironic that Lewis allegedly derives his gross generalizations from Turkey, the most secular of Arab/Muslim states, or maybe "modern" means late Ottoman in his world view. Doesn't much matter, in the "marketplace of ideas", Lewis has got a sellable product, regardless of whether or not it's actually backed up by any real research. ]
Source: Harper's Magazine, Jul2002, Vol. 305 Issue 1826, p69, 6p
Author(s): Said, Edward W.
Why the many Islams cannot be simplified
Discussed in this essay:
Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong. Modern Library, 2000. 222 pages. $19.95.
What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis. Oxford University Press, 2002. 180 pages. $23.
I met a Danish journalist in New York a month after the terrible attacks. "I am so sorry I didn't have a chance to read the Koran before I came to see you," she said, "but you know it was sold out in Copenhagen." I failed to see the reason for her rather strange apology. "I wanted to read it to understand," she immediately explained, which led me to ask her what exactly it was that she wanted to understand. "Islam," she said ruefully. "I wanted to understand Islam before I came to New York to interview you about the events of September."
This was the first time it had been explicitly suggested to me that my comments about 9/11 would be illuminated not by whether they made sense but by whether or not my questioner had read Islam's holy book. During the post-September crisis, I had been inundated with requests for interviews or written contributions by every U.S. newspaper and TV channel of note. I had refused to appear or be interviewed in the United States because it seemed obvious to me that I was called on because of some subliminal expertise I was supposed to have about Islamic terrorism, even though I have spent the last fifty years in the United States, forty of them as a professor of English and comparative literature, and have always been outspokenly secular in my views. During the present crisis, I didn't want to be tokenized or made to represent the "other" point of view, despite my long involvement as an advocate of Palestinian rights and the many books and articles I have written on cultural misunderstanding, ignorance, and misrepresentations of Arabs and Islam. What could I know about the crazed fanatics who committed suicide in the slaughter of innocents? And why indeed was there this extraordinary assumption that from my university office I had some special insight into the smoldering twin towers?
True, I was born in the Muslim world, and culturally my Christian Arab Palestinian parents grew up steeped, as every Arab was, in Muslim culture. Arabic (the language of the faith itself) was my natal language, but, I asked my Danish interlocutor by way of analogy, "If you met a Syrian coming to visit Denmark for the first time would you suggest he should prepare himself by reading the Bible, or by reading Hans Christian Andersen?" Without hesitation she answered, "Andersen, of course." I then suggested that reading great contemporary novelists from the Islamic world, writers such as Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, Jabra Jabra, or Yashar Kemal, might be more worthwhile than plowing through the Koran, since, I went on to say, you mustn't imagine that Muslims wake up in the morning, reach for their handy Koran, then go out during the rest of the day and do what it says. It's not that kind of book. Nor is there the kind of coherence in the world of Islam that makes everything that takes place in it Islamic.
As a religious idea, Islam goes back to seventh-century Arabia and to the Prophet Muhammad, God's Messenger, whose book of divine revelations is collected in the prose-poetic suras of the Koran. Having said that, however, one is only at the very beginning, and even primitive, level of what Islam is. On the purely scriptural level, along with the Koran there is first of all a vast collection of ahadith, or prophetic sayings and deeds of Muhammad, and a massive library of interpretations of those sayings. Together these constitute the Islamic gospel, which is expressly grafted on--with due respect and veneration given them--as a kind of completion of the Judaic and Christian monotheistic traditions: Muhammad is the last of the prophets, and to most Muslims he in effect closes the prophetic succession forever. As the religion grew enormously in the century after Muhammad's preaching and career, the faith spread into hundreds of different regions and cultures, from China and India in the east to Morocco in the west, to Europe in the north, and to Africa in the south. Each region and people who came under its sway developed its own kind of Islam. Thus, Islam is a world of many histories, many peoples, many languages, traditions, schools of interpretation, proliferating developments, disputations, cultures, and countries. A vast world of more than 1.2 billion people stretched out over every continent, north and south, including now the Americas, it can't adequately be apprehended or understood simply as "Islam."
The problems facing anyone attempting to say something intelligible, useful, or accurate about Islam are legion. One should therefore begin by speaking about Islams rather than Islam (as the scholar Aziz al-Azmeh does in his excellent book Islams and Modernities), and then go on to specify which kind, during which particular time, one is speaking about. In a series of profoundly compelling essays, the brilliant Muslim-Indian philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, a colleague of mine at Columbia, has sketched out the problems that have to be faced whenever one tries to define Muslim identity. What he demonstrates is that far from there being a simple one-to-one correspondence between Islam (whatever construction one may put on it) and every believing or faithful Muslim, there is on the contrary a whole set of profound conflicts at the very heart of one and the other, conflicts between absolutism and tolerance, between the doctrinaire and the liberal, between commitment and skepticism, to mention only a few; and, once we add matters of language, culture, history, politics, community, and school of interpretation in all the various parts of the world, the question of Islam and Muslims becomes virtually unapproachable from any simple or summary point of view.
The point I am trying to make is that on intellectual and historical grounds, Islam is not properly a subject at all but (at best) a series of interpretations that are so divergent in nearly every case as to make a mockery of the enterprise conceived of by the interpreter as one monolithic whole called "Islam." The most ironic thing of all is that only fundamentalists and anti-fundamentalists agree that what they are discussing is the single object they both call "Islam." For anyone with any clarity of thought and common-sense ideas about the complexity and variety of concrete human experience, it is much more sensible to try to talk about different kinds of Islam, at different moments, for different people, in different fields, such as thirteenth-century Arab-Muslim philosophers of history, or eleventh-century Islamic-Andalusian architecture, or eighteenth-century Yemeni religious controversy, or political, economic, cultural, and religious developments in one or another Islamic country, though specifying how "Islamic" a country or group is requires laborious effort to begin with.
Once one gets a tiny step beyond the core beliefs (since even those are very hard to reduce to a simple set of doctrinal rules) and the centrality of the Koran, one has entered an astoundingly complicated world whose enormous--one might even say unthinkable--collective history alone has yet to be written. I would strongly recommend as a rudimentary but very useful beginning Tarif Khalidi's book Classical Arab Islam: The Culture and Heritage of the Golden Age (Darwin Press, 1985). Perhaps, given the hitherto strikingly unsuccessful European-language attempts, it would be better not even to try to go beyond what Khalidi does so well and so modestly. But for various ideological and even commercial reasons, handbook summaries of Islam continue to be confected, using the entirely fictitious premise that "Islam" can be discussed as if all of it hung together coherently like the Hapsburg empire, for example, or music from Bach to Beethoven, or the history of Philadelphia.
Within Islam's diversity, however, there has been a constant effort on the part of Muslims, from the Prophet's immediate successors, the caliphs, to Osama bin Laden, to try to speak on behalf of the true faith. All religions contain this babble of competitive claims. But the clamor of rival interpretations, dynasties, and cultures within the Islamic domain has, I think, vacillated between providing the various Islamic communities with heat or light, or a combination of both. It depends how one reads such works as the Koran, which you consider to be the true tradition, which aspects of the Islamic past are important, which aspects reclaimed, which rejected, and so on. In this, as I said above, Islam is like any other religion, especially Christianity and Judaism. They are all in a state of flux and contested turbulence. So Islam mustn't be treated any differently from the way Christianity and Judaism are treated, as vast complexities that are neither all-inclusive nor completely deterministic in how they affect their adherents.
One question to be kept in mind is: Why continue to try to write about Islam, per se, at all? This is especially pertinent in the United States after September 11, as millions of words have been spilled trying to characterize "Islam" in the aftermath of the terror attacks. American public discourse has been grappling most energetically with our enemies, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, the axis of evil, and so on, but not with any particularly useful results that I know of. Reflective, disinterested research on delicate matters of faith or history appears to be out of the question--and isn't what the market requires, at any rate. The context and framework of discussion and writing about Islam is too inflamed, too urgent, too locked up in questions of defense, war, the clash of civilizations (to say nothing of such equally fractious issues as American values, freedom, and righteousness, and the crusade on behalf of the "West"), for anything that could be considered an adequate understanding of Islam's huge complexity and its basic resistance to reductive formulas. That obviously doesn't mean that writers will not try, or will not attempt syntheses that answer the need for quick pseudo-understanding, of the sort my befuddled Danish journalist was looking for. But it helps a great deal to know that such an embattled context as ours now is, rather than "Islam" itself, has ended up determining the kind of account of Islam that we're going to get.
The history of trying to come to terms with this somewhat fictionalized (or at least constructed) Islam in Europe and later in the United States has always been marked by crisis and conflict, rather than by calm, mutual exchange. There is the added factor now of commercial publishing, ever on the lookout for a quick bestseller by some adept expert that will tell us all we need to know about Islam, its problems, dangers, and prospects. In my book Orientalism, I argued that the original reason for European attempts to deal with Islam as if it were one giant entity was polemical--that is, Islam was considered a threat to Christian Europe and had to be fixed ideologically, the way Dante fixes Muhammad in one of the lower circles of hell. Later, as the European empires developed over time, knowledge of Islam was associated with control, with power, with the need to understand the "mind" and ultimate nature of a rebellious and somehow resistant culture as a way of dealing administratively with an alien being at the heart of the expanding empires, especially those of Britain and France.
During the Cold War, as the United States vied with the Soviet Union for dominance, Islam quickly became a national-security concern in America, though until the Iranian revolution (and even after it, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the United States followed a path of encouraging and actually supporting Islamic political groups, which by definition were also anti-Communist and tended to be useful in opposing radical nationalist movements supported by the Soviets. After the Cold War ended and the United States became the "world's only superpower," it soon became evident that in the search for new world-scale, outside enemies, Islam was a prime candidate, thus quickly reviving all the old religiously based cliches about violent, antimodernist, and monolithic Islam. These cliches were useful to Israel and its political and academic supporters in the United States, particularly because of the emergence of Islamic resistance movements to Israel's military occupation of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. Suddenly a rush of what appeared to be respectably expert material spouted up in the periodical press, most of it purporting to link "Islam" as a whole to such absurdly reductive passions as rage, antimodernism, anti-Americanism, antirationalism, violence, and terror. Quite unsurprisingly, when Samuel Huntington's vastly overrated article on the clash of civilizations appeared in 1993, the core of its belligerent (and dishearteningly ignorant) thesis was the battle between the "West" and "Islam" (which he sagely warned would become even more dangerous when it was allied with Confucianism).
What wasn't immediately noted at the time was how Huntington's title and theme were borrowed from a phrase in an essay, written in 1990 by an energetically self-repeating and self-winding British academic, entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Its author, Bernard Lewis, made his name forty years ago as an expert on modern Turkey, but came to the United States in the mid-seventies and was quickly drafted into service as a Cold Warrior, applying his traditional Orientalist training to larger and larger questions, which had as their immediate aim an ideological portrait of "Islam" and the Arabs that suited dominant pro-imperial and pro-Zionist strands in U.S. foreign policy. It should be noted that Orientalist learning itself was premised on the silence of the native, who was to be represented by an Occidental expert speaking ex cathedra on the native's behalf, presenting that unfortunate creature as an undeveloped, deficient, and uncivilized being who couldn't represent himself. But just as it has now become inappropriate for white scholars to speak on behalf of "Negroes," it has, since the end of classical European colonialism, stopped being fashionable or even acceptable to pontificate about the Oriental's (i.e., the Muslim's, or the Indian's, or the Japanese's) "mentality."
Except for anachronisms like Lewis. In a stream of repetitious, tartly phrased books and articles that resolutely ignored any of the recent advances of knowledge in anthropology, history, social theory, and cultural studies, he persisted in such "philological" tricks as deriving an aspect of the predilection in contemporary Arab Islam for revolutionary violence from Bedouin descriptions of a camel rising. For the reader, however, there was no surprise, no discovery to be made from anything Lewis wrote, since it all added up in his view to confirmations of the Islamic tendency to violence, anger, antimodernism, as well as Islam's (and especially the Arabs') closed-mindedness, its fondness for slavery, Muslims' inability to be concerned with anything but themselves, and the like. From his perch at Princeton (he is now retired and in his late eighties but still tirelessly pounds out polemical tracts), he seems unaffected by new ideas or insights, even though among most Middle East experts his work has been both bypassed and discredited by the many recent advances in knowledge about particular forms of Islamic experience.
With his veneer of English sophistication and perfect readiness never to doubt what he is saying, Lewis has been an appropriate participant in post-September discussion, rehashing his crude simplifications in The New Yorker and the National Review, as well as on the Charlie Rose show. His jowly presence seems to delight his interlocutors and editors, and his trenchant, if wildly unprovable, anecdotes of Islamic backwardness and antimodernism are eagerly received. His view of history is a crudely Darwinian one in which powers and cultures vie for dominance, some rising, some sinking. Lewis's notions (they are scarcely ideas) seem also to have a vague Spenglerian cast to them, but he hasn't got any of Spengler's philosophic ambition or scope. There isn't much left to what Lewis says, therefore, than that cultures can be measured in their most appallingly simplified terms (my culture is stronger--i.e., has better trains, guns, symphony orchestras--than yours). For obvious reasons, then, his last book, What Went Wrong? which was written before but published after September 11, has been faring well on the bestseller lists. It fills a need felt by many Americans: to have it confirmed for them why "Islam" attacked them so violently and so wantonly on September 11, and why what is "wrong" with Islam deserves unrelieved opprobrium and revulsion. The book's real theme, however, is what went wrong with Lewis himself.' an actual, rather than a fabricated subject.
For the book is in fact an intellectual and moral disaster, the terribly faded rasp of a pretentious academic voice, completely removed from any direct experience of Islam, rehashing and recycling tired Orientalist half (or less than half) truths. Remember that Lewis claims to be discussing all of "Islam," not just the mad militants of Afghanistan or Egypt or Iran. All of Islam. He tries to argue that it all went "wrong," as if the whole thing--people, languages, cultures--could really be pronounced upon categorically by a godlike creature who seems never to have experienced a single living human Muslim (except for a small handful of Turkish authors), as if history were a simple matter of right as defined by power, or wrong, by not having it. One can almost hear him saying, over a gin and tonic, "You know, old chap, those wogs never really got it right, did they?"
But it's really worse than that. With few exceptions, all of Lewis's footnotes and concrete sources (that is, on the rare occasion when he actually refers to something concrete that one could look up and read for oneself) are Turkish. All of them, except for a smattering of Arabic and European sources. How this allows him to imply that his descriptions have relevance, for instance, to all twenty-plus Arab countries, or to Indonesia or Pakistan or Morocco, or to the 30 million Chinese Muslims, all of them integral parts of Islam, is never discussed; and indeed, Lewis never mentions these groups as he bangs on about Islam's tendency to do this, that, or the other, backed by a tiny group of Turkish sources.
Although it is true that he protects himself at first by saying that his polemic "especially but not exclusively" concerns an area he vaguely calls the Middle East, he throws restraint to the winds in all of what follows. Announcing portentously that Muslims have "for a long time" been asking "what went wrong?" he then proceeds to tell us what they say and mean, rarely citing a single name, episode, or period except in the most general way. One would never allow an undergraduate to write so casually as he does that, during the nineteenth century, Muslims were "concerned" about the art of warfare, or that in the twentieth "it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed gone badly wrong." How he impresses nonexpert Americans with generalities that would never pass in any other field or for any other religion, country, or people is a sign of how degraded general knowledge is about the worlds of Islam, and how unscrupulously Lewis trades on that ignorance--feeds it, in fact. That any sensible reader could accept such nonsensical sentences as these (I choose them at random) defies common sense:
For the whole of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century the search for the hidden talisman ]an invention of Lewis's, this is the supposed Muslim predilection for trying to find a simple key to "Western" power] concentrated on two aspects of the West--economics and politics, or to put it differently, wealth and power.
And what proof is offered of this 200-year "search," which occupied the whole of Islam? One statement, made at the start of the nineteenth century, by the Ottoman ambassador in Paris.
Or consider this equally precise and elegant generalization:
During the 1930s, Italy and then, far more, Germany offered new ideological and political models, with the added attraction of being opposed to the Western powers. [Never mind the dangling "being opposed"--Lewis doesn't bother to tell us to whom the models were offered, in what way, and with what evidence. He trudges on anyway.] These won widespread support, and even after their military defeat in World War II, they continued to serve as unavowed models in both ideology and statecraft.
Mercifully, since they are "unavowed models," one doesn't need to offer any proof of their existence as models. Naturally Lewis offers none.
Or consider, even more sublime, this nugget, which is intended to prove that even when they translated books from European languages, the wretched Muslims didn't do it seriously or well. Note the brilliant preamble: "A translation requires a translator, and a translator has to know both languages, the language from which he is translating and the language into which he is translating." (It is difficult for me to believe that Lewis was awake when he wrote this peculiarly acute tautology--or is it only a piercingly clever truism?)
Such knowledge, strange as it may seem, was extremely rare in the Middle East until comparatively late. There were very few [sic] Muslims who knew any Christian language; it was considered unnecessary, even to some extent demeaning. For interpreters, when needed for commerce, diplomacy, or war, they relied first on refugees and renegades from Europe and then, when the supply of these dried up, on Levantines. Both groups lacked either the interest or the capacity to do literary translations into Middle-Eastern languages.
And that is it: no evidence, no names, no demonstration or concrete documentation of all these Middle Eastern and Muslim incapacities. To Lewis, what he writes about "Islam" is all so self-evident that it allows him to bypass normal conventions of intellectual discourse, including proof.
When Lewis's book was reviewed in the New York Times by no less an intellectual luminary than Yale's Paul Kennedy, there was only uncritical praise, as if to suggest that the canons of historical evidence should be suspended where "Islam" is the subject. Kennedy was particularly impressed with Lewis's assertion, in an almost totally irrelevant chapter on "Aspects of Cultural Change," that alone of all the cultures of the world Islam has taken no interest in Western music. Quite without any justification at all, Kennedy then lurched on to lament the fact that Middle Easterners had deprived themselves even of Mozart! For that indeed is what Lewis suggests (though he doesn't mention Mozart). Except for Turkey and Israel, "Western art music," he categorically states, "falls on deaf ears" in the Islamic world.
Now, as it happens, this is something I know quite a bit about, but it would take some direct experience or a moment or two of actual life in the Muslim world to realize that what Lewis says is a total falsehood, betraying the fact that he hasn't set foot in or spent any significant time in Arab countries. Several major Arab capitals have very good conservatories of Western music: Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, Amman--even Ramallah on the West Bank. These have produced literally thousands of excellent Western-style musicians who have staffed the numerous symphony orchestras and opera companies that play to sold-out auditoriums all over the Arab world. There are numerous festivals of Western music there, too, and in the case of Cairo (where I spent a great deal of my early life more than fifty years ago) they are excellent places to learn about, listen to, and see Western instrumental and vocal music performed at quite high levels of skill. The Cairo Opera House has pioneered the performance of opera in Arabic, and in fact I own a commercial CD of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro sung most competently in Arabic. I am a decent pianist and have played, studied, written about, and practiced that wonderful instrument all of my life; the significant part of my musical education was received in Cairo from Arab teachers, who first inspired a love and knowledge of Western music (and, yes, of Mozart) that has never left me. In addition, I should also mention that for the past three years I have been associated with Daniel Barenboim in sponsoring a group of young Arab and Israeli musicians to come together for three weeks in the summer to perform orchestral and chamber music under Barenboim (and in 1999 with Yo-Yo Ma) at an elevated, international level. All of the young Arabs received their training in Arab conservatories. How could Barenboim and I have staffed the West-Ostlicher Diwan workshop, as it is called, if Western music had fallen on such deaf Muslim ears? Besides, why should Lewis and Kennedy use the supposed absence of Western music as a club to beat "Islam" with anyway? Isn't there an enormously rich panoply of Islamic musics to take account of instead of indulging in this ludicrous browbeating?
I have gone into all this detail to give a sense of the unrelieved rubbish of which Lewis's book is made up. That it should fool even so otherwise alert and critical an historian as Paul Kennedy is an indication not only of how low most people's expectations are when it comes to discussions of "Islam" but of the mischievous ideological fictions that pseudo-experts like Bernard Lewis trade in, and with which they hoodwink nonexperts in the aftermath of September 11. Instead of making it possible for people to educate themselves in how complex and intertwined all cultures and religions really are, available public discourse is polluted with reductive cliches that Lewis bandies about without a trace of skepticism or rigor. The worst part of this method is that it systematically dehumanizes peoples and turns them into a collection of abstract slogans for purposes of aggressive mobilization and bellicosity. This is not at all a matter of rational understanding. The study of other cultures is a humanistic, not a strategic or security, pursuit: Lewis mutilates the effort itself and pretends to be delivering truths from on high. In fact, as even the most cursory reading of his book shows, he succeeds only in turning Muslims into an enemy people, to be regarded collectively with contempt and scorn. That this has to do neither with knowledge nor with understanding is enough to dismiss his work as a debased effort to push unsuspecting readers toward thinking of "Islam" as something to judge harshly, to dislike, and therefore to be on guard against.
Karen Armstrong is the other best-selling author tossed up by the mass anxiety so well traded on by the media in recent months. Like Lewis, she wrote her book long before the September events, but her publishers have pushed it forward as an answer to the problem of our times. I wish I could say more enthusiastically that in its modest way it is a useful book, but, alas, for too much of the time it's too humdrum for that. Yet her intentions seem decent enough. Most of the book is potted history that chronicles events since Muhammad's birth without much insight or particularly fresh knowledge. The reader would get as much out of a good encyclopedia article on "Islam" as from Armstrong, who seems to be a very industrious if not especially knowledgeable author. Her Arabic is frequently flawed ("madrasahs" for madaris, for example), her narrative often muddy, and, above all, one reads her prose without much sense of excitement. It is all very dutiful and, like Lewis's book, too frequently suggests great distance and dehumanization rather than closeness to the experience of Islam in all its tremendous variety.
Unlike Lewis, however, she is interested in concrete aspects of Islamic religious life, and there she is worth reading. Her book's most valuable section is that in which she discusses the varieties of modern fundamentalism without the usual invidious focus on Islam. And rather than seeing it only as a negative phenomenon, she has an admirable gift for understanding fundamentalism from within, as adherence to a faith that is threatened by a strong secular authoritarianism. As an almost doctrinaire secularist myself, I nevertheless found myself swayed by her sympathetic and persuasive argument in this section, and wished that instead of being hobbled by a rigid chronological approach she had allowed herself to wander among aspects of the spiritual life of Islam that, as a former nun, she has obviously found congenial.
Of course one can learn about and understand Islam, but not in general and not, as far too many of our expert authors propose, in so unsituated a way. To understand anything about human history, it is necessary to see it from the point of view of those who made it, not to treat it as a packaged commodity or as an instrument of aggression. Why should the world of Islam be any different? I would therefore suggest that one should begin with some of the copious first-person accounts of Islam available in English that describe what it means to be a Muslim, as in Muhammad Asad's extraordinary book The Road to Mecca (a gripping account of how Leopold Weiss, 1900-92, born in Lvov, became a Muslim and Pakistan's U.N. representative), or in Malcolm X's account in his memoir, or in Taha Hussein's great autobiography, The Stream of Days. The whole idea would be to open up Islam's worlds as pertaining to the living, the experienced, the connected-to-us, rather than to shut it down, rigidly codifying it and stuffing it into a box labeled "Dangerous--do not disturb."
Above all, "we" cannot goon pretending that "we" live in a world of our own; certainly, as Americans, our government is deployed literally all over the globe--militarily, politically, economically. So why do we suppose that what we say and do is neutral, when in fact it is full of consequences for the rest of the human race ? In our encounters with other cultures and religions, therefore, it would seem that the best way to proceed is not to think like governments or armies or corporations but rather to remember and act on the individual experiences that really shape our lives and those of others. To think humanistically and concretely rather than formulaically and abstractly, it is al ways best to read literature capable of dispelling the ideological fogs that so often obscure people from each other. Avoid the trots and the manuals, give a wide berth to security experts and formulators of the us-versus-them dogma, and, above all, look with the deepest suspicion on anyone who wants to tell you the real truth about Islam and terrorism, fundamentalism, militancy, fanaticism, etc. You'd have heard it all before, anyway, and even if you hadn't, you could predict its claims. Why not look for the expression of different kinds of human experience instead, and leave those great non-subjects to the experts, their think tanks, government departments, and policy intellectuals, who get us into one unsuccessful and wasteful war after the other? |
