Fighting Fictions

I listened to a recorded interview of a group of Iraqi female refugees from the territories formerly ruled by ISIS. A twelve-year old girl among them railed against the western female reporter for the abomination of not having her body fully covered from head to toe. The child said that those who failed to accept Islam deserved whatever punishment, torture or painful death they received, and that this justice would be served up once ISIS had regained its ascendency. Among the just punishments she looked forward to witnessing: molten metal poured into the ears of those who listened to music.

Torture for listening to music? This, the will of God? Is there no evil under the sun that someone will not attribute to God, that they won’t indulge in in the name of Goodness? What sort of creatures are we humans, that there is nothing we can’t be convinced is from God?

Hearing such views brings me close to despair. If such thinking is possible, what hope is there for humankind? But I have to bring myself back from that horrified reaction, so I do what I often try to do. Assuming that this young child is similar to the child I was, and that, like I was, she is being raised among ordinary human beings, who react both thoughtfully and emotionally to their experience and environment, what could bring about such thinking? In other words, what is it in this child’s experience that might have generated such thoughts in me were I similarly exposed.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/19/714652629/we-pray-for-the-caliphate-to-return-isis-families-crowd-into-syrian-camps

What comes to my mind first is the bombing: month upon month upon year of bombing. Bombing that took countless lives and destroyed entire cities, and all the resulting death and destruction. What must it be like to come of age in a war zone, under siege and unable to defend whom and what one loves? That alone, I imagine, could cause me to hate, to hate whatever ‘other’ was sending those bombs. I think of the other things this child said, about the peace and plenty she enjoyed during the five years she lived in ISIS controlled territory. She said there was food and water for everyone, that the necessities of life were shared, and that people treated one another as equals. Now, she has none of that.

I didn’t hear much else, but I can imagine more. I consider what view this child and her family might have of the west, of the US and Canada and the European countries who are united in their desire to drive out ISIS. I imagine that among the glimpses of our world offered up by the media, and by Hollywood, wealth and consumption are among the things that stand out. Those things and a hedonistic, laissez-faire morality that can be shocking even to we who live in its midst – as I imagine it must seem to one raised to adhere strictly to fundamentalist Islamic teachings. The obesity, the over-consumption (I’m an obese, over-consumer myself, so not merely pointing a finger), the cultural images that are bursting with obscenity, graphic violence, and hate, and the luxury to focus our attention on trifles and indulgences, rather than necessities … that must all show, musn’t it? It’s easy to see how all of this could easily be made to seem evil, particularly if you’ve lived in depravation, particularly if you’re the recipient of particular teachings that call for modesty, the suppression on sensual appetites and tradition.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, hypothesizes that the fundamental distinction that elevated Sapiens above other species of Homo is our ability to create and to believe in Fictions. He says that it is the ability to share concepts and abstractions such as: religion, nationhood, money, human rights, etc. that gave us the ability to organize in previously impossible aggregations, and to order our world in ways those other hominid species couldn’t have imagined. To offer concretes examples, it is the ability to accept the shared fiction represented by colored lights and painted white lines on asphalt, to the point where we can travel half a world away, to a place we know nothing of the people, the customs or language, and yet hurtle down a highway in a metal machine at impossible speeds, and fully trust that we are in no danger from the similar vehicles, operated by strangers, that are hurlting directly at us. Or the ability to hand over objects of immense importance to us, to more strangers, in exchange for flimsy pieces of colored paper that have no inherent value whatsoever. It is the ability to completely believe in Gods, in galaxies, in dna, and in the ‘right’ to free speech, with no personal evidence of any of it. Not only that: these beliefs often survive a great deal of personal evidence and experience that refutes them. Haven’t we all experienced enough personal or professional consequences to the things we say, to recognize that freedom of speech is essentially a fiction, rather than a natural, human right?

As a child myself, I was definitely given to moralistic, good vs bad thinking. Weren’t we all? Being Black, and growing up in the US in the 50’s and 60’s, much of what I was taught, at home and community, is that White folks were bad, and never to be trusted.  While the messages from the broader society constantly taught, showed, implied, in ways bold and subtle, exactly the opposite. During my very righteous teens, much of my thinking was about how to escape the ‘brainwashing’ of the broader society so that when the revolution came, I’d be ready and able to kill White folks. I’m not joking here. In my high school years, at a very elite, establishment prep school in New England, my fellow Black students and I had very serious discussions about whether we’d be able to turn against our White classmates when things went down.  We all struggle, in one form or another, with ‘what to believe’. But I’m sure that growing up with a great deal of ‘message dissonance’ is what allows me now to shift my viewpoint toward that of ‘the other’.

So it seems to me that a very necessary next step to human evolution – if we are to survive – will be an increased ability to see through our own cherished fictions, in order to be able at least to understand the fictions of others. Historically, it seems that this is the only way that “Peace” eventually comes about. Somehow – and inexplicably, it sometimes seems to me – most Vietnamese have overcome the fear and hatred of Americans that I can’t imagine they didn’t experience, to the point that countless visiting US serviceman speak of being welcomed there. A great many South Africans have apparently overcome their previously cherished fictions about one another, to the point that White and Black coexist and progress together. It was recently documented how – 25 years after the Rwandan genocide – people live side-by-side with those who murdered their family members during the bloodbath.

But elsewhere, destructive fictions are stubbornly clung to, or are resurrected to fuel new dissatisfactions. And so Nazism is on the rise. And the religious, Confederate right in America reasserts itself, against Blacks and Jews and Gays, and those who make certain medical choices about their own bodies. And in an overcrowded detention center in Iraq, a twelve-year old girl wants molten metal poured into the ears of those who would dare listen to music.