Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 3

The time has come again to lay off my blog and focus on other projects. As usual, however, I’ve been turning over some posts and won’t be able to rest until I get them out there at least in rough form. So here is Part 3 in my “Oh, The Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!” series.

 

Good Muslims / Bad Muslims

I’ve been wanting to post an account of a trip I once took from Belfast to the Sahara Desert via Casablanca and back again via Madrid--all in two weeks. It was a fairly hard-core trip, with no tour guide, no itinerary, and little money. During that time, strangers scammed my travel companion and me for money (with tales of U2 tickets that never appeared) and others helped us out of jams (when we got stranded on the edge of the desert).

I did not see this live in Marrakesh:

 

Although I have had other experiences in Northern Africa and the Middle East, and more intimate experiences with Muslims, that trip comes to mind whenever I run across the debate about Islam, because I would assume that most of the people I encountered on that trip were Muslim. Some treated us poorly indeed, but there is no doubt in my mind that those who helped us did so out of a sense of hospitality at least partially derived from their religion. A student named Aziz stuck with us through some tight scrapes and eventually let us crash at his place. The most common forms of Islam, like many other religions, generally encourage treating others with kindness.

I suppose the point of this post would have been that Muslims are just like anybody else, which is to say they are complicated. It should be impossible to have the debate about good Muslims versus bad Muslims without feeling dumber for it--although the times do call for that debate. Personally, I'm even uncomfortable analyzing the issue as I am now because talking about Muslims as them compared to us is othering and hard to pull off without sounding condescending.

 

Who Sticks In the Knife?

Another post I had planned springs from a personal ordeal I’ve been going through. I suddenly found myself in a big international mess due to my tax preparer doing everything wrong for a couple years. One of the ways I alleviate stress is by viewing matters through the framework of ideas, and in this case I felt like Friedrich Nietzsche (as always) and Franz Kafka were relevant.

One of the many soul-crushing aspects of international tax problems is that they take forever to sort out and the sorting is labyrinthine. Imagine if your survival depended not on running through a giant maze as in The Maze Runner, but on filling out endless forms, negotiating tax laws, paying endless bills, making frantic phone calls, and biting your fingernails. The System is coming down on you hard, according to its own secret principles, and will do so again whenever it feels like it.

You are utterly powerless.

Along the way, it occurred to me that despite the injustice of it all, no one was concerned with the morality of it: the gears of interlocking apparatuses were simply grinding away. A great deal of the modern world is like this. The totally administered society, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Marcuse, dispenses with morality in favor of impersonal systems in which no one is accountable for what is right. Each person is a functionary who need only do their job according to the rules, much like--to take a dramatic example--Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt’s face for the banality of evil.

I thought Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals might shed some light on this, but I’ll never find the time to review that right now. But I also thought of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (free here), about a man named Josef K. who wakes up one morning to find that he is on trial. He never learns his crime or how he can defend himself, but as he spends more and more time trying to satisfy the Law (previous post), his life falls apart. Eventually, he gets the death sentence and the courts send a couple goons to drag him out to a quarry and execute him with a butcher knife. Curiously, however, neither of the goons wants to do the deed, for that would be taking too much personal responsibility, and that is exactly what the systems governing us--and we when we work for them--want to avoid. They would prefer the illusion that we somehow did it to ourselves:

The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it…

Hopefully, I will escape the knife, but other projects demand my attention. Projects within projects within projects. . .  So for now this blog is on a slowdown.

 

 

Related posts:

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 1

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2