Concerning Some Abstractions
Extremism and Race
In essence, I consider an abstraction to be:
"a manifestation, possibly the primary manifestation, of
the-separation-of-otherness: of a lack of empathy, and
which lack results in some distinction being made between 'them'
and 'us', and thus with some living being (human or otherwise)
being assigned to some abstract category, or group, and/or
regarded as the genesis of or some representation of some posited
existing or future ideal. Often, some abstraction – some category
or some group or some ideal – is imputed to have some value,
higher/lower, in relation to some other abstraction, with the
result that some abstractions are considered to be 'worth
fighting/killing/dying for', and/or regarded as 'morally superior'
to or better than other different, or vaguely different,
abstractions, even if such difference is illusory and thus only
'in the eye of the believer'." Rejecting
Abstractions - A Personal Lesson From Extremism
There is thus a difference between an abstraction and a descriptor.
A descriptor is just a word used to describe something which already
exists and which is personally observed or is discovered, whereas an
abstraction by its nature is: a generalization; a hypothesis; a
posited thing; an assumption or assumptions about, an extrapolation
of or from some-thing; or some assumed or extrapolated ideal 'form'
of some-thing. Sometimes, abstractions are generalizations based on
some sample(s), or on some median (average) value or sets of values,
observed, sampled, or assumed.
Or expressed simply, a descriptor describes what-is as 'it' already
is, according to its φύσις (physis: its nature, its
being) and in accordance with wu-wei; whereas an abstraction denotes
what is presumed/assumed/idealized, past or present or future. A
descriptor relies on, is derived from, describes, individual knowing
and individual judgement; an abstraction relies on something
abstract, impersonal, such as some opinion/knowing/judgement of
others or some assumptions, theory, or hypothesis made by others.
In relation to human beings, abstraction involves an assigning of
individuals to some abstract category or group, and then
interpreting or judging or describing those individuals according to
the criteria posited for that category or group. This results in an
impersonal, fallacious, presumptuous, 'knowledge' concerning those
individuals, and amounts to a dehumanizing of those individuals, for
a genuine knowing of them requires a personal interaction with them
over a period of time and of necessity the use of the very
individual faculty of empathy in the immediacy-of-the-living-moment.
Thus, as a result of such a personal knowing, an individual might be
described as kind, with 'kind' being a descriptor, and neutral. As a
result of using abstractions, an individual might be described as
Caucasian, or as Muslim, with the abstraction, the category,
Caucasian or Muslim by its nature as an abstraction imputing or
conveying to others certain attributes and characteristics (of
appearance, life, personality, and so on) which may or may not apply
to the individual so described.
Also, and most importantly, all human manufactured abstractions
ignore The Cosmic Perspective - our place in the Cosmos - and thus
are a manifestation of hubris, of our arrogance, our insolence. For
we human beings are simply one fragile mortal biological life-form
on one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy in a Cosmos of
billions of galaxies; our abstractions merely the opinionated
product of our limited fallible earth-bound so-called
'intelligence', an 'intelligence', an understanding, we foolishly,
arrogantly, pridefully have a tendency to believe in, have faith in,
and exalt.
Extremist and Extremism
Are 'extremism' and 'extremist' abstractions? Personally I do not
believe that they are, since I regard those terms as but useful
descriptions of the character, the nature, of certain individuals
and of their deeds; with such character and such deeds already
having been revealed by the actions, by the life, of such
individuals.
In effect, 'extremist' and 'extremism' are not ideals, but
descriptors of what is known or revealed through observation and a
personal knowing. A function of the empathic-knowing of an
individual as that individual is.
As a result of some forty years of practical experience as an
activist, I consider that an 'extremist' is a person who tends
toward harshness, or who is harsh, or who supports/incites
harshness, in pursuit of an objective that is usually considered to
be of a political or of a religious nature. Hence, for me, extremism
is the result of such harshness as well as the principles, the
causes, the characteristics, that promote, incite, or describe the
harsh action of extremists.
Thus, and I believe quite correctly, I have described myself -
categorized myself - as an extremist, as a promoter of extremism,
both during my neo-nazi years and during my years propagating a
harsh interpretation of Islam, an interpretation which included
supporting bin Laden and the Taliban, supporting and promoting
'martyrdom operations' ('suicide attacks' by Muslims) and thus
supporting and promoting attacks on, and the killing of,
non-combatants.
Relevant questions here include the following: (1) Are racism and
the promotion of impersonal hatred immoral, bad, harsh? (2) Is the
targeting and killing of non-combatants (including women and
children) immoral, harsh? According to my criteria - the criteria of
my weltanschauung, The Numinous Way - the answer is that they are
immoral, bad; they are divisive, impersonal (unempathic), a harsh
(an extreme) manifestation of the error, the hubris, that is
the-separation-of-otherness. For what is moral is compassion, the
peace - the gentleness - of a personal shared love; what is fair,
honourable, kind; what manifests the gentility of wu-wei, what
manifests the empathic knowing of individuals in the
immediacy-of-the-moment.
In the simple sense, all individuals we do not personally know -
whom we have not interacted with personally and who thus are unknown
to us via, who are inaccessible to, our faculty of empathy - are or
should be presumed to be 'innocent', unjudged. Given the benefit of
the doubt. For that is the fair, the honourable, the empathic, the
humane, thing to do. Thus to promote impersonal goals and objectives
- abstractions such as 'suicide attacks' or the hatred and prejudice
of racism - which badly affect, harshly impinge upon, which hurt,
injure, or kill people we do not know, is assuredly wrong.
My character during my extremist years - or at least the dominant
part of my character at the time - was certainly harsh or tended
toward being harsh, since my motivation was to harshly pursue, if
necessary by violent means, some harsh impersonal goal, some harsh
impersonal objective, to engage in activities, with the aim of
trying to bring that goal, that objective into-being; with the
attainment of that goal, that objective, having immoral priority
over virtues such as personal love, personal happiness, compassion,
empathy, peace, kindness, and honour. In effect, my life - my deeds,
my behaviour, my words (spoken and written) - revealed, proved, that
I was indeed an extremist promoting extremism; that I was immoral;
that I acted unethically and that I promoted and championed and
violently strived for what was wrong.
There is thus in my case - and in the case of others like me - only
an acknowledgement of the facts and a recognition of what is moral
and what is immoral. For the criteria used are proven deeds, a
character directly revealed - individual to individual - by such
deeds, and a knowing, an acceptance, by us of what is immoral, bad,
wrong.
Race
As mentioned in FAQ About The Numinous Way dated
9/March/2012 -
" Race is a manifestation of the causal separation-of-otherness,
and thus contradicts empathy and the intuitive knowing of and
sympathy with the living other that individual empathy
provides or can make us aware of.
The notion of race separates, divides, human beings into
manufactured lifeless categories which nullify the empathic
knowing of individual human beings. Such assignment of individuals
to a posited abstract category - some assumed 'race' or sub-race -
is irrelevant, since individual human beings are or have the
potential to be unique individual human beings, so that such an
assignment, whatever the alleged reason, is a dehumanizing of
those individuals. For our humanity is expressed by an individual
and personal knowing of individuals, by a personal interaction
with others on the basis of respect, tolerance, reason, and
honour, and which personal knowledge of them renders their alleged
or assumed ethnicity or ancestry irrelevant."
A human being is an individual person who is unique or who has the
capacity to be unique, the capacity to develope their uniqueness.
Those human beings, those unique individuals, who are not personally
known to us, are because they are unknown to us - being thus unseen,
unfelt, by our sense, our faculty, of empathy - cannot, should not,
be judged by us, or be the subject of or assessed using the
assumptions made by us or presented to us by others whether in
spoken or in written form. Such is the foundation of The Numinous
Way, of the personal weltanschauung I have developed by means of
pathei-mathos, where empathy via a direct and extended personal
knowing is regarded as the only moral way to really know, to assess,
an individual, to discover their physis, their character.
Thus the alleged or assumed 'race' of a person is irrelevant;
unimportant. To assume things about someone on the basis of their
alleged or assumed 'race' is wrong, contrary to the ethic of empathy
and to the honour, the fairness, the compassion, that manifest the
knowing that empathy teaches and reveals to us. For 'race' is a
supra-personal categorization, an impersonal large-scale grouping,
in which the human faculty of empathy, and thus a direct personal
knowing of individuals, play no part.
Furthermore, 'race' - however defined - is an abstraction. An ideal
and/or a generalization, and a generalization which even
taxonomically has no relevance. Thus, even the observed physical,
physiological, genetic - the biological - characteristics which have
been said to or are alleged to differentiate one human race from
another and thus to possibly define separate human races are
irrelevant because such differentiation or definitions are by their
very nature medians, or assumptions extrapolated from limited data,
or an interpretation of data according to a hypothesis, and all of
which data are static, time-dependant, relating as they do to a
perceived or an assumed commonality existing or alleged to exist
'now' or at some static moment in time but which perceived or
assumed commonality did not necessarily exist in the past and will
probably, almost certainly, not exist in the future.
For in reality humans change, through social interaction and
migration, over millennia so that, for example, some posited
so-called 'race' said to exist now in some specific geographic
location did not exist twenty thousand years ago (probably not even
ten thousand years ago) and the peoples allegedly said to be of this
race are and always have been in flux, changing, adapting,
assimilating, being assimilated, migrating.
To define such a static 'race' there has to be assumptions made
about 'when' it allegedly came into being and about what median
values are used to determine if a specific individual 'belongs to'
such a race.
But all life - human and otherwise - changes, is subject to change,
is in flux. Life changes as it changes [1] and has
changed as it has been changed. This is the wisdom of wu-wei; of the
physis of things: of beings, of life. To make some posited category
the 'ideal' and thus to impute an importance to, and try to
preserve, such a static impermanent human-manufactured impersonal
'thing' over and above the flux of life, over and above the wu-wei
of individuals, over and above the morality of empathy, compassion,
fairness, and over and above the wu-wei of love, is wrong, inhuman,
immoral, contrary to the physis of life itself. It is hubris, an
ignorance of, or an arrogant disregarding of, The Cosmic
Perspective, and thus is a cause of suffering because it upsets the
natural balance, the natural harmony, of life.
David Myatt
March 2012
Notes
[1]
ἔστι δ᾽ ὅπη νῦν
ἔστι: τελεῖται δ᾽ ἐς τὸ πεπρωμένον:
οὔθ᾽ ὑποκαίων οὔθ᾽ ὑπολείβων
οὔτε δακρύων ἀπύρων ἱερῶν
ὀργὰς ἀτενεῖς παραθέλξει
Aesch. Ag. 67-71
What is now, came to be
As it came to be. And its ending has been ordained.
No concealed laments, no concealed libations,
No unburnt offering
Can charm away that firm resolve
Translated by DW Myatt
Acknowledgement: This text summarizes my replies to
questions submitted to me in - or which arose during - recent
correspondence with several individuals, some of whom raised
various objections to my Numinous Way, especially in relation to
the concept of 'race' and my use of terms such as 'extremist' and
'extremism'.