I’m glad I posted Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in full. As some readers have impressed on me, it’s more interesting than the display of bigotry. It suggests that a leading Muslim sees exactly the problem with the Muslim world – its inability to adapt, its insulation from intellectual discourse, even religious discourse, its isolation from modernity and science. Through the hate and bile, this is actually somewhat encouraging, no? It suggests that some people are finally grappling with reality. One of the as-yet unexplored dimensions of the Iraq liberation is that Iraq’s long-deferred entry into the global market, the new porousness of its media, and the dynamism of its emerging market will all help expose the backwardness of other Islamic states. And that might indeed spur the move toward reform, which is our only long-term hope in the fight against Islamist terror. It may well already be occurring in Iran. These things take time. They require patience. In the short term, as Bush is discovering, they might lead to political costs. But they are infinitely better than the status quo ante, or than most of the alternatives.
“INSTANT THOUGHT”: I should really respond to Leon Wieseltier’s diatribe against blogging, voiced in the Los Angeles Times. Here’s what he said about his colleague, Gregg Easterbrook. He ascribed Gregg’s mistake as something due to
the hubris of this whole blogging enterprise. There is no such thing as instant thought, which is why reflection and editing are part of serious writing and thinking, as Gregg has now discovered.
Hubris? I think it would be hubris if one believed that somehow blogging is a superior form of writing to all others, or somehow revealing of the truth in ways that other writing isn’t. But I know of no bloggers who would argue that. It’s a different way of writing, one that acknowledges that it is imperfect and provisional and subject to revision. In that sense, it makes far fewer claims than, say, a lengthy essay published in the literary press. But, by acknowledging its limitations, it is also, I’d argue, sometimes more honest than other forms of writing, in which the writer pretends to finality, to studied perfection, to considered and re-considered nuance or argument, when he is often winging it nonetheless. Someone can say nothing in 10,000 words; and someone can also say something in ten. It simply depends on the quality of the writing. The truth is: every written word is provisional. The question is one of degree. But there is nothing less “serious” about a blogged idea just because it is blogged and not produced after fifteen edits by Cambridge University Press. As the philosopher once said, everything is true as long as it is never taken to be more than it is. Blogging is now a part of literature. And it deserves to be understood rather than simply dismissed. (By the way, there’s now an online petition to defend Easterbrook here.)
The Dish 