Book #1: Religion and State by L. Carl Brown

[Tukhachevskii]

Tukhachevskii, Thank you for your very learned comments.

All I did was quote people who really are.

But I just had the thought that very deep learning (which is good, which is just great) is not the level at which everyday practical politics operates. Its not clear to me (btw, I would guess there is a deeply learned discourse about this topic too, I just dont know much about it) if the profoundest thinkers really influence events or just understand them better and laugh bitterly every night as they go to bed.

Profound thinkers, a rare breed, often inform the zeitgeist (Hegel! [PBuH]) or have taught people who do go on to influence things; Aristotle and Alexander come to mind, or Leo Strauss’ students although I can’t personally say I’d call him profound. Of course then there are complete train wrecks like Milton Freidman who captured the (tiny) imaginations of Reagan and Thatcher. In Britain the Sociologist Anthony Giddens (whom I had liked up until that point) wrote a treatise called The Third Way. This then became New Labour intellectual property. I doubt what New Labour did with it resembles anything like what Giddens intended. Only Nietzsche (PBuH), IMHO, ever truly understood things and laughed about them too though not bitterly (and then went insane)! Then again, Professor “Sir” Lawrence Freedman, one of my former teachers and an incredibly intelligent man, ghost wrote Tony Blair’s “Doctrine of International the Community” laying down the doctrine for pre-emptive intervention/invasion (or “ethical” foreign policy)...and was awarded a knighthood for his troubles and then.... sat on the Butler Inquiry into the Iraq War fiasco! You couldn’t make this stuff up! Not many people know that either. Then again there’s one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, Martin Heidegger, and his ill-fated flirtation with Nazism. On a more prosaic note I cannot imagine politicians, who unfortunately do seem to affect events more than most people, discussing deep philosophical concepts. That is not what politicians are for. A politician, in the words of Gordon R. Dickson in Way of the Pilgrim, “is best described as one who seeks the confidence of its fellow beasts, more with words than acts, in order to be voted into a position of power over them” [p.249]. Politicians need to preach at the lowest common denominator which is why politicians never tend to say anything meaningful at all when they speak (which is why I can’t stand presidential or prime ministerial debates). For one, the nature of democracy would not allow a philosopher-king and secondly no-one would vote for someone that way inclined. Think about it. Wouldn’t you be suspicious of someone who actually had two brain cells to rub together asking you for your vote? Would you trust him (or her)?

At the level at which decision makers take decisions, it does not seem to matter that the actual history of Islam (or anything else) is much more complex than this thin book can encompass. So the big question may not be what the book covers and what it leaves out, but whether the WRITER of the book knew much more, understood deeply and then CHOSE (wisely?) to simplify in this manner; for the sake of actually having an impact on everyday decisions? as carefully/subtly crafted stylized facts? or is he really rather shallow and what you see is what you get?

Academics tend to write books for several reasons; 1) because they have to prove they are doing something; 2) and on a related point, to advertise their existence; 3) to make money (a paltry amount BTW); 4) to join in (when certain topics become hot the inevitable cottage industries tend to follow); 5) this could have been written merely as a course book for his students to discuss (more common than you’d think). Had Francis Fukuyama written The End of History (an execrable book if ever there was one) at any other time it would have been derided (and thankfully was later) instead of becoming a hit which spawned numerous copies and rebuttals by people who wanted the spotlight (yes, Academics also suffer from delusions of grandeur). When academics do try and influence the zeitgeist they do so either by writing books that use populist simplistic language or go in the opposite direction and feign profundity through the usage of over-complicated words. There are exceptions to that too. Some Academics often get commissioned by publishers to write on a topic that publisher thinks is going to make them money in some emerging market niche. Some are just the paid mouthpieces of others (i.e., John L. Esposito). In my experience the really good stuff hardly ever gets talked about or even mentioned or, if it does, then the author has usually been dead a while so the person ”discovering” them can take all the credit. People who are deeply versed and familiar with a subject, however, often do write introductory texts but also tend not to make sweeping generalisation unless they can back them up with proof. A Professor of mine once lamented that the Academy nowadays was more interested in quantity not quality (he himself has only ever written one book on South Africa but is an expert on International Politics and History!).