The Mob and the Other

Given the outbreak of bedbugs across the country, you would think that the bedfellow index would be down. But no: we have found the Other again, and this time the group target is Muslims. In the 50’s it was communists among us. Thanks to the leadership provided by Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, America was treated to a witch hunt that brought down a good many otherwise respectable folks who were arbitrarily painted with the communist brush. While the red brush was not slapped on a particular ethnic group, it was enthusiastically supported by Roman Catholics who had experienced their share of suspicions by long-settled Protestants as waves of Catholic immigrants coming from all sorts of European countries and speaking all sorts of languages landed on American soil during the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century.
However, the immigrant Catholics had only a religion in common and therefore created their own churches organized by ethnicity. Poles went to their own churches; Irish went to predominantly Irish churches; and Italians went to Italian churches. Catholics dug no secret tunnels to connect those ethnic churches nor did they dig any to the Vatican.
The same human tendency that enables us to make constellations out of random stars drives our propensity to see conspiracy where there is none. Unlike the scientist, who collects vast quantities of data to test the validity a hypothesis, the all too common man can develop a certainty out of coincidence. Once the common man latches on to an idea, he runs with it beyond belief, especially if his fellow travelers or friends believe the same certainty. Doubt is for sissies. Skepticism is for Doubting Thomases.
And that is how we, as humans, have invented gods as well as constellations. True believers would personify or deify certainty in order to give it even greater power rather than trudge the slow road of the scientist who must learn to live with the fact that his hypothesis is seldom a safe bet, that today’s truth may be tomorrow’s mirage.
The truth about Muslims is that they represent even more diverse ethnicities than the Roman Catholics did. They come from all over the world, not just Europe. They speak more diverse languages and represent more varied cultures than the Protestants ever dreamt about the Catholics. If attributing conspiracy to Catholics turned out to be a herding-cats enterprise, then doing so with Muslims is as logical as counting on unanimity happening at the UN.
Religious faith conditions the mind to stop thinking. And it enables the mind to accept as truth notions that have no provable basis. After all, that is what faith is all about. Faith is a sort of blindness cloaked in the disguise of light. Darkness is a placed called Hell, a place to avoid, not an obscurity in need of intense illumination. The conspiracy-inclined mind can generalize false assumptions without evidence because evidence can contradict belief. Never doubt; just believe, and you shall carry the light. The scientific mind works inductively: it gathers facts first and then reaches a tentative conclusion, seldom a certain one. Scientists are proved wrong by discovery. True believers are right by fear-driven, self-contained, hermetically sealed belief. It is the common, everyday, Immaculate Conception. Any contradiction only detracts from the purity of thought, however wrong.
Seeing a bear in a cluster of stars poses no threat; attributing terrorist ideology to a mainstream world religion does*: it gives power to those few like Al Qaeda who would use the religion for its own evil ends by persuading the religion’s mainstream believers that they are demonized. Al Qaeda merely says to the mainstream: “See? I told you so. They are bent on destroying you, so join us in destroying them first.” That does not mean the mainstream will join them en masse, but it does invite the young and easily radicalized to join the extremists.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” said Emerson. Small minds tend toward conspiracy theory. They want to see cause and effect where coincidence lies. And they firmly believe coincidence lies, for everything is the intention of someone or something: God, if you are a religious believer: the government or the corporation, if you are not.
Let’s give Muslims the benefit of our inevitable doubt, for inevitable it will be. We got over fear of Catholics and then fear of Communists, although we have lately, thanks to fear-mongers in the Republican contingent, experienced a recrudescence of anti-socialist rhetoric aimed at that Muslim-born, foreign-born, socialist, community organizer named Barack Hussein Obama. They are trying to make him the Other. Recently, they have gained some ground in doing so, thanks to fear-driven faith of the vigilante minds that shoot first and ask questions never.
* All the religions of Abraham have outrageous pronouncements tucked away in their hallowed texts which both inspire extremists and abhor critics. That’s the problem with literal interpretation of texts of any kind, including the Christian Bible. Literal interpretations can be recipes and justifications for heinous crimes against humanity, all in the name of God.