Reification

Although the proximate subject of this post is Andrew McCarthy's article "Imagining Islam" in NRO, the impediment to understanding posed by the lazy habit of attributing personality (see this post) to abstractions is not confined to Islam. It is another of the logical fallacies that have hollowed out modern political discourse

There is a nuanced difference, but for my purposes the term "reification" includes the belief that because you have hung a label on something (hypostatization) it must therefore exist. Among the more common are "human nature", "society", "community", "the government", and so on.*

McCarthy's imagined Islam is one that condemns the actions of jihadists, "an ideology so dedicated to human rights, so sternly set against savagery, that acts of terrorism were, by definition, 'un-Islamic activity'." But the one he claims is the real Islam, which is none of those things, is no less an imaginary construct.

His subject is not Islam, but rather the moral cowardice of those in his own society who seek to appease the unappeasable and, by doing so, increase the likelihood of greater aggression from a declared enemy that has been injured but not disabled - indeed has been further empowered - by an insufficiently ruthless application of the gun in gunboat diplomacy.

As I've said before, if someone - in this case the current rulers of Iran - repeatedly states that all must submit to their will or die, then they are my mortal enemies and I do not require any further justification for wishing them killed before they can carry out their threats.

I do not need to dehumanize or demonize them. They are human beings motivated by the usual mix of desires and fears, calculation and passion; but I do not care what their motives are - they pose an existential threat to all that I hold dear, and I want them gone.

All the rest of it is bull-shit.

*It occurs to me that "reification" may itself be a hypostatization. Hmm. Will have to revisit Chomsky's Language and the Mind, as I vaguely remember him resolving this conundrum.

P.S. By e-mail from Robin, I learn that the term "personification" is commonly used to describe the attribution of human characteristics to the inanimate/abstract. Damn. That complicates the linguistics even further.