Medieval Moderns

Behind the ‘punchline’ coded into this would-be memetic message below, there is another deeper, cultural contradiction lurking, which historians would tend to find more interesting.

There's a lot more to it than 'one man's Jihad is another man's resistance'. The flag on the left symbolises a package of attitudes and behaviours which are basically 'Medieval' or rather locked in the seventh century, whilst that on the right symbolises an alternate set, 'Modern' and locked in the twentieth century.

 

On some levels the shift could be characterised as cynical, but more often than not, there's greater interchange than subterfuge, such that the very individuals in that region who are doing this — not just those easy enough to identify as 'terrorists' — clearly exhibit a distended obsession with both the hyper-Medieval and the hyper-Modern, to the extent that they themselves would not be able to adequately account for the balance between them in what we can call their everyday mentalities. (The 9-11 pilots were textbook cases.)

 

Most westerners are so completely ensconced in fairly mundane Modern environments that they can't (or won't) pick up on this.*

 

But, out here in the beyond of the developing world, latent pre-modern, pre-global mentalities have kept bubbling away for centuries. Yet whilst I could have a stab at explaining their impact on the cultural life of a nation like Guatemala, I'd not be able to detail anything quite so stark or indeed pernicious as some of the more muddled, shape-shifting outlooks of the Medieval-Modern Middle East**.

 

Right wing polemicists in the West tend to refer to a "clash of civilisations", which is a mis-characterisation and unhelpful. What is actually happening is a kind of lumpiness in this incompletely modernised, globalised world, a broad set of irregularities rather than an outright polarity which can be easily mapped onto (useful) political positions.

 

The Israelis say the Palestinians don’t want peace and their own modern state. The truth, more intriguing, and perhaps confounding, is that they kind of only half want it.

 

* Some western academics do seem to intuit, if not accept the implications of this, and their response is typically to infantilise the Jihadi-Palestinians, which takes the edge of both aspirations, Medieval and Modern. And in doing so, they compromise their own rigour and their ethics, ending up only half wanting a peaceful resolution themselves. 

 

** e.g. by day, tireless leader of the UNRWA teachers’ union, by night, demented Hamas terror kingpin.