Ghost of a flea

Where they make a desert, they call it peace

Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment (1977)* stars tactful saboteur and Flea role-model, Jorg X. McKie. Without giving away the twists and turns which make Herbert's writing so educational, the experiment of the title is a multi-generational project; a population made to forget their origins and isolated on a harsh planet where fantastic over-crowding ensues in a city straddling the only habitable river valley. Herbert loves these pressure cooker environments - Arrakis, also known as Dune, leaps to mind. His books are as much Gedankenexperiment as entertainment. The people of Dosadi are so dangerous to the universe from which they have been cut off because on Dosadi they have learned to do anything to survive. All affection, sentiment and honour have been cut out.

There is a passage which strikes me every time I read the book because every time I come across it I struggle to figure out quite what Herbert means by it. When told a faction has developed a corps of "death fanatics", McKie asks if they are "homosexual".** They are, a fact Herbert - through McKie - argues is significant.

First, what is Herbert - and by extension, my argument - not saying? Herbert is not calling "homosexuality" unnatural, he is not saying homosexuality makes a society go terminal. But he is clearly linking homosexuality with shock troops and an apparently inexplicable eagerness to die; to terminate one's own prospects of immortality through having children. On the face of it, the link is obvious given historical examples; these include Shaka's formidable Zulu war machine, Hitler's brown shirt Sturmabteilung, and the Taliban. The behaviours of these men do not fit Western notions of gay culture, confound stereotypes of effeminacy and run counter to the explicit, overt moral strictures and ideology of the causes for which these men fought. But they are excellent examples of the "homosexuality" Herbert is talking about and a link to seemingly irrational berserk behaviour.

Homosexuality represents a problem for evolutionary biology; how is it behaviours which do not result in an obvious likelihood of producing children nevertheless recur with such frequency in all human populations? Something genetic is being expressed*** which offers an adaptive value overcoming the apparent pro-creative disadvantage of preferring men to women****. Inclusive fitness is one likely answer; even if a man does not actively perpetuate his own genetic line his behaviours may so benefit his close relatives that his genes reproduce themselves anyway. Remember: The propagation of a gene-line is not a kind of apostolic succession; it is about whether specific lines of code make their way into the next model. A man freed from child-rearing may be able to devote more time to collecting resources - including status - which mean his sisters' children are all better fed, better housed, better educated, etc. and consequently more likely to pass on the family's genetic inheritance.

Another thought is that a man who screws anything - men, women, sheep, passing shrubbery - is more likely to pass on his genes and pass them on more widely even by accident than a man who does not. In evolution it is a question of whatever works. This is not about morality, it is about statistics.*****

To my point. There is a reason the urban jihadis of Amsterdam and elsewhere specifically target gay men. Islam as a memeplex and as an adaptive strategy is about access to and ownership of women and by extension the control of sexual behaviour. Any number of cults function as a means for a small, core group of men - usually around a single charismatic leader - to mate with as many women as possible while relegating the majority of men to non-breeding status. David Koresh, Mormon fundamentalists, Raelians, the SeaOrg core of Scientology, and, yes, Islam at its earliest foundations down to its most determined exponents today; the list goes on and on. We see this structure over and over again because it works, at least so long as their are neighbouring populations which can be conquered by the otherwise non-breeding males of the cult and mined as a source of slaves, concubines and the spoils these cults cannot produce for themselves. The jihadis target gay men because of the unacceptable truth their overt ideology denies in themselves. And, quite possibly, out of an unconscious recognition of the most dangerous among their enemy if Europe undergoes another phase change, enters a swarm state and carries out another apocalyptic genocide.

Those SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss, btw.

I titled this post with a quote from Tacitus: Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace." What Tacitus' British chieftain Calgacus says as a metaphor I say literally. There is a reason Israel is a technocratic utopia, a greenhouse and oasis amidst barbarism and it is not because the Jews stole what is not theirs and it is not because Arabs are incapable of creativity and industry. It is because Israel is founded on an ideology which creates and preserves and invests while its neighbours are subject to dictatorships which for all their oil-tick wealth and ransom are incapable of producing anything. No industry, no art, no science, no literature. I have come to believe Islam is a machine for making deserts. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Islam means peace.

But the jihadis are not the only death cult we face. Mark Steyn****** writes about the simultaneous demographic and cultural collapse of Europe faced with a vigorous, self-assured Islam. This stuff seems to recapitulate immigrant scares of the past; I am thinking of Know Nothing fears of 19th-century Irish immigration to the United States in particular. Protestants are chronically convinced Catholics are illegitimately having more sex, more children and more fun. But demographic trends are as ephemeral as any other trend and facts, they say, are stubborn things. They do not uniformly support Steyn's case. The Muslim diaspora may be having more children in the Dar al-Harb,at least in those parts of the diaspora where the rest of society is prepared to support the wives and children. But Steyn himself points to the immigrant populations of Maine and New Hampshire: Where there is welfare there are Muslims and where there isn't there aren't. This is not because Muslims immigrants are bad people, it is because Muslim parents are rational people. Again, this is not about morality, it is about being able to do math. The bleeding hearts among us may think it is indelicate, even offensive, to point this out and yet it remains the case. Despite the fears of anyone worried about being swamped by an army of Muslim children, in every polity where Islam becomes the dominant ideology and consequently assumes responsibility for government we see mayhem and demographic collapse. The fall of the Taliban has seen the massive repopulation of Afghanistan; there will be no Muslim horde emerging from anywhere governed by the jihadis. Our current trouble is not about a Western will to decline confronted with a vigorous believing cult. It is a head on collision between two death cults with the teachings of the Frankfurt School and Sayed Kutb in a race for the bottom.

I will say it again: This war is not an engineering problem. It will not be won on the battlefield, it cannot be won on the battlefield. This is a war of civilization against two competing nihilisms. Their nihilism, and ours.

* The Wikipedia entry is one big spoiler; I am not linking it.
** The scare quotes are to indicate this term is problematical. People read homosexual and they think gay. But being "gay" is a socially and historically contingent phenomenon. Just as the people arguing a particular kind of marriage - inevitably the kind of marriage to which they subscribe - comes down from time immemorial are mistaken so too are the people who think there is a "gay gene" for aptitude in interior design. The world is more complicated than this.
*** If not a love of camp films.
**** Please note I am talking specifically about men here; though Herbert's Fish Speaker troops from God Emperor of Dune may be an articulation of the same logic.
***** A commonplace among the socons represents one of their many forays into Darwinian thinking where they think it will score points, viz AIDS as an expression not only of divine punishment but as proof "homosexuality" is unnatural. First of all, as if there could be anything more natural than epidemic disease: Welcome to nature. Secondly, AIDS does not represent much of a problem in adaptive terms. Any disease which kills its host quickly will burn itself out. Ebola and plague are fearsome but they are not persistent. And famously, genetic conditions such as Sickle Cell Anemia may kill you in middle-age but you are far more likely to have had children - and passed on your genetic condition - than your neighbours who died of malaria in childhood. We are not likely to have a sense of the adaptive consequences of HIV until several generations have gone by, assuming anyone is still doing science by then.
****** Who frequently uses metaphors from musicals and for whom "homosexuals" are an idée fixe. Just saying.

Related: "The Semiotic Steamroller" wherein Mr. Taylor quotes Gods of the Copybook Headings in favour of Muslim immigration:

Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 22, 2008 08:27 AM

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Posted by: Chris Taylor at February 22, 2008 12:21 PM

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