Rappacini's Garden

Well, I guess this is really for Joe Katzman, 'cause Once Upon a Time, he told me to try. :)

Do you know the story? A young and handsome Tuscan medical student arrives in Padua to further his education. The highlight of his rather dismal lodgings is the view from his window-- it overlooks the strange and mysterious garden of the mad botanist, Dr. Rappacini. And also the fair Beatrice, Rappacini's daughter. As it turns out, Beatrice has been nutured and raised with poisonous plants, so that the very texture of her being is poison. Yet both Beatrice and the garden glow with health and beauty. Beatrice is not just beautiful, but terrible. Her breath slays, her touch burns, a tear or a kiss can kill.

Here is the analogy to Islam: The precepts of Islam are both poisonous and incomprehensible to western society. How can there be suicide bombers, beheadings, cruel oppression and torture of one's fellow human beings? By being raised with it. Like Beatrice Rappaccini the jihadis are steeped in poison, yet it does not harm them. Islam is only healthy for islamists.

The integrity of Islamic culture is based on kin selction and competition, like all cultures. I have said before that Islam might be described as an ESS, an evolutionarily stable strategy, (or Sir Richard's term, a CSS or culturally stable strategy). In his magnificent book, Evolution and the Theory of Games, John Maynard Smith defines an evolutionarily stable strategy.

"A strategy is a behavioral phenotype; ie, it is a specification of what any individual will do in any situation in which it may find itself. An ESS is a strategy such that if all the members of a population adopt it, no mutant strategy can invade."

But what are the particular strategies that define Islam, and armor it? Two I have considered are the concept of a religion-language, and the implementation of a slave class, in this case, women.

Amritas planted this meme seed-- what if cultures develvop both religion and language simultaneously? What if religion and language are essentially inseperable? The memes are strongly reinforced by learning languge and religion at the same developmental stage, surely a great advantage to survial in the EEA. I think this strategy is well nigh impervious to penetration. In Islam there is only one book-- children learn to read through the short suras of the Qu'ran. Arabic is the most "godly" language I have ever learned-- greetings and farewells, and the building blocks of everyday conversation, are heavily veined with references to Allah. I was interested in Amritas' description of Morman and Jehovah Witness missionaries learning arabic to proselytize, but I doubt the missonaries can gain much traction, except with the young. It is well known that the easiest time to acquire a language is under the age of seven-- for example, I can still think in French, even though I rarely use it, because I learned it very young.

Charles Johnson draws our attention to this debate on gender apartheid in Islam. From the outside, it is obvious that Islam opresses women-- but how does it become obvious from the inside? I think this an easier strategy to overcome for two reasons-- 1) the strategy is already mutating due to the osmotic pressures of western civilization, and 2) we understand it better since woman's rights are a common and fairly recent development in all Western Societies.

Of course, there is no happy ending for Rappacini's Daughter. A rival scientist concocts an antidote for her condition-- "a medicine most potent...and almost divine in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients most opposite to those..." that make up her nature. But for poor Beatrice the antidote is the deadliest poison, and she falls lifeless to the ground. "As poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death".

The tenets of a free society are just as deadly to Islam as Baglioni's antidote. That is why the jihadiis fight so hard. But the vote at the end of January is the death knell for totaliterian Islamic culture, and they know it. Viva mutation!