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LEVI-STRAUSS_BARRACKS

                                             December 6, 2021

  Kawame Anthony Appiah,
  from "The Key to All Myths",           LEVI-STRAUSS
  on Claude Lévi-Strauss's
  opinions:

    "Islam, he said, was an ideal "barrack room
    religion": its displays of aesthetic finery
    were a "veneer" over "the bigotry pervading
    Islamic moral and religious thought."  As
    for Western culture, Lévi-Strauss thought it
    had been deformed by it's medieval
    confrontation with Islam ("the West, by
    taking part in the crusades, was involved in
    opposing it and therefore came to resemble
    it") and was threatening to impose
    monocultural uniformities on a world whose
    varieties he sought to preserve.

A strange mishmash, I think, indulging in bigotry
while accusing of bigotry...

It occurs to me that those noble Christians were
traveling great distances to get corrupted by their
encounters with Islam-- it would seem that the
Christian values (acceptance? pacifism?) were long
since compromised or the Crusades wouldn't have
happened in the first place.


    The idea that opponents tend to become mirror images
    of each other came up a lot throughout the cold war,
    it was the standard left-wing commentary: the "free
    world" was drifting toward totalitarianism ostensibly
    to protect itself from those *other* totalitarians,
    Destroying itself in order to save itself.
    The abyss gazes also.




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