LucasPeri

Which are the most humane (empathetic, compassionate) Arab / Middle Eastern novels? Thought behind the question: I read a bunch of these novels last year -- my selection algorithm was to sample widely among the award-winning works from the region (Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Palestine, Jordan, among others) -- and, overall, I was very struck by the darkness and violence. (Abundant rape, murder, violence, and so forth.) In trying to figure out why the outlooks are so consistently bleak, I don’t think it’s only a matter of colonialism. For example, The Blind Owl is often ranked as the best novel to come out of Iran, which was never colonized as such, but nonetheless describes an obsessive madman who kills and dismembers his partner. In Season of Migration to the North, the colonizer -- Britain -- is described as being quite benevolent at least at the object level (granting a scholarship to the protagonist; treating him unreasonably justly during his murder trial). Men in the Sun is similarly grim while taking place in a post-colonial Arab world. Even books that are sometimes described as heartwarming (such as Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy) centrally feature rape and female oppression (that Amina is not permitted to leave the home is a core plot issue). One guess is that it is a function of award selection algorithms: gritty despair is seen as high-status and structurally celebrated. Another theory would be the period: there are lots of humane novels in the Western canon (Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot…), but those are more likely to be from the nineteenth century, whereas the Arab / Middle Eastern novelistic canon didn’t emerge until the twentieth. I’m not sure this explains it, however. In Search of Lost Time, Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Midnight's Children are all critically-acclaimed 20th century novels, close to the top of almost any list, that one would not describe as macabre. It’s possible that I just read the wrong books and got unlucky. So: which authors from the region can best be compared to Faulkner, Eliot, Fitzgerald, or Rushdie? (And if they haven't won major awards, does that indicate that the awards have a negative bias?)

We may never know the motive

In the wake of Charlie's assassination, many people are demanding that we redouble our devotion to the "free marketplace of ideas." The call seems at first glance courageous and noble. In reality, it is reckless and impractical. We had an open marketplace of ideas; the Left shot it up. Not only have extreme leftists committed violence in the marketplace of ideas; more scandalous still, mainstream left-wing voices have cheered and made light of the violence. There can be no open marketplace—of ideas or anything else—under such conditions. Marketplaces require rules, confidence, and common media of exchange. They require, in other words, order. Liberty requires order. One cannot be both free and undisciplined, for instance, or free and ignorant. We know this philosophically, and we also know it intuitively. It's why we don't let toddlers vote. What we require now is the reassertion of order. We must insist upon the acceptance of basic truths and moral goods, not as the asymptotic goal of endless debate but as the axiomatic foundation without which debate cannot occur. We must foreclose certain antisocial behaviors and suicidal ideologies. We must, to borrow a phrase from Chesterton, stop "the thought that stops thought." In practical terms, this means we must stigmatize certain evil ideas and behaviors, and we must ostracize people who insist upon them. More practically, this means that people who persist in such disorder should lose their social standing. In certain cases, they should lose their jobs. There must be consequences. With any political reform, it is wise to err on the side of caution. The offenses that merit such ostracism should be particularly egregious. A good place to begin would be with those who celebrate the murder of an innocent man.

Germany says it plans to build Europe’s most powerful military by 2039.

Name one Somali political philosopher who influenced America’s system of government.