This strikes me as a good example of the concept of intersectionality.
Within the context of a given political structure, small expressions that in other contexts would indicate the oppression of women can seem like a powerful choice.
But the choice is for the lesser of two evils, which doesn’t seem like a real choice to me.
I think you’re missing my point. And the Ottoman’s surely pulled from the Byzantines (making them as “western” as anyone, which the Turks have long claimed, that they are indeed part of Europe and in fact were a european empire long before they moved into the middle east), but they pulled from other places as well - the Persians, the previous Islamic empires in the Mid East, and the far east. By saying “western style bureaucracy”, I mean to ground it historically in a time and place. Not all bureaucracies look the same and function the same. I think it matters that we differentiate.
I think that for many people this is about all they have.
Actually, I can totally understand that. This stuff is seriously depressing and hard to deal with. No worries. Have a kitteh hug…
It may have been here on BoingBoing, but someone opined that fundamentalism is a byproduct of/reaction to modernity. As such, it’s part of modernity. This really clicked with me, but at the same time, this cuts both ways and I wonder if Mennonites (particularly, groups therein such as the Amish), Quakers, and Haredi Judaism could be seen this way. As there’s much I admire about Quakers, “fundamentalist” is not a term I’d like to use to describe them, which leads me to wonder whether it’s fair to use the term at all (compare with “terrorist” vs. “freedom fighter”).
Anyway, along these lines (actually, that’s my assumption), there’s the book @Mindysan33 described:
Thanks, this goes on the (long) list of things to read.
Yeah, I was mentioning this thread to my wife last night and it didn’t go over well – after this happened, why in the hell should anyone give a shit about their paperwork, or banning perfume, etc.?
You got me thinking about this, and I have kooky theory that you’re more than welcome to blast out of the water. This may well be Western-style bureaucracy, but if it is, its source isn’t actually the files of the KGB or the FBI. I have a theory that this particular nascent style of bureaucracy, where every citizen is connected to a well of information and statistics about their status and function in society, doesn’t come from a particular real place and time, it’s synthetic and grounded in ideas about totalitarianism.
To use an analogy: It’s like the so-called “neutral” American accent which comes from television broadcasts, rather than a particular region. It’s almost a fabrication extracted from a sort of cultural flattening. Similarly when we talk about totalitarianism, we take a series of tropes to form the basis of our understanding, but the historical sources of these tropes aren’t well represented by those tropes. The Gestapo is a famous example of totalitarian executive power, which controlled every facet of German daily life under Hitler. Except that it’s not true. The Gestapo was never hyper-competent, and was arguably extremely inefficient. A lot of why Americans accept the myth of the Gestapo’s competence was in part to explain why our cold-war allies never resisted their fascist government. We absolved them by creating the idea that they had little agency to resist or to think for themselves. The real reasons behind German complacency in the face of Nazi atrocities and policies is a complex and separate topic, but our mythology of totalitarianism is not deeply connected to those complexities.
Similarly, we believed in the competence and the aptitude of the KGB during the Cold War to serve a different purpose: Our enemy had to be competent to justify our fear of them. Soviet Russia was certainly a threat to American and European interests, but the specter of Soviet-style totalitarianism and the crush of its bureaucracy was used to fuel popular fears of the “Evil Empire.” And with that, you have where our ideas of bureaucracy and totalitarianism stop being connected to historical realities, and become the product of fiction. Suddenly we were talking about Star Wars and the Empire, while Reagan may have not been creating an explicit allusion to the popular franchise with the phrase “Evil Empire,” the language no doubt inspired popular comparison.
Moving into the present, absent the specter of large scale entities that pose existential threats to the United States and Europe, we began to reassess our ideas about the competence of our now vanquished enemies. It seemed that in hindsight, they were bumbling fools, delaying the inevitable outcomes for their failed states. Indeed, it seemed like a good time to declare such foolish notions as “The End of History.” Who was competent, intelligent, and capable of marshaling the kinds of resources and information that these regimes had failed to? Well… us. How could we be stopped?
As technology, and specifically information technology advanced, we suddenly became capable of achieving the totalitarian visions of the past, of the kind that the Gestapo and the KGB could only have dreamed. As inefficiencies in managing the vast American population arose, we cribbed from these totalitarian ideas about bureaucracy to create more effective management of civil society. We got so good at it, that the NSA became capable, on what was essentially a whim, of surveilling all American telecommunications in a manner that was previously only dreamed of by conspiracy theorists. With the rise of entities like ISIS that aspire to the kind of hegemony enjoyed by the United States, they began to crib from us in much the way we cribbed from our fictions.
All of this is to say: We invented this style of controlling, highly individualized bureaucracy in our fiction. Everything about our science fiction revivals of past evil regimes was a reflection of outsized fears of their competence, and as these fictional concepts of totalitarianism invaded our collective consciousness, we internalized and embraced them. So out of fiction we created the modern bureaucracy we know and love today.
TL;DR: I go on a rant about how sci-fi created ISIS.
The Quakers are rather a progressive group, on the whole. Women were always a major part of the leadership, it was always rather democratic in organization, and they were at the forefront of various social justice causes, so I’m not sure that they fit in with your other examples very well. Bayard Rustin was a Quaker, and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) was a group founded by Quakers. One can be a Quaker, and not even really believe in God, or at least some branches of the quakers:
And I think that’s an important point. You’re right, but I do find the whole “paperwork” thing interesting. Maybe that makes me a bad person because it seems like I’m ignoring their reprehensible mode of operating, but I’m really not. I think understanding what they are doing and why they are doing it matters.
I think… yes. I agree with all of what you’re saying here. It totally makes sense, given the realities of the Cold War, totalitarianism, etc. The book you want that discusses how the Cold War, especially US/Soviet engagement in the Third World made the current world is probably Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War:
The big complaint about much older Cold War histories is that they only focus on the US Soviets as agents of history, but newer scholarship has focused on the Non-aligned/Third world/global south as active agents in this time.
I’d love a Sci-fi created ISIS rant. I say start a new topic about that and go for it, cause I’d love to read it!
Oh, no denial, there. I’m thinking more of their origins vis a vis the established church(es). I’m drawing parallels between Quakers and Restorationism but I’m also equating the latter with fundamentalism, which now I realize may not be accurate (at least, not all the time).
Not at all, it goes without saying.
No, I agree with you here. I should clarify that this wasn’t my reaction, but I’m not about to criticize my wife’s – what happened in April was devastating. (And that is but one such event out of many – that one just happened to hit much closer to home for us.)
I love the Nixon gif after a post about Quakers…subtle!
Yep. Nixon was a complicated man.
Apparently, I’ve posted much to much. 27% of replies! I should shut up, no? 
Why? You’re making interesting contributions.
But, the system is yelling at me!
And thanks! That actually means a lot!
No!
Alrighty then!
Restorationism? Isn’t that associated with the Disciples of Christ; who come in both conservative and liberal flavors?
I guess that’s a specific example (Restoration Movement) but Restorationism (at least, as Wikipedia describes it) seems to apply to many if not most Protestant denominations, to one degree or another (of course not all of them are fundamentalist). See also “One True Church.” (EDIT: never mind that; I guess it’s related though)
P.S. Disciples of Christ churches that I’ve visited seemed similar in tone to Methodist churches (which I grew up attending). FWIW.
How is it related, if at all to
which is also known as Theonomy?
Good heavens, I could have gone the rest of the evening without knowing about that. They sound like Falangists. EDIT: No, worse. But to answer your question it does sound to me like (a type of) restorationism.
