It’s all a matter of terminology.
The French are not banning “burkinis” but “Hijrakinis”. Not all of them really know it yet but this is what is actually happening.
Banning the veil is not banning a “headscarf” it’s banning a “Sharia Shawl”
Banning the Islamic beard is not banning “facial hair” but “Jizya Beards” or “Believer Beards”.
Banning the wearing of headgear is not banning hats, it’s banning “Submission Caps”
Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister gave voice to the iconographic dimension of attire when he defended the depiction of Marianne – herself perhaps not actually a real person but an icon in her own right – as bare-breasted and a visible face. Her face is unveiled, Valls said, because she is free. Her breast is bare because the Republic nourishes the people of France.
“Vous parlez de Marianne ! Marianne, le symbole de la République ! Elle a le sein nu parce qu’elle nourrit le peuple ! Elle n’est pas voilée, parce qu’elle est libre ! C’est ça la République ! C’est ça Marianne ! C’est ça que nous devons toujours porter !”
The relabelling from “attire” to “symbol” is relevant. It moves the taxonomic location of the item out of the “individual choice” level of analysis and into the “cultural symbolism” level.
After all. The Swastika is banned in Germany not because it’s a Hindu/Buddhist Symbol (one culture on the cultural level) but because it was adopted by the National Socialists (a different culture on the cultural level) and was not therefore a simple and ancient way of drawing a pattern with straight lines.
The Secularists forget that they are not “generic secularists” but “Christian secularists”.
If the roots of an Apple tree are cut, the fruit remains “apples”.
If the roots of a Peach tree are cut, the fruit remains “peaches”.
Cutting the roots of the trees does not make apples into peaches.
But in time neither tree will bear any fruit at all.
Multiculturalism argues that since the roots of the apple tree force the fruit to be apples, and thereby discourage the kind of diversity which would allow peaches, pears, and plums to grow equally alongside — even after Affirmative Action Laws passed by the insects living on the tree-trunk mandated it — over the objections of the leaves, by the way, that it became obvious the way to the Ultimate Harmony of Diversity was to poison the roots. To deracinate the tree.
Trees, once free of their dictatorial roots sunk as they were into some long-forgotten historical ground, could then be home to a Veritable Rainbow of All Possible Fruits. True Diversity at last.
And if the relabelling, the use of terms which appear to shift the level from “individual” to “culture” and by so doing bring into consciousness the possibility of “cultural displacement” produces unease and dismay – if this relabelling generates anxiety – then this response itself is confirmation of at least the subconscious awareness of the existence of these levels.
Responses which systematically exclude relevant levels, perspectives, and dimensions are known examples of “systematically distorted communication”.
This term was introduced by Habermas in his analysis of political propaganda. Noam Chomsky makes note of this approach in his work on “manufacturing consent”. George Lakoff calls it “reframing”. Stage magicians and pickpockets call it “misdirection”.
Related forms are ‘trigger warnings’ and the many categories of ‘hate speech’.
When a culture has lost its icons it has lost its symbolic connection to its own history. To deracinate the icons and make them mere “personal fashion choices” or expressions of “individual preference” is to forget the cultural ground in which these very ideas — the idea of “personal choice” and “individual preference – are grounded. Our iconography is a daily reminder of our commitment to these values. Other icons depict other values and other commitments.
If all we see is “personal choice” and if we cannot see or appreciate the iconography and the values that iconography symbolises then we are deracinated.
Our loss of cultural foundations is echoed in our growing fascination with finding our biological roots. Those of us who have no icons to use to tell us about our roots instead have the option of having DNA tests to find out what percentage of our genome belongs to what racial group. That this should be taking place in a population of people more and more inundated with the ideology of “self-identification” a certain irony is obvious.
Some cultures naturally die out. Others evolve gradually. Still others are subjected to assaults from without and treachery from within. Such assaults are best understood as cultural genocide. Assaults from without have been seen in Palmyra, Bamiyam, Timbuktu, and
A culture which forgets its icons and has lost its iconography is deracinated. Deracinated cultures are dying cultures.
When a culture’s rulers are unable or unwilling to deal with the “cultural level of discourse” with the members of that culture, when those cultures whose elites systematically engage in denying the iconographic roots of the culture even as the mass of members wish to preserve them are in danger of violent convulsion.
Here endeth the lesson.
Unjustified Margins 