Getting into Their Minds IV:  Foundations 

Aristotle proclaimed a great truth about humans:  humans are born tabula rasa.  “Tabula rasa” refers to humans being born without intellectual content, or, knowledge; they obtain mental content from experience.  This is part of "human nature," with very specific needs and requirements, easily recognized as far back as Aristotle. The nature of human nature has not been lost on Islam.  Islam recognizes human nature, but it turns it onto the human in many very fundamental ways to produce that uniquely blighted human:  the Muslim. 

Everybody knows that an infant begins life with enormous mental flexibility but loses flexibility steadily until adulthood, when it is all but gone in most people.  The adult then is “set in his or her ways.”  Change always remains possible in principle, but few adults attempt it or stick with the effort.  In the West, education serves to expand the mind while keeping that mind receptive to cognition until adulthood.  Islamic “education” serves to twist then close minds before adolescence, while building impregnable refractoriness to future change in each Muslim. 

When a child is born into a Muslim household anywhere in Islamia, that child grows up to become a Muslim adult.  Few escape; fewer even try to escape.  From adolescence on, Muslims act like clones, exhibiting the same fundamental characteristics, no matter where they are in the ummah (the global “community” of Muslims).  The lack of variation and variety are staggering.  Why? 

To produce millions of “clones” from tabula rasa babies speaks to an extremely potent force.  There are obvious differences among individual Muslims, but we are focusing on the modal Muslim personality, the one so identical in multimillions of Muslims that it instantly defines the Muslim to all other humans on earth. One of the cardinal characteristics of Muslims is their closed-mindedness, their refractoriness to outside ideas and influences, and their near-universal attempts to destroy anything that runs counter to their Muslim mindset. 

A few years ago, an outstanding scholar, Dr. Raphael Patai, published The Arab Mind. While critical, he wrote from an affectionate viewpoint, based on his having lived for many decades with Arabs in the Levant.  For understanding some basic thinking [1] processes of the Arab-Islamic mind, his book cannot be beat, and it serves as excellent background for our articles.  (Dr. Patai’s book has been extensively reviewed here). 

Take a set of tabula rasa identical twins born in Islamia.  Whisk one away at birth to a Western household.  Leave the other with its Muslim parents in Islamia.  By adolescence, the Muslim considers going to Allah (death) to be his highest value in life.  The Western-raised adolescent considers life itself to be his highest value.  Most likely the Muslim will be able to verbalize his value, while the Western child takes it so for granted that he must be extensively coached to be able to verbalize his intellectual contents.  And, if this child raised in the West is confronted with the "value" of death, he will be greatly perplexed to understand it.  The Muslim, if confronted with the value of life, will spout Islamic platitudes about why valuing life over Allah (death) is improper. 

Death and life are polar opposite values for a human to hold.  The "default" for human beings is life, even if they have trouble verbalizing why.  Life has stringent requirements, if it is to be optimized, while death has none.  The Muslim has the easy job because death requires nothing.  Emotionally, the Muslim regards death as a promotion! 

Why would a tabula rasa human, growing up with a “default acceptance” that his being alive as a value, then abandon this position and seek its opposite?  Taking this person to be 16 years of age as an arbitrary “given,” what happened in those 16 years for this person to develop a complete disvaluing of life?  Noting that this particular disvaluing comes wrapped with many thoughts and values which make possible the disvaluing of life, what did this child incorporate into his mind from infancy?

PHILOSOPHICAL TASKS OF INFANCY

Obviously, no child is in any way ever a formal philosopher, and cannot introspect the workings and contents of their minds.  However, we can draw on observations, our own knowledge of the structure of human knowledge, and determine what must be learned.  Human nature is human nature, and human minds begin alike: tabula rasa.  The kinds of data that go into these blank minds makes all the difference. 

Formal philosophy recognizes fives major branches:  metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and esthetics.  In the earliest days of philosophy in Ancient Greece, the overwhelming concern of philosophers was the subject of metaphysics[2].  Other branches were considered, of course, but the fundamental nature of all of reality obsessed them.  And, every other branch they developed depended on the metaphysics they developed, as it was with the philosophers in their beginnings.  So it is with children[3]. 

Humans, fresh born, have a faculty of awareness that we name “consciousness.”  Enormous amounts of data bombard these infants through their sensory mechanisms, and these data flood their brains.  They are the material of which the infant is aware, through his or her consciousness.  Neonates can not differentiate between themselves and anything beyond themselves.  As far as anyone can tell, raw sensory data stimulate them but do not take on meaning.  Innate mechanisms trigger babies’ crying from stimuli of hunger or physical discomfort, independent of any function of the infant’s will.   

The very first psychological task of the infant thrust on him or her by Mother Nature is to distinguish himself as separate from his environment, and that is also one of his first great "metaphysical leaps."   

All the while all these stimuli bombard him, his mind develops a crucial level of organization by combining sensations into perceptions.  Percepts are clusters of sensory data which become meaningfully integrated by the infant.  A huge development occurs when the child differentiates himself from his environment, at even the most primitive level.  By doing this, he is forming the percept of “entity,” along with “out there” and “in here.”  These fundamentals will never change as fundamentals, but they will undergo continuous enrichment and refinement as he develops.  Other entities the infant soon comes to recognize include his care-givers, food and its containers, and so on. 

What the infant has done metaphysically—albeit wordlessly--is to establish the beachhead in his mind of “that is something” and “that is not me” or “that is me.”  His very first axioms (precursors to the most basic concepts and principles of existence) are fully in place at the most fundamental and primitive level:  existence, identity, and consciousness. 

It probably is impossible to separate an infant’s tasks into “the metaphysical” versus “the epistemological,” except for purposes of discussion.  Both are inextricably linked, developing each according to its nature as well as conjointly.  It is almost impossible to imagine one working without the other at this stage of life. 

Every infant  starts making something meaningful of his perceptions.  Part of that meaning involves emotional coloring.  For example, most infants under most circumstances will associate the care-giver, later usually to be known by some entity designation like “Mommy,” as a positive entity.  He cannot verbalize nor understand verbal language, but at the perceptual-emotional level, he forms very powerful impressions, which become integral to his subsconsciousness and consciousness.  Were we to put adult words to the process, we could say that the infant is developing a sense of existence, something we will call “sense of life” later in his life.  In simple emotional terms, he is determining whether something is positive for him or negative for him. 

Coexisting with this sense of reality come two powerful orientations of the infant to himself and to the world outside himself.  Almost simultaneously and certainly in a complete mixed up manner, he deals with what we can call “primacy of existence” and the “primacy of consciousness” orientations to himself and the world.  Straightening these out will occupy much of his life into adolescence, and much of the quality of his adulthood depends on how he manages these conflicting orientations. 

With primacy of existence development maturing later in life comes self-sufficiency.  However, as an infant he is helplessly dependent on others, and the only means he has of satisfying needs depends on his manipulating others on his behalf.  Initially, in the baby, the primacy of consciousness orientation dominates.  This is just the way infants are.  It is when they fail to transition from this that serious problems develop later on. 

In his primacy of consciousness orientation, he cannot keep things straight, so to speak, for a good while.  If he closes his eyes, the world and objects “disappear.”  If he opens his eyes, the world “appears.”  If he hollers, others come to bring him comfort, whether a blanket, a bottle, holding, a fresh diaper, or whatever.  At a sub-conceptual level, he experiences himself as the causal force of the universe.  His wishes reign; he is the total narcissist. 

In the broadest sense, every child becomes a philosopher, making his own version of the five major branches of philosophy.  The reasons for this are the requirements for survival, again, imposed by Mother Nature as his, human nature. 

Lacking wings, claws, venom, etc., humans have only one fundamental means of survival, and that is their brains.  Specifically, it is his mind.  Even more specifically, his mind must be in the optimal state, which is operating by choice at the conceptual level.  Nothing in life is automatic or guaranteed regarding his survival, but very bad things happen when humans try to live at the perceptual level only. 

Every mind has a conscious portion which attends moment by moment to all the details of the external and internal environments.  The conscious portion is, of necessity, limited in capacity, say, to some seven percepts at the most at any given moment.  Yet the mind forms continuously memories and draws on an enormous reservoir of stored information.  Vast shuttling goes on between the consciousness mind and these vast stores of emotions, memories, facts, images, and so on, which are in the bigger portion of his mind—his subconscious.  He may call on subconscious material quite deliberately and consciously, or materials may come to consciousness without his direct order, based on his prior cognition. 

Things do not just pop into consciousness randomly.  The shuttling between the conscious and subconscious portions follows directives (call them “laws,” meaning principles describing action, e.g., the “laws of physics”), which the growing human builds in, usually at the sub-verbal level.  Such functions are part of his psycho-epistemology[4].  As life goes on, one’s own psycho-epistemological rules become automatized, and so become harder and harder to change, but they always retain the capacity to be changed by conscious effort. 

One’s fundamental philosophy and psycho-epistemology[5] are formed implicitly from by a combination of what one encounters in life and what one makes of these encounters and oneself.  Only later, when one is fully at the conceptual level, can one dissect, diagnose, and change what one formed earlier by developing the acquired skill of introspection.  The mind works ceaselessly at all ages and tries to incorporate and integrate whatever comes in.  [In anticipation, that ceaseless struggle by the mind to apprehend reality is what causes Muslims such endless anguish.]  In every culture, what comes in for almost everyone is a mish-mash of the rational and irrational, good and bad, the contradictory and the non-contradictory, and so on.  What most people have is a vast array of sensical and non-sensical contents, processes, and behaviors—in many way “skulls full of mush.” 

For Islam, what goes into the Muslim mind is explicit, not implicit.  Islam goes much farther.  Nothing is left to chance.  Over vast periods of time, Islamists have developed the most formidable mind changing methodology of all.  The Communists and Nazis could only wish to have the success of Islam.  Islam starts early, and it marches right through the nascent personal philosophy of the tiny Muslim, from metaphysics and epistemology, etc., to full blown Muslim. 

The metaphysics of Islam—to say nothing yet of its killer epistemology--is more horrible and deforming than most recognize, and it twists the young Muslim mind long before it can defend itself.  The key to Islam is recognizing how it uses the epistemological needs and processes of the human mind to destroy the normal human and replace with the Muslim mind. 

While the foregoing is a trifle technical, it sets the stage for our looking into what Islam does to this budding metaphysics and epistemology.  We will look at that next.