The Importance of Desire

The posts thus far have centered on deconstructionist critiques of aspects of the modern life and the modern world. I would like to depart from the more technical stuff to discuss one of the more fundamental topics related to human nature.

One of the famous scenes in cinematic history was the 'Greed is Good' speech given by the sinister investment exec Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas, in the movie 'Wall Street' (1987). For those unfamiliar with the scene, do watch:

The motto 'Greed is Good' has been used to describe the Wall Street shenanigans that led to the 2008 Bank Crash. But it points to a deeper underlying philosophy. Modern so-called free market economists, such as from the Ayn Rand school, tend to treat each individual as separate economic units pursuing their own interests, and state we are all better off by following our own paths. From their perspective, human beings are geared by Nature to follow what they deem to be to their advantage, and any aspiration for bettering the condition of others is weakness and a result of social engineering.

Any advocate of social welfare would no doubt find such a view as anathema, but there is a kernel of truth hidden in the excessive egoism of this belief. Human beings are created by God each with an individual essence. Since birth, our experience through the lens of sensory perception is pretty much a self-centered universe. No matter how close we may feel to kith and kin, we can never view reality through someone else's kaleidoscope. The pain and joy of others can only be reflected onto our internal mirror of observation and then into our own consciousness. We remain bound to this captive reality of the single self (self here not necessarily defined as the classical Islamic concept of 'nafs').

From this egocentric viewpoint, it is only natural that the self would function to fulfill its own inclinations, be they bodily, mental or spiritual. It is hard to conceive of a pattern harder to break than following one's own interests. The question really lies in what one defines as his or her own interest, then things can get a bit murky. Here the idea that the fate of the larger society is tied to the individual can broaden the concept of 'personal well-being' to be inclusive of friends, family and the general human race.

The fundamental point is that desire, seen as the pursuit of the fulfillment of the inclinations of the self, is hardwired into the DNA and makeup of humanity. We are desire-centric beings. While this may seem at the surface to be obvious, in the day-to-day grind we can forget how essential desire may be to our progression in life. Desire is the fuel for the (metaphorical) fire, and if there is any benchmark we can use to measure men, it is by the quality of their desire.

Desire can take the form of self-preservation, which is the most basic. Once this has been fulfilled, we normally gravitate towards desires of our own wants and occasionally desires of service to others. There are unfortunate folks for whom the desire for self-preservation remains the predominant desire in life, a sort of knee-jerk reactive state of being in which circumstances pushes the individual forward whereas he or she would prefer to remain in inertia.

Desires can drive civilizations to the same degree they can drive individuals. We can look at the early Arabs in the first three centuries after the advent of Islam as driven strongly by desire. This wasn't a crude desire for land and loot, but a desire to conquer all the imaginable vistas of mankind, inspired by their confidence in their Deen. Only later did Muslims reach a stage of self-satisfied complacency which marked a turning point and a steady decline that has not been arrested. The Modern West, following their deity Progress, similarly is marked by a desire to claim a world kingship.

To bring the subject of desire closer to home, I often think of the numerous goals I have set for myself in life, some which have been accomplished and many (such as learning a new language, being more punctual or what have you) which remain in the still theoretical. In the past, I would concentrate heavily on the barriers that block my way, the scale and type of challenges that need to be crossed for me to achieve what I want. But I would find myself frustrated when the task I set for myself simply cannot be done.

It is only recently that it occurred to me that these failures have more to do with a lack of desire rather than the impediments in front of me. It is analogous to someone worried about driving through dangerous terrain when his tank his half-empty. How many times have I thought of something worthwhile that I genuinely wanted to achieve, but inside at my core I knew I lacked the requisite excitement and passion to get me over the finish line? It dawned on my that to accomplish something that is substantial and worthwhile, the desire has to be burning hot and not lukewarm. The focus, to begin with, should be to inculcate a desire that is strong enough to last the distance. Rather than seeing your goal as merely a 'good thing', think of it as as essential as food and water. This takes some time, but once your desire is set, the challenges can and will be overcome insha Allah.

Ambitions, which in a way are channeled desires, are key to a healthy psyche. We need something bigger than the sticks and carrots society may offer us. I do feel disappointed when I look around the current generation with its noticeable lack of any higher ambitions, be they worldly or otherwise. We wait for others to tell us what our ambitions should be, which is a pretty silly approach. Lower ends desires of nice music and tasty food are so easily satiated nowadays, what else is left?

The desire to live in service of others, in particular our Creator, can be a higher-end desire. But I would hesitate perhaps to use the word 'selfless', as even in our service of the Divine and humanity, we do so with the expectation of some spiritually enhanced state or internal sense of satisfaction. These are still, in a way, forms of self-satisfaction, so perhaps there can never be a true state of selflessness after all. The 'will to want' remains in us, even in Jannah, which is the culmination of every journey of desire. 

Why we need to Media Detox

Are you who you think you are? The modern world tends to emphasize the idea of personal autonomy. We are our own independent and self-sufficient creatures without the need for other social entities to define our identity. To be able to define one's own identity on one's own terms is considered the ultimate goal of the freedom of expression offered by modern society.

The reality is that we have, wittingly or unwittingly, surrendered much of the formation of our own personalities to outside forces of media. As Edwards Bernays said in his book Propaganda, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Television (and film) tends to be a passive medium, encouraging indolence, and creating viewers who can put their minds on autopilot for a few hours a day, leaving the real thinking to the big wigs of society. Unlike reading a book, which activates the imagination and pushes you to continually reform your thought processes, television allows us to be only receivers of the toxic sludge that passes for modern programming. So deep has is the penetration of media in our psyches that if we were to remove all the names, the cultural references, the imagery & icons from our brains, very little may remain.

They say that much of our personalities are formed by trying to be like others. This may seem a weakness, but truthfully this is fundamental human characteristic. Since childhood, human beings are imitative creatures, searching for external stimuli to inform one's own process of identity formation. This is why it is so important to have positive role models in one's formative years, they provide templates for us to build our own personalities. In the case of television though, the 'others' are not even people we see in the flesh or interact with.

Broadcast media tends to affect us on two levels. The first is the level of belief. Beliefs relate to whether we consider anything to be true or false. Did Armstrong land on the moon? Does gravity exist? Are cold showers better than hot showers? Our worldview on what is or is not falsifiable is based to a great degree on media perception. But such beliefs can be malleable when countered by evidence to the contrary.

The impact of media on the second level, that of attitudes, is far more insidious. Attitudes relate to our predisposition, our instinctual deep-seeded emotive response to situations. Once the media has influenced an attitude, it tends to stick and usually takes much more time and effort to shift compared to beliefs. When facts are presented that clash with existing attitudes, our beliefs tend to incline towards attitudes rather than reality. A classic example is how, several years after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the American public persisted in their bogus belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction despite ample evidence to the contrary. It was a belief that settled well with prevailing attitudes.

This is why we need a media detox. A conventional detox (short for detoxification) is an intensive process of removal of dangerous toxins from the body. A media detox follows a similar route. It requires weaning oneself off of the broadcast media that has dominated our lives. This can be done gradually or as a sudden break But in the end we need to free the captivity over of our minds and embrace life outside a box. And like a regular detox, a media detox would require dealing with some withdrawal effects, such as the slowing of time.

There may be no such thing as a 'healthy consumption' of television or film. Yes, there are movies, shows or channels that have substantive content, but being able to limit oneself to watching this sliver of useful content in a sea of time-wasting drivel is a huge challenge. We shouldn't be accomplices to our own mental degradation. Giving ourselves an extended media break can allow our brains some breathing room to be able to focus on life as it passes us by.

Britain and Palestine: A Curious History

A week or so ago, we received word of the announcement of a longer ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza to halt the ongoing Israeli massacre. Notwithstanding the ridiculousness itself of having a ceasefire between an oppressor and the oppressed, both sides claimed victory. From the Israeli standpoint, this is mere nonsense posturing, given the fact that they failed to end rocket fire into Israel or break the will of Palestinian resistance inside Gaza. Their much vaunted 'deterrence capacity' has flopped and this can't be painted as anything else but a strategic defeat. From the Palestinian perspective, while some measures of the blockade have been eased (for now), Gaza still remains a prison, and future promises of a seaport are unlikely to materialise given Israel's track record of deceit.

The timing of the conflict coincided with my reading of the book Bible and Sword by Barbara Tuchman, author of the famous Guns of August. The book explores the intriguing history of Britain's relationship with Palestine over the centuries, and the seeds to the conflict we seed unfolding today. Much of the history is quite revealing, though sadly it is colored by Tuchman's heavy Orientalist bias, her emphasizing exclusively the Jewish connection to the land, to the extent that the actual living residents of Palestine across eras hardly get much attention.

General Allenby entering a
conquered Jerusalem, 11 December 1917

Three seminal events define Britain's unique relationship with this sliver of Mediterranean land, according to Tuchman. The first is the bloody series of holy wars known as the Crusades. The second is the translation of the Holy Bible into the English language. And the third is the birth of the modern Zionist movement.

The Crusades were launched in 1095 under the call to reclaim Jerusalem by the head of Western Christendom, Pope Urban II. It was hardly a British affair; indeed, Britain as a nation-state didn't even exist at that point. Richard the so-called Lionheart is often painted as an English hero, but he hardly spent much of his life in the country. But the whole affair underlined a somewhat inexplicable obsession of the Western Church with the Holy Land that didnt resonate with Eastern Orthodox Christianity (no Byzantines were called to fight in the Crusades, only Europeans). Following countless massacres and defeats later, a truce allowed for  freedom of access to a steady stream of pilgrims from Europe to sites in the Holy Land, which remained under Muslim control.

This continued until the advent of the 16th century. Following the start of the Reformation, a drastic change began in England, with the diminishing of the papal authority and a process of secularization of many spheres of life. Part of this process was the translation of the Latin Bible in English, which took almost a century before culminating in the King James Bible in 1611. While the translation of a Bible may on the surface seem a rather mundane action, it had far-reaching consequences. Whereas previously there was an unassailable position of the clergy as intermediaries between the masses and the Latin Bible, translation the Bible represented a nationalisation of religion and emphasized a more private relation with God's Book.

An outcome of the translation of the Bible was to emphasize the Old Testament descriptions of the Holy Land and to lay special importance on the land itself, for example places such as Canaan and Jerusalem. For the follower of the English Bible, the traditional New Testament universalist message was somewhat downplayed for a new reverence towards sacred geography. The idea of the Jews as the special Chosen People of God was looked at in an almost literalist fashion. The rise of this new Protestantism coincided with the decision to allow the Jews, who had be expelled from England in 1290, to return.

Fast forward to 1897, and the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland chaired by Theodore Herzel. However, prior to this, there were consistent efforts from the Evangelical community in England in the 19th century to return to the Jews to their supposed Promised Land, without much avail. The birth of the Zionist Movement, an ostensibly secular pesudo-nationalist political project dedicated towards a Jewish homeland, cemented a curious Christian-Jewish alliance for the same objective after centuries of mutual hostility and distrust.


The British Empire, top dog of the competing global powers, became the vehicle for the realisation of the early Zionist agenda. The execution of Zionist goals was done through a sly mix of appealing to Evangelical Christian sentiments and baser imperial interests among the British political elites, of men like Balfour, David Lloyd George, and others. The culmination of the efforts was the securing of the famous Balfour Declaration in 1917, making the Jewish project in Palestine an official goal of British foreign policy. Lloyd George, British Prime Minister at that time, ordered the Commander in Egypt, Edmund Allenby, to secure "Jerusalem before Christmas" which he delivered with two weeks to spare.

Perhaps given the controversial implications, Tuchman as an author doesn't give much credence to the theory that British elites felt that by granting the Balfour Declaration, they would be able to curry favor with the influential American Jews and secure the military involvement of the US in World War I. Lloyd George himself though admitted to such a line of thinking in his own autobiography. The Declaration it cannot be denied came at a critical time in the war, with significant advances by the Germans and Britain on the back foot. President Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned in 1916 on the platform of keeping the US out of the war, made a dramatic U-turn to join a conflict that his country had no direct stake in. It proved the turning point.

Much apologies if this article seems like a boring rehearsal of history, but for those who are fans of mystery novels, history often plays out in a similar fashion. It takes a trained eye to be able to connect the dots and trace the path to where we are now. Bible and Sword offered such interesting historical tidbits once you can get beyond the Eurocentric dross. History, even sad history such as this, continues to fascinate me. I wish it were the same for everyone.