That’s the standard theory: the real reason for murderous events in Europe and Mosul and Bangladesh — even Nigeria – lie in a centuries old grievance detected by Jihadi John. But there’s another explanation you may wish to consider. You are watching entropy at work, witnessing the destruction of information and seeing disorder take over the world.
To understand this more clearly, open the case of your computer and consider the arrangement of the jumper wires (assuming you still have jumper wires). There are only a few ways the jumper wires can be correctly connected but millions of ways they can be wrongly attached. Order (in the sense of a functioning arrangement) is that small percentage of outcomes that work. Entropy is all the ways it won’t work. Order is statistically hard to achieve. Disorder is relatively easy to create.
It took an ancient craftsman years to produce those statues preserved in the Mosul Museum. It took an thug only a few minutes to pound it into rubble and dust.
Since order and knowledge are expensive, what we call civilization essentially advances by remembering which wires go where.
The innovation of political correctness however, holds that since all jumper connections are equally valid, anything goes and one can even rearrange older wiring to suit aesthetic impulses. By declaring all cultures equal we open the doors to entropy. We may not notice the effect at first, because — to continue the computer example — there is still enough residual functionality in your machine to carry on.
By and by we disable the CD drive, the USB ports, then some of the keys in the keyboard. Then one day we pull out a really important jumper and the hard disk stops. But by then we cannot acknowledge the damage we’ve done since according to our progressive thinking we ought to have improved things. And this thought will still be in our minds as the blade of the machete slices off the hand we put out to ward the blow.
It will come as a mystery, a total mystery. The reason for our befuddlement is because while ISIS’s destruction of Mosul’s artifacts is serious, it does not spread entropy as drastically as the Western cultural elite. Their powers of demolition are far greater because modern technical civilization depends on what economists call
rational ignorance.
Unlike pastoral societies when a man might know all the things that mattered, most of us moderns know very little outside of our narrow fields of competence. We compensate by trusting others to know things about which we choose remain substantively ignorant for lack of time. This opens up a tremendous opportunity for Western charlatans to spread entropy for their own narrow, sectarian reasons.
The more complex and less transparent society and technology become the more we must rely on rational ignorance.
