Compos Mentis

This May Not Go Over Very Well

The link really doesn't have much to do with what I'm going to write about, except that it prompted a line of thought and one of its assertions: that terrorists are not, on the whole, uneducated but generally have at least moderate education. The author explains this in economic terms, but I'm not convinced of the causal link in such arguments, since they seem to be post facto instances.
Anyway, along those lines, at Oxford I've been attending the Doctor Who society, where we sit around with people who like the good Doctor and watch episodes. Some of us are fairly casual fans, but others have obviously spent a good deal of time and effort into knowing the series intimately. This is obviously not a unique phenomenon. I know, for example, far more about the Star Wars universe than anyone who has simply watched the six movies could ever pick up. Other science fiction series have similar fans. Dr. Who, however, beats the rest in terms of length and depth, along with the lack of a cohesive chronology, at least as far as I can determine. The fans have very impressive intellectual knowledge. One of the more knowledgeable of them has cross-referenced events that took place in episodes spanning decades. They can point out multiple plot holes based on which incarnation of the Doctor one considers to be legitimate.
To some people, this just seems ridiculous, like these young adults are caught in a game of make-believe that has outgrown its roots. Why would anyone, they ask, spend so much time and effort learning about things that do not in fact exist? Why are they so interested in events which are not real?
What I believe the advent of science fiction accomplished was the idea of alternate realities. Not necessarily just holding to the future and advance societies, but just the idea that the world can be constructed differently from how we perceive it. I hypothesize that, before science fiction, fiction was supposed to be construed in our world or else a obviously distorted version of our world, for example in Gulliver's travels. Anyway, it is definitely a recent idea. Alternate realities can have their own logic, their own history, their own science, their own metaphysical foundations. They can have a God, no god, many gods. They can change. They have total freedom in a way that reality does not. Not to go too deep into psychology, but obviously this would be a comforting thought to people who feel like they have no control over reality.
What is interesting is the original objection to this immersion into alternate realities. It is true that they do not exist, but that does not necessarily mean that we access them, especially intellectually, in a way any differently from the way we understand reality proper. There is one reality, and (to ape Aristotle somewhat) knowledge of it is best, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge of alternate realities is different fundamentally from knowledge of reality proper.
The application should be obvious. The first people who jumped to my mind were the Marxists, who built a completely fantastic view of history. Their reality, at least in some regards, was an alternate reality. They were highly educated, Marx especially (though he's a special case because it's hard to say just how Marxist he was) but the fact that were applying rules from an alternate reality to reality proper just meant they were committing a type fallacy. Terrorists, I imagine, work in the same way.
I'm going to answer the question of how I can be sure that there is a reality proper and not just a series of anthropocentric alternate realities by glossing over it. It's really not essential to the question, anyway. The point is not that the terrorists are or are not educated, it is the type of education they get which is the issue.

posted by Emmett @ 14:31