A society’s hostility toward rivals outweighs impartial assessment of the quarrel’s importance

Evidence

The attitude adopted by a society in such a case is largely determined by the degree of hostility it feels, rather than by any impartial assessment of the importance of the quarrel. It is not suggested that hostile societies to-day feel more antagonism than hostile societies felt during the Crusades. In fact, the attribution of so many crimes to Islam, those which most disgusted Christendom, was not Just a means (even sincerely and confidently brought forward) to discredit a rival religion. It was also and more simply an expression of the hostility that Christendom felt for the civilisation at its borders. It may be that it is a human tendency for men to dislike other people’s thinking differently from themselves. This would explain why a man often attributes to those who think differently from him a version of their opinions that they themselves cannot recognise, but which from his point of view is agreeably repulsive. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1493

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that enemy societies are attributed unrecognizable, ‘agreeably repulsive’ versions of their views directly parallels Aziz’s Racial Muslim and Anidjar on how the West constructs Islam’s distorted image for its own polemical needs.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that constructing the other’s opinions as ‘agreeably repulsive’ — repulsive in a way that satisfies the self — is a dense insight about the pleasures of mischaracterization.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on how every hostile culture manufactures a version of its rival’s thought that is ‘agreeably repulsive’ — repulsion designed to be satisfying rather than merely distasteful.