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Replying to my post on the difficulty of convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was uninvolved in 9/11, Jason C. writes:
My impression from talking to people about current events - and I mean reasonably sophisticated, educated people - is that they see the world as divided into a handful of categories:- Europeans. They are liberal, effete, atheistic, and are constantly having sex and getting drunk. Anything goes in Europe.- Middle-Easterners, a.k.a. Muslims, a.k.a. Arabs. This includes Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, etc. These people are crazed religious fanatics who do not care about their own lives. They act only to satisfy their unquenchable blood lust. Sometimes they kill each other, but mostly they hate America and Jews.- Asia. Where communists and very tiny things come from. A continent of industrious gnomes.- Africa. Where starving people live.- South & Central America. Where Mexicans come from.They then interpret events like 9/11 by imposing these categories on them. So when a student says "Why did God let the Iraqs attack us on 9/11?" he's really just saying something like, how come all those crazy Muslims want to kill us? He picks "Iraq" just because it's a prominent example of a Middle Eastern country.Sadly, that tracks with my experience, too. I'd add that I'm not sure it's radically different elsewhere (Europeans, for instance, know much more about other European countries, just as we know more about different states, but seem similarly scared of Arabs), but it is a problem. Even imply an interpretation of events that fits into these preexisting categories and folks latch on with unbelievable ease.
