The inability to perceive the religious dimension of the current crisis has led to some strange results. It’s well understood that software must adapt or die. Faced with challenges, Islam was adapting, in for example, Turkey. This was Islam 5.0. Arguably it was a stable release. Given enough time, the Islamic world could have taken a different path.

Then through some quirk of fate, oil was discovered beneath Saudi Arabia, and that kingdom with its billions reissued an ancient, bug-ridden version Islam: Wahabism 1.0. Then Jimmy Carter’s blunders unleashed yet another variant from the archives on the world.

Now Wahabism 1.0 and Islamic Revolution Beta are out there wreaking havoc, even upon the Muslim world itself. GWB wanted to unleash a competing product, a hodge podge of libraries collectively called Freedom Agenda 2.0. That didn’t do so good. But it was the right idea and it could have become a useful product if enough development resources had been thrown at it to work the bugs out. I think it’s an analytical mistake to imagine that at some level, the current world crisis isn’t about a clash of ideas. The result of ignoring the memetic aspect of the current struggle is expressed in Barack Obama’s view of terrorism as crime. Terrorism in that paradigm is banal; it has the intellectual content of pickpocketing or murder for hire. And that point of view is fundamentally wrong. While I don’t think that terrorism is entirely about ideology, it is a mistake to empty it of intellectual content.