Posted on 12/18/2007 11:37:23 AM PST by BGHater
The clash of civilizations we're living through is widely seen as a battle between Islam and Christendom. I'm convinced it's more basic than that. The reason Iraq and Afghanistan remain unsettled battlefields isn't that our two civilizations can't agree on the nature of God. It's because we can't agree on the nature of man.
In the West, we take it for granted that human beings are autonomous individuals. We decide for ourselves how we dress, where we work, whom we marry. Our political system is an atomized democracy, in which everyone is expected to vote according to their own idiosyncratic values and interests. Our pop music and movies are about misunderstood loners. The ethos of individual empowerment fuels daytime talk shows.
Individualism has become so fundamental to the Western world view that most of us cannot imagine any other way of conceiving human existence. But in fact, there are billions of people on Earth -- including most of the world's Muslims -- that view our obsession with individualism as positively bizarre.
In most of South Asia and the Middle East, humans are viewed not primarily as individuals, but as agents of a family, tribe, clan or sect. As Rutgers scholar Robin Fox wrote in a brilliant essay -- excerpted in last month's issue of Harper's magazine -- this explains why so many Arabs marry their cousins. In tribal societies, your blood relations are the only people you can trust.
This fundamental difference in outlook explains much of what we find barbaric about traditional Muslim cultural practices. Honour killings -- to take a newsworthy example -- strike Westerners as a particularly horrific species of murder. But that's because we think of people as individuals. If you instead see a woman primarily as a low-status breeding agent of her patriarch's clan, everything changes. By taking up with an unapproved male, she is nullifying whatever value she once had as a human. In fact, her life has negative value in the sense that her shameful lifestyle is an ongoing humiliation to the men expected to enforce discipline within the clan's ranks.
An intractably tribal outlook also makes Western-style democracy impossible -- which explains why nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq has become such a thankless slog.
The reason many of us post-9/11 hawks had such high hopes for these campaigns is that we shared George W. Bush's sunny claim that "Freedom is universal. Freedom is etched in everybody's soul." It turns out that's not true. As Fox notes, freedom and individualism are relatively recent development in human history. Tribalism, on the other hand, is a deeply rooted instinct that has been "etched" on our evolutionary psychology since simian days. Even in Western societies, you can still see it rise to the surface when tensions flare (a point Paul Haggis made with exquisite artistry in his Oscar-award winning film Crash).
Democracy requires consensus-building and shared values. But in tribal societies, politics is viewed as a battle of all-against-all, in which the strongest tribe openly appropriates the state apparatus to enrich itself at everyone else's expense.
In this regard, Saddam Hussein was the ultimate tribal leader. Not only did he restrict his inner circle to Sunnis, but they were Sunnis from his own narrow Tikriti sub-clan. The idea of creating a "representative" government that includes Kurds and Shiites with their own independent power bases would have struck him as completely insane. So would the idea of handing over power to another tribe merely because its leaders chalked up more votes in an election. During most of human history, letting another tribe lord over yours meant yielding the power to pillage your granaries and rape your women. (In parts of Africa, it still does.)
This explains why the United States and NATO have gotten nowhere with grand national political projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are both intensely tribal societies. Instead, progress has come at the micro level -- with military commanders sitting down with individual tribal patriarchs and, essentially, bribing them with guns and money. In the West, we call that corruption. In tribal societies, it's politics.
Is there something about Islam that serves to lock in mankind's inherently tribal instincts? Perhaps. The word Islam translates to "submission." And empirically speaking, there seems to be something within the faith that discourages individualism and the democratic freedoms associated with it.
On the other hand, the non-Muslim nations of sub-Saharan Africa are every bit as tribalized as the Muslim nations of North Africa and Asia. And for all the media focus on Aqsa Parvez, several of Canada's first honour murders actually were performed by Sikhs. In any case, the successful integration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims into Canadian society shows that, after a generation or two, at least, the faith hardly prevents immigrants from coming around to our democratic, individualistic ways.
As for foreign entanglements, it's worth noting Fox's warning that our own Western march to individualism took centuries -- a grinding process in which we moved "from tribalism, through empire, feudalism, mercantile capitalism and the industrial revolution … shrugging off communism and fascism along the way."
In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are essentially asking the locals to cram all of this into a few years. We shouldn't be surprised if it takes a little longer.
jkay@nationalpost.com
It is. The full title is “The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West”
We lost over 200,000 soldiers fighting those tyrants tooth and nail, and ended up fire-bombing and killing their cities (including many, many civilians in them caught up in the struggle) to the point where not only their armies were defeated, but the PEOPLE WHO HAD SUPPORTED THOSE ARMIES WERE ALSO ABJECTLY DEFEATED and wholly ready to surrender unconditionally.
Some people do not like it when I say it, but, in essence, we made "good" Germans and "good" Japanese out of those peoples and it has largely endured to this day.
It's time we made "good" Muslims out of the radical Islamics and all who support them.
IF that's what you believe, then you wont mind me telling you to go to hell!
Right is right, wrong is wrong. Good is good, evil is evil. Truth is truth, lies are lies.
IF you cant/wont distinguish the difference between them you are either a clueless idiot, or a tool of evil.
Here’s a funny thing to think about... well, not funny really.. but, if the United States (and most other countries) suddenly ceased to exist in it’s current form, let’s say due to a major, global disaster (Asteroid hitting the planet for example).. the world would be reduced quickly to small, surviving enclaves of humans who would effectively save themselves as best they could and most likely would NOT adopt something like “Federalism” and a Constitution to continue to exist.
In short, they’d kill anyone trying to take their survival benefits (food, land or whatever) and it would be... golly, tribalism. And they’d survive just fine without Congress wouldn’t they?
No "perhaps" about it. Islam is just a cult which sanctifies all the ugly tendencies of tribal patriarchal pastoral-nomadic culture by cloaking them in a sham "religion." It's Jim Jones' People's Temple on an immense scale. Polygamy, genital mutilation (to keep the young subjected to the chieftains), slavery, brigandage, etc. All ancient traditions among pastoral nomads of the Arabian region.
They’re also called ‘liberals’
Hmmm... perhaps we should note that not all tribal systems are created equal. Islam doen’t equal tribalism and tribalism doesn’t equal islam. And none of it can stand up to nationalism, ask the Scots or the amerinds.
There's a guy I know from Iraq who says that Saddam Hussein decreed that all existing last-names were void, and would be replaced by the person's father's first name, in an attempt to weaken extended families.
That’s the elephant in the living room that virtually no one wants to see. But it is the undeniable and logical conclusion at which we must arrive if we want to save our own civilization.
I just received this book. Every page contains gems.
That's like the old Irish and highland Scots (definitely tribal or clan societies) with their O'- and Mac-Somebodies. Russians have their patronymics, and Scandinavians their -sons or sens. Tribalism is deeply rooted, but has been suppressed in the West by Christianity, the rule of law, and capitalism. Even so, peoples as similar racially as Flemings & Walloons, or Czechs & Slovaks, cannot get along.
Yep. See #34...just finished posting. What a coincidence, lol
It is important to differentiate between anthropological/sociological descriptions of human behavior and their philosophical sources. Indeed, one of the great philosophical failures of the 20th century has been an overemphasis on sociological models as normative instead of merely descriptive. That sort of mistaken emphasis is what has given rise to class analysis and the attempt to deal with human intercourse purely on the basis of power relationships between collectives. That is how an outsider might suspect we behave by appearance and in the absence of better information, but (1) there are no outsiders (short of God) and (2) there is better information.
That the source of political rights resides within the individual and not within a collective is one of the deep truths of the Enlightenment that was the inevitable consequence of that individual's relationship with his or her God, whatever form the latter might take. It is one of the foundational characteristics of what we term Western civilization. The challenge to that composed of the denial of God and the supremacy of the collective has led us down the pathway of tribalism largely because in the absence of the structure of Western civilization the survival mechanisms kick in. It is not a superior set of cultural behaviors, it is a primitivism that is clear evidence of the failure of those alternate behaviors that pretended to be superior.
Tribalism may be transcended by such structures in that way, and in fact only in a healthy society is this possible. Where, for example, a member of an ethnic group may consider himself or herself primarily an American and still maintain that ethnic identity, this is not a sign of a misplaced loyalty but a sign that where the repository of political rights is in the individual, that individual is free to apportion those loyalties as he or she chooses and not at the behest of the demands of the collective. This is not simply a transference of subordination to a larger collective. What is significant is the individual's ability to decide.
Excessive tribalism in American politics is, ultimately, un-American. It strikes at the very foundations of the overall social structure and imposes the claims of the collective. It is useful for those who who wish to control individuals through the demands of the collective. These are chains.
All IMHO, of course.
Besides all those primitive blood-line clan names, it’s struck me that many English (and other Euro) surnames are vocational; they denote an occupation or craft: Cook, Clark (clerk), Miller, Smith, Wright (Wheelwright, Wainwright, Cartwright, etc.), Carpenter, Fuller, Weaver. I think this is evidence of settled, civilized society with lawful market exchanges of services, over a period of many centuries. I doubt there is anything like that in Arab or other nomadic-tribal-brigand cultures.
Islam is far too large and disconnected to be destroyed militarily. We need to destroy it by not being afraid to offer its children better options than the imams do. And that means we must be an example of that better option, and not the increasingly corrupt welfare state we are morphing into.
Good point. Although the name Khayyam means “tent maker” in Arabic....that’s as advanced as they got.
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