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Posted on 11/14/2011 8:50:17 PM PST by Noumenon
Carroll Quigley, in the course of his examination of the failure of most Latin American / South American nations-states, delivered an astonishing analysis of what he believed to be the root cause of these failures in the first edition (1966) of his renowned Tragedy and Hope. Here, in almost an aside, he defines what he calls the "Pakistani-Peruvian axis" - a combination of Asian despotism and Arabic outlook (key word, that - outlook), both of which have their roots in Bronze Age antiquity, that pervade what Quigley calls the shattered cultures that dwell on its axis from Pakistan to the mountains of South America. This analysis makes an appalling sense out the cultural train-wrecks that persist to this day from the Arabic East, through the southern Mediterranean and Spain to South America - and in corporate boardrooms in Paris, London and New York.
If his analysis is correct - and I believe that it is largely so - it provides the perfect framework for the triumph of the greatest evil of modernity - the will to power as the dominating and driving force of those who would exterminate most of the worlds population and rule the remainder of humanity like cattle.
I fear for our civilization. Read on to find out why.
The Pakistani-Peruvian Axis
The problem of finding constructive patterns for Latin America is much more difficult than the problem of finding constructive priorities. One reason for this is that the unconstructive patterns that now prevail in Latin America are deeply entrenched as a result of centuries, even millennia of persistent background. In fact, the Latin American patterns that must be changed because today they are leading to social and cultural disruption are not really Latin American in origin, or even Iberian for that matter, but are Near Eastern and go back, for some of their aspects for two thousand or more years. As a general statement, we might say that the Latin American cultural pattern (including personality patterns and general outlook) is Arabic, while its social pattern is that of Asiatic despotism. The pattern is so prevalent today (1960s era - WD) not only in in Latin America, but in Spain, Sicily, southern Italy (Fukuyama’s ‘low trust’ societies - WD) the Near East, and in various other areas of the Mediterranean world (such as Egypt), that we might call it the “Pakistani-Peruvian axis.” For convenience of analysis, we shall divide it into “Asiatic despotism” and the “Arabic outlook.”
We have already indicated the nature of Arabic despotism in connection with traditional China, the old Ottoman Empire, and czarist Russia. It goes back to the archaic Bronze Age empires, which first appeared in Mesopotamia, Egypt, The Indus Valley and northern China before 1000 BC. Basically, such an Asiatic despotism is a two-class society in which a lower class, consisting of at least (emphasis mine WD) nine-tenths of the population supports an upper, ruling-class consisting of several interlocking groups. These ruling groups are a governing bureaucracy of scribes and priests associated with army leaders, landlords and moneylenders. Such an upper class accumulated great quantities of wealth as taxes, rent, and interest on loans, fees for services or simply financial extortions. The social consequences were either progressive or reactionary, depending on whether this accumulated wealth in the possession of the ruling class was invested in more productive utilization of resources or was simply hoarded and wasted. The essential character of such an Asian despotism rests on the fact that the ruling class has legal claims on the working masses, and possesses the power (from its control of arms and the political structure) to enforce those claims. A modified Asiatic despotism is one aspect of the social structures all along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis.
The other aspect of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis rests on its Arabic outlook. The Arabs, like other Semites who emerged from the Arabian desert at various times to infiltrate neighboring Asiatic despotic cultures of urban civilizations were originally nomadic tribal peoples. Their political structure was based on blood relationships and not on territorial jurisdiction. They were warlike, patriarchal, extremist, violent, intolerant and xenophobic. Like most tribal peoples, their political structure was totalitarian in the sense that all values, all needs all meaningful human experience was contained within the tribe. Persons outside the tribal structure had no value or significance, and there were no obligations or meaning associated in contacts with them. In fact, they were hardly regarded as human beings at all. Moreover, within the tribe, social significance became more intense as blood relationships became closer, moving inward from the tribes through clans to the patriarchal extended family. The sharp contrast between such a point of view and that associated with Christian society as we know it can be seen in the fact that such Semitic tribalism was endogamous, while the rule of Christian marriage is exogamous. The rules, in fact, were directly antithetical, since Arabic marriage favors unions of first cousins, while Christian marriage has consistently opposed marriage of first or even second cousins. In traditional Arabic society, any girl was bound to marry her father’s brother’s son if he and his father wanted her and she was not usually free to marry someone else until he had rejected her (sometimes after years of waiting).
In such traditional Arabic society, the extended family, not the individual, was the basic social unit; all property was controlled by the patriarchal head of the family and, accordingly, most decisions were in his hands. His control of the marriage and of his male descendants was ensured by the fact that a price had to be paid for a bride to her family, and this would require the patriarch’s consent.
Such a patriarchal family arose from the fact that marriage was patrilocal, the young couple residing with the groom’s father so long as he lived, while he continued to live with the groom’s paternal grandfather until the latter’s death. Such a death of the head of an extended family freed his sons to become heads of similar extended families that would remain intact, frequently for three or four generations, until the head of the family dies in his turn. Within such a family each male remains subject to the indulgent, if erratic, control of his father and the indulgent, and subservient care of his mother and unmarried sisters, while his wife is under the despotic control of her mother-in-law until her production of sins and the elimination of her elders by death will make her, in turn a despot over her daughters-in-law.
This Arabic emphasis on the extended family as the basic social reality meant that larger social came into existence simply by linking a number of related extended families under the nominal leadership of the patriarch who, by general consensus, had the best qualities of leadership, social dignity and prestige. But such unions, being personal and essentially temporary, could be severed at any time. The family units tended to make all political relationships personal and temporary, reflections of the desires or whims of the leader and not the consequence or reflection of any basic social relationships. This tended to prevent the development of any advanced conception of the state, law, and the community (as achieved, for example, by the once tribal Greeks and Romans). Within the family, rules were personal, patriarchal, and often arbitrary and changeable, arising from the will and often from the whims of the patriarch.
This prevented the development of any advanced ideas of reciprocal common interests whose interrelationships by establishing a higher social structure, created, at the same time, rules superior to the individual, rules of an impersonal and permanent character in which law created authority, and not, as in the Arabic system, authority created law (or at least temporary rules). To this day, the shattered cultures along the whole Pakistani-Peruvian axis have a very weak grasp of the nature of a community or of any obligation to such a community, and regard law and politics as simply personal relationships whose chief justification is the power and the position of the individual who issues the orders. (emphasis mine - WD The state, as a structure of force more remote and therefore less personal than the immediate family is regarded as an alien system to be avoided and evaded simply because it is more remote (even if of similar character) then the individual’s immediate family.
This biological and patriarchal character of all significant social relationships in Arab life is reflected in the familiar feature of male dominance. Only the male is important. The female is inferior, even subhuman, and becomes significant only by producing males (the one thing, apparently, that the male cannot do for himself). Because of the strong patrilocal character of Arab marriage, a new wife is not only subjected sexually to her husband, she is also subjected socially and personally to his family, including his brothers and above all, his mother (who has gained this position of domination over other females in the house by having male children). Sex is regarded almost solely as a physiological relationship with little emphasis on the religious, emotional or even social aspects. Love, meaning concern for the personality or developing potentialities of the sexual partner, plays little role in Arabic sexual relationships. The purpose of such relationships in the eyes of the average Arab is to relieve his own sexual desire or to generate sons.
Such sons are brought up in an atmosphere of whimsical, arbitrary personal rules where they are regarded as superior beings by their mothers and sisters and, inevitably, by their father and themselves simply on the basis of their maleness. Usually they are spoiled, undisciplined, self-indulgent and unprincipled. Their whims are commands, their urges are laws. They are exposed to a dual standard of sexual morality in which any female is a legitimate target of their sexual desires, but the girl they marry is expected to be a paragon of chaste virginity. The original basis for this emphasis on a bride’s virginity rested on the emphasis on blood descent and was intended to be a guarantee and was intended to be a guarantee of the paternity of the children. The wife, as a child producing mechanism, had to produce the children of one genetic line and no other.
The emphasis on the virginity of any girl who could be regarded as an acceptable wife was carried to extremes. The loss of a girl’s virginity was regarded as an unbearable dishonor by the girl’s family, and any girl who brought such dishonor on a family was regarded worthy of death at the hands of her father and brothers. Once she is married, the right to punish such a transgression is transferred to her husband.
To any well-bred girl, her premarital virginity and the reservation of sexual access to her husband’s control after marriage (her “honor”) have pecuniary value. Since she has no value in herself as a person, apart from her “honor,” and has little value as a worker of any sort, her virginity before marriage has a value in money equal to the expense of keeping her for much of her life since, indeed, this is exactly what it is worth in money. As a virgin, she could expect the man who obtained her in marriage to support her as a wife. As a matter of fact, her virginity was worth much less than that, for in traditional Arabic society, if she displeased her husband, even if she merely crossed one of his whims, he could set her aside by divorce, a process very easy for him, with little delay or obligation, but impossible to achieve on her part, no matter how eagerly she might desire it. Moreover, once her virginity was gone, she had little value as a wife or a person, unless she had mothered a son, and could be passed along from man to man, either in marriage or otherwise, with little social obligation on anyone’s part. As a result of such easy divorce, and the narrow physiological basis on which sexual relationships are based, plus the lack of value of a woman once her virginity is gone, Arab marriage is very fragile, with divorce and broken marriage about twice as frequent as in the United States. Even the production of sons does not ensure the permanence of the marriage, since the sons belong to the father whatever the cause of marriage disruption. As a result of these conditions, marriage of several wives in sequence, a phenomenon we associate with Hollywood, is much more typical of the Arab world, and is very much more frequent than the polygamous marriage, which while permitted under Islam, is quite rare. Not more than 5 percent of married men in the Near East today have more than one wife at the same time, because of the expense, but the number who remain in a monogamous union until death is almost equally small.
As might be expected in such a society, Arabic boys grow up egocentric, self-indulgent, undisciplined, immature, and spoiled, subject to waves of emotionalism, whims, passion and pettiness. The consequence of this for the whole Pakistani-Peruvian axis will be seen in a moment.
Another aspect of Arabic society is the scorn of honest, steady manual work, especially agricultural work. This is a consequence of the fusion of at least three ancient influences. First, the archaic bureaucratic structure of Asiatic despotism, in which the peasants supported the warriors and scribes, regarded manual workers, especially tillers of the soil, as the lowest layer of society, and regarded the acquisition of literacy and military prowess as the chief roads to escape from physical drudgery. Second, the fact that Classical Antiquity, whose influence on the subsequent Islamic civilization was very great, was based on slavery, and came to regard agricultural (or other manual) work as fit for slaves, also contributed to this idea. Third, the Bedouin tradition of pastoral, warlike nomads scorned tillers of the soil as weak and routine persons of no real spirit or character, fit to be conquered or walked on but not to be respected. The combination of these three formed the lack of respect of manual work that is so characteristic of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis.
Somewhat similar to this lack of respect for manual work are a number of other aspects of traditional Arab life that have spread the length of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis. The chief source of many of these is the Bedouin outlook, which originally reflected the attitudes of relatively small group of the Islamic culture but which, because they were a superior, conquering group, came to be copied by others in the society, even by the despised agricultural workers. These attitudes include lack of respect for the soil, for vegetation, for most animals, and for outsiders. These attitudes, which are singularly ill-fitted for the geographic and climatic conditions of the whole Pakistani-Peruvian area, are to be seen constantly in the everyday life of that area as erosion, destruction of vegetation and wild life, personal cruelty and callousness to most living things, including one’s fellow men, and a general harshness and indifference to God’s creation. This final attitude, which well reflects the geographic conditions of the area, which seem as harsh and indifferent as man himself, is met by those men who must face it in their daily life as a resigned submission to fate and to the inhumanity of man to man.
Interestingly enough, these attitudes have successfully survived the efforts of the three great religions of ethical monotheism, native to the area, to change these attitudes. The ethical sides of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sought to counteract harshness, egocentricity, tribalism, cruelty, scorn of work and of one’s fellow creatures, but these efforts, on the whole, have met with little success throughout the length of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis. Of the three, Christianity, possibly because it set the highest standards of the three, has fallen furthest from achieving its aims. Love, humility, brotherhood, cooperation, the sanctity of work, the fellowship of community, the image of man as a fellow creature made in the image of God, respect for women as personalities and partners of men, mutual helpmates on the road to spiritual salvation, and the vision of our universe, with all of its diversity, complexity, and multitude of creatures, as a reflection of the power and goodness of God – these basic aspects of Christ’s teachings are almost totally lacking throughout the Pakistani-Peruvian axis and most notably absent on the “Christian” portion of that axis from Sicily, or even the Aegean Sea, westward to Baja California and Tierra del Fuego. Throughout the whole axis, human actions are not motivated by these “Christian virtues,” but by the more ancient Arabic personality traits, which become vices and sins in the Christian outlook: harshness, envy, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, and hatred.
Wow... best essay I’ve read here in a long time.
That was perhaps the most useful analysis in the whole of Tragedy and Hope. An even more interesting book by Quigley is The Evolution of Civilizations which paints a coherent picture of the chaos which we see as history. It describes the processes through which civilizations have arisen, flourished and collapsed. There are about two dozens true civilizations in world history. And they go through the same processes.
bfl -
“The Pakistani-Peruvian Axis
The problem of finding constructive patterns for Latin America is much more difficult than the problem of finding constructive priorities. One reason for this is that the unconstructive patterns that now prevail in Latin America are deeply entrenched as a result of centuries, even millennia of persistent background. In fact, the Latin American patterns that must be changed because today they are leading to social and cultural disruption are not really Latin American in origin, or even Iberian for that matter, but are Near Eastern and go back, for some of their aspects for two thousand or more years. As a general statement, we might say that the Latin American cultural pattern (including personality patterns and general outlook) is Arabic, while its social pattern is that of Asiatic despotism. The pattern is so prevalent today (1960s era - WD) not only in in Latin America, but in Spain, Sicily, southern Italy (Fukuyama’s ‘low trust’ societies - WD) the Near East, and in various other areas of the Mediterranean world (such as Egypt), that we might call it the “Pakistani-Peruvian axis.” For convenience of analysis, we shall divide it into “Asiatic despotism” and the “Arabic outlook.”
That said, I don't share Quigley's elitist views and his contempt for the common man. At the end of the day, Quigley felt that humankind would be better off under the guidance of a ruling class elite. I think we've had quite enough of that.
Quigley was a brilliant historian. His application of scientific method and anthropological science to history remains unparalleled today. Most historians relate facts and events. Quigley looked for the underlying patterns, the drivers of human behavior and culture.
This, of course was quite at odds with modern prevailing historical wisdom, most of which is infected with the Marxist outlook - the denial of culture or individual conscience in the role of human affairs.
That was an excellent essay. I would like to seriously recommend a brand new book that covers similar topics, by David P. Goldman (Spengler of Asia Times):
http://www.amazon.com/How-Civilizations-Die-Islam-Dying/dp/159698273X
Take a look at the reviews posted under Amazon.
It is somewhat like reading Victor Davis Hanson or Mark Steyn (without the humor).
Replying to myself here. Here’s a link to a recent interview with Goldman which summarizes his book:
http://www.aina.org/news/20111114102512.htm
Yes, I’m familiar with Spengler’s (Goldman’s) work. The man has a remarkable and incisive mind. His latest book is on my ‘must read’ list.
Question: Was this Arabic outlook that passed to Latin America the result of the vestiges of the Islamic Invasion of the Iberian Penninsula? In other words, would Quigley say that this outlook has been bread into the Latin American Gene Pool from the many centuries of Islamic Domination of the Iberian Penninsula?
Carroll Quigley postulated that Western civilizations proceed through the following stages:
1. Mixture - different societies come into contact and produce a society with an outlook different from any of the combined parts.
2. Gestation - the period of time between the mixing of the different societies and the expansion of the civilization.
3. Expansion - the surplus generated by the society is invested in activities that benefit the civilization. This can include an increase in knowledge, increase in physical area, technological advancements that increase efficiency, etc. Civilizations make use of different instruments of expansion. Quigley calls a social organization or unit an instrument if it meets social needs.
4. Age of Conflict - The rate of increase resulting from the use of one or more social instruments slows down which results in "interesting times". The instrument can be reformed or a new instrument consistent with the civilization's outlook can circumvent the old instrument. If reform is achieved, a new age of expansion begins. If the vested interests of the previous instrument of expansion increasingly consume resources while serving no social needs, Quigley says that the instrument has then become an institution. Expansion can continue, but it is at the expense of neighbors, which leads to imperialist wars. When the vested interests have crushed all internal opposition, the next stage appears.
5. Universal Empire - typically a state or political unit on the periphery of the civilization gains power over the whole civilization. The illusion of a golden age appears. The social organization remains stagnant.
6. Decay - lack of belief in the civilization's outlook or inability to meet needs of the people leads to people opting out of the system. An age of cynicism, low cunning and despair.
7. Invasion - external forces disrupt the civilization's social organization and it is unable or unwilling to defend itself. That spells the end of the civilization.
Quigley stated that modern Western civilization as embodied by America has succeeded in arriving at the brink of the Age of Conflict stage no fewer than four times, but has always managed to reinvigorate itself by launching into a new Age of Expansion. Recall that expansion in Quigley's terms doesn't necessarily apply to the acquisition of new territory. If he’s correct, we’re now out of options, and that we’ve progressed rapidly through to stage 6. As many of you know, I have my own ideas about what’s going on with respect to the role that the will to power has played in modern times.
An excellent reference work on civilizational collapse appears here: The Catastrophe” What the End of Bronze-Age Civilization Means for Modern Times
Yes, that's exactly what Quigley claims. We sometimes forget that the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Muslims in the early 700s, and that the last vestiges of Islamic domination were not expelled from Spain until the late 1400s. 700 years of cultural domination will leave a lasting impression on the conquered culture. When and if a subject culture ever re-emerges, it will not be the same; it will have taken on some aspects of the subjugating culture.
Thank you very much!
You might find this interesting...
Thank you my friend.
Most likely ... now all I need to “find” is time to read it. ;-P
I remember someone here within the last week-or-so telling of having spent some time working in Saudi Arabia.
His work crew of locals, as a result of generations of inbreeding, all had some combination of one or more of bad eyes, bad ears, or bad kidneys.
Many most-likely feeble-minded, too.
Every strip mall had a hearing-aid store, an eyeglass store, and a kidney-dialysis center.
If demography is indeed destiny, then the West is in danger of succumbing to a horde of pathologically cruel and inhumane genetic defectives.
Oh, my. Was I just politically incorrect?
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