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Posted on 06/14/2002 6:35:35 AM PDT by xsysmgr
If you write things in public about the Middle East, you get a lot of reader responses. After a while you start to spot trends in these responses, trends that are very suggestive about how people think and feel on large subjects.
When I myself write about the Middle East, I generally pause somewhere along the line to point out that, while individual Arabs are neither better nor worse, in the generality, than individual Englishmen, Americans, or Hungarians, Arab society has never got the hang of rational politics, and shows no signs of doing so. Hence every one of the Arab countries is either an obscurantist theocracy or else a secular "people's republic" under the thumb of cynical gangsters.
There's a response that I get rather often from Arab readers to this line of talk. It goes more or less as follows: "What do you expect? Of course the Arab world is politically backward. You Americans installed those regimes! You maintain them! The people of Saudi Arabia etc. would love to get rid of their horrid despotic rulers, but America won't let them! If Saudis tried to overthrow their monarchy and establish a popular government, the U.S.A. would move in to stop it! It's all America's fault! "
The first thing to be said about this argument is that a lot of intelligent-sounding Arabs (and Pakistanis, and assorted others) believe it — I get half a dozen e-mails a week along these lines. The second thing to be said is that, taken as a thesis in political science, it is dog poop.
It is, as a matter of fact, the case that democracy in the Arab world is probably not in the interests of the U.S. There are strong reasons to believe that any Arab democracy would swiftly degenerate into fascism and that Arab rulers, though certainly odious, are, on the whole, less hostile to the U.S. and our interests than are the Arab people at large — certainly less than the politically organized opposition in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, even possibly Iraq. Palestine, too: The current unpopularity of Yasser Arafat among his people, for example, seems to arise from a perception that he is not anti-Semitic and anti-American enough to please them.
It is none the less true that a determined attempt by the people of any Middle Eastern nation to overthrow a pro-American regime would certainly succeed. The name "Shah of Iran" mean anything? When a nation reaches a revolutionary point, there is very little that any outside power can do to change the course of events, unless, like Stalin in post-WWII Europe, or the Romans in 1st-century Palestine, the power is exceptionally ruthless. Which, of course, for better or worse, the U.S. is not. Revolution — and reform, too, which is an entirely different thing — rises up from the people. It can't be imposed, nor even much managed, by outsiders, except in very special circumstances like those of postwar Japan. If the people of Syria or Pakistan were determined to have constitutional government, there is nothing the U.S. or anyone else could do to deny them it. Contrariwise, if they are not determined to have it, nobody can give it to them, certainly not us.
Why, then, do so many people seem to believe that "It's all America's fault!" I think there are a couple of things going on here.
One of those things is that we are the Daddy nation: big, strong, rich, and dominant. A lot of the world is in the same relation to the U.S. as a difficult teenager is to his father. It's not just our size, our wealth, or our strength that drives them crazy; it's our very existence that can barely be tolerated, and the knowing how much they still depend on us. I am an autonomous being! I have a will of my own! I have seen the future — I am PART OF the future — and you dare to stand in my way?!?! In the case of the Arab world, this attitude is probably magnified by the often-observed phenomenon of the pampered Arab male adolescent, doted on by his female relatives, all the hopes of the family pinned on him.
Another thing, I think, is that pretty much all of the Arab world is locked in a kind of cargo-cult mentality. Cargo cults came up in the Melanesian islands of the South Pacific during WWII. The peoples of these places saw the Americans and British come in and build airstrips. Then, when the airstrips were built, planes started to arrive, loaded with cargo. The Melanesians deduced, not altogether unreasonably given their state of knowledge, that if they built airstrips, then planes would come to them, too, likewise bringing cargo. They accordingly hacked makeshift runways out of the jungle and built mock-up control towers out of grass and mud. Then they sat and waited for the cargo to arrive.
You get a cargo-cult flavor in a lot of Third World countries. America has skyscrapers. America is rich and strong. Let's build some skyscrapers — then we'll be rich and strong, too! The idea that the wealth and the strength are rooted in customs, arrangements, laws, liberties, traditions, patterns of thought and behavior and association, and that the skyscrapers are an incidental byproduct, is not well understood.
The communist world was a lot like that, too — and still is, where it survives. Pyongyang is full of broad sweeping boulevards and grandiose buildings. There is no traffic to use the boulevards, and the people who occupy the buildings, when they bother to show up for work, are ragged and starving. When the boulevards were laid out and the buildings built, though, most people probably believed that prosperity and national strength — the cargo! — would inevitably follow.
Sub-Saharan Africa was a cargo-cult sort of place in the 1960s and 1970s, after the colonial powers left. Every new nation got itself an airline, a university system, a couple of superhighways, a prestige industrial project, a constitution. See, we are just like a European country! Just like America! Surely the cargo will come! Alas, it didn't come. The prestige project has been swallowed up in the bush, grass grows in cracks in the superhighways, the constitution was trashed by President-for-Life Klepto Thuggo, and a rebel army is camped in the university library, using the books for cooking fuel.
Living in China in the early 1980s, I used to marvel at all the pointless fakery that went on. They had a "parliament" that never debated anything, "newspapers" with no news, "trials" where nothing was tried, the verdict having been decided in advance. Why do they bother? I wondered. I began to suspect that the answer was: Because America has these things. See how rich, how successful they are! Therefore we must have these things too. Then we shall be rich and successful, like America! (Bertrand Russell, reporting on his visit to Russia in 1920, said that the aim of Lenin and his Bolsheviks was: "To make Russia as industrialized and Yankee as possible.")
In my pessimistic moods, I think that constitutional government is a sort lucky fluke that random peoples stumble on from time to time, once in a millennium perhaps. The English figured it out somehow in the early-modern period, and carried it to their colonies, who improved on it. The Roman republic had a pretty good shot at it for a while, till the very success of their system made their territories too large for the system to manage. Similarly with the ancient Greeks. A scattered few other places — Western Europe, Japan, India, Taiwan — look as if they have got the right idea. I wouldn't say their grasp on it is always very firm, but at least for few decades their parliaments will debate, their judges judge, their newspapers report news. Most of the world, though, including all of the Arab world, is sunk in political darkness, which is the natural state of mankind. The people of these places know that something is lacking, but they just can't figure out what the heck it is. We built the runways and the conning towers and the hangars — look! Why won't the cargo come?
It must be America's fault.
— Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor.
Culture can't be imposed. It can't be copied. It takes generations to change it.
We have [had?] a really great culture. I fear greatly the radical changes that have been brought about in the last 40 years by the trashing of religion, trashing of patriotisim, and the promotion of victimology. I don't think these things are anything good to our long term culture. And I have no idea how anyone can influence a reversal of this.
I have always called it the "style mentality." It's a major problem for American kids who grow up thinking that the "suit" or the "tan slacks" and the "smile" are what have value and such symbols can be exchanged for money. They dress, and address, for success, they build that, but then not much comes easily --- it's enough to make a person terribly frustrated and seek unhealthy "alternative lifestyles" such as drugs, drinking, and the lesser performing arts.
What's missing is the knowledge ... of what drives people to further their freedom and the fruits that manifest.
I claim that what makes America work --- what makes, therein, capitalism work --- is that we people are the authorities, not just as "soverign people," but as individuals. At our level, we have quite a lot of authority; or that is, we once did.
So the question is:
Can a runway be built and then airplanes land, spewing forth cargo, and thus "do good" in the long-term; in a land where people still are subjects, or are not far removed from having been subjects, nor are they inclined enough to affirm their removal from being subjects?
History says no.
The "engine of democracy" is more accurately an engine of individual liberty and determination to have both liberty and property in support of furthering both. Such is the formula for growth.
We grow to have and have to grow. Our wealth is assets, not money, not style, not cargo.
Those three cannot be given and then expect from any combination thereof, these: growth, sufficient, but especially self-determination, sufficient.
We commune and we establish justice to help each other survive the business and perils of our growth; and we use our authority --- which is our willingness to risk life and limb --- to preserve our communing and justice, and we do that by enforcing over both, our rule of law.
We do the growing. We do the preserving. We do the enforcing.
To make efficient our communing and justice, we elect governors of such offices and departments in our lives; and they, and all officers therein, are subject to our authority:
That they administer their posts in accordance with what we have directed as the responsibilities and enumerated as the powers of their office, not of, nor for, them, we thereby --- trusting in a higher authority --- temporarily and temporally delegate to them, and limit them, to certain duties, at their peril to perform, or exercise, anything otherwise.
This is a mystery to many people, especially "over there," because to behold the possibilities, that their "leaders" are also their office holders and subjects --- their servants --- is frightening; it means that for such a shift in individual authority to be so, the people must be willing to risk life and limb, and organize accordingly.
For Prosperity, Liberty and Justice for All.
Just like that, the formula.
Mike
(a.k.a. First_Salute)
This reminds me, the liberals are always do studies on poverty and the poor. They should be studying the wealth. Poverty is the normal condition of humanity, while wealth is the exception. You don't learn about ending poverty by studying the poor. Obviously, they failed at ending poverty.
I have always called it the "style mentality." It's a major problem for American kids who grow up thinking that the "suit" or the "tan slacks" and the "smile" are what have value and such symbols can be exchanged for money. They dress, and address, for success, they build that, but then not much comes easily --- it's enough to make a person terribly frustrated and seek unhealthy "alternative lifestyles" such as drugs, drinking, and the lesser performing arts....First_Salute
You and Derbyshire are right there on the same page, Mike. (And it's a damn good page to be on! Yet another reason for you and me to go on the road. :) We do the singing thing, and then you give a lecture on the unimportance of style versus the ultimate importance of depth/integrity/character). America is desperately in need of that lecture.
Those ‘kids’ of whom you speak obtain their predisposition to embrace symbolic value as a substitute for intrinsic value from someone outside of themselves (generally their parents. But, if their parents are among that ever-growing group of biological procreators who attempt to parent in absentia, then they more likely learn from their peers, or other societal influences (television being a favorite instructor) that outward vestments actually have meaning (or at least more meaning than they deserve), and are an ultimate goal to be achieved.
One of the results of such a shallow destiny, as you so beautifully point out above, is that, once they are satiated with creature comforts, they still sense a void within themselves (a void whose still-empty shape roughly resembles the shape of individual character/integrity/honesty/work ethic/altruism/courage). And, not recognizing those qualities to be of any real value (after all, they can’t be bought or sold, or bartered, or worn, or flaunted for fleeting admiration), they attempt to fill that nebulous, aching hole with more physical world stimulants/relaxants (whichever is more momentarily appealing) – (your ‘unhealthy alternative lifestyles, drugs, drinking....’) – only to find that the void is still there (and may have become even more demanding of notice).
It's too bad. In our early days as a nation, we had serious problems. But, for the most part, they were external to ourselves. We looked within ourselves for the character/integrity/honesty/work ethic/altruism/courage to surmount those difficulties. Now, when our youth, especially, have been conditioned to look outside of themselves for reinforcement and support, and cling to material things to provide it, their odds of disappointment/failure (or much worse) are 1/1. What an ignoble inheritance/precarious future we are leaving the next generation.
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