Dice are rolling

We are now started on a chain of events across the world, the resolution of which will determine the global reach of democracy during my children’s generation.  These events appear disconnected, but have in common the failure of top-down systems - from meritocracies to thugocracies - to withstand the complex pressures generated by the globalization of production, consumption, finance, and above all, communication and information.

The most remarkable feature about this moment of change is that, until recently, it had stopped short of systematic violence, at least outside Iraq.  Can this last?  The historian in me doubts that great change can be brought about without murderous resistance.  The recent massacre perpetrated against demonstrators by Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, tends to confirm my pessimism.

History is written in violence; that is an indisputable fact about the past.  About the future, I can only hope to be proven wrong.

Let me start with the latest of the transformational events:  the defeat by a wide margin of the EU constitution in France.  While a geiser of verbiage has spewed nonsense and platitudes all around the subject (the least objectionable of it accessible via RealClearPolitics), the fact to hang on to here is that the non vote has ended an era in Europe, and that no one has a clue as to what comes next.

Will the Europeans surrender ever more abjectly to the demands of their political elite - that tyranny of schoolmasters de Tocqueville warned against?  Or will they reconsider their moral and political condition, as individuals and as peoples, and opt for greater freedom of action, greater risk, but also a greater ability to influence the future?

Before that question is even formulated, there will be many temptations presented to the Europeans:  to abandon hope, to hide behind smugness and cynicism, to rage against vast impersonal forces, or against an America which seems to embody them, in short, to become a destructive force on the world stage, because that is always easier than shouldering one’s share of responsibility.

The Europe of the next generation is being born today.  Let’s keep tabs on the infant, to see whether he develops the character to stay free and become a force for good.

Across the Middle East, long-time dictators are tottering, and the only questions are, when will they yield, and what will replace them.  The history of the region has swung between absolutism and tribal warfare.  After the overthrow of Saddam by U.S. troops, the Shiites and Kurds, long oppressed by the fallen dictator, have joined to form a government based on the principle of popular sovereignty.  In response, the Sunnis have unleashed tribal war under the guise of religion.  They find support among those in the Arab world who consider Kurds as eternal foreigners, and Shiites as loathsome heretics.

Nowhere in the world are the dice rolling more consequentially than in Iraq.  If blowing up innocents succeeds as a political strategy, the entire Middle East will be in flames within a year, and the war on terror will be as good as lost.  I don’t think this will happen.  For me the question is less about terror than, yet again, about character:  will the mutually hostile tribes of Iraq be able to reach some arrangement that allows them all to prosper?   If the answer is no, the present state of violence will continue or intensify.

If events in Iraq are the most consequential to the next generation, those in Lebanon are probably the most suggestive of the direction the rest of the Middle East will take.  Lebanon has a long history of inter-tribal compromise, free press, entrepeneurial genius, and representative government (of a sort).  If democracy can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere in the region.

But Lebanon has also known tribal war to the death, and the feelings, both of blind loyalty to one’s own and of equally blind rage against one’s opponents, are still very much alive in the population.  Circumstances have bestowed a huge opportunity.  The Syrian occupation has ended.  Yesterday’s elections have raised Saad Hariri, son of the murdered former prime minister, to de facto leader of the opposition forces.  Against him are arrayed the Syrians, the Iranians, their creatures in Lebanon, and those who profited from the old order, including Hezbollah, the armed Shia militia.

Democracy in such an environment is a tall order, and Hariri himself knows that, if he fails to deliver a new Lebanon within a few years, the window of opportunity will slam shut.

In Syria and Egypt, two dinosaurs, Bashar Assad and Hosni Mubarak respectively, are feeling pressured by the U.S. and threatened by their own peoples.  Both have been throwing dissidents in prison, while promising to lead a reformist movement in person.  That is likely only if we believe a triceratops can evolve into Abraham Lincoln.

Assad has called for a Baath Party congress in early June; while dissident Syrians expect few changes to come out of it - “you simply cannot fix a corpse,” one of them maintains – he is desperate enough to try dramatic gestures.  Mubarak just held a referendum for a tightly controlled “reform” of the presidential elections, which went so well his thugs celebrated by beating up dissidents; they showed a preference for manhandling women.

The motto of the Egyptian opposition is kifaya:  enough.  It’s an apt term.  The twin farces in Syria and Egypt won’t last long.  But what follows the dinosaurs, in countries where the laws of political evolution have been unnaturally distorted, is anybody’s guess.

Then there’s India and China.  Both appear to be on the threshhold of great power status, yet neither can continue on the path it is currently pursuing.  Prosperity in India runs up against the corruption and arbitrariness of the state and central governments, the infamous “license raj.”  Either transparency is attained, or prosperity will be smothered.

As for China, it resembles a levitation act, amazing while it lasts but ultimately in defiance of the laws of physics:  what goes up must come down.  Laissez-faire, wild-west economic freedom managed by a totalitarian-minded party is too gross a paradox to endure.  One side or the other must win out.  In India and China the dice are rolling, the stakes are huge, and the outcome impossible to foretell.

In truth, the stakes are immense for the entire world.  The next 20 years, conceivably, can see an expansion of freedom unparalleled in history, with revolutionary consequences for the moral and material condition of the human race.  Just as likely is a world in which rulers wage savage war against their own people, tribe seeks to exterminate tribe, and only the fortunate few among nations can escape the vortex of violence.  We are not entirely powerless in this drama, but as Machiavelli observed, luck also enters the equation, and in that sense the future will feel very much like a roll of the dice.

Religion and democracy

I’ve been sitting on this NYT piece for a couple of weeks, because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to wade into the media’s current mania about religion.  The author, Mark Lilla, sets out to refute the thesis, put forward by Gertrude Himmelfarb and others, that the Anglo-American Enlightenment differed from the Continental version by its acceptance, in fact its welcoming, of religion.

This was unquestionably the case.  Lilla, however, maintains that the acceptance of religion among British and American thinkers was contingent on changing it:  only a liberalized Christianity, those Enlightenment worthies believed, can coexist with self-government.  And there’s an element of truth in that as well.  John Locke began a process of rationalizing Anglicanism that led, by a tortuous and indirect path, to Jefferson’s odd attempt to write a Gospel stripped of miracles, to New England Unitarianism, and ultimately to the vague spiritual effusions of Emerson and Thoreau.

The way Lilla sees it, our Enlightenment got it wrong.  Biblical religion can only be rationalized so far:  eventually, it fights back.  Anglicanism was overtaken by Methodism.  Today, the Unitarians are greatly outnumbered by more traditional varieties of Christianity.  This alarms Lilla, who trots out the business about the Rapture and warns us all to be on our guard against an uprising by bible-waving theocrats:

The leading thinkers of the British and American Enlightenments hoped that life in a modern democratic order would shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith. American religion is moving in the opposite direction today, back toward the ecstatic, literalist and credulous spirit of the Great Awakenings. Its most disturbing manifestations are not political, at least not yet. They are cultural. The fascination with the ”end times,” the belief in personal (and self-serving) miracles, the ignorance of basic science and history, the demonization of popular culture, the censoring of textbooks, the separatist instincts of the home-schooling movement — all these developments are far more worrying in the long term than the loss of a few Congressional seats.

No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so. If there is anything David Hume and John Adams understood, it is that you cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge.

For some reason, Hume and Adams are made by Lilla to stand for the British and American Enlightenments.  As a general proposition, that’s fair enough.  But Hume was a monarchist as well as an atheist.  The defense of democracy against religion, as a question for discussion, never entered his mind.

Adams, on the other hand, wrote the constitution for a state that retained an established church after 1789, and anyone old enough to recall the phrase “banned in Boston” knows that the Puritan religious impulse long outlasted Adams’ day.  Even Jefferson, when he was president, took care to be seen going to church carrying the largest bible he could find.

There is much to be said on this subject, but I won’t carry on.  I don’t think anyone outside a few fevered heads in MSM and academia worry about this question.  I know many religious people, and not one has raised the Rapture as a subject of conversation.  Home-schooling isn’t some sort of test of one’s adherence to democracy.  It’s a choice, which is what a free country provides.  And the “demonization” of popular culture is perpetrated by most parents, Jews and gentiles, Christians and heathens, myself included, who wish to preserve a shred of innocence in childhood.

One can be tolerant and religious, or intolerant and religious; the same applies to the secularists.  No group has a monopoly on intolerance.  The love of reason has led to the guillotine as well as to modern science.  Without making any cosmic statements about the Enlightenment, I’m certain the Founding Fathers intended the free exercise of religion to flourish.  That was the point of the first words of the Bill of Rights.

The worry was about a single all-controlling church, such as the Church of England or the Catholic Church in pre-revolutionary France.  The proliferation of faiths nullified that threat.  To demand that religious belief be adjusted to a single political ideology strikes me as, well, intolerant, or at least wildly naive.  To assert  that all religions that stray from liberalism are undemocratic is to deny the reality of American history.

The concern of democracy isn’t with belief but with behavior:  with character.  Conceivably, a person can have a perfect understanding of reality, and become a mass murderer.  There is no logical contradiction in this.  Equally, a person can hold all kinds of fanciful beliefs about God and spirituality, and be tolerant and engaged in civic affairs.  No inconsistency there either.  I have trouble understanding why “reality-based” critics of religion, not only academics like Lilla but scientists like Richard Dawkins, fall into a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder about what other people choose to believe or disbelieve.

Allow me a South Park moment.  One episode has great fun ridiculing the beliefs held by Mormons.  But at the end, the little Mormon kid confronts the South Park brats with the following argument, with which I will conclude this post (in the interests of de-demonizing popular culture, I have omitted the expletive at the end of the soliloquy):

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy.

Deep thought

“Our contemporaries are ever a prey to two conflicting passions:  they feel the need of guidance, and they long to stay free.  Unable to wipe out these two contradictory instincts, they try to satisfy them both together.  Their imagination conceives a government which is unitary, protective, and all-powerful, but elected by the people.  Centralization is combined with the sovereignty of the people.  They console themselves for being under schoolmasters by thinking that they have chosen them themselves.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

 

Virtue in the people, part deux

What did Madison mean by that quote?  He meant that without self-command, the individual - and in the aggregate, the citizenry - is incapable of self-government.  We can’t be good parents unless we place our children’s wellbeing above our own.  We can’t be good neighbors unless we perceive our homes as part of a community that rises or sinks together.  We can’t be good citizens unless we accept that we owe a debt, to be paid in integrity and restraint, to our dead fathers and to our great-grandchildren not yet born.

Insofar as we are individuals, and not, as David Hume once wrote, “a bundle of perceptions,” we must impose a theme and a purpose on the random events of everyday life.

The world is a hard unforgiving place.  Yesterday’s success becomes the reason for tomorrow’s failure.  The temptation to become comfortable, self-absorbed, and smug when one has known prosperity, is a difficult one to resist.  A virtuous people are always uneasy:  eternally vigilant, in Jefferson’s words.  Their fate is in their own hands.  The corrupt, in success, are self-smitten, and in failure find many villains to rage against.

That brings me, once again, to Europe.  A spate of articles have appeared over the last few days speculating on the future of the EU and the European “social model” after the vote on the European constitution this weekend in France, and next week in the Netherlands.  The early elections in Germany, the country that patented the “social market,” adds to a growing premonition that, for good or evil, the Europe the next generation is about to take shape.

I find two quotes particularly telling, one by Michel Rocard, once prime minister of France, the other by Gunther Grass, a great German novelist.  These are not the words of vigilant and self-commanding persons.  Both men look on a world of chaotic contending forces, and see instead a cunning ideological conspiracy, led by America, and aimed at making Europe weak and poor.

Rocard, after blaming the unpopularity of the EU constitution in part on President Chirac, who happens to be his political enemy, goes on to the big picture:

The world has undergone massive economic deregulation, prescribed by the monetarist doctrine supported by the conservative forces dominant in the developed countries of North America, Europe, and the Far East. This economic tsunami has come to us from the United States - there is nothing in it for Europe, but the right-wing forces in all our countries, which have coalesced into the majority that governs Europe, have rallied to its support.

It is the desire to reject this state of affairs that, above all else, explains the “No” many French people want to shout.

Rocard disagrees with the rejectionists, but only because he believes a newly constituted EU will be “big enough to block the neo-liberal tsunami.”  Somehow the adoption of a 600-page document by the French and the EU will end the coldness of the world and the harshness of reality.  Grass splashes out into economic deep water with all the expertise of an author of fiction:

“We are all witnesses to the fact that production is being destroyed worldwide, that so-called hostile and friendly takeovers are destroying thousands of jobs, that the mere announcement of rationalisation measures, such as the dismissal of workers and employees, makes share prices rise and this is regarded unthinkingly as the price to be paid for ‘living in freedom’.”

“Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions – [it] has thereby become an object of ridicule. It is degenerating into a subsidiary of the stock exchange. Democracy has become a pawn in the dictates of globally volatile capital.

“The social market economy – formerly a successful model of economic and cohesive action – has degenerated into the free-market economy.”

The Germans, like the French, are no longer in command of their own fate:  otherwise, how could they fail?  Democracy has been violated.  Painted barbarians stand astride the city gates.  That last sentence of Grass’ explains a great deal:  “formerly a successful model” is the cry of the last dying dinosaur, enormous and powerful, no doubt wonderful in its own esteem, about to be overcome by nimble mouse-sized mammals.

The world condemned by Rocard and Grass in the same one in which unprecedented numbers of Chinese and Indians, as well as formerly communist East Europeans, have left poverty behind, and taken their place among the “developed” nations.  To rage against this transformation isn’t merely corrupt:  it’s monstrously selfish.  Let me end this post with the words of Martin Kettle, from his sane and insightful piece in today’s Guardian:

What went wrong for Germany was also what went wrong for Europe. It was not East Germany alone that collapsed in 1989. It was communism more generally, and not just in eastern Europe but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world. And rightly so. The prospect that hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indian people will enjoy double or treble the prosperity that their parents knew is the single most wonderful possibility in the modern world.

There was nothing wrong with the postwar settlement for the Europeans who benefited from it, especially for those who had survived the terrible years of 1914-45. But it was only sustainable as long as the millions who languished under communism were unable to get their share of the prosperity, security and freedom that western Europe enjoyed. Once communism collapsed, the privileges and protections that were essential to the western settlement began to be unsustainable economically and, in an important way, morally too.

Virtue in the people

These words are from Madison.  They summarize neatly what this blog is about:  the two-way traffic between freedom and morality.  They also pose a question about how to interpret recent events in Europe.

Germany’s ruling Social Democratic Party has just suffered a devastating defeat in North Rhein-Westphalia, the country’s most populous state and one the SPD has owned for 39 years.  Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in an unusual move, has called for early general elections, this fall instead of the scheduled date in 2006.

In France, meanwhile, most polls show a narrow edge for the non vote on the EU constitution, coming up 29 May.  President Chirac has invested his prestige and wagered his political future on ratification of the constitution, yet as with Schroeder, his support may be the very reason for its defeat.  And if the constitution goes down, the EU’s future becomes a huge question mark.

What are we to make of all this?

One way is to see it through an American lens.  Here, Schroeder and Chirac were derided as the “axis of weasels,” and for good reason.  They fanned anti-Americanism in Germany and France for political gain, and opposed the U.S. in Iraq far beyond the point of a disagreement among friends.  But more:  they clearly saw their countries as standing for something qualitatively different from the “Anglo-Saxon” way of life, and themselves as leaders of a kinder, more humane, wholly secular “social Europe.”

That their geopolitical power was meager, that their economies were drifting downward, troubled these two men not at all.  They offered token gestures of reform, but in all big things hunkered down with the status quo.

So the case can be made that, in Germany, the electorate has decided to dismantle Schroeder’s SPD-Green political Jurassic Park.  In the state election, the conservative parties received a clear majority.  The leftist alternatives to the SPD lost ground.  The bloody flag of anti-Americanism was waved before the vote, and failed to move.  The people of Germany may well have reflected on the stagnation of their economy, with the largest number of unemployed since before World War II, and decided on change.

Similarly, the French may well find the 600-page EU constitution impossible to swallow for good republican reasons.  Etienne Chouard lists ten of those reasons, all persuasive to an American reader, my favorite among which is:  “A constitution must be readable before a popular vote is allowed:  the text of this one is unreadable.”

The surrender of nationhood, the prospect of rule by hyper-bureaucrats, the meager aspirations to “sustainable development” and a “social market economy,” may disgust a people who once considered themselves the vanguard of liberty in the globe.  If the French vote no, anti-Americanism as a vote-getting device will once again have failed.

That’s the cheerful interpretation.  The Germans will abandon dinosaurian socialism.  They will reform their economy, which will once again become the locomotive of Europe.  The French will opt for France rather than Brussels, open-air clarity rather than 600 pages of opaque regulatory claustrophobia.  Both countries will, if not exactly kiss and make up with us, at least cease to define themselves by their opposition to our “hegemony.”

Unfortunately, another interpretation is possible, which posits much less virtue in the peoples involved.  In every democracy, the voters much choose between long-term interests and short-term desires.  The contrary case can be argued that, in Germany, the voters punished Schroeder because he wasn’t Jurassic enough.  His reforms, marginal as they were, offended the electorate’s aggressive desire for stasis.  The large number of unemployed are still a minority of the voting population:  those who have, don’t wish to share.

The next six months, as the country staggers toward elections, will see a frenzied assumption by the left of ever more extreme postures, including anti-Americanism on the geopolitical and economic fronts.  If this is how matters develop, the Germans will have sold their birthright, and their children’s, for a mess of potage.

In France, the opposition to the constitution is led by a bizarre alliance of socialists, Trotskyites, hard nationalists, and people who might best be described as frightened and confused:  not a good indicator of virtue among the non crowd.  The chief argument against the constitution seems to be that it is too “Anglo-Saxon,” though the idea of Americans or Englishmen considering, even for a minute, such a bloated governing document, is comical.  The French may see any change as threatening.  Chirac is himself a bloated governing entity, open to criticism from many directions, but as with Schroeder his punishment may result from having done too much rather than too little.

If the French vote no, in this scenario, we can expect the country’s political pathologies to assert themselves:  government bribery in the form of subsidies, labor blackmail in the form of strikes, narrow personal and sectarian interests taking hold everywhere, with  possibly a veneer of anti-Americanism, shared by all, to provide the illusion of unity.  The interesting question is whether the outcome will be different with ratification.

Which way will it go?  I am not in the prophecy business:  I don’t have a clue.  The stakes for Europe, as has been noted with a touch of despair, are immense.  The past performance of this generation of Europeans hasn’t been encouraging.  In any case, the political issues and parties contesting power in both countries are of secondary importance.

If the citizens of Germany and France wish to sacrifice their children for the desires of the moment, no plan or policy can help them.  Equally, if those citizens seek to enlarge their sphere of freedom and to transcend selfishness, their countries may indeed rise to compete, happily and healthily, with the United States.

Women, work, and happiness

Yesterday I posted on the divide in life expectations created among women by marriage, divorce, and unwed motherhood.  Now, here is the flip side of the coin:  those women who are able to pursue their ambitions in the workplace, but feel pressured and unhappy precisely because they have a husband and children, and only so many hours in the day to satisfy all the demands upon them.

This interesting but ultimately wrong-headed post by Black Five maintains that “feminists” have insisted women are exactly like men, and should take to the workplace in that spirit.  Well, I’ll freely admit my ignorance of feminism as a coherent ideology, primarily because I am, in anthropological jargon, “a guy.”  But what little has come my way of feminist arguments has been concerned almost entirely with abortion.  Far below that in importance, I have read various condemnations of marriage, the family, and pretty much everything about our way of life because it is tainted by the “patriarchy” - which, I take it, has nothing to do with the first chapters of the bible.

Has feminism addressed the home versus workplace decisions every woman must make?  I have no idea.  But someone should.

I am the oldest of three siblings.  My mother worked until I was born, and returned to the workforce after my youngest sister was past minding.  She has a degree in mathematics, is as smart as any dozen men put together, but believed, like most of her generation, that her main calling in life was to be a wife and mother.  That left something out, I suspect.

My wife has worked all her life.  She has raised three children, and put up with the likes of me, but she came from a generation that believed there should be no difference between men and women.  I believed that too, and no feminists had to persuade me.  My wife has been a success at work, and remains the pillar on which the three kids and the clueless husband (not to mention the equally clueless dog) lean on for support.  I suspect that crams in too much responsibility, too many demands on a single life.

I have a young daughter, and I ask myself what advice I should give.  Go out, compete, knock the socks off those other guys in the workplace?  Stay home, enjoy your children, then go out and make the best of it?  What is the vision of the good life, for American women?

Women, marriage, and poverty

Morality makes life infinitely simpler, by selecting certain behaviors and valuing them highly.  We call these behaviors “good.”  We understand, but rarely state, that they are implicated in the shaping of successful lives, in producing happiness, self-command, good citizenship, and a degree of freedom.

When morality is confused with an arbitrary or even tyrannical system of rules, to be accepted or rejected at pleasure, the consequences may enter the realm of good and evil, but more often become a tipping-point in an individual’s life, from success to failure.  For every moral monster, I would suggest, there are 10,000 human wretches who suffer from their own mistakes.

That is the case with marriage and motherhood.  For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, the institution of marriage suffered a catastrophic decline after the 1960′s.  First divorce, then unwed motherhood, became socially acceptable behaviors.  Whether this was good or evil I will leave for others to determine:  but for many women it has meant poverty, dependency, and heart-breaking misery.  This WSJ piece by Kay Hymowitz compares the mating and marriage expectations of middle-class women with those of the poor, and the consequences that follow:

This is a vain, though commonplace, attempt to soften the ghetto’s destructive decoupling of marriage and childrearing. In opinion polls, the authors observe, higher-income women share their poorer sisters’ attitudes toward premarital sex, cohabitation and even out-of-wedlock childbearing. But the truth is that the vast majority of middle-class women–and the same can be said for poor immigrants–arrive at maternity wards with husbands in tow. They know that an orderly domestic life is the stage set for upwardly mobile children and the cue to America to keep its promise.

Morality, properly understood, isn’t about passing judgments on one’s neighbor, but about achieving a good life.  The decline of marriage, properly understood, is a decline in morality, and hence a reduction in the number of Americans with access to the good life.

 

Modernizing tyranny in Syria

A month and a half after I reported a telling wobble in the regime of Syria’s Bashar Assad, the WaPo has noticed.

Beset by U.S. attempts to isolate his country and facing popular expectations of change, Syrian President Bashar Assad will move to begin legalizing political parties, purge the ruling Baath Party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007 and formally endorse a market economy, according to officials, diplomats and analysts.

Assad’s five-year-old government is heralding the reforms as a turning point in a long-promised campaign of liberalizing a state that, while far less dictatorial than Iraq under Saddam Hussein, remains one of the region’s most repressive. His officials see the moves, however tentative and drawn out, as the start of a transitional period that will lead to a more liberal, democratic Syria.

I repeat what I said in my earlier post:  even token moves toward democracy are a tribute to President Bush’s freedom policy, which is forcing Middle East tyrants down a path that is uncomfortable to their vanity and may well be dangerous to their authority.  That said, we shouldn’t expect too much from Assad’s June party congress.  One dissident quoted in the WaPo article called it the “modernization of authoritarianism.”  Certainly, Syrian blogger Amarji, who originally held hopes, has grown increasingly cynical:

A few days ago, the President issued a special degree inviting the Syrian Social National Party to join the National Progressive Front, as assortment of socialist, communist and Nasserist parties already cannibalized and marginalized by the Baath Party.

But the “new” party now invited in is not actually the real thing. It is only a schismatic movement within the SSNP, represented by a deaf 84 old man who reportedly slips in and out of senility ten times in the span of ten seconds. So, this is how the regime is planning to reform itself. [ . . .]

So, even if new faces should emerge during the upcoming Congress, old ways and patterns will continue to dominate and dictate.

My all-time favorite blogger, from the Middle East or anywhere, Karfan of Syria Exposed, has an even dimmer, and more profane, view of the situation.

Every day Karfan goes to work, he has to be tortured hearing about the upcoming big event that became the talk of the year this year: The Baath Party Regional Convention. So much rumors and talks that gives Karfan headache to hear and see people talk about as if it is going to be the Big-Bang of Syria. The Baath will change its name, the Baath will change its objectives, the Baath will allow political life, the Baath will get rid of all the old guard, King Lion the 2nd will reshuffle and clean the Baath party and so on and so on.

In order for a party to do all of this shit, it has to be a Political Party. Karfan wonders when in monkey’s name this “Thing” became a real party. Yes, granted we call it “The Party”and “Baath Party” but these are mere names of some “thing” that exists and we had to call it a name. It does not mean anything like a political party or any political or organizational entity. It just exists around us and between us like that black-cloud of pollution on top of Damascus and Banias, like the sewage stink, or like the Mukhabarat’s Peugeot white cars. “Baath Party”, “People’s Assembly”, “Cultural Center”, and “People’s Army” are just names of things that had nothing to do with those names.

“King Lion the 2d” is of course Bashar Assad, who inherited the Baathist “throne” from his father.  The WaPo article reports that Syrian intellectuals have lost much of their fear of speaking out.  I note, as a historical fact, that bloggers Amarji and Karfan have preceded them in the hierarchy of courage:  they have been telling truth before Assad’s fiasco in Lebanon, before the party congress was announced, before there was much hope.

That they are now joined by others suggests that the results of the congress are ultimately unimportant.  Something has thawed in that long-frozen country, and no amount of posturing or “modernizing” will put the pieces back in place.

 

Bernard Lewis on Muslim democracy

A must-read article by Bernard Lewis in Foreign Affairs, providing some of the historical and cultural background to today’s “Arab spring.”  Lewis claims that equality among believers was a “basic principle of Islam from its foundation in the seventh century . . . Islam really did insist on equality and achieved a high measure of success in enforcing it.”  How that was achieved Lewis does not mention, and he appears to contradict himself when he relates that the principle of “consultation” by the ruler involved tribal chiefs, the landed gentry, and other grandees.

Lewis’ skill in translating Arab culture to Americans, using masterful prose, is second to none.  His sympathy with his subject is apparent, but he never condescends, and never overlooks the obstacles on the way to democracy in the Muslim world (if, indeed, such a region exists).

Obvious difficulties are the rage of the dictators who don’t wish to lose their jobs, and the equal but opposite rage of the fundamentalists who wish to dictate the narrowest possible interpretation of the Koran.  But one always learns new facts from Lewis – most startling, to me, was his assertion that no concept exists in the Arab world for “citizen.”

This notion, with roots going back to the Greek polites, a member of the polis, has been central in Western civilization from antiquity to the present day. It, and the idea of the people participating not just in the choice of a ruler but in the conduct of government, is not part of traditional Islam. In the great days of the caliphate, there were mighty, flourishing cities, but they had no formal status as such, nor anything that one might recognize as civic government. Towns consisted of agglomerations of neighborhoods, which in themselves constituted an important focus of identity and loyalty. Often, these neighborhoods were based on ethnic, tribal, religious, sectarian, or even occupational allegiances. To this day, there is no word in Arabic corresponding to “citizen.” The word normally used on passports and other documents is muwatin, the literal meaning of which is “compatriot.” With a lack of citizenship went a lack of civic representation. Although different social groups did choose their own leaders during the classical period, the concept of choosing individuals to represent the citizenry in a corporate body or assembly was alien to Muslims’ experience and practice.

It is with this bit of historical knowledge in mind that we must judge the slow evolutions of Iraq’s newly-elected assembly.  In general, and despite the problems he analyzes so well, Lewis remains optimistic.  Democracy, he concludes, has spread to unlikelier places, and there’s no reason to suspect that the Muslim Middle East is, for cultural or religious reasons, immune to the trend.

 

Science loses its method

I noted a few days ago that the frenzy over global warming seems to have converted many scientists into inquisitioners, demanding an end to critical thinking on the subject, an end to discussion, and immediate obedience to their authority.  I used the persecution of Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist, as my example.

Well, it must be the global warming equivalent of flu season.  Neil Collins at the Telegraph reports on a letter he received from Sir David Wallace, CBE, FRS, treasurer and vice-president of the Royal Society:

We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments around the world. I hope that we can count on your support. [. . .]

There are some individuals on the fringes, sometimes with financial support from the oil industry, who have been attempting to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.

An appeal not to publish contrary views:  can anything be less in the spirit of science?  A charge of conspiracy by evil-minded, world-destroying oil corporations:  can anything be more contrived or shallow?  A distinction between those who have a the right to be heard, and those on the “fringes” whose “distorted view” must be silenced by the media.  I’m trying hard to think of moderate words to describe this attitude, but “aristocratic” is the best I can do, if I’m to avoid “tyrannical.”

In my previous post, I argued against this corruption of the scientific approach without presenting my own views of global warming.  The reason was simple:  I’m no expert, and my opinion is only that.  But if the experts seek to impose an end to the discussion, and to attack and discredit their opponents, then one must wonder how much their opinions are worth, and how sure they are of their arguments.  So let me come clean.

That the earth is getting warmer seems to me pretty certain.  The extent of the change, on the other hand, is far from certain.  The responsibility of the human race for global warming is wholly unproven.  The consequences of any amount of warming will be unpredictable, and may well be benign.

After all, the entire history of human settlement and civilization has taken place during a brief interglacial period.   When Lord Salisbury, prime minister, retired from politics at the height of his powers in 1902, someone explained his decision in terms of cosmic perspective:  “He knows that there was once an Ice Age, and that there will be one again.”  Ponder that, and worry less about global warming.