Why Don’t Western Elites Get the Middle East? Because They Think It’s Just Like Them (Sort of)
Be sure to read my article: Syria: No Longer Revolution, It is A Civil War, A Guide to the Battle
I’ve come to realize a hitherto hidden dimension of why it is so hard for Western establishment figures (policymakers, journalists, and academics) to understand the Middle East. It is the conflict between the thirst for good news and the reality of bad news.
Being optimists (based on the relatively good course of their own societies?) and believing that positive change is really easy if people only put their minds to making it happen (ditto and also liberal thinking), they exaggerate any sign that things are getting better.
Moreover, contemporary thinking trembles in horror about saying anything critical about Third World peoples (racism, Islamophobia) while it is considered noble to criticize “ourselves.” On top of that is the assumption that no one can really be radical. They are just responding to past mistreatment and will revert to being moderate the minute the oppression is corrected.
So constantly we are led to an artificial optimism that ignores threats or even converts them into benefits.
How many examples I see every day!
A group of young Palestinians in Fatah, who explicitly say they want to wipe out Israel, form a new group and–hocus-pocus–we are informed that this is the long-awaited Palestinian equivalent of the dovish Israeli Peace Now movement!
We are told that the Libyan masses are fighting for democracy against dictator Muammar Qadhafi and suddenly we have prisoners being tortured and murdered, arms being sold to terrorists elsewhere, gun battles among factions, and a radical Islamist state emerging.
In Turkey the regime arrests hundreds of people, represses the media, pushes women out of government jobs, promotes antisemitism and, voila!, it is first called moderate Muslim (they deny it is Islamist) and then promoted (?) to moderate Islamist!
Radicals (except in the West?) are apparently representatives of backward, irrational, primitive societies and so if all Third World societies are equal to those of the West they just can’t have such people. Everyone must be a moderate, concerned about global warming and ecology; dedicated to democracy; and passionate about getting more material goods as the highest goal in life.
It never ceases to amaze me that those who most loudly proclaim Multiculturalism, diversity, and the equality of all societies simply can’t seem to comprehend that cultures and societies are different. They are in fact diverse! Living 40 years under Muammar Qadhafi in a semi-literate, tribal-based society does not create people like those on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And not even the Upper West Side for that matter.
Equally ironic, is that while Western elites are quick to look down on their own unwashed masses (bitterly clinging to their guns, religion, and hating outsiders, right?), they fail to comprehend that this is precisely the central theme throughout the Middle East and many other parts of the world.
Perhaps I should suggest an amazing new formula that would make it easy for Western elites to understand what’s going on in the Middle East:
Just think of the Islamists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey; the regimes in Iran and Syria; Hamas, Hizballah, and even the Palestinian Authority as being like the…Tea Party!
Scary, huh?
A great essay, but you miss the bedrock upon which multiculturalism rests: great restaurants, with interesting spices, and no hamburger or potatoes.
Excellent observation, don’t forget the upper east side wine and cheese bars, or did you mean to include those?
The burger gets an unfair rap.
Hamburgers are a nutritious meal. Good meat, veggies, a bread. The fat content is reasonable. They provide a good calorie hit (600 to 800) for what should be the biggest meal of the day (noon). Plus fries. That we are able to supply over 1/2 of the caloric intake in a single meal is not a reason to discriminate.
I spent 40 years in construction. The craft personnel do well with a good mid-shift meal.
The guy who, several years ago, made news by living on fast food burgers was a fool. He ate three complete burger meals a day. No one, not even the chains themselves, propose that as a proper use of the fixed burger meal.
sigh
but i like hambergers and potatos.
should i move to egypt?
Actually all westerners mess up that way when they first try to understand the middle east.
You fill in the gaps of your knowledge with reasonable assumptions, but nothing about Arab societies is familiar or reasonable (or workable, they’re painful places to live).
Reasonable assumptions about society or even human nature will get you in trouble every time.
I remember a case a decade ago where a Palestinian family honor-killed a 7 year old girl (who, perhaps had been rumored to be molested). Try to fit that into reasonable assumptions about human nature.
Turkey is now the main USA agent in the region–for better or worse
A key NATO member–it is what it is
If you want to understand the state of Christians would you interview a Canadian fundamentalist who represents .0001 of the Egyptian Christians and claim you have reported on the Christian situation in Egypt?
PJM published such nonsense from MJ Totten–incredible–
Big fail
Victor said: “Turkey is now the main USA agent in the region – for better or worse – A key NATO member–it is what it is”
President Abraham Lincoln said: “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg” –
Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/abrahamlin107482.html#ixzz1e2SaZyaU “
What you are describing is what Richard Landes calls Cognitive Egocentrism, or more precisely in this case, Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism:
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/reflections-from-second-draft/cognitive-egocentrism/
Victor, so you haunt PJ and people like Mr. Rubin with your immature reaction to Mr. Totten? How long would you bet you remain here off topic before Barry pulls your plug? You think he doesn’t know you called Michael a mere travel log writer? You insult him and think you can pitch tent here?
Josh, you are right. It is a normal response, but then we’re far past first reactions.
Barry, well said. Perhaps Obama officials have frequented Turkish restaurants in the US and have formed some fantasy about Turkish society. How shocked would they be to watch Valley of the Wolves on Turkish prime time?
On a deeper level I think it has to do with the more Liberal concept of fairness (what replaces equality). Old School would say that we judge societies relative to our own values. We don’t assume anything except a basic human desire to reach the professed goals of our own society which we regard as quite evolved. Others feel that it is all about fairness. As long as that bar is reached (a vote?), all things are equal. Israel may be right and Hamas wrong, but fairness is to give both sides a voice and a settlement is splitting the difference. The Muslim Brotherhood may have a dangerous agenda, but because they represent a certain amount of people, its fair to give them a seat at the table. Its not about what is right or wrong. That is too absolutist. It is about what is fair.
The last time I read the Constitution, I didn’t see the word fairness.
He IS a travelouge writer and proxy journalist. He’s an egomaniac who insists on filling his threads with 8th rate photos and has probably banned more commenters than he actually has; what’s more childish than that? Victor told the truth and was banned and telling the truth there generally speaking is cause for banning.
What kind of “journalist” lives next door to Egypt and doesn’t go there during the biggest event in its history in decades, and Libya too?
Share your meds with Victor, you need them both. Your last sentence makes as much sense as Victor does in a whole day.
Victor was banned for generally being a repetitive asshole going off-topic every chance he had while pimping for Turkey. Then he shows up and attacks Totten. But then just take it up with Totten himself. As for your pearls of wisdom, we’re waiting……
Didn’t think so.
It makes no sense? He just put up a piece about a guy who rode a motorcycle into Syria: why didn’t he do it himself? That’s journalism by proxy.
He promotes himself as a middle eastern journalist but never went to Egypt during the revolution or Libya while he was right next door. You don’t get that?
He claims it cost him thousands of dollars to spend several days in Egypt; in what world is Egypt that expensive to fly to and stay in?
You can’t take it up in his own threads cuz only worshippers are allowed in. I don’t personally care one way or the other but I can read and know the when I’m being shilled and when someone is following someone while accusing them of going off topic. What are you this 3rd rate journalist’s cousin or something?
“It never ceases to amaze me that those who most loudly proclaim Multiculturalism, diversity, and the equality of all societies simply can’t seem to comprehend that cultures and societies are different. They are in fact diverse!”
That’s because if they admit that different cultures might also have different moral standards they will have a great difficulty holding on to cultural relativism.
Moral relativism stems from the fact that ethics aren’t pbjective. Ethical values are not a quality of the object or act itself, like mass or speed that can be measured – morality is how we judge objects and acts, and therefore it’s subjective. So we can’t claim that our ethical values are objectively valid. The moral relativists concluded thus that every moral system is valid relatively to its subjective basic premises.
But then there’s the Nazi challenge because moral relativism actually forces you to consider Nazi morality as equally valid and legitimate as any other morality, such as liberal morality or philanthropic morality. But as long as this challenge remains theoretical relativists prefer to ignore it beacuse the difficulty is really enormous – on one hand you can’t accept the Nazis were morally good, but on the other hand you can’t prove Nazism is evil because there is no objective morality. So being a moral and cultural relativist you live with a cognitive dissonance. But as long as the contrast between your own moral system, your own values, and the values of other groups isn’t sharp you can ignore this cognitive dissonance in order to afford holding to you relativist view. In our time cultural relativism has become not only a logical standpoint, but also a moral one, so abandoning it will make you see yourself as immoral, as a “supremacist”.
The challenge becomes more serious when some version of the “Nazi challenge” becomes a reality, and not just a hypothetical case, i.e. when there’s an actual existing value system that stands in stark contrast to yours. Then the cognitive dissonance becomes too disturbing to bear. And there are 2 ways to resolve it:
1.) Drop the relativism. But that’s too difficulty logic-wise, and also morally and emotionally for people brought up in postmodern culture and conditioned by its values.
2.) Deny there can be any significant differences between the value systems of different cultures, so you can continue avoid challenges to your cherished cultural relativist worldview.
Most relativists choose denial because this is the easiest path to take.
This is not a complete explanation because, as you said, they don’t have a problem delegitimizing different value systems within their own “tribe”, but it’s certainly a strong contributing factor. So indeed to keep on holding to diversity, they need to deny the existence of diversity in value systems.
Because multiculturalists declare that ethical values are relative to each culture, one corollary is that you can make ethical judgements only inside a culture, not across cultural boundaries. So multiculturalists can condemn the Tea Party freely, as it’s inside “our” culture. Ditto for Israel, which has been declared “ours”.
But when it comes to “other” cultures, such as most of the rest of the Mideast, the difficulty begins. If the Multiculturalists were really convinced of their relativist convictions, they could just say that Arab patriarchal structures were fine for Arabs, authoritarianism, veils, honor-killings and all. But the multiculturalists are simultaneously trying to uphold their own Western cultural convictions, which strongly believe in democracy and universal human rights. And obviously if a right is universal, it must cross cultural boundaries. So their whole world view is self-contradictory.
How to resolve the contradiction? First, as you said, denial: pretend cultures differ only in their tastes for food and music, not in core values. Second, be chary of judging anybody who is “other”, while gleefully slamming anybody who is “us”. This is why multiculturalists support Hamas over Israel, or Iran over the Iraqi government — since we put the Iraqi government in place, it’s tainted by our touch, and is liable to be slammed. The mullahs of Iran, who’ve been at war with us for 30 years, cannot be judged so harshly, if at all.
In short, multiculturalism guarantees that your entire world view will be upside-down and backwards to reality. Multiculturalists always support the terrorists.
A healthy culture will convey its values (and its history) to its children. If they grow up aware of their culture and its distinctive character, they will be able to recognize the contrasts that become apparent when looking into other cultures. But this is only because they can use their own cultural identity as a frame of reference.
If they have not been properly schooled, they will not even appreciate the roots of their own culture, let alone become able to acknowledge whatever stems out of some other roots. In such a schizophrenic state of confusion, a simple error of projection will quickly throw them in the trappings of multiculturalism: If they can’t recognize the value of their own culture, what will protect them against falling for the theories that profess its worthlessness, and perceive other cultures as equally worthless, and therefore equivalent?
If our elites are not capable of doing better than projecting (although their state of ignorance and intellectual laziness is less excusable than that of children), they will never learn anything about the Middle East, because you have to acquire the facts before making any attempts at “understanding” them, which only means judging it by your familiar standards. If you actually learn about the Middle East, you might some day decide that one’s attempt at understanding it is not a particularly productive endeavor!
This is why the works of enlightened witnesses such as Barry Rubin, Raymond Ibrahim, Michael Ledeen, Michael Totten and others at PJ media are so useful: They brings facts about the Middle East. They know better than trying to produce some “theory” of the Middle East.
The reason that Western Elites don’t get the Middle East, or ANYTHING, for that matter, is because they suffer from COU (Center Of The Universe) Delusion.
The Elites simply can’t grasp that others, such as communists or Muslims of any variety, who follow other philosophies, based on other world views, aren’t just reacting to the actions of the Supremely Intelligent, Supremely Important, Supremely Superior, Elites such as themselves. They ARE the center of the intellectual universe. To The Elites it is incomprehensible that ANY “other” could have an agenda that doesn’t include approval by the Elites.
For The Elites it is not merely what they believe, its who they are.
The odds of them ever facing reality about the Middle East are infinitesimally small.
“Equally ironic, is that while Western elites are quick to look down on their own unwashed masses (bitterly clinging to their guns, religion, and hating outsiders, right?), they fail to comprehend that this is precisely the central theme throughout the Middle East and many other parts of the world”.
I assume you don’t really think think that Americans who, as BHO put it, with his particular spiteful and ignorant spin, “bitterly clinging to their guns, religion … hating outsiders” are the “unwashed masses”? I’d say they are our equivilent of yeoman stock. They work hard, fight our wars, go to Tea Party rallies, and read PJM.
There is a differnece of several million light years between the typical Pashtun Mullah, squating in a village in Ghazni, and a Tea Partier from Alabama (or a Dati computer scientist from Ariel, for that matter).
I think he’s making fun of the left that ridiculously sees the Muslim Bros as moderate, sophisticated, pro-democracy bunch while seeing the American right wing, and particularly the Tea Party, as ignorant regressive reactionaries who cling to their guns, religion, and hating outsiders, to quote Obama, a description more fitting the Islamists and their followers. But he’s probably also trying to make the leftists think in terms they already know. If they can think that part of their own “tribe” is backward, reactionary and driven by ignorance, bitterness and hatred, they should be able to think that the equivalent exists also in other cultures.
Heh,
It seems the “great unwashed masses” of the US comprise the OWS.
I am reminded of a story I saw a while back on German TV. Some aid workers went to the very foggy mountainous region of Yemen and decide they could help the people by showing them how to build water collecting devices using simple nets mounted on poles to condense the fog. They got enough water so that the tribal women no longer had to walk down to the valley and haul water back for their families, a very time-consuming and strenuous chore. For Westerners, this was a no-brainer kind of help. Yet when the aid workers revisited the area a couple of years later, the poles were falling over, the nets had not been mended, and the women were once again making daily trips down the mountain.
Most tribal peoples are probably less primitive, but their ways of doing things can be just as deeply ingrained. The “enlightened” of these cultures may not always tell their Western contacts the whole story.
Mr. Rubin, you use a very light touch in bringing up a truth that is at the heart of our total failure in our dealings with the Middle East: an irrational insistence on not being” judgmental” of any aspect of Islam, religion or rule. Those responsible for policy, and those who represent the U.S. in negotiations, operate from the premise that all people, everywhere, wish to be free and select their government through democratic process. They go all teary-eyed at “Arab Spring” revolutions, from which the eventual victors turn out to be Muslims. The mass demonstrations ar eprotests against tyrants, not pro-democracy. In spite of the hundreds of years of evidence of the stultifying, intolerant, enterprise-preventing, regressive and oppressive nature of Islamic theocracy, our “specialists” continue to prattle abut dialog on persuasion. Despite the open proclamation by Muslim leaders of the hatred they have for the West and Judeo-Christian principles, and their determination to fulfill Allah’s command that they kill all Jews and rule the world, our envoys tell us, “There, there. They don’t really mean it.” They really mean it! We are acting like the Dodo birds of the South Pacific, who made no effort to defend themselves or flee when meat-hungry sailors walked right up to them to kill them.
Islam’s greatest pride is its immobility, rejection of any effort at reform, and its adherence to strict obedience to the Koran and the Mullahs. The only thing that will stop its current full-court press against the perceived decline of will in Europe and America is military defeat. The biggest mistake we have ever made was G.H.W.Bush’s failure to follow through in the Gulf War, crush Sadam Hussein and and Syria, and make clear our might and our determination. Rushing to bringing back all our troops now from the troubled Arab world serves only to support their belief that we are decadent, lacking in will, and so increase both their contempt and aggressive behavior. There is no way we can prevent military confrontation other than submission.,,none They will make sure that the day comes.
Grim indeed. It is the price we will pay for the self-preening moral equivalence you so rightly call to our attention.
The problem goes both ways. The Islamists make incorrect assumptions about the west because they project their own values onto ours.
The idea of actual religious tolerance and diversity is unthinkable. Therefore Western Christians (or Jews in the case of Israel) must only be pretending to be fine with Muslims being Muslims.
All tribes are assumed to be eternally at some level of war with all others. All alliances are temporary contrivances until conditions are ripe for another attack. So we see constant shifts and false maneuvers in our relationships. The behavior of Turkey and Egypt lately are great examples of this. They assume we are doing the same.
Emotions such as pride and dignity are treasured far above pragmatic results. Attempts by the West or Israel to build peace based on economic cooperation have failed for this reason. Islamists see any such attempt as a trick to subvert and dominate.
Civil rights and liberties are seen as a sign of weakness. The idea that someone would tolerate something they personally find objectionable because Liberty itself is held as a higher value does not occur to the Islamist mind. This creates a sense of moral superiority in the Islamic world.
All of this creates a great sense of paranoia and conspiracy theories flourish in the Islamic world. The strong sense of superiority and self identity clashes with certain objective realities such as lack of real economic, technological, political, and scientific achievent. The only way to resolve this is conflict through a conspiracy.
Any long term stable relationship between the US and the ME is not possible because the differences are too fundamental to resolve. We already know that attempts to introduce liberal democracy in ME (Israel as the only exception) and nearby Islamic nations is a total failure. In Turkey we see signs of that experiment unravelling already.
Democracy lasted in Turkey a good while under the Attaturk system. But Attaturk understood that he needed to keep Islam down with a strong hand to make it work. We’ve been under the illusion that if we respectfully pussyfooted around Islam, Islam would leave our efforts alone. The very opposite is true. Where Islam sees weakness, attacks.
I agree with you 100%. Political Islam can not be tamed! One other thing is that I think Western elites know darn well what islamist regimes are like or are likely to become! Why then are they tolerating or at times even praising them? Because Westerners are trying to create islamist regimes loyal the West all over the Middle East. Guess why. Because they can grab the oil in the Middle East with ease if and only if ignorant moslem masses stay asleep by islamic lullabies while the West robs them down to their underware! This is exactly what is happening in Turkey right now, a one time secular state alert to Western exploitation of its natural resources. This has been happening in Saudi Arabia for decades and it will happen in Libya, Tunisa, Egypt, Syria and all the other moslem countries surrounding the oil wellas of the Middle East. Did anyone hear the US complain about lack of democracy or human rights in Saudi Arabia?
Spindok, Nadine,
Your comments bring up the question of “Islam’s inability to adapt”, as David Goldman recently wrote (quote accuracy possibly not quite verbatim).
The whole world seems to be entering a crisis that can be most easily recognized by looking at financial statistics, whatever the root causes might be. If we are in fact entering a global economic winter, what to make of the Arab “spring”? For instance, last February, during the Tahrir square drama in Cairo, the Egyptian economy was already in crisis, and things have even further deteriorated since then, with reasonable prospects for further deterioration. Widespread hunger in Egypt and other troubled nations of Islamic tradition has become a reality, with no proportional remedy in sight.
So all cultures are now being challenged, Islam perhaps probably more severely than the West. This could be more revealing that a direct military confrontation between the West and Islam. When parts of Indonesia (a Muslim nation) were devastated by a Tsunami a few years ago, help came from the West, not from the oil rich nations of the Persian gulf. The same was true in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake in the mountains of Pakistan. Can the Islamic nations save themselves? If not, does not this reveal longstanding deficiencies in the Islamic nations, attributable to Islam itself?
The question is, if there are long-standing deficiencies in the Islamic nations, AND the character of these nations does not permit serious self-reflections and self-criticism (whether for reasons of honor, religious scruples, tribal codes of conduct, etc.), then how will these nations react when their deficiencies reach a crisis level? How CAN they react?
We will see the answer play out in the very near future in the various countries of the Middle East.
in a nutshell arabs/muslims are from mars and westerners are from venus or can substitute any two planets you wish. the twain shall never meet.
Anthropologists are in short supply. Relatively, there are too many political scientists.
My sense of Barry Rubin is that he not a conservative, but a liberal who has become critical of liberalism as a result of seeing the fantastic unregenerate illusions about Islam in which liberals indulge.
His below article reminds me of a comment Jim Kalb made recently at VFR, that liberals totally misconstrue the nature of Islam because they believe that liberalism “fully realizes what’s right and just and fulfilling,” which “makes it the natural way to look at things.” Therefore all human beings, including Muslims, must be liberals–or at least aspiring liberals–just like us. That liberals in general and Americans in particular think everyone in the world is really “like us” is of course nothing new; it’s a point that I, for one, make all the time. But Mr. Kalb’s comment added interesting psychological and philosophical nuance to that idea, and, as you will see, it’s almost as though Rubin has been reading Kalb.
A New York Times article which acknowledged that “Activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of achieving decisive power across the region.” Notice on how many points Barry Rubin’s analysis is similar to Mr. Kalb’s:
From the stuff you’ve posted, it looks like the Times, in line with their general approach to things, has been persistently and somewhat mindlessly optimistic as to likely developments and the people involved. I don’t know if I’d call that Orwellian exactly. It does lead to distortion and incoherence when they report events, all in defense of a dominant party and its ideology. So the effect is rather similar.
What I’d say is that they are acting like secular journalists who are Conscious Of Their Responsibility. People in that position have to make instant sense of every possible event among every kind of people everywhere in the world, otherwise they couldn’t put out the morning edition, and they have to do so in a way that gives practical guidance to decisionmakers.
To do that they need a story line that applies automatically to everything. Once they have the story line they’re going to resist changing it, because then their world would fall into chaos, and this world during their lifetime is all that exists for them. In addition, they’d be unable to perform their function of providing a usable account of events for officials, concerned citizens, people who want to be part of what’s happening, etc.
The story line is that contemporary liberalism, which is the view that motivates and justifies the dominant tendencies in present-day government and intellectual life, fully realizes what’s right and just and fulfilling. That makes it the natural way to look at things. It’s not that hard a problem, so on general everybody’s going to settle into it as the way to go. Anything else would be weird, and you shouldn’t assume weirdness, so events should be interpreted as part of that process.
Views like Islam are also attempts to realize what’s right and just and fulfilling. It follows that Islam’s most intelligent, insightful, disinterested, and committed adherents are going to realize that their tradition is really just a particular way of approximating contemporary liberalism, so there’s no conflict. Ditto for the masses of Muslims. They can’t have a special ideological ax to grind, because they’re the masses and ideology is something for special interests, so they’re just trying to pursue in their own way the normal human goals fully realized in liberalism. There’s no way to keep the fundamental identity between Islam and liberalism a secret, since we have TV, Internet, etc. Now, so in the coming years people are going to realize it more and more.
Responsible journalists should do what they can to forward the process. They should encourage change, since change is generally for the better, be open to Muslims and Muslim views, since at bottom we all end up in the same place and openness makes the progression easier, and above all fight prejudice and misunderstanding, the view that the Other is other in the extraordinarily radical sense that he’s not at bottom a contemporary liberal. Because if that were so he wouldn’t be a human being at all, since contemporary liberalism is the true and perfect and obvious expression of humanity. That would be crazy and irrational. It’s the sort of thing Republicans and conservative Christians think. It would mean that Auschwitz or something like it is a good idea. Why do you think the Times should push such a view?
Forgot the Link
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/021040.html
It’s a good thing you forgot the link because I wouldn’t have read it if I knew it was Lawrence Auster’s. I have no idea who is Jim Kalb (Kalb means a dog in Arabic, but I suppose it’s just a conincidence), but he’s certainly on to something. One of the things that perplex me in many Western cultural products (movies, songs, documentaries etc.) is how much they lay upon Western culture, and how unique in a bad sense they believe it is. They blame every inhibition they have, – particularly sexual, but not only – not on culture in general, but specifically on Western culture, as if all other cultures are more “natural”. Of course, they also believe imperialism, slavery and racism are particular Western inventions. It’s truly bizarre, completely divorced from history and reality. Like they believe that peace, harmony and tolerance are the natural human state and not something humans evoloved with great effort and pain over millennia, like it’s the true human biology, the way humans have lived all along, until the Euros suddenly went berserk and created this aberration we call Western civilization.
Now Jim Kalb offers a complementing nuance to this oddity. That liberals believe that liberalism is “the natural way to look at things”. Yes, indeed, it seems so, though it’s hard to believe any somewhat literate person can come up with such an absurd idea. They must somehow believe, consciously or not, that before their ancestors became “conservative”, perhaps a couple of thousand years ago, the entire humanity was liberal in its worldview. Therefore conservatism is an unnatural deviation, and as a deviation it’s unique to Western culture. That’s why both conservatism and Western culture must go for the innocense, peace, harmony and tolerance to “come back”. They seem to believe something like that. Yes, that would explain so many things. Like, for instance, the old myth that chimpanzees don’t murder. If they are our closest relatives and they don’t murder, it supports the assumption that in our natural state, that is beore we adopted the deviant “conservatism”, there was no murder among humans. Except that chimpanzees do murder, and murder was more tolerated among humans thousands of years ago, before our ancestors adopted “conservatism”. The life of the individual was far less valued back then. And imperialism and slavery were common phenomena among all races.
In a sense the belief that liberalism is the natural worldview is probably a result of the modern belief in rationalism. Rationalism assumes that human desires are limited to some very basic individual and mostly materialistic needs. We all want a roof over our heads, enough food for ourselves and our families, health, to be warm in winter, to have love, friendship and sex, and some food for our souls, such as books and entertainment. This is assumed to be the natural state. Therefore such phenomena as a desire for power over others, murder, and xenophobia are seen as abnormalities in need of psychological explanation, rather than the cruelty of nature humans worked so hard to evolove from.
From a liberal point of view, if one looks at it objectively, contemporary Western culture (that is the last 50 years or so) is the apex of human achievement so far. But if one believes in a primordial paradise of peace and tolerance and harmony with nature that preceded Western civilization as we know it, then indeed “Western civ got to go”, as students chanted in the 60s, since it’s the cause for the “downfall” of man from that “primordial state of bliss” (how very biblical). And all other cultures that didn’t adopt Western civ are more “natural” and therefore more peaceful, tolerant and harmonious with nature cause this is “the natural way to look at things”.
Rubin’s comparison of the Islamists to the Tea Party sort of assumes that you could call the Tea Party America’s Islamists. I think the Tea Party would be offended by the accusation.
So far, at least, the Tea Party hasn’t blown up many buildings, airliners, city buses, Marine Corps barracks, or Buddhist statues. Maybe they’ll get around to it, but I don’t think so…
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