Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Arab League chief warns U.S. to fix Mideast policy " . . . Arabs were feeling 'humiliated, depressed and helpless' by the United States' policy in the Middle East but would not stand by and watch Washington let Israel stay 'above international law'." "Islamic Arabia is an honor-shame culture. In such cultures, the primary concern is what others believe about you. If others believe you are inferior, then you are humiliated and shamed, and you will hate not only those who perceive you in such a shameful way, but also the source of that perception." This is the primary reason why the Israeli-Arab 'problem' is insoluble at this point. Israel, by its very existence, is a humiliation to its neighbors, who, in all their hundreds of millions, lack the power to conquer a tiny state with seven million citizens. Worse, the quality of Israeli existence is a humiliation: Surrounded, constantly threatened with attack, vilified, dependent ultimately on the goodwill of the United States for survival, and yet Israel, at least in comparison to any other country in the Arab world, thrives. Its people live in freedom. It is incredibly productive. It is the only nation in the middle east to make the desert flower wholesale. Everything it accomplishes, every new height to which it rises, is a living rebuke to Arabia, which has done none of these things." "To a shame culture, Israel's mere existence is absolutely intolerable. The Palestinians are a side issue. The Arabs don't care about Palestine, and they never have." " . . . Turkey is no solution, either, because its secular government is, all by itself, a humiliation to Islam." "And Israel itself is not the ultimate problem, because the existence of the west itself is an intolerably shameful fact of life to Islam. The mere presence of the United States is an unbearable humiliation to a honor-shame culture that perceives any more successful group as a rebuke not only to its person, but its religion and even its God. God promised Islam that all other nations and faiths would submit to it; the continued existence of any non-submissive states or religions is not just a humiliation, it is a humiliation in the eyes of God - and it cannot be borne." "If Israel were to vanish tomorrow, the next day the shamed, humiliated rage of Islam would focus on the United States. For the west to live in peace, the entire culture must be changed, and I suspect that this is not possible without first defeating it so thoroughly that even its religion is discredited. Shame cultures make war on anybody more successful than they. They cannot help it. They cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. That's why almost every festering 'struggle' around the world partakes of this equation: SomeNation<-->Islamic Foe. Honor-shame cultures are culturally incapable of renouncing war unless one of two things happens: Either every other state or culture submits to them ("Islam" means "submission"), or they are defeated so decisively the culture itself is destroyed. 12:00:03 PM  Google It!  comment  []

The New Statesman Profile - Francis Fukuyama He is the intellectual as celeb, ready to pronounce on all the questions of the day including, soon, our "posthuman future". "For 50 years, from Pearl Harbor to the final deliquescence [meltdown] of the Soviet Union, the United States stood at Armageddon and did battle for the Lord against the vast forces of totalitarian evil. Suddenly, the age of trial was over. The question for the thoughtful was: what now? Two schools of thought quickly emerged." "Who will be next, said this first school, as prominently represented by Harvard's Samuel Huntington. Whose potential threat might now justify the defence budget and the national security state? Huntington's answer . . . Americans must expect 'the clash of civilisations'. There would be conflicts . . . between whole civilisations." "More widespread was the triumphalist interpretation. 'That's it! We were in the final, and we just won! The United States is the last superpower! Now the world will want to adopt not just our political philosophy, democracy, but our economic system, free-market corporate capitalism, as well.' Triumphalism triumphed." "And the most persuasive, because the least overtly ideological and most benign, exposition of this doctrine was in an article, subsequently expanded into a book, by a youngish classicist-turned-political scientist called Francis Fukuyama. . . . The article that made Fukuyama famous was entitled 'The End of History' . . . It argued not overtly in favour of triumphalism, but against pessimism. For decades, people had feared the end of liberal democracy. Now, suddenly, a consensus seemed to be emerging in its favour, 'as it conquered rival ideologies like monarchy, fascism and, most recently, communism'. So liberal democracy would turn out to be 'the end point of mankind's ideological evolution,' and so 'history' - meaning 'history understood as a single coherent evolutionary process' - was over. . . . [The article] was therefore a product of the conservative establishment that had, by the 1980s, succeeded in Kristol's dream of displacing liberalism as the prevailing American public philosophy." "Fukuyama went on to expand his article into a book, The End of History and the Last Man . . . much of the book was a restatement of the argument put forward by the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve. (Fukuyama studied in Paris under Jacques Derrida.)" " . . . [Fukuyama] has the rare gift of lucidity in explaining complex ideas. And although he is a product and protege of the neo- conservative stable, he is by no means a narrow or predictable ideologue. The End of History was an almost comically overrated book. It was successful because it spoke to a particular mood in the US, a mood not so much of aggressive triumphalism as of relief. Not only was the cold war over, but Americans could take legitimate pride in the growing acceptance of ideals they liked to think were their own - though, in truth, democracy and capitalism are scarcely American inventions." "Fukuyama tackles his great subjects from an essentially Candidean standpoint. All is for the best in the best of all possible societies. Yet we should still welcome the universality of his intellectual ambitions. After all, we complain about the pervasive stranglehold of specialisation. We should be delighted when someone comes along who is willing to take on philosophy, history, management studies, sociology and bioethics, and who has cool, clear thoughts to offer on those and other fields - for us to take or leave. He may not be the Last Man, but it would be a pity if he were the last would-be Renaissance man." 11:06:23 AM  Google It!  comment  []