The Spectator of March 2030 will wonder how the immense, mature, formidable, intelligent, capable, rational western society of 2011 got itself into such a tizz about the Arab world. Why ever (our successors will ask) did we think we had anything really big to fear from the 21st century’s most spectacularly unsuccessful regional culture?
Last weekend news reached us that Arab League leaders had approved the idea of a (presumably) US-led and UN-flagged imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya. ‘Great news,’ cry the muddle-headed advocates of such a plan — as though what the Arab League leaders think is of any serious importance, even in their own countries. William Hague went so far as to suggest that the leaders’ declaration gave the plan the necessary stamp of regional approval.
But who are these ‘leaders’? To remark that they were meeting in Cairo gives edge to that question. Do we yet know what sort of a creature the Egyptian government is going to be? The statesman speaking for the League last weekend was its current chief, the Omani foreign minister — fresh from popular demonstrations against his own undemocratic government. Bahrain is looking dodgy again. Or shall we take Morocco? Or Yemen? Or Saudi Arabia? On closer inspection the Arab League turns out to be a collection of despots, crackpots, tinpots, oligarchs, police states and medieval-style monarchies. They’ve been spending billions in recent decades on their air forces, aeroplanes and weaponry. Why can’t they impose their own no-fly zone on Libya if they’re so keen to have one?
We know why. The moment any attempt was made to reach consensus on a practical plan for Libya by the politicians of the rest of the Arab world, they would all start falling out among themselves. They are for the most part leaders of failed or failing polities, and pathologically disputatious.
What is it about the Middle East? Has any other region in recent history (except for sub-Saharan Africa, which has so much better an excuse) been so correlated with dysfunction in government? Where are the success stories? Is the problem the leadership, or is it (more likely) the societies and belief systems that support and tolerate that leadership?
I write as a senior cleric in a London mosque, Dr Usama Hasan, fights attempts to expel him on account of his public suggestion that Islam should reconcile itself with Darwinism and reconsider its insistence that the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. I realise many educated Muslims will agree with Dr Hasan; and Christianity has its reactionaries and nutters too. But how are the Arab nations to advance, to hold their own in a science-based and technology-driven world, and to invest their oil money wisely, if the paradigm of wisdom and enlightenment held out to their younger generation is the witch-hunting of science? Why do thoughtful, modern people in this culture seem cowed, supine, apologetic in the face of what appears to be mainstream opinion in their world? Even the valiant Dr Hasan has been forced — and has agreed — to make a public retraction of his perfectly common-sense statement.
So far, so Melanie Phillips; and what I’ve written here could have appeared, and has, in 1,000 right-wing columns, musings and blogs across the West. But I’m about to disappoint these worthy folk, for I believe the evidence points in a diametrically opposed direction to the conclusion that so much of the western right favours. Many see North Africa and the Middle East as huge potential threats to world security. They are starting at shadows.
I’m not afraid of the Arab world. Its 20th- and 21st-century hallmark is incompetence. It cannot choke off its own sales of oil for long or it will choke itself. Its beliefs are self-defeating. Its anti-science tendencies are crippling. Its waste of the intellect and drive of half its population — women, the mothers of its sons — is stultifying. Its institutional intolerance of difference, dissent and independent thought is sapping to creative energy. Its predilection for schism and feud are enfeebling. Its fear of competition and its cultural weakness for nepotism and corruption are impoverishing. This way of thinking and this way of living will never conquer the world. Indeed I suspect its powers may have peaked during the oil shocks of the 20th century and may already be in terminal decline. I suspect too that the culture’s dominating collective psychological trait is a huge inferiority complex, fiercely denied even to itself.
I recommend a wary eye upon its more notable crazies, and its crazier regimes but, beyond that, sympathy. Sympathy for all the talent wasted, the energy stymied, the ideas suffocated, the brave people persecuted. Failed states, like failed individuals, can kill, have an unending potential to irritate and trouble-make, and need approaching with care: they remain prodigiously capable of producing pathetic individuals prepared to blow themselves up in railway stations. But our approach to these dangers should start from the recognition that the problem is the weakness and failure of a culture, not the threat posed by its strength and success. We shouldn’t for a moment be scared.
Nor, I fear, hopeful. This year’s sensation, the so-called Arab Spring, the flames of liberty and democracy flickering across North Africa and the Middle East, will flare, falter and die, as new despotisms or laughing-stocks replace old ones. We cannot unwind and reassemble Middle Eastern societies by force of arms or no-fly zones. 2030 will see our horrified fascination with this region as a distraction from a less exotic but far more important concern: the slow attrition of our own economic competitiveness, upon which, in the end, the entire western ascendency, and the ascendency of our values and ideas, depends.
Comments