There’s been a serious brouhahahaha about John Stewart’s takedown of Egypt’s “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood President Mursi’s for imprisoning Egyptian fellow political satirist, Bassem Youssef for making fun of the president. The take down is pretty devastating – from a Western point of view, and even received an endorsing tweet from the US Embassy in Cairo (oops).  The Tablet has a nice summary of some of the issues (HT: Elsie).

I’d like to discuss two honor-shame aspects to this affair, one obvious, the other less so, but both, I think, closely linked.

The first, obvious one, is the reaction of an honor-shame driven leader to having the mickey taken out of him publicly. Associating his own face with both his office and his religion, Mursi took the mockery as a direct assault on the legitimacy of the state. (Psychologists call this ego inflation.) This is classic behavior and explains, among other things, why fascists, who strive to regain the virility that modern values (like free speech) deny them, use the power of the state to suppress dissent.

Note the difference between Bush (Stewart’s target) and Mursi. Although even otherwise highly intelligent people could not stop accusing Bush of (incipient) fascism, somehow we can’t use the appropriate term “Islamofascism” because… it might hurt Mursi’s feelings.

The second aspect concerns one of Stewart’s “gotcha” moments. At one point he shows an earnest Mursi assuring an eagerly attentive Wolf Blitzer that when he’s president, he’ll embrace the whole Egyptian family, and wouldn’t dream of suppressing criticism. Stewart’s implication and our “reading”: what a ludicrous hypocrite.

Here I’d like to introduce an alternative reading. Mursi would not recognize himself as a hypocrite here. When he spoke with Blitzer he was perfectly sincere, and doing what he should do – please the audience by telling them what they want to hear. He was, to coin a term, “polishing his face” in the eyes of the West. In the West we would call this “lying to save face.” Had he told the truth, he would have lost face with his Western audience. But, as my father (definitely of the intergity-guilt school) often put it, “sincerity is the cheapest of virtues.”

However, when confronted with the painful experience of having his personal vanities mocked – the hat! – a different audience and different set of concerns, that cheap virtue proved unbearably light in the face of public mockery. My bet is that if you showed Mursi the interview with Blitzer and asked about Youssef, he wouldn’t see the connection. That’s not what he meant when he made his assurances to CNN and his American audience.

This kind of emotionally-driven dissonance between two different performances is a ubiquitous element of much Arab-West contact. (All of this, of course, analysis forbidden to post-Orientalists.) When Sari Nusseibeh indignantly denounces suicide terror before a Western audience and then praises the mother of a martyr for her son’s sacrifice, he’s sincere both ways. When Islamists deny the Holocaust ever happened and then accuse Israel of being the new Nazis bringing a Holocaust on the Palestinians, they do not see the contradiction. Both statements blacken Israel’s face and strengthen theirs; both offer immense emotional satisfaction and (alas for civil society), a strong resonance with Western infidels who apparently also find such debasing formulas about Jews almost irresistibly attractive.

Such a lack of concern for what would strike Westerners as hypocrisy is not because Mursi doesn’t know about hypocrisy. On the contrary, he and his defenders will readily use the term to accuse foes, including, I’m sure by now, John Stewart and Wolf Blitzer (those Jews who control the Western media). Public hypocrites are quick to throw stones.

But in some cultures where “face” is paramount, the term has a different meaning. I’m told in China, the term is the equivalent of “politeness.” And while Mursi was being polite with Wolff – it was a smashing interview – he expected the same politeness from his public and from his “friends” at the US Embassy. So when they tweeted the take-down, they extended the rude humiliation. (And to think that the field of international diplomacy has a very limited discussion of issues of honor and shame.)

From the perspective of an honor-shame culture (i.e., one in which it is permissible, expected, even required, that a “man” can lie, and even shed blood for the sake of his honor), the hypocrisy is all on Blitzer and Stewart (two of those “Jews who control the media”): from his perspective Blitzer was polite when it suited him, then Stewart stabbed Mursi in the back with Blitzer’s tape. At some level, there is a recognition that this criticism is true. Otherwise it wouldn’t hurt.

But the hurt, the embarrassment, are more powerful than any impartial commitment to equal standards, to conscience.

Which leads me to my final reflection. Why are people who are so easily hurt, so bent of hurting, and why, oh why, do so many Westerners, especially among the elites, cheering them on?

Just to give you an idea of how insane this has become, our Secretary of State and First Lady were about to give an award for courage to a Muslim woman whose anti-American and anti-Semitic credentials are impeccable.

In the meantime, rather than dwell on the murky depths, let’s ascend to the heights of courage (alas that denouncing Islamist misogyny should be the heights of courage in our age), namely Tax’s work.

Double Bind: tied up in knots on the left

MEREDITH TAX5 February 2013

I have spent the last twenty years working on issues of women and religious censorship.  As a feminist activist in International PEN and then in Women’s WORLD, I couldn’t help noticing that increasing numbers of women writers were being targeted by fundamentalists. Not all these fundamentalists were Islamists; some were Christians, Jews, or Hindus.  In fact, one of my own books was targeted by the Christian Coalition in the US.

Nobody on the left ever objected when I criticized Christian or Jewish fundamentalism.  But when I did defence work for censored Muslim feminists, people would look at me sideways, as if to say, who are you to talk about this?  This tendency has become much more marked since 9/11 and the “war on terror.”

Today on the left and in some academic circles [tautology? - rl], people responding to attacks on Muslim feminists in other countries are likely to be accused of reinforcing the ”victim-savage-saviour” framework or preparing for the next US invasion.  This puts anyone working with actual women’s human rights defenders in places like North Africa or Pakistan in an impossible situation.

From these concerns springs my book, Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, published by the Centre for Secular Space.

7. With every year that passes, the contrast between this intensely democratic and highly organized modern community and the old-fashioned Arab world around it grows sharper, and in nothing, perhaps, more markedly than on its cultural side. The literary output of the National Home is out of all proportion to its size. Hebrew translations have been published of the works of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Kant, BergsoIl, Einstein and other philosophers, and of Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Byron, Dickens, the great Russian novehsts, and many modern writers. In creative literature the work of Bialik, who died in 19×5, has been the outstanding achievement in Hebrew poetry, and that of Nahum Sokolov, who died in 1936, in Hebrew prose. A number of Hebrew novels have been written reflecting the influence on the Jewish mind of life in the National Home. The Hebrew Press has expanded to four daily and ten weekly papers. Of the former the Ha’aretz and the Dauw, with circulations of about 17,000 and ~5,000 respectively, are the most influential and maintain a high literary standard. Two periodicals are exclusively concerne with literature and one with dramatic art. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the culture of the National Home is its love of music. It was while we were in Palestine, as it happened, that Signor Toscanini conducted the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, composed of some 70 Palestinian Jews, in six concerts mainly devoted to the works of Brahms and Beethoven. On each occasion every seat was occupied, and it is noteworthy that one concert was reserved for some 3,000 workpeople at very low rates and that another 3,000 ‘attended the Orchestra’s final rehearsal. All in all, the cultural achievement of this little community of 400,000 people is one of the most remarkable features of the National Homeland.

8. There is Arab literature, of course, and Arab music, but the culture of Arab Palestine is the monopoly of the intelligenzia; and, born as it is of Asia, it has little kinship with that of the National Home, which, though it is linked with ancient Jewish ,tradition, is predominantly a culture of the West. Nowhere, indeed, is tie gulf between the races more obvious. Anyone who attended the Toscanini Concerts at Jerusalem might have imagined, if he closed his eyes, that he was in Paris, London, or New York. Yet, almost within earshot was the Old City, the Haram-esh-Sharif, and the headquarters of the Arab Higher Committee. It is the same with science. The Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot is equipped with the most delicate modern instruments ; the experiments conducted there are watched by chemists all over the world: yet from its windows can be seen the hills inhabited by a backward peasantry who regard it only as the demonstration of a power they hate and fear and who’ would like, no doubt, when their blood is up, to destroy it.

Palestine Royal [Peel] Commission Report (1937), p. 116.

In Zionist historiography, the Peel Commission is largely seen as hostile to Zionism, breaking even Weizmann’s Anglophilia. But a closer read suggests immense ambivalence on the part of the British and fascinating comments on the situation. Among other things, this passage highlights the difference between an indigenous Jewish culture in “the national homeland” and the essentially fragmented culture of the Arab world (international elite/”intelligenzia” with no local rootedness). Like the Muslim interest in Jerusalem because it’s in the hands of the Jews, so we find an Arab attachment to “Palestine” because it means something to the Zionists. Mimetic, invidious desire – hardly what one would normally expect progressives to encourage.

I personally would see the accusations of “apartheid” against Israel – e.g., the differential in living standards between “settlers” and “Palestinians” in the “West Bank” – as products of economic culture rather than oppressive discrimination. Note that even under conditions of great hostility, Palestinians have a much higher standard of living than those in neighboring Arab nations, a phenomenon that dates back to the earliest years of Zionism. In the words of Hasan Shukri, mayor of Haifa and president of the Muslim National Associations, in a telegram to the British in July of 1921:

We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy whose wish is to crush us. On the contrary. We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre, and Nazareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining

(Hillel Cohen. Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, p. 15).

Of course, not all Arabs agreed, and those who did not considered people like Shukri traitors who deserved death (Shukri, surviving multiple assassination attempts, eventually fled to Beirut).

The “post-colonialist” romanticization of these latter groups as resisters of Western imperialism, rather than as frustrated dominators (imperialists) mired in their zero-sum world of envy and resentment, and the former as quislings, rather than progressive-minded peoples capable of rising above the “us-them” prison, says much about the current disorientation of the “progressive” Left.

I also append some of the notes I took while preparing for and during the discussion. I welcome comments. Will post earlier readings over time.

Envy, Jealousy and the Politics of Scarcity (Zero-Sum)

Readings:

Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, chap. 1,

Schoeck, Envy, chap. 3

Schoeck, Envy chap. 5 (Envy and Economic Underdevelopment)

Schoeck, Envy, chaps. 7, 11. (Envy in Social Science (7), in Philosophy (11). Interesting material on Nietzsche, who clearly inspired important parts of Schoeck’s thinking.

Schoeck, Envy, chap. 22 (Envy in Human Societies)

Walcott,  The Greeks and Envy chs. 1-3, and

Walcott, The Greeks and Envy chs. 7-9

George Foster, “Anatomy Envy“

Suggested:

Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Natural State: The Political-Economy Of Non-Development”

Landes, The Emotional Logic of Game Theory

Some of the issues raised:

Definition: Envy is an emotion that is essentially both selfish and malevolent. It is aimed at persons, and implies dislike of one who possesses what the envious man himself covets or desires, and a wish to harm him. Graspingness for self and ill-will lie at the basis of it. There is in it also a consciousness of inferiority to the person envied, and a chafing under this consciousness. He who has got what I envy is felt by me to have the advantage of me, and I resent it. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, (Edinburgh, 1912) vol. 5, p. 322.

Envy is classic zero-sum. Your gain is my loss; your success robs me of my sense of value; admiration for you is humiliation for me.

Envy is malevolent: If you have something that makes me envious, I’d rather harm you than get the object. “I wish Boris’ goat were dead.”

Envy is a ferocious policeman of conformity: any tendency to step out of the conforming group brings retaliation. Key dimension of early social solidarity. Schoeck almost argues that envy is what permit the levels of functioning software of solidarity that first enabled homo faber/sapiens to peel off from the hardwiring of instinct.

Envy is a form of vengeance: retaliating against someone who has robbed you of… (honor, prestige, sense of self-worth, property).

Resentment at another’s success: the desire to do harm

Schadenfreude: joy at another’s failure: To what degree do news media become  Schadenfreude-mongers? “If it bleeds it leads.”

Malignant envy and shame: the invisible force field that inhibits people from seeking success: Crabs in the basket – if we’re all here together it’s somebody else’s fault (the aristocracy, the man,  phallo-logocentric partriarchy, the 1%); if you get out, then I’m at fault (lazy, cowardly, lacking in the necessary qualities).

Envy aims at equals: the narcissism of small differences; but in matters of “human dignity”, everyone is given the right to consider themselves equal, therefore, to be resentful of anyone.

Honor and Envy

Honor a great good: in principle expandable (somewhat); in practice (through envy) zero-sum

Sharing the spotlight: honor/glory a self-limited good: honor of a millionaire in Hollywood or in Welsh village

Aristotle: those who love honor are more envious

The importance of honor – more precious than life: among other things driven to it despite the assault of envy it elicits.

Glory as the ultimate: people remember you when you’re no longer alive

Philotimea (love of honor) is difficult and most productive of envy

Paradigms of Justice:

pre-modern (h-s, prime divider): “my side is always right.” invidious cognitive egocentrism: I envy all better than me, and assume that all worse than me envy me. A world in which one assumes malevolence as the norm. Denial of responsibility and projection of guilt the norm.

modern (integrity-guilt, civic polity): “whoever is right, my side or not.” liberal cognitive egocentrism: i do not wish others ill and presume, at least as an initial default, that others do not wish me ill. Benevolence the norm. Self-criticism and acceptance of responsibility (among other things for failure) necessary.

post/hyper-modern (masochistic omnipotence, hyper-self-criticism, cultural suicide): “their side right or wrong.” Progressive cognitive egocentrism: if I blame myself for everything, others will forgive me and like me, and I can fix anything. Complete denial of envy (and of self) in order to posture as the most moral.

The double edge of envy: emulation and excellence? Or resentment and sabotage? Partly depends on the self-confidence of the person. Looking at the successful and wanting to learn and imitate/adapt reflects self-confidence; feeling inadequate and wanting to tear down and do damage reflects fear of failure (one of the plagues of h-s cultures, since failure is so often punished).

Chinese vs. Arab responses to the West (and to Jews)

Ubiquity of envy: institutions only tell you how a culture manages, not whether there’s envy.

Managing envy, the public secret.

Envy as a brake on economic development (Schoeck, chap. 5): if the headwinds of envy are gale force, few ships will leave harbor of conformity to try innovation.

I’d like to emphasize a different aspect of the text, namely the profound role that projection plays in its formulations about “the Jews.” Indeed, if it were not that they have insulated themselves entirely from real-world feedback (with the help of their European and global allies), they might have hesitated to publish so deeply embarrassing – indeed humiliating – a piece of self-revelation. But then again, projection lies at the heart of the anti-Semitic mind, as in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Text bolded by PMW, my comments added throughout.

“Israel is Trembling”
by Sawsan Najib Abd Al-Halim

“We’re used to seeing vampires in Dracula movies, where the murderer and the vampire act in the dead of night, and as soon as dawn breaks, the murderer disappears and hides during the day.

The brave warrior, who at the very least has moral values, fights in the daytime. In all wars, in all eras, honorable nations conducted their battles during the day and slept at night. But has Israel even a trace of morality?

A brave warrior is proud when he confronts another [warrior] as brave as he, and the more he is struck, the stronger he grows, proud in his struggle and respectful of his adversary. But since Jews are – as our grandparents said of them – sons of death (expression of contempt, meaning ‘a coward,’ -Ed.), they are too cowardly to confront an enemy face to face, especially if their enemy is as well armed as they…

A brave warrior is proud when he confronts another [warrior] as brave as he, and the more he is struck, the stronger he grows, proud in his struggle and respectful of his adversary.

Jews think that their fortresses will protect them from death, but any breach of these fortresses or protective walls instills panic and fear in their hearts, and they are seized by fear and trembling. If a missile falls beyond their protective walls or if even a bullet passes over them, you can see how their hearts fill with horror – and this is because Allah has stricken fear in their hearts and decreed humiliation and degradation upon them until Judgment Day…

Historically, it is known that the lives of Jews have always been war and fighting. 

The only reason for this is that they have been outcasts in every corner of the earth, and not one nation in the world respects them, for they cause strife, and scheme everywhere they settle.

We know that they have been defeated in every war they have fought throughout history, and they have been dispersed in every direction, but Allah’s curse upon them and his fury at them cause them to continue with their transgression and tyranny. 

[Ma'an News Agency's website, posted Nov. 18, 2012, accessed Jan. 29, 2012

Redesigning the Peace Process

Ignoring cultural difference and overestimating politics has left us without a resolution. We can do better.

(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photos Shutterstock and Wikimedia Commons)

Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, there hasn’t been a moment when the punditocracy hasn’t insisted that Israel needs to make a deal with the Palestinians—and soon. Otherwise, they claim, Israeli democracy, saddled with millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control without citizenship, will have to choose between the twin catastrophes of democratic suicide and apartheid. And since the solution that everyone knows is the eventual one–land for peace–is so clear, let’s just get on with it.

It hasn’t panned out. We’re now approaching two decades of failure of the two-state solution. Every strategy for pulling it off—Oslo, Taba, Geneva, Road Map, Dayton, Obama/Clinton—has, despite sometimes enormous efforts, failed or died stillborn. And yet, with each failure, anew round of hope emerges, with commentators and politicians arguing that this time, if we just tinker with some of the details, we’ll get peace right. (Or, as an increasing number have now come to believe, it’s time we abandon the two-state solution entirely.)

The predominant explanation for this impasse in the West has focused on Israel’s role:settlements that provoke, checkpoints that humiliate, blockades that strangle, and walls that imprison. Palestinian “no’s” typically get a pass: Of course Arafat said “no” at Camp David; he only got Bantustans while Israelis kept building illegal settlements. Suicide bombers are excused as registering a legitimate protest at being denied the right to be a free people in their own land. In Condoleezza Rice’s words: “[The Palestinians] are perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace … the great majority of people, they just want a better life.” The corollary to such thinking, of course, holds that if only the Israelis didn’t constantly keep the Palestinians down the world would be a better place. So, the sooner we end the occupation, the better, even if it means urging the United States to pressure Israel into the necessary concessions. It’s for Israel’s own good.

This line of thinking is driven entirely by politics. Oslo thinkers from Bill Clinton to Thomas Friedman believe that what was needed was a political settlement and the rest would take care of itself. In 2007, Rice reflected this outlook in a statement of faith that projected a peculiarly modern outlook: “I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

Overestimating the power of politics and dramatically underestimating the importance of culture has actually hindered the possibility for a political solution. For Jews, especially progressive Jews, the early second decade of the 21st century poses a particularly interesting and painful meditation just in time for Yom Kippur: In our quest for “fairness,” for splitting the blame evenly, for misidentifying problems as political and therefore easily solvable—so easily solvable they could be dispatched with a simple email, as one exasperated BBC anchor put it recently—are we actually working against both parties in the conflict?

I believe the answer is yes. And those who wish to pursue a peaceful resolution need to take a hard look at the cultural difference between Israelis and Arabs—and craft policy that confronts it.

***

Any approach that pays heed to cultural issues yields a very different view as to why the conflict persists. The zero-sum logic of Arab attitudes toward Israel does not represent merely the choices made by politicians, but Islamic religiosity and deep-seated cultural mores. From the Arab perspective, the very existence of Israel represents a stain on Arab honor and ablasphemy to Islam’s dominion in Dar al Islam. Some, like the Palestinian Authority, may have made a tactical shift in which they will, despite the shame of it, talk with Israelis and even make public agreements. But they have treated such engagement as a Trojan horse, a feint to position for further war. Within this cultural context, the peace process has actually served as a war process.

Well-meaning Oslo proponents, afraid that criticism of, and demands on, the Palestinians would delay the peace process, denounced anyone who made these kinds of observations as enemies of peace. So, when Arafat said “no” at Camp David in the summer of 2000, and a wave of suicide bombers came pouring out of the belly of the horse, these same Oslo supporters, including many an alter-Juif, rather than admitting they had called it wrong, preferred to blame Israel.

But bitterest of ironies, in so doing, they fed the very culture they denied. Palestinian hatredhas festered under the guidance of Oslo-empowered elites, unopposed by the very actors one would expect to have the courage to call out such vitriol: journalists, human-rights organizations, and progressives. Instead, these groups have gone out of their way not to inform their readers of this culture of hate.

By constantly reinforcing a Palestinian sense of grievance against Israel, activists like the lateRachel Corrie, journalists like BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and CNN’s Ben Wedeman, and Israel-obsessed organizations like Human Rights Watch have unwittingly contributed to the very war that rages. And as a result of this consensus, Israel appears to most in the West as a terrible oppressor when the sad but redeeming truth is that the Israelis are the best enemies one could hope for, and they face the worst.

Nothing illustrates the cultural gap between Israel and Palestine better—and offers a more immediate and constructive way out—than the problem of Palestinian refugees. They are the symbol of Arab political priorities. When faced with the catastrophic humiliation of 1948, when the combined Arab nations, fully confident of a glorious victory, failed to destroy the upstart Jewish nation in the heart of the Muslim world, the Arab leadership unanimously chose to herd Arab refugees into prison camps so that they could serve as a symbol of Israeli crimes and a breeding ground or the counter-attack.

For over 60 years, Arab leaders have blocked any efforts to remove these people from these wretched camps because to do so would be a tacit acceptance of Israel’s permanence and would acknowledge the humiliating defeat. (By contrast, Israel rapidly moved the even larger number of Jews chased from the Arab world in 1948 out of their refugee camps.) The Arabs thus went from a zero-sum loss (the establishment of Israel) to a negative-sum solution: sacrifice your own people on the altar of your lost honor. No negotiations, no recognition, no peace.

Not only do Palestinian negotiators insist on the return of 5 million refugees to Israel (it was one of two key deal-breakers at Camp David), but the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon recently explained that Palestinian refugees not residing in the future Palestine would not be citizens in that state. In other words, Palestinian refugees still captive in camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan only have a right to citizenship in Israel.

So, here’s my proposal to those who somehow feel we must revive the peace process now, before it’s too late. Call for the Palestinians to show their good intentions, not toward the Israelis, but toward their own people. Get those “refugees” out of the prison camps into which they have been so shamefully consigned for most of a century.

Begin at home, with the over 100,000 refugees in Territory A, under complete PA control. Bring in Habitat for Humanity and Jimmy Carter to help them build decent, affordable, new homes. Let us all participate in turning the powers of Palestinian ingenuity away from manufacturing hatred, fomenting violence, and building villas for the rich and powerful, while the refugees live in squalor as a showcase of Israeli cruelty, and start to do good for a people victimized by their own leadership.

To take this position, so aligned with progressive values, however, we would have to confront two obstacles. First, overcoming our immense reluctance to criticize and make demands on the Palestinians. That would also mean we’d also have to renounce the impulse to attack as racists or Islamophobes those making the demands. We also have to consider, especially true for journalists in the field, the possibility that we’re intimidated, afraid to criticize people with so prickly a collective ego. Second, it would mean overcoming the widespread hunger for stories of “Jews behaving badly.” After all, if it weren’t for the appetite for moral Schadenfreude, the whole idea of pinning the miserable fate of the Palestinian refugees on Israel rather than on their Arab jailors would never have taken hold in the first place.

***

Such introspection and self-criticism can be a little like chewing glass, but I can think of no more important communal task this Yom Kippur.

How often have I gone overboard, how often have I accepted a lethal narrative in order to save face with my friends who expect me to rise above being an “Israel-firster”? How often have I admitted to crimes on behalf of my people without checking to see if they were accurate? How often have I failed to speak out against the depravity of the Palestinian leadership, out of fear of being called an Islamophobe? In the answers to those questions lies the path to a real peace in this troubled, blessed land.

Do we outsiders who say we want peace want it badly enough to confront our own comfort zones? Let’s hope. Those Palestinians and Israelis who are ready to live in a win-win world depend on it.

***

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In my search for people who have handled these complex and politically charged issues, I’ve found lots of cases of good work spoiled by a sloppy kind of symmetry in which the author dare not distinguish between various cultures. Russell Jacoby, one of our more prominent intellectuals, the  Moishe Gonzales Folding Chair of Critical Theory (at least he has a sense of humor), has written a book on the roots of violence, an obvious topic of interest for me: Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present (Free Press, 2011)

Alas, the book is full of even-handed passages in which cultures far less prone to violence must be matched to depressingly violent societies, and texts of great subtlety on the subject get reduced to caricatures to “make the point.”

Enmity marks the relationship of brothers throughout the Hebrew Bible. Esau considered killing Jacob; Joseph’s brothers contemplated killing Joseph.96 “Am I my brother’s keeper?” rings out as the great rhetorical question of Western culture. (Russell Jacoby, Bloodlust, pp. 61-62).

Actually, Jacoby might have gotten away with this had he written “… throughout Genesis.” But even there, that’s not the case. In the patriarchal narratives – i.e., Abraham’s progeny of “God’s chosen,” self-control and reconciliation replace the fratricidal impulse. And while sibling rivalry is a major theme of the patriarchal narrative, there is a clear progression from the zero-sum hostilities of the first generations (Ishmael-Isaac, Esau-Jacob), explicitly made worse by parental favoritism, to the remarkable positive-sum resolution (through atonement and forgiveness) of the third generation, where all the brothers inherit the blessing (despite parental favoritism).

And the following three books of the Pentateuch (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers) feature probably the most exceptional and dynamic sibling collaboration in the history of world narratives: Moses and Aaron. Did Jacoby stop reading at Genesis? Or did he just want to make a point about how the fratricidal origins of civilization in which these tales, suitably reduced to their lowest denominator (sibling rivalry) offer us, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, “cogent metaphors or universally applicable tales (p. 58).” In any case he managed to profoundly misrepresent a foundational text in search of the “universal.”

Is it any surprise then, that when he gets to the Arab-Israeli conflict, he goes for the same symmetry, kin rivalries.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict also is waged not between strangers but rather between kindred peoples. In the heady years after World War I, when the Arabs and the Jews sensed the possibility of independent states, the principals emphasized the kinship of their peoples. That was a moment when a defeated Ottoman Empire gave the victorious Europeans the power to divvy up the Middle East and to create new countries both for diasporan Jews and for the Arabs, who had been dominated by the Turks. Faisal Ibn Husain, who would become king of Iraq, met with Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel. In the aftermath of the encounter, Faisal declared that “the two main branches of the Semitic family, Arabs and Jews, understood one another.” He called the Jews our “nearest relations” and “our cousins.” Of course this could be a problem.

Especially for the Arabs who pursued an alliance with their cousins the Jews, and often enough got themselves assassinated by their brothers.

“We Israelis resemble our Arab enemies in more ways than we care to know,” writes Avner Falk, an Israeli psychologist, in a book titled Fratricide in the Holy Land. Falk refers to character traits, customs, food, and dress. He reminds us that Jews and Arabs believe they descend from two biblical half brothers, Isaac and Ishmael. “From the psychological viewpoint, the Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs think, feel and act like rival brothers who are involved in a fratricidal struggle.”68 He notes also that “almost half of the Israeli Jewish population came from Arab or Muslim countries” and that “many of them are culturally and linguistically Arab.”69 This does not mean that this population appreciated their Arab counterparts more than the European Jews might. Closeness has bred contempt. Sephardic Jews—at least those from the Middle East—are generally much more anti-Arab than the Ashkenazi from Europe and Russia. The assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin came from a family of Yemenite Jews and believed Rabin to be too conciliatory toward Arabs. He declared after his arrest in 1995, “I was afraid an Arab might kill him [Rabin]. I wanted Heaven to see that a Jew had done this.”70 (Jacoby, pp. 52-3).

One would not know from this account, that the degree of fratricide among Arabs is as stunningly high as it is low among Jews. Every Arab “uprising” has a rate of internecine murder equal to or higher than that of Arabs killed by outsiders (1936-39, first intifada). Not only does Jacoby get a self-critical Jew to obliterate the differences, but he focuses on one of the rare cases of fratricide among Jews (Rabin). As a result, he can cram the Israeli-Arab conflict into the same procrustean bed as all this other examples. Indeed, who knows how he’s mutilating those other cases to fit his symmetrical pattern.

I do not question Jacoby’s commitment to finding ways out of the violence against stranger and brother that we see around the world (writing a book is no mean feat). I just question whether some of the folks engaged in finding answers are sufficiently committed to the task that they will violate the politically correct dogmas of our age in order to think clearly. After all, would Chris Hedges have given him a laudatory blurb had he not put the Israelis in their place?

Nietzsche once compared thinking to diving into an ice-cold pond and seizing a stone lying on the bottom. Time to wet more than our feet.

1) Opening paragraphs of the op-ed with links (WSJ does not include links in digital edition)

2) Links for the rest of the article that was published.

3) Segments of a longer piece which I cut down to fit within op-ed dimensions (in bold)

Richard Landes: Romney Is Right on Culture and the Wealth of Nations

Mitt Romney caused a firestorm last week in Jerusalem by commenting on the cultural dimensions of Israeli economic growth. Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat, correctly seeing an implied criticism of Palestinian culture, called Mr. Romney a “racist” and complained that Palestinian economic woes are really caused by the Israeli occupation. Analysts said Mr. Erekat’s reaction was a sign that Mr. Romney has disqualified himself as a broker for peace. The episode reveals as much about the dynamics of the Middle East conflict as about presidential politics.

In making his brief case, Mr. Romney cited two books: “Guns, Germs and Steel,” by geographer Jared Diamond, and “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” by economist David Landes (my father). As in other fields of social “science,” economists argue about whether development derives from cultural advantages or from natural ones such as resistance to disease and access to primary resources. Prof. Diamond, whose book focuses on societies’ natural advantages, last week wrote an op-ed in the New York Times emphasizing both culture and nature and trying to draw Prof. Landes in with him.

Read the rest.

…[Israel] rose from the bottom of the third world to the top of the first world, in a century: Israel, the Start-up Nation. The Arab nations, on the other hand, illustrate the necessity of (a certain kind of) culture: even those with vast petrodollars still have among the least productive economies in the world. Alas, Saudi Arabia’s major exports are oil and hatred.

cognitive egocentrism

positive-sum

But probably the most important trait in any such society is the ability to self-criticize, to allow people to “speak truth to power,” to encourage people to recognize valid criticism and learn from it. Societies with such cultures treasure intellectual capital… The better a society can embrace the paradox of rebuke (it’s easier to take than it is to give well), the higher their learning curve, the more effective their entrepreneurship. “rule or be ruled” Here, where someone else’s gain is experienced as one’s own loss, one may decline opportunities that benefit others as well. As Adam Smith pointed out, men prefer inefficient slavery to wages because they treasure dominion over wealth…

Many analysts prefer to emphasize institutions over culture. While that may be true in some cases, the attempt to impose economically beneficial institutions (rule of law, free press) cannot succeed where the culture rejects it. For example, one can legislate a press “free” as often as one wants, if the alpha males in the culture find public criticism an attack on their manhood, they will retaliate in ways that make sure the press self-censors. As our experience in Iraq shows, democratic institutions, even well-attended elections, cannot overcome the pervasive mistrust of tribal, ethnic, and religious commitments.

In the “prime-divider” societies created by such zero-sum values, powerful actors acquire wealth by taking, rather than making, an ethos that goes back to the tribal warrior’s principle, “plunder or be plundered.” For the plains Indians, he who raised horses was not nearly as manly as he who stole them from the enemy (other). Or, as Bernard Lewis put it, in some cultures, you make money to go into politics, while in others, you go into politics to make money.

2002 report by Arab intellectuals to the UN

cultures of impoverishment 

It’s worth noting here that no culture is monolithic. Every culture has people with different tendencies, different styles. A “culture” in the sense of something that characterizes the style of a given group of people is the product of favoring and encouraging certain ones over others. In a tribal warrior honor-shame culture, “senseless violence” is an oxymoron: all violence is meaningful, a sign of seriousness. In a modern civil society, “senseless violence” is a tautology: all violence is irrational, a sign of an inability to reason.

The culture sets the tone, establishes the values of the “honor group.” In some cultures, a community’s pressure will force a family to kill a daughter for the sake of the other children who would otherwise be shunned for not washing the family’s honor in blood; in some cultures, group pressure will make domestic violence a mark of shame. And as Anthony Appiah argues, moral revolutions come from a shift in what the “honor group” treasures. 

From the late 19^th century on… Arab populations remained stagnant and poor where Jews did not (Nablus, Gaza, Nazareth), something noted by pro-Zionist Arabs like Hasan Bey Shukri, as early as 1921.

presence of Jews a great advantage.

…under Israeli rule (the notorious but remarkably prosperous “occupation”)

ten fastest-growing economies in the world

To this day, every Israeli policy-maker, right, left and center, advocates encouraging economic growth in the West Bank: in classic positive-sum terms, it’s in Israel’s interests to have a successful Palestinian economy. …if I am only master of it.” (Weathered by Miracles, p. 207)

…And these actors have dominated Arab political culture (and their public sphere), starting with the attempt to obliterate the offending “Zionist entity” in 1948. The Arab League, shamed by the psychological Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, implemented disastrous negative-sum policies, imprisoning their own refugees in camps, and kicking the Jews out of Arab countries. That Jewish exodus, now being replicated by a Christian one, left the Arab world bereft of a vital economic force. As a result, just like the Spaniards who had kicked the Jews out in 1492, the huge flow of wealth that followed – gold from the New World for Spain, petrodollars from the West for Arabs – washed through these economies like water through desert soil.

Palestinian “leaders” and the frustrated alpha males of the “Arab Street” followed suit, preferring to sacrifice their own people on the altar of lost honor. They denounced and punished anyone working with Jews as traitors. They fostered the culture of death that praises suicide mass murderers as “martyrs,” that poisons the minds its own children with burning hatreds. In the 1980s, they trashed the growing West Bank economy with an “intifada,” rapidly led by the newly minted, paranoid and genocidal Hamas, in the late 1980s. Recently, Nabil Shaath, a PA figure Western journalists often label “moderate,” denounced the economic prosperity brought on by cooperation with Israel as accepting “servitude for prosperity,” not because living well alongside Israel – Palestinians have the highest standard of living of all Arabs in the region with the exception of Israeli Arabs – necessitates servitude, but because in their zero-sum world, if Israel wins at all, Palestinians lose, and so not dominating means servitude.

The new youth group, Palestinians for Dignity, carries on the “honorable” tradition even today: they threaten to throw their own people under the bus just to force the EU to snub Israel. This political culture of zero-sum honor, gives new meaning to the expression “cutting of your nose to spite your face.”

Even where Israelis played no part, these patterns of behavior applied. Arafat took over the West Bank and Gaza and parceled out the successful businesses to henchmen; the myriad “security forces,” paid for out of Arafat’s vast and opaque funds, established protection rackets; and, of course, when Arafat said “no” to Camp David he brought further catastrophe upon his people. Decades of open borders and employment vanished rapidly in the years of terror.

daily chooses a culture of death

suffering of their own people.

And the eagerness with which many observers have seized on Erekat’s complaints, sometimes against their own logic, reveals an underlying prejudice against the very people they think they defend… It’s not genes but values that matter, it’s not predetermined, but a matter of choice. And anyone who considers Romney a racist for praising Israel by pointing out the obvious, because that hurts Palestinian feelings, tacitly assumes that Palestinians cultural traits, like a deep aversion to self-criticism and a corresponding appetite for scapegoating, are inalterable. That’s a prejudice almost as bad as racism, even if disguised as sympathetic condescension.

Jared Diamond concludes his column:

Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.

Anyone who thinks that “culture” is a one-factor explanation does not understand the argument for “culture.” On the contrary, until Westerners start thinking in far more sophisticated and less essentialist ways about cultural differences and change, there’s no way we’ll understand history and the modern world, and we will preside, as the current dominant voice in both academia and journalism seem to do, over a declining civilization, squandering its hard-won and hard-earned advantages for the chimeras of moral equivalence and post-colonial anti-Zionism.

We were doing so well. Writing about economics and politics for the last five months here without once mentioning the US presidential race. But it’s all over. Mitt Romney has given us no choice, wading into the debate about the origins of inequality and prosperity around the world.

Here is what Mitt says:

I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries. And as you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.

He continues:

Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. One, I recognize the hand of Providence in selecting this place.

Mitt Romney also identifies the origins of his thinking as David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations  and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (though presumably not the origin of his numbers, which are incorrect; the gap between per capita in Israel and West Bank and Gaza is about tenfold).

Well actually, Jared Diamond doesn’t say much about culture. In fact, his thesis is about how geographic and ecological conditions led to the differential development paths and prosperity among otherwise identical peoples. In fact his theory would predict that Israelis and Palestinians should have identical levels of prosperity.

Actually Romney cites Diamond to contrast him with Landes along precisely these lines.

Readers of this blog and of Why Nations Fail have already heard us inveigh against geographic determinism. Those interested in this debate can start from Jared Diamond’s engaging and critical review of our book in the New York Review of Books, and then look at our letter and Jared’s response . Perhaps it’s just us. But doesn’t Diamond just say that he disagrees with us but without substantiating how he counters our arguments?

In any case, we digress. Mitt Romney is instead taking his cue from David Landes. But as we show in Why Nations Fail, cultural differences cannot explain differing levels of prosperity. Deng Xaioping didn´t change Chinese culture after 1978 to make the economy grow, but he did change economic institutions a lot. Indeed, many cultural differences we see are the outcomes of different institutional choices. This is surely the case between North and South Korea, for example. After all, does Mitt and David think that there were huge cultural differences between the north and the south of the 38th parallel before the separation of Korea into two?

As I’ve argued against Zakaria, the issue is not a simple dichotomy. Let me state three theses:

1) Without cultural foundations (what I call “demotic religiosity“), no one, including the geographically favored Western European continent would have generated modern economies.

2) Even once modern economies have emerged, with both the technological and social blueprints available (and, more recently with the intensification of  globalization), without some kind of cultural preparation, changes in economic institutions will make limited difference (Arab economies).

3) Innovation remains largely the product of specific cultural conditions that favor independent, creative thinking, risk-taking entrepreneurship and a strong learning curve based on the ability to self-criticize (Israel).

Of course the difference between Israel and Palestine is not the same as the two Koreas. It was created by the migration of Jewish people, mostly after World War II. Many came from much more developed parts of the world than Palestine which had endured centuries of debilitating Ottoman and then British colonialism. They brought more advanced technologies and high levels of human capital, which in themselves were the result of the institutions and incentives that they faced. As Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein point out in their book The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History , the origins of these very high human capital levels are in the historical adoption of institutions in Jewish society.

I’d consider this much more a matter of culture than institutions, which are the product of that culture. Schools are institutions, but the culture of those schools determines their contribution to the society. Madrassas where students learn the Qur’an by heart are schools, but they hardly contribute to a modern economy. What distinguishes Jewish schools, both religious and secular, is a culture of disagreement and controversy which prizes the ability to give and receive rebuke (tochachot). As the Ethics of the Fathers puts it, one of the features of a Torah scholar is that he “loves rebuke.”

This is one of the most important and difficult traits to foster. Most cultures, even ones that have escaped the heavy gravitational pull of “honor-shame” dynamics, have difficulty with open discord. They prefer consensus, in which the egos of “big men” are not bruised by public contradiction. Of course such societies are vulnerable to “Emperor’s New Clothes” scenarios in which, afraid to break with consensus, people line up to confirm patent falsehoods.

This is where the roots of Israel’s current prosperity lie. They have further been strengthened by Israel’s integration into the world economy, which has enabled it to continue the process of technology transfer and encouraged trade and investment.

Again, these are cultural matters. The UN study of Arab economic development emphasized the appalling lack of translations into Arabic. As a culture, the Arab world is insulated by their language not only from other cultures but, some pre-post-moderns would argue, from reality. Israeli culture – technological, intellectual, business – is wide open to foreign influences.

Why hasn’t this prosperity spilled over to the Palestinians since the British left in 1948? A definitive answer would need to be based on much more research, but a plausible one comes from the reaction of Saeb Erekat, an aide to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, to Mitt´s remarks:

this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation.

It seems to us that Mr. Erekat, not Mitt Romney, has the right idea.

What a sad and uninformed cop-out. As I’ve pointed out in more detail elsewhere, Erekat’s scape-goating of the “occupation,” which has arguably done much more good for the Palestinian economy than damage (compare the economy from 1948-67 under Jordanian rule with the period 1967-1987). The difficulties and impediments imposed by the “occupation” – checkpoints, barriers, blockades – are specifically a response to the hate-mongering terror campaign generated by a radically zero-sum Palestinian political culture. Erekat won’t own that element of the story because it might mean he’d be forced to do something about it. But why would intelligent and free people in the West indulge his radical lack of self-criticism?

We end this by agreeing with what Sandeep Baliga and Jeff Ely say on their blog . Mitt should do some more reading.

I can think of some other people who could afford to do some more reading before taking public positions.

I begin with a high profile target, Fareed Zakaria, who ought to reread his own brilliant piece right after 9-11 on why Arab countries had so much trouble adjusting to modernity.

Capitalism, not culture, drives economies

By Fareed Zakaria, Thursday, August 2, 1:40 AM

Mitt Romney has explained that his comments abroad were simply truth-telling. “I tend to tell people what I actually believe,” he said. With regard to one much-debated comment — on the cultural differences between Israelis and Palestinians — many agree with him. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists including Marc A. Thiessen and John Podhoretz all applauded. Podhoretz wrote: “Anyone who publicizes his remark is helping Romney win the election.”

“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said at a fundraiser in Israel, comparing the country’s economic vitality to Palestinian poverty. Certainly there is a pedigree for this idea. Romney cited David Landes, an economics historian. He could have cited Max Weber, the great German scholar who first made this claim 100 years ago in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which argued that Protestant values were the most important fuel for economic progress.

The problem is that Weber singled out two cultures as being particularly prone to poverty and stagnation, those of China and Japan. But these have been the world’s fastest-growing large economies over the past five decades. Over the past two decades, the other powerhouse has been India, which was also described for years as having a culture incompatible with economic success — hence the phrase “the Hindu rate of growth,” to describe the country’s once-moribund state.

China was stagnant for centuries and then suddenly and seemingly miraculously, in the 1980s, began to industrialize three times faster than the West. What changed was not China’s culture, which presumably was the same in the 1970s as it was in the 1980s. What changed, starting in 1979, were China’s economic policies.

The same is true for Japan and India. Had Romney spent more time reading Milton Friedman, he would have realized that historically the key driver for economic growth has been the adoption of capitalism and its related institutions and policies across diverse cultures.

This is a somewhat facetious line of argument. Chinese ex-pats always showed exceptional talent in economic and entrepreneurial activities. But the important issue Weber addressed in the Protestant Ethic (now available in a great new edition/translation by my colleague Stephen Kalberg) was not “who can develop economically at all?” but how was the West capable of generating a form of economic development never before seen on the planet?

The fact that copying that model took most countries (with the exception of Japan) several centuries merely underlines the exceptional nature of that effort. The question facing us now is not who can generate, but who can take advantage of both the blueprints of development and the massive global economy that beckons any country ready to open the gates. As Zakaria himself noted in his 9-11 essay:

[In] the Arab world, modernity has been one failure after another. Each path followed–socialism, secularism, nationalism–has turned into a dead end. While other countries adjusted to their failures, Arab regimes got stuck in their ways.

Now while Zakaria notes that “Importing the inner stuffings of modern society–a free market, political parties, accountability and the rule of law–is difficult and dangerous,” he does not seem, at least in this (very lite) current essay to realize the “cultural dimension” of that argument. Why is it difficult and dangerous for societies to adopt these “inner stuffings of modern society”? Is it merely because the dictators refuse (as the political model would like to imagine)? Or do the problems permeate the society, as in the strength of honor-murders as a reflection of profound anti-egalitarian patriarchal culture that runs throughout the social and political strata?

Moreover, Weber’s argument, which I know from personal experience had an enormous impact on my father, David Landes’ scholarship, was fundamentally about culture – indeed about religion, more precisely, demotic religiosity. As Weber says at the very start, it’s not about making money but what you do with your wealth. The spirit of capitalism that interests him, Weber notes, does not begin in wealthy Florence with the Medici, but in the backwoods of Pennsylvania with Ben Franklin. Until people stopped turning their fortunes into positions of leisured wealth and political power, and kept reinvesting them in further capital ventures, modern industrialization did not occur.

The link between economic policies and performance can be seen even in the country on which Romney was lavishing praise. Israel had many admirable traits in its early decades, but no one would have called it an economic miracle. Its economy was highly statist. Things changed in the 1990s with market-oriented reforms — initiated by Benyamin Netanyahu — and sound monetary policies. As a result, Israel’s economy grew much faster than it had in the 1980s. The miracle Romney was praising had to do with new policies rather than deep culture.

Here’s a classic example of the false dichotomy. Changing policies and institutions only works if there’s a culture to take advantage of it. It’s a bit like installing new software in a machine that doesn’t have the speed or memory to work it (or is that too value-laden a comparison?). Capitalist laws and institutions will only work well if the culture underlying those principles already exist, especially the values surrounding positive-sum, voluntary interactions.

I have not yet found the reference, but I have heard that Schumpeter referred to capitalism as the “first culture in which one doesn’t need to kill another man in order to become a man.” My only quibble is that it’s not the first. But as a statement about the radical value shift involved in moving from coerced to voluntary relations, I think it gets at a core issue.

Ironically, the argument that culture is central to a country’s success has been used most frequently by Asian strongmen to argue that their countries need not adopt Western-style democracy.

This may offer an important clue. I’ve often found, even among medieval historians, that people oppose arguments that they think may lead to politically objectionable positions. Here, culture is allegedly used by dictators to prevent liberal political even as they implement liberal economic reforms (i.e., unfetter capitalist tendencies). How many important arguments (like the fall of the Roman Empire in the West), are subject to this kind of pre-emptive thinking?

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew has made this case passionately for decades. It is an odd claim, because Singapore’s own success would seem to contradict it. It is not so different from neighboring Malaysia. The crucial difference is that Singapore had extremely good leadership that pursued good economic policies with relentless discipline.

I’m not sure what the argument is here. Malaysia is not an economic basket case as this comparison implies. And Singapore isn’t really a country so much as it is a city-state.

Despite all this evidence, most people still believe that two cultures in particular, African and Islamic, inhibit economic development. But the two countries that will next achieve a gross domestic product of $1 trillion are both Muslim democracies — Turkey and Indonesia.

Turkey is not nearly as healthy economically as this figure implies.

Of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world today, seven are African.

The lower the GNP, the faster the rate of economic growth.

The world is changing, and holding on to fixed views of culture means you will miss its changing dynamics.

It’s not at all clear what “fixed views of cultures” means. This sounds a lot like Jared Diamond’s dismissal at the end of his piece for the NYT of ”one-factor explanations.” The cultural issues are very complex (as are all “cultures”). And they do change, although not as quickly as laws and institutions, which (one can delude oneself into thinking), offer a quicker fix.

Actually, I think one of the assumptions behind much of the rejection of the “cultural” explanation lies in an assumption that somehow culture is unchangeable. Hence Erekat’s claim that Romney’s remarks were “racist,” as if somehow Palestinian or Arab culture was in their “genes.”  Granted there are cultures that change faster than others; granted we do not know what happens in the long run to cultures that change (too?) rapidly (e.g., China); granted some cultures change very slowly (Arab, so far). But cultures change.

In my course of honor-shame culture, I point out that in the Middle Ages, Europe was still very much an honor-shame culture, and that it took most of a millennium to shift some fundamental values. (Anthony Kwame Appiah has some very interesting remarks on the dynamics involved.) I think, for example, that Palestinian culture would change rapidly once it got free of the talons of an honor-obsessed elite (religious and secular) and stopped thinking of the destruction of Israel as the only path to happiness.

I think people who think the culture argument is racist actually reveal how little confidence they have in the ability of (certain) other cultures to change.

When societies or people succeed, we search in their cultures for seeds of success. Culture being a large grab bag, you can usually find what you want. We observe the success of Jewish, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian people in various societies and attribute it to culture. But it may really stem from the traits of diaspora populations — small groups of entrepreneurial immigrants forced to live by their wits in alien cultures. Interestingly, Palestinians have a reputation around the Middle East for being savvy merchants and traders and have been successful in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Interestingly, Muslim immigrants to Europe in the past generation have had a miserable record of integration, indeed, in far too many instances, a record of regression.

Culture is important. It is the shared historical experience of people that is reflected in institutions and practices. But culture changes. German culture in 1935 was different from 1955. Europe was once a hotbed of violent nationalism; today it is postmodern and almost pacifist.

If we want to see post-modernism (and some of its offshoots like post-colonialism) as shifts in culture (really in intellectual culture), that doesn’t guarantee that such shifts are stable, or capable of generating a self-sustaining culture. This post-modern turn among an intellectual elite driven by both tyrannical guilt and a huge fund of unacknowledged envy, may turn out to be a suicidal move.

The United States was once an isolationist, agrarian republic with a deep suspicion of a standing army. Today it has half of the world’s military power.

These remarks show a real misunderstanding of what “culture” means. This is about social “consensus,” or changing self-images and attitudes, not about the underlying culture. And while these attitudes and self-perceptions may change (Greece and Rome were both demotic polities that became imperialist), culture dynamics - values/modes of interaction and communication – operate at slower and more basic levels.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.” That remains the wisest statement made about this complicated problem, probably too wise to ever be uttered in an American political campaign.

So now we have the key. Those who emphasize culture are the conservatives who want to slow change, those who reject it for political (ie legal and institutional) drivers to change are the liberals.

If you read Rip Van Winkle, you can see how a culture could change as a result of a political revolution. That’s not, however, the simple result of political changes. Americans were poised to shift towards the new civil polity, to leave behind “hat deference” and other cultural symbols of aristocratic dominance and to adopt a culture of egalitarianism, voluntary association, and self-reliance. The French less so. A François de Vinquel, falling asleep in 1788 would awaken to a monarchy in 1828 that resembled the earlier one far more than America in the aughts of the 1800s resembled the same place in the 1760s.

The idea that politics will solve the problem may offer some relief for the impatience to see change advance rapidly. It can, however, backfire. All those believers in positive-sum, “rational” behavior who pushed the “Oslo Peace Process,” and who thought that they could change Yassir Arafat around by bringing him back to “govern” the Palestinians, miscalculated badly, with strong negative consequences for the economy. Not only did the experiment blow up in everyone’s faces (a characteristic result of unfettered negative sum thinking like Yassir’s), but given the poisoning of a entire generation of youth with genocidal hatreds, the cause of Palestinian autonomy has been set back catastrophically.

What I find disturbing here is that not only are the “liberals” (as here defined) so impatient to effect change that they ignore (or misinterpret) any data that may “get in their way,” but they are as quick to dismiss anyone who might point out the dangers in assuming that political changes will transform the culture, as a bunch of “right-wingers” of bad faith. It’s mistakes like this that may have Europeans making critical errors in dealing with an immigrant population of Muslims who have very different values and attitudes towards relations with the “other,” and towards accepting criticism, than they do.

Bottom line: This is not an “either-or” issue. Capitalism is a cultural phenomenon with legal, institutional and even political manifestations.