Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Barry Rubin has a good piece here trying to explain why it is our "elite" opinion-makers don't seem to get it...imagining that everyone, everywhere is motivated by values roughly equivalent to post-religious left-leaning college professors: Why Don't Western Elites and Governments Comprehend International Realities?
...In short, why don't they get it?
There are lots of answers, of course but even after one goes through the list the basic disconnect between reality, perception, and policy remains baffling. To see a society with such advantages and assets act as if it were intent on suicide, or at least with blind disregard for its survival, is a strange phenomenon. To view the stronger obsessed with making concessions, the more moral consumed with guilt, a blind inability to identify enemies who keep proclaiming their nature and intentions is just plain bizarre.
If I had to put it all in one sentence--admittedly a long, complex one--it would be this like this:
American and Western policymakers and intellectuals cannot believe or comprehend that so many would fight for bad causes out of ideological--nationalist, religious, traditionalist--worldviews, turning down material betterment in exchange for years of sacrifice, defeat, and suffering; engaging in a battle that a pragmatic assessment says they cannot win.
Much of the West has lost the ability to understand how a world view can be narrow and fantastical or, on the contrary, quite internally rational but merely designed to deal with a very different set of circumstances and society. You don't get to be the dictator of Venezuela or leader of al-Qaida or a powerful cleric in Iran by behaving and thinking like a Western democratic politician.
They don't understand what Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tried to explain back in 1979: We didn't make the Iranian revolution to lower the price of watermelons...
There are indeed a lot of answers. The West has indeed forgotten the power of religious fervor, and that it's not just a matter of "silly words in some book" that people can be ridiculed out of, but a matter of a way of life, integral to existence, that people are willing to fight and die for. It's more than a childish scorning of religion can handle when you come up against people who haven't lived in societies where church and state are separated (or at least sent back to their respective corners by a referee on a regular basis), but instead are bound up one to the other.
We also have a very superficial, instant gratification society, and we've lost the thread when it comes to understanding why entire populations aren't made to jump at the prospect of affordable XBox 360's (or cheaper watermelons).
And then there's the Marxist poison that so many young college students are exposed to -- that there aren't actually people who hew to a competing ideology, because there is no ideology, only economics. Ideology is just a false consciousness -- you only believe you believe those things when actually you're just being manipulated by evil capitalists to do so -- so when, because Marxists are pretty well wrong about everything, the enemy fails to be motivated by money perks, we are stumped for an explanation for this seemingly irrational response.
And always the money solution seems like it should work. Besides being rational-seeming in the abstract, take an individual and say, "Would you like this, and this, and this..." and they nod and say, "Oh yes!" and we leave able to say, "See? We all want the same things!" But put them in a group, in a culture, as part of a society, and see how things change...see what kind of leaders emerge. There's a value divergence that yields unexpected results.
It's not all about the money. There are people motivated by other things, even if we don't get that anymore.
[h/t: CJ]
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