ShrinkWrapped

Culture and Freedom in the Middle East, Plus a Bonus Question

In the halcyon days of the 1960's, when the counter-culture started rolling and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations were exciting and raucous ways to spend the day, there were large demonstrations taking place on a regular basis.  At times the combination of provocative youngsters (and some agents provocateurs) and nervous Police and National Guardsmen led to violence, the worst of it the tragedy at Kent State.  Most of the time the demonstrations were peaceful despite rhetorical excess. 

[Some of the abuses by the most privileged, college students at Ivy League Universities among them, have been effaced from history but the worst abuses involved property damage, by and large, with an occasional punch thrown.  The violence of the Weathermen occurred on the fringe of the anti-war/counter-culture constellation.]

The counter-culture engaged in mass celebrations as well.  Estimates at the time suggested over a million people congregated for three days of mud, music, sex, drugs, and rock and roll in August 1969.  There were no reports of violence at Woodstock.

Contrast the behavior of the crowds at anti-War demonstrations and counter-culture events with the behavior at the mass demonstration in Cairo's Tahir Square last Friday:

CBS reporter's Cairo nightmare

Lara Logan set upon by mob in brutal sex attack

"60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, "Jew! Jew!" as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo's main square Friday, CBS and sources said yesterday.

Before you set upon me for making a blanket accusation that the Egyptian democracy protesters are rapists and Jew-haters, consider the culture in which this occurred.  A week ago I discussed The Triumph of Feminism*: Porn Star Sex! (now cross posted at my Psychology Today blog) and pointed out that the prerequisites for equality between men and women has only existed for a short time:

The notion of sex being an intercourse, in all the multiple meanings of the word, between men and women meeting each other as relative equals in a mutually gratifying and enriching, occasionally transcendent, experience, is a relatively recent development in human history. We need only recall that it is just within the last hundred years that men and women have become enlightened enough to re-define the words "All men are created equal" to mean men and women. For most of human history, women were the property of their men (as they remain in much of the world today, including, especially the Muslim World); if there was love and affection in a relationship or a quasi-equality (since there was no legal equality) it was simply the great, good fortune of the woman involved to have been found by a liberal minded man. Romantic love, which is lust leavened by love and affection, was idealized because it was so rare as to be a fantasy that both men and women aspired to.

Lara Logan left Egypt after the assault, in part because were she to report rape to Egyptian authorities, she would be blamed and probably arrested.  (I do not know the applicable laws in Egypt, however, under Sharia a women needs the corroboration of four male witnesses to rape; otherwise the presumption is that she engaged in adultery and the punishment for adultery in most Muslim lands is Draconian.)

There is no way to predict which direction the Egyptian revolution will take.  The portents are not good.  Between our benighted administration's blindness to the evil and threat of Sharia and Islamism and the fecklessness of our "news" media, we are not being well served.  Within one week of the departure of Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood is already making inroads: [All emphases added: SW]

Egyptian military embracing the Muslim Brotherhood?

The initial decisions of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces upon taking over the Egyptian government included a commitment to make changes to the country's constitution. The council has imposed a 10-day deadline on that process. That is ambitious to say the least, but if it can be done, it is a good thing. The sooner the military relinquishes control of the country to an elected government, the better.

It is important that the new Egyptian government be truly representative of the population and at the same time be protective of minority groups. The constitutional changes must reflect those goals. However, a look at the eight members who the military council has named to the panel that will recommend changes to the constitution is not comforting. The judge heading up the effort, Tariq al-Bishri, is an avowed critic of secular government, favors the introduction of Shari'a-based laws and openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian law over the past 40 years certainly reflects a basis in Islamic law, but strict Shari'a code has not been fully adopted.

...

The committee will not rewrite the entire constitution, but focus on six articles, including those that deal with the nomination of presidential candidates, the presidential election process, the election of members of the parliament and how to amend the constitution. That is a good thing. I do not want a panel with an Islamist Shari'a advocate and an avowed member of the Muslim Brotherhood addressing the legal code or individual freedoms.

Yes, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The council named Subhi Salih, a lawyer who is a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Coincidentally, the Islamist organization announced it will become a formal political party. In just a few short days, a formerly illegal organization is now a well-organized political party and has a representative on the panel that will rewrite significant portions of the Egyptian constitution. The Brotherhood released a statement calling for "the establishment of a democratic, civil state that draws on universal measures of freedom and justice, with central Islamic values serving all Egyptians regardless of color, creed, political trend or religion."

Egypt and the greater Arab/Muslim world are inhabited by cultures that explicitly deny full humanity to women and non-Muslims.  This is an inseparable part of Sharia.  Perhaps there will some day be a Sharia that respects others but it is not currently a very significant factor in he Arab World.

We remain, almost 10 years after 9/11 at almost the same spot where we started.  There is a titanic clash going on in Islam between their traditional way of living, based on Sharia, and Modernity.  Either the Arab/Muslim world has an internal evolution/revolution which moderates Sharia so that it can function in a modern world (which some insist is possible and others complain is a contradiction in terms; I do not know enough to form an opinion on the matter) or there will yet be  a clash of civilizations between 1.3 billion Muslims and the Modern World.

Speculative question for the day:

How does China respond if the rising tide of unrest in the Middle East (all independent of Israel; could someone please inform the New York Times) causes oil prices to rise to levels that threaten China's ability to maintain its economy? 

The Protean Evil

It has been said that anti-Semitism is the Protean Evil.  It can fit into anyone's paranoid worldview.  For example, if you hate Communism, it is a trivial matter to decide (and find compelling evidence) that Jews are Communists.  On the other hand, if you hate Capitalism, it is an equally trivial matter to find support for the proposition that Jews are Capitalists.  It is a bitter fact of life that Jews tend to be successful at adapting to whatever system they are in; success then breeds resentment, and a two thousand year old hatred presents a low energy, well worn pathway for distress and anger to be channeled away from one's own shortcomings. 

Today David Bogner, an Israeli, shows how even the non anti-Semite can easily fall into he pattern of attributing events to "the Jews" when in reality they are minor players:

Damned if we do... and damned if we don't

In an Op-Ed piece yesterday, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times lambasted Israel... both for having been too supportive of now-ex-Egyptian- President Mubarak, and for not being supportive enough of the protesters who ultimately got him to resign.

And today, Iran is just the latest voice in the Muslim world to blame Israel for having supported the protesters and engineering the overthrow of Mubarak.

What Israel actually did was exactly nothing. 

Israel never had any ability to actually influence events in Egypt.  Obama's dithering was all his own; it is characterological.  Obama may well be the least likely President to be influenced by Israel since Eisenhower.  Here is more from David Bogner, discussing the banal evil of Tom Friedman, friend of Israel and flat earther extraordinaire, who spent a few days speaking to young people in Tahrir Square and thinks that makes him knowledgeable about the Egyptian Military Coup (née Revolution.)

But even Friedman acknowledged why Israel might choose the devil it knows over the one it doesn't"

"... everyone can or should understand Israel’s strategic concerns. They are totally valid. The peace treaty with Egypt has been the cornerstone of Israeli strategy and economic growth for 30 years. Israel has scrupulously abided by the treaty. Of course Israelis are worried about convulsion here. How could they not? But the way they are handling themselves, is not helping them." [emphasis mine]

Again, WTF?  Either we have a right to be concerned about regime change by a mob made up of G-d knows who, or we do not.  Which is it Tom?

And yet from Turkey to Tehran Israel has been lambasted for egging on and supporting the protesters.  We simply can't win.

I might add that the protesters themselves accused Mubarak of being an Israeli agent.  The one thing uniting all factions in Egypt, from the secular democrats to the Muslim Brotherhood, is animus toward the Jews. 

In contrast to Tom Friedman, who I am sure does not possess a single anti-Semitic bone in his body but is a willing tool of anti-Semitism, it is refreshing to see that some people do not need to disguise their Jew-hatred with anti-Zionism nonsense or a more subtle antipathy evinced by their need to assign blame to Israel where none( or minimal) can possibly be due.  

'Zorba the Greek' composer: I’m anti-Semitic

BERLIN – Mikis Theodorakis, best known for composing the musical score to the film Zorba the Greek, recently declared on Greek television that he was “anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.” “Everything that happens today in the world has to do with the Zionists,” was one such comment.

Another was “American Jews are behind the world economic crisis that has hit Greece also.” Theodorakis also blasted Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou for establishing closer relations with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was guilty, he said, of “war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza.” 

The 86-year-old composer said in 2003 that Israel “is the root of evil.” 

The Tom Friedmans of the world are much more dangerous than the honest anti-Semites.  I prefer an honest Jew hater to Tom Friedman's "more in sadness than anger" animus any day of the week.

Naturalistic Sociological Experiments

The most important stories going forward, that will in large part determine the course of national and international events in the next 20 years, are rarely remarked upon directly.  At the moment all eyes are on Egypt and the larger Middle East.  Can the Egyptians, Tunisians, Algerians*, and the Yemenis, possibly followed by the Syrians, Jordanians, and the Saudis* (and if we are very lucky, the Iranians*) forge responsive democratic systems which enable modern economies that can produce enough for the countries to become stable and eschew the easy Utopian solutions offered by Islamism? 

[*Nations which have oil, including Iraq, will have a great deal more error tolerance than those who lack natural resources and must depend primarily on their human capital to create a robust economy.]

In Europe, the recent declarations by Merkel, Cameron, and Sarkozy that multiculturalism has failed, is another set of data points in the experiment.  In the balance between assimilation and multiculturalism, the assimilationists are winning.

Implicit in these developments is the unspoken question whether certain populations contain constitutional (ie, biological derived) characteristics that make their ability to become productive members of a modern global economy and its national derivatives problematic.  It has been considered axiomatic that all populations have the requisite abilities to become members in good standing of the modern world; what happens if Biology raises impossible impediments?

[I have discussed aspects of this in The 10,000 Year Explosion: A Most Dangerous Book.]

Steve Sailer, who risks being labeled as a racist on a daily basis, is one of the few writers who routinely raises these questions.  Today he reviews Byron Roth’s The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature.  In his review he points out that the prevailing thinking about immigration, that the two poles in the argument are between the assimilationists and the multiculturalists, may not take science (and reality) into account:

Byron Roth’s The Perils Of Diversity: Apologies To The Grandchildren

The multiculturalists, such as the Ford Foundation and the ethnic pressure groups it funds like La Raza, encourage immigrants to “retain the culture of their home country” so that the host country will become “a vibrant mélange”. In contrast:

“Assimilationists, who are clearly in the minority among academics, journalists, and other elites, argue that the melting pot pattern common to the immigrant experience in the United States until the 1970s is a better formula for integration of immigrants …”

Assimilationists tend to be neoconservatives, such as the contributors to Tamar Jacoby’s 2003 book Reinventing the Melting Pot. Some have made brave contributions by opposing bilingual education etc., but they are often blindly insouciant about the quantity and quality of immigrants.

Both views, however, as Roth notes, rest upon “the idea that different groups of people are virtually identical and interchangeable …”

Unfortunately, he observes,

“There has been virtually no discussion among assimilationists of the extent to which it is possible for immigrants to make the changes necessary for successful assimilation”

Roth reviews the social science in tremendous detail (The Perils of Diversity includes 993 footnotes and a 35-page bibliography).

There is much more in his review that is worth consideration but the fundamental point, that all extended families (which is what ethnic groups are) are identical in their constellation of those abilities which are requisite for the adequate functioning of relatively free, relatively democratic, modern economies and the cultures that rest upon such economies. 

Although the details are not specified, this is not simply about different IQ endowments as the "smart fraction" set believe.  The correlation between smart fraction and economic development may holds true for some populations but there are a great many other traits, for example, one's temperamental response to authority or one's sexual impulsivity, that probably play an equally important role in the functioning of large groups.  The important point that Sailer emphasizes is that culture and biology create a feedback loop.  Roth notes that there is a m mismatch between the speed at which cultures change and the speed at which biology can change.:

“It is important, however, to recognize that the effect of genes on culture is likely to operate quite quickly … Changes in the demographic makeup of a population will have almost immediate effects, whereas the evolutionary impact of a society on its inhabitants will take centuries … The nature of these changes is likely to be wide-ranging and is, without exaggeration, of world-historical significance …”

One of the implicit criticisms that the Left made of the Iraq war was that the Arabs (rarely more differentiated than that) were constitutionally incapable of being free.  They needed a strong man to control their passions and removing Saddam Hussein was a fool's errand in terms of culture change.  That experiment is still in process.  The events in Egypt raise a new the question of whether the Arab world can modernize and escape the siren call of Islamist Utopianism.  That experiment has just begun.  Assimilation of the Arab immigrant in Europe is another experiment whose course is unknown.  On our own borders we have the question of assimilating millions of poorly educated Mexicans, fleeing a failed state: will they simply cause the failure of their new state as they bring too much of their culture with them to assimilate?  Are they constitutionally capable of becoming productive members of a vibrant, modern economy?  Second and third and fourth generation Mexican immigrants are falling behind in many categories (including college attendance and graduation.)  Is that a partial answer to the question? 

Biology may soon be taking this question in directions that have been thoroughly discredited but may be unavoidable going forward.  To ask the questions risks ruin; to not ask the questions risks disaster.

A Confession

With all that is going on in the world, especially the unrest in Egypt and our government's incoherent response to it, I had not realized that I recently committed a serious legal offense. 

The transgression actually occurred a couple of years ago.  My Middle Son, now safely ensconced in Hawaii, had a group of friends over one night to play cards.  When it was time for the young men and women to depart, there was a commotion.  Our Golden Retriever, yclept Hootie, was making a greater racket than normal and when I investigated found that a nasty, snarling, masked and bearded intruder standing in the walkway in front of our house preventing anyone from leaving.  I picked up the nearest weapon (a hockey stick) and proceeded to confront what I could only assume was an Islamist terrorist.  (Mask, beard, irrational behavior; what else could he have been?)  At that moment, our Golden took matters into his own hands (or teeth) and proceeded to establish the limits of our tolerance.  A battle ensued.  After what seemed like several hours but was only a few minutes, Hootie was able to grab the raccoon by the scruff of his neck and attempted to shake some sense into him.  The raccoon became less feisty with this show of force and I should have steeped in to stop any further "disproportionate" response.  Alas, I was too slow and Hootie resumed his attack, grabbed the raccoon, whose name I never learned, and shook him until his neck snapped. 

Hootie subsequently received Rabies shots (as did I, having been splattered during the fray and with the body mysteriously vanishing during the night, most likely courtesy of our local vigilantes, ie coyotes) and I thought that was the end of the matter.  Now, I discover that I am potentially in trouble with the law and am struggling with my conscience; just as with Raskolnikov, I suffer from pangs of guilt and consider turning myself in.  I became aware of my felonious nature by way of Drudge this morning:

Man faces misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty after his dog kills young raccoon that caused some damage to garage

Seth Foster, 23, said he found his family garage in disarray last summer and sent his dog in the building to investigate.

Grizz, a blue heeler, returned with the culprit, a young raccoon.

As two teenage boys watched, one of them filming its actions with a cell phone, Grizz killed the coon, Foster said.

Now, Foster is facing a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty resulting in death, which is punishable by a maximum of 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. A jury trial is scheduled for Feb. 25 in Jackson County District Court.

At this point our national obsession with zero tolerance of aggression is becoming farcical and may one day end in tragedy.  Our bureaucrats are incentivized to eschew judgment in favor of an ever expanding and byzantine structure of rules and laws.  Our leaders appear to believe that the use of force is almost never justified to protect ourselves or our national interests (though it is less certain that they are averse to using the threat of force to advance their own political interests) and their understanding of how the world works is sophomoric at best. 

With all the attention on Egypt, you may have missed this spectacularly inept performance, noted by Galrahn:

Anti-Piracy - The "Wow We Really Look Stupid" Edition

At least the photography is good...

ARABIAN SEA (Feb. 2, 2011) A skiff being towed by a suspected pirate mothership is destroyed by weapons fire from the guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92) after Momsen disrupted an attack on a commercial oil tanker in the Arabian Sea. Momsen and the guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill (CG 52) came to the aid of the merchant vessel simultaneously in a coordinated rescue and assist effort after receiving a distress call. Momsen and Bunker Hill are deployed supporting maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Hull Maintenance Technician John Parkin/Released) 

Why do we look stupid?  I will highlight the salient point:

This is almost certainly a policy issue that is sourced to the current administration. The credibly of Congress to hold a hearing on piracy and believe they can speak credibly to industry and assure them the government is trying to help doesn't exist with incidents like this. How does the President escape criticism when there is news that a known pirate mothership was only a few thousands yards and under the guns of a US cruiser and US destroyer - 20,000 tons of the most powerful weapons ever to sail the seas - and was allowed to simply sail away?

So why do we stupid? Because the policies of our civilian leaders are stupid when that type of nonsense is permitted, or even tolerated. The rules of engagement of the United States allow us to bomb a house in Pakistan based on intelligence gathered from orbit, but we can't touch a Somali pirate mothership on the high seas a few thousand yards off the starboard bow of two of the most powerful warships on the planet?

We destroyed the skiff but never shot at the mothership!!!

The Obama administration's foreign policy is simply incoherent.  There is no other word for it.  there is no consistency, no follow-through, no appreciation for downstream effects.  There is a tendency to support the worst authoritarians and totalitarians if they are our enemies, while attacking our friends and holding them to an impossible standard of behavior.  Mubarak is a thug and a dictator.  Is he worse than Ahmadinejad, who tortures and kills with gusto and yet, when the Iranian people were in the streets, our President acted as if the demonstrators were an inconvenience and a personal affront?

When the United States is no longer an object of fear and respect, the entire world suffers.  Who else besides America will stand against the despots?  China? Russia? The EU?  Egypt, with all its faults, was slowly opening up its economy under Mubarak (even as Mubarak and his cronies were looting th place.)  After we became bogged down in Iraq and our American Left attacked Bush's democratization agenda as dangerous and imperialistic, we retreated.  Obama has been much more comfortable (unsuccessfully) wooing despots than working toward liberalization and democracy.  The chickens do appear to be coming home to roost.  The damage to the international order may last a generation.  Let us hope that the Egyptians can work out a way forward which will ensure greater freedom rather than a descent into Islamist totalitarianism.

Lets let Galrahn have the final word:

The Obama administration is delusional if they believe this isn't adversely impacting our credibility globally. These policies and restrictions on naval forces make us look stupid, while perpetuating and magnifying the perception of US decline.

Simplifying Complexity

Studying complex systems and the failure of complex systems is fascinating in and of itself, but it has become a more serious discipline in the last few years and understanding how complex systems fail is increasingly relevant to our understanding of our increasingly complex world. 

Joseph Tainter takes the position that complex societies start to fail when the marginal returns on increased complexity in solving societal problems peaks and starts to diminish; it is all down hill from there.  More and more resources are devoted to shoring up a system that is becoming more and more inefficient in addressing the needs of the population. 

Two stories today bring up the issue of complexity and how it impacts problem solving.  Dinocrat links to articles discussing (some in) our society's singular devotion to controlling CO2 and the related desire to bring high speed rail to that tiny percent of Americans who desire it, subsidized by the far larger cohort who must fund it.  Go to his post for the links; there is little new here.  Environmentalists believe that we need to control CO2 and get people out of their cars in order to save the planet.  Dinocrat's comment is apt:

Long twilight struggle

Some ideas are merely bad; some ideas are spectacularly bad. Occasionally you can distinguish those that are spectacularly bad by the over-the-top way they are defended. Alas, there’s no way to change the minds of some people. The Copernicans didn’t change older minds as much as they waited for the believers in Ptolemy to fade from the scene.

In contrast, Galrahn posts a neat little article about a recent development in the struggle by Drug dealers to keep our demand for drugs satisfied:

Nacro Subs

This story in the Houston Chronicle on the captured narco submarine in Ecuador last year is an interesting read.

...

The article notes the submarine could submerge up to 50ft and make 20 knots for short periods of time on batteries. It is quite remarkable what can be built in the middle of a jungle these days.

On the surface there is little that connects these stories yet on a deeper level they tell us a great deal about the ways in which our Society may fail.  On the one hand we have a story about clever people using relatively modern technology, which has become quite user friendly as the information content of the technology has exponentially increased, to solve a difficult problem.  For a relatively low ROI, the Drug Cartels can move their product to America while maintaining the price point at a place where they can satisfy their customers while making themselves incredibly wealthy and powerful.  The United States in return will ramp up the complexity (and cost) of our response in an attempt to achieve the impossible, ie stopping drug abuse.

Consider next, the stories about CO2 and high speed rail.  Once again our society is devoting immense resources to solving insolvable problems.  Even if you accept the premise that human produced CO2 is causing Global warming, the ROI of controlling CO2 is negative.  In other words, we can spend immense amounts of money and in the end, effect the level of CO2 in the atmosphere minimally, more likely not at all.  Our resources devoted to combating CO2, at the current level of understanding of the problem and with current technology, is money flushed down the drain; it is a complete waste.  Likewise, since there are no rail lines in America outside of long haul freight trains that actually make money or even break even, the resources devoted to high speed rail (which few want to ride except as a novelty) are resources wasted with negligible returns.

One of the problems facing our society is that we have lost the ability to determine what kinds of problems are solvable versus the kinds that are not solvable.  We spend fortunes trying to erase the testing gap between White Americans and minority Americans yet for the last 100 years that gap has never changed.  We do not yet understand why the gap exists or how to change it (except by dumbing down the tests until they are meaningless) yet we persist in increasing the complexity of our efforts. 

Please note that it does not matter if you believe that AGW exists and is biome threatening or if you believe that the gap between white and minority success is caused by society's racism (or minority culture or their genetic constitution).  It does not matter if you believe that drug use is a terrible bane that should end.  The salient fact is that with our current technology and understanding of the problems, they are not solvable no matter what we do.

Perhaps Tainter's thesis needs to be amended.  Perhaps it is not simply that the marginal returns on investment in complexity decrease over time but that Societies go amiss when they lose the ability to distinguish those problems that are possible to solve versus those that have no current solution?

[NB: My oxymoronic title refers to the fact that Complexity always fails when we attempt to do the impossible.  If we do not first define the problem and understand its causes or approach it as a "trial and error" engineering problem and respond to changes we evoke or produce, we cannot hope that by simply increasing the complexity of our efforts we will produce a better outcome.]

The New "One-Drop Rule": From Tragedy to Farce

One of the more interesting bits of knowledge that has emerged from the Psychoanalytic study of the mind over the last century is that unconscious conflicts can often be expressed in two diametrically opposed outcomes.  The classic example is of the young child's hatred toward a new baby who displaces him form the center of his mommy's universe.  The child would like to kill the baby (loving feelings toward a sibling develop much later and sometimes never develop at all) and often makes aggressive actions toward the intruder.  There is a reason that wise parents do not leave 2 year olds alone with newborn siblings.  Very quickly the young child learns that aggression toward the sibling is met with disapproval by the parents.  The aggression must first be suppressed.  The child denies he hates his baby brother; in fact, he might "love him to death" and occasionally hug his new rival just a bit ore strongly than is comfortable for the newborn.  Recognizing that the leakage of aggression is met with displeasure, the mind must then exercise a more effective defense; a "reaction formation" occurs in which the hatred is turned into its opposite and buried underneath affection.  "I don't hate my new sibling, I love him!"  Eventually, when the defense works, the youngster believes it and in fact does come to love his sibling.

On a larger level society often has difficulty coming to terms with conflicted beliefs.  The Civil war was fought because society came tot he understanding that slavery is a moral blight and that no man could be held in bondage in a nation which purported to celebrate Freedom.  The legal freeing of the slaves required a war but the conflicted feelings toward the Negro persisted (and persists.)  In the hundred years after the Civil war it was widely accepted that Negroes were inferior.  One reflection of this belief was the "One Drop Rule" which held that anyone with even one drop of "Negro blood" was considered a Negro. 

The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as black of individuals with any African ancestry; it is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status.^[1] The one-drop rule was put into law in the twentieth century, for instance in Virginia under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (following the passage of similar laws in numerous other states). Despite the strictures of slavery, in the antebellum years free people could have up to one-eighth to one-quarter African ancestry (depending on the state) and be considered legally white.^[2] Community acceptance, carrying out community responsibilities, and appearance were often the most important factors if a person's racial status were questioned.

Similarly in the United States, people of partial Native American descent were usually classified as Native American. In the early years of these types of unions and marriages, the fathers were usually European and the mothers Native American. Most Native American tribes had matrilineal descent systems, so within those communities, they also considered the children to belong to the mother's people.

The concept of the one-drop rule has been chiefly applied to those of sub-Saharan black African ancestry. The poet Langston Hughes wrote in his 1940 memoir:

You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown.^[3]

The One-Drop Rule reflected the idea that Negro blood was tainted and that its inclusion in a person's ancestry represented contamination of a more idealized form by a devalued.  Negroes who passed as white were law breakers; anti-miscegenation laws remained on the books until 1967!

In the 1960's the Civil Rights movement removed the last vestiges of legal discrimination from Black (née Negro) Americans.  The Black Power movement and the increased status of the American Negro enabled the type of psychological jujitsu that America thrives upon; the formerly devalued morphed into its opposite and became idealized.   The Black American experience was more authentic than the bourgeoisie white suburban experience.  Black slang and fashion became big business.  Entire genres of music became dominated by Black artists (making immense fortunes for white businessmen.)  Rappers and ghetto style weer the new authenticity.

The election of Barack Obama, with a Black African father and white mother, represented the apotheosis of this transformation.  After a youth spent being "white" Barry, using all the privileges accorded Black Americans by white elites, he became the Black Barack Obama of his young adulthood.  His early adulthood was spent acquiring and developing his "authenticity" as a Black man.  Yet rather than finally lay to rest our obsession with race, the One-Drop Rule has now become farcical:

Halle Berry Cites 'One-Drop' Rule in Battle Over Whether her Daughter Is Black or White

Halle Berry said she is in a war of words with her ex-partner, Gabriel Aubry, about their daughter's racial identity.

Berry, 44, is the daughter of a white mother, who was a psychiatric nurse, and a black father, who was a hospital attendant in the same ward. Aubry is French-Canadian and white.

The couple is in the middle of a bitter custody battle over their 2-year-old girl, Nahla.

"I feel she's black. I'm black and I'm her mother, and I believe in the one-drop theory," Berry said in an interview with Ebony magazine.

This is a fascinating bit of cultural development.  Halle Berry would no more raise her child and send her to a "Black" primary school than would Barack and Michelle Obama.  Their "Blackness" is an affectation rather than an identity forged in the "authenticity" of the streets. 

In an NPR discussion of race this morning, one commentator pronounced that we will never be free of the racism of our society until we no longer have 30% of al blacks living in poverty.  Nowhere in the learned discussion that followed was there any sense of awareness that so much of the pathology of the Black American community is a result of cultural pathologies (children raised by single mothers, often with multiple half-siblings, substance abuse, irresponsible behavior, the conscious devaluation of education in much of the community, and a host of other ills.) 

For the record, the poorest American Blacks would be considered middle class in most of the world.  They lag in comparative terms (and the definition of poverty increases every year) with white (and Asian) Americans and all of the efforts for the last 50 years, the "War on Poverty", have done nothing to shrink the gap (though more and more Black Americans enter the middle class each year; the single best predictor of a Black child becoming middle class is an intact family.  Try to find that data point in liberal discussions of Black poverty.)

The sad fact is that Black American communities remain deeply troubled and as a result, devalued, even as they are idealized by our cultural elites. 

Psychological defenses are wonderful things.  They protect us against unpleasant realities and from the awareness of our own shortcomings.  They can preserve self-esteem even when such elevated self-esteem is not supported by any actual accomplishments.  By idealizing the "ghetto" we are helping keep far too many Black Americans trapped in the ghetto, a place few people, Black or white, would prefer to live. 

What Does "Freedom" Mean in the Middle East?

 "You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means."
      -- Inigo Montoya

The current conventional wisdom is that Egypt is a country ripe for Freedom.  Tom Friedman, the most conventional of conventional thinkers, wrote a glowing ode to Egyptian Freedom today:

Speakers’ Corner on the Nile

In 40 years of writing about the Middle East, I have never seen anything like what is happening in Tahrir Square. In a region where the truth and truth-tellers have so long been smothered under the crushing weight of oil, autocracy and religious obscurantism, suddenly the Arab world has a truly free space — a space that Egyptians themselves, not a foreign army, have liberated — and the truth is now gushing out of here like a torrent from a broken hydrant.

He includes some obligatory comments about the "realists" (and the scare quotes are in the original):

What one hears while strolling around are all the pent-up hopes, aspirations and frustrations of Egyptians for the last 50 years. I know the “realist” experts believe this will all be shut down soon. Maybe it will. But for one brief shining moment, forget the experts and just listen. You have not heard this before. It is the sound of a people so long kept voiceless, finally finding, testing and celebrating their own voices.

Just as Islam does not mean what many in the West think it means (it means submission, not freedom), for too many, perhaps most Egyptians, Freedom means the freedom to surrender to Islam.  Here are some numbers: [HT: The Muqata]

Among other things, a tremendous majority of Egyptians believe that apostates should be put to death; that hardly sounds like they share our conception of Freedom.

Add that somewhere between 30-40% of Egyptians are reportedly illiterate and you do not have a situation that is auspicious for the birth and development of democracy.  What you do have is a country that is primed for an Islamist course, whether directly under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood or through figures who the West can imagine are secularists (a species that is in short supply in the Middle East, though not, perhaps in the salons where Tom Friedman is regularly feted.)

The Western intelligentsia imagines that words mean the same thing to everyone else that they mean to themselves.  (That such beliefs persist alongside the post-modern belief, equally tightly held, that words are merely constructs which emerge from a narrative and have no independent meaning, is a paradox that should trouble them but that they manage to assiduously avoid.)  The belief that our concept of Freedom, fought over and watered with blood, sweat, and tears, is the same Freedom imagined by the majority of Egyptians,  is foolish and dangerous.

The First Resilient Community

In order for a community to become a "resilient Community" it must be relatively small yet with enough expertise to support itself when the global economy suffers disruptions.  Those who discuss Resilient Communities, like John Robb, tend to imagine the central government breaking down, the supply chain becoming disrupted, and middle class communities suffering from the new depression.  In order to combat such an eventuality (since current theories about collapse suggest that our inter-connected global economy is becoming more vulnerable to catastrophic failures) small communities must, to this way of thinking, divorce themselves from the larger economy by, for example,  indulging in local farming in all its varieties and developing local industries (eventually desk top fabrication) and local energy sources.  I have not seen any mention of the fact that we may be seeing the development of a large scale Resilient Community in the Middle East in statu nascendi.

People do not change until either there are terrific incentives to do so, or they have no choice.  For several decades after the establishment of the state of Israel, the foreign policy of the state and the prevailing opinion of the populace, favored engagement with their neighbors even if, at times, this led to short term pain.  The efforts to become a "normal" country in the Middle East reached their apotheosis with the break down of the Camp David "Peace" Conference and the subsequent descent into the Second Intifada.  The effect on the Israeli public was such they became convinced that no efforts on their part would ever be able to change Arab public opinion toward Israel and the Jewish people and that their neighbors were simply irrational barbarians.    Just as the Chinese had built a series of walls to keep out the barbarian hordes over the last two thousand years, the Israelis would build a wall to keep out the suicide murderers of Palestinian Authority and Gaza.  This has led to innumerable downstream effects.

The Palestinians and the Israelis have been locked in a dance of death with creative Palestinian attempts to murder Israelis eventually trumped by more creative Israeli counter-measures.  Israel has thus had to become more resilient and robust.  The next stage in the process is about to begin; consider:

Egypt: Investigator says pipeline explosion caused by bomb

Judge issues report with testimony from guards saying men stormed the terminal, restrained guards and detonated explosives via remote control.

The chief investigator into the gas terminal explosion in Egypt's northern Sinai Peninsula said it was caused by four masked gunmen who set off a bomb.

Egyptian Judge Abdel Nasser el-Tayeb said in a report Monday that the terminal's guards testified that the men stormed the terminal in two cars, briefly restrained the guards and then set off the explosives by remote control.

Egypt's natural gas company had blamed the Saturday blast on a gas leak.

The blast and fire at the gas terminal in the Sinai town of El-Arish did not cause casualties.

The explosion sent a pillar of flames leaping into the sky, but was a safe distance from the nearest homes, said regional governor Abdel Wahab Mabrouk on Saturday. He added the fire was brought under control by mid-morning, after valves controlling the flow of gas were closed.

The terminal is part of a pipeline system that transports gas from Egypt’s Port Said, on the Mediterranean Sea, to Israel, Syria and Jordan. The Sinai Peninsula, home to Beduin tribesmen, has been the scene of clashes between residents and security forces.

Israel had hoped that by making their economy minimally integrated with their neighbors (ie, dependent on Egyptian gas exports enriching Egyptians and supplying Israel with needed energy supplies) the incentives for Peace would increase and incentives for war would be mitigated.  People rarely attack those who pay them for goods and services.  The current unrest in Egypt and the explosion of the pipeline mean that Israel is even more incentivized to develop their own natural gas fields in the Mediterranean and to continue their cutting edge work on alternative energy.

Notice that among other things, an Israeli natural gas industry will make Israel relatively energy independent.  This improves Israel's resiliency.

[Israel's vulnerability to nuclear attack is the primary reason that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be an existential risk for Israel.  They can survive the hatred and paranoid delusions of their neighbors; they cannot survive an Iranian nuclear weapon.]

[The comparison to America's refusal to promote energy resiliency does not reflect well on this country.  The thesis promoted by Tainter is that Complex Societies continue to invest in complexity with diminishing returns until eventually the entire edifice becomes sclerotic and fails catastrophically.  The ability of environmental activists to use our legal system to destroy our energy industry's ability to increase output keeps us hostage to the worst elements on the planet.]

Certainly Israel is not yet a Resilient Community in the sense of being able to survive completely cut off from a Global economy yet if, as so many believe, we are in the early stages of a breakdown in the global order, more resilient societies will fair far better than less.  The developing world, née third world, once upon a time was resilient.  When the indigenous peoples lived close to the land and they were able to sustain themselves, ie feed themselves, they were far better placed to survive economic and other shocks than we imagine ourselves to be.  However, now, were the international web of trade and interaction to fail, the poorer nations will fail the most spectacularly.  The largess from modern, wealthy, successful economies, including medical care and food, means that lands that once could support a limited number of subsistence farmers, are now populated by some multiple of that number; a return to subsistence forced by the isolation of the global economy would be devastating. 

[An alternative to an atomized world of separated Resilient Communities is a world of interconnected functioning economies with the non-productive nations (Tom Barnett's Gap) increasingly marginalized rather than increasingly connected.  Nations like Egypt which are poorly run and are teeming with irrationalities of all sorts which are inimical to modernity, will essentially be increasingly walled off from the modern world and left to sink to their own level.]

The Triumph of Feminism*: Porn Star Sex!

* The title would more appropriately be the Triumph of Modernity or the Triumph of Post-Modernity or the Triumph of Progressivism, but the current purposely provocative title will sell more papers.

Human beings are not by nature moderates.  When we incorporate a new belief or feel passionately about anything, we tend to embrace it with heated, and irrational, intensity.  The history of human progress includes a tendency for all revolutions to go over-board; the French Revolution is far more the norm than the American revolution.  Certainly not everyone grasps new paradigms with the full efflorescence of their passions but enough do to imprint the movement.  Usually there is a plausible basis for such extremism.  For example, if you follow the chain of associations from elevated CO2 in the atmosphere caused by man's activity all the way through the dubious chain to catastrophic global warming (or climate disruption or whatever the prevailing environmentalist extremist meme of the day) then the planet's biosphere is at stake and all measures must be considered to "save the planet."  Extremism is a natural default state for homo sapiens.  It is built into our neurophysiology which demands that the world be divided into Manichean all-good and all-bad.

[This originates in the binary nature of our nervous system and the fundamental unit of mental activity, which is the determination of the edge, the place where self and not-self meet.  The development of the mind from the simple binary view of the world to the fully adult appreciation of complexity is the subject of the various fields of Psychology, including such disparate disciplines as Psychoanalysis and Neurophysiology.]

Violet Socks appears to be a thoughtful young woman of the left who laments that Sex is losing its pleasurable aspects as it becomes "pornified":

Looks like my generation may be the last to actually enjoy sex

It’s amazing what conditioning can do. “Ordinary sex,” which today’s pornsick dudes find so dull, is actually pretty thrilling. You know: intimacy, passion, affection, love. That sort of thing. But I suppose if you’ve been conditioned to respond sexually to the sight of plastic fembots being anally raped, boring old mutual love and passion aren’t going to float your boat.

It’s really a pathetic situation. Men are so warped they can only respond to the pornography they’ve imprinted on; women are stuck with trying to supply a reasonable facsimile of same. Nobody’s actually making love. They’re just acting out stupid porn videos.

The proximate stimulus for her reaction is an article in Salon which takes as its starting point a New York magazine feature:

What women want: For you to want them

New York magazine's porn package gets to the heart of women, smut and lust

This week's issue of New York magazine is a triple-X triple-feature. The three cover articles star the familiar characters: "Sexting" teens in junior high, porn-obsessed young men, and the digital frontier of free smut -- with a guest appearance by Sasha Grey and a comedic interlude of personal tales of failed dirty talk. That's the world of porn: sometimes scary, sometimes sexy and occasionally very funny. But what's most compelling about this package (mind out of the gutter, you) is that it illuminates something that is present in almost all conversations about the influence of porn but that is rarely talked about explicitly as much as it should be: the female desire to be an object of lust.

I would never question whether a journal of such profound intellectual gravity as New York magazine might not, after all, have gotten to the "heart of women, smut and lust" but might note that a synecdoche is not, by definition, a full description of reality and the desire to be desired, including all the permutations of the fantasy to be lusted after, does not define a woman's sexuality.

The commenters at Violet Socks come from the usual post-women's lib weltanschauung which assumes that all difficulties in the relationship between the sexes is caused by the beastly nature of men.  This is partly true but, as with so many today, is also ahistorical and incomplete.

The notion of sex being an intercourse, in all the multiple meanings of the word, between men and women meeting each other as relative equals in a mutually gratifying and enriching, occasionally transcendent, experience, is a relatively recent development in human history.  We need only recall that it is just within the last hundred years that men and women have become enlightened enough to re-define the words "All men are created equal" to mean men and women.  For most of human history, women were the property of their men (as they remain in much of the world today, including, especially the Muslim World); if there was love and affection in a relationship or a quasi-equality (since there was no legal equality) it was simply the great, good fortune of the woman involved to have been found by a liberal minded man.  Romantic love, which is lust  leavened by love and affection, was idealized because it was so rare as to be a fantasy that both men and women aspired to.

Neither men nor women are inherently civilized beings.  Children must learn to tame their impulses; that requires tolerating frustration, delaying gratification, developing a future time orientation and a host of other difficult to acquire cognitive skills.  In the golden days of yore, these questions were irrelevant.  For the 99% of the population for whom life involved constant efforts to eke out a subsistence living, love was an afterthought, if thought of at all.  It was only the very wealthy who had the time and refinement to imagine romantic love (and even there the woman was hardly an autonomous agent.)  And this is where Porn Sex appears, for what is Porn Sex except the reification of perverse sexual fantasies, ie, sex without regard to the desires and gratification of the partner.

Consider that historically the very wealthy and powerful had open access to whatever perversion they desired.  Nero was famous for his debauchery.  Droit du seigneur  was first described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, 2700 BC.  Marquis de Sade was surely not the first nobleman to amuse himself with the behavior that now bears his name.  The incontrovertible truth, as painful as it may be to many, is that "True Love" could not exist before women were freed to be legal equals to men.

Consider what has happened since women were first freed by the legal system.  All of the pillars supporting the moderation of our drives, our sexual impulses, have been systematically stripped away by our prevailing culture.  First, God and religion was abandoned as unnecessarily restrictive.  Then the frightening consequences of the sex act were mitigated (first by Penicillin and then by the pill.)  Then, the Women's lib movement, in the hypomanic flush of their first bloom, realized that once free, women could be freed from all restraints.  Why shouldn't a woman be free to have any and all the sex she wanted?  As with all revolutions, this went too far.  Men were not just vilified for oppressing women for so long but traditional male characteristics were demonized; male aggression was the cause of all the world's problems; male sexuality was insensitive at best, considered rape by the more extreme int he movement.  Along with the devaluation of male gender identify, women's gender identity was also denigrated.  A woman who may have been inclined toward domesticity, who desired a traditional marriage, was not even considered a woman!  (Note the animus directed as Sarah Palin, who should be seen as the apotheosis of women's liberation but is hated by the radical feminists because she is not one of them.)   

Once male and female traditional roles were unbalanced and fluid, and the prevailing ethic became no longer one which included responsibility and the taming of impulses, all bets were off and the race to the bottom was on in full force.

In a post describing Why Tyranny Fears Art – UPDATED, Elizabeth Scalia quotes Bono:

About ten years ago, maybe longer, I read an interview with U2’s Bono, and he said (paraphrasing from memory) “art and lovemaking are the ways to touch God.”

I think he meant that art and lovemaking were transcendent because they are both activities are a means of self-revelation – that they take us out of ourselves and make us vulnerable in an act of creation, or co-creation, and there is tremendous power in that.

Well, I happen to think – if that’s what he meant – that Bono was correct. The co-creative power of sex is so powerful it can create life despite science’s best efforts to prevent it. And art is so powerful, it can topple egos, open souls and defeat ideologies.

Once sex and the sacred have been dissociated, pleasure is all that is left.  It is not impossible to capture transcendence in a hedonic relationship but it is surely more difficult and exceedingly rare. 

Young women who find themselves with men who only know how to interact with a Porn fantasy or imagine they can only find a connection by way of enacting their version of a Porn fantasy will, of course, be disappointed, as will all those men who are their mirror images.  After enough disappointment they may, if they are lucky, learn before too late that a relationship between a man and a woman can emerge, even form the porn saturated culture in which we live, but it requires nurturance, a slow dance of engagement, time, and commitment.   Tragically, too many have no patience for such a dance and prefer the quick release of inflammatory passion.  They can expect to emerge sated but should not expect to emerge intact and happy.

Sharia and Western Self-Deception

Austin bay is a very smart military man who typically has a sharp appreciation of reality, yet even he manages to convince himself that there can be moderate Sharia Muslims.

In an otherwise very smart discussion of Islamist Mensheviks Versus Islamist Bolsheviks -- Egypt's Next Crisis? [HT: Instapundit] Austin Bay asks an important question and offerrs a careful parsing: [Emphases mine-SW]

How the military manages (or mangles) the near-term directly affects the answer to the long-term question that revolt in a predominantly Muslim state eventually confronts: What type of Muslim religious party or faction will emerge as a major force in Egyptian politics? Will it be Islamist or Militant Islamist?

There is a significant difference. Turkey's moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) has had demonstrated success in a democratic secular politics and at least claims it remains committed to Turkey's secular structure. There are reasons to be wary of the AKP, but it exists -- and it is a sworn enemy of al-Qaida. In Tunisia, moderate Islamists also pledge to support democracy.

...

Islamists advocate implementing Shariah (Islamic) law "as the basis of all statutory issues." Americans may find Islamist policies arbitrary and restrictive, but Islamists do not use violence. Moreover, the Islamists represent cultural and moral values respected in predominantly Muslim societies. Islamists can accommodate themselves to democracy -- a Militant Islamist is a totalitarian and despises democracy.

The primary difference between what Austin Bay refers to as Islamists versus Militant Islamists is that the militant version are ready and willing to use violence, against Muslims and non-Muslims alike to gain power while the Islamists are willing to use the political process to gain power.  Both agree on instituting Sharai as the law of the land once they are in a position to do so.  Among the tenets of Sharai Islam:

Death to Apostates; converting from Islam to another religion is illegal and punishable by death.

Freedom of speech is severely restricted; blasphemy is punishable by death.

Homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death.

Adultery is illegal and punishable by death.

Women are not considered to be equal to men.  In a court of law a woman's testimony is considered only half as valuable as the testimony of a Muslim man (non-Muslim's testimony is barely acknowledged).  This leads to such absurdities as a woman needing four men to testify to a rape; otherwise the assumption is that she is an adulteress and adultery is punishable by death.

You may have noticed there is a theme running through Sharia law; note as well that these laws are supported by large majorities in most Muslim nations.

There is much more; for example, the laws devoted to business make modern commerce difficult. 

[There is an interesting article in the Economist which takes a particular view of this effect: The crescent and the company.  The article also contains a brief discussion of one strand of Islamic resentment:

The “long divergence” [the title of the book reviewed in the Economist article and a description of the gulf between Islam and the modern world-SW] also helps to explain some of the Islamist rage against capitalism. Traditional societies of all kinds have been uncomfortable with corporations which, according to Edward Thurlow, an 18th-century British jurist, have “neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned”. But that unhappiness has been particularly marked in the Middle East. Corporations and other capitalist institutions were imported by progressive governments that believed the region faced a choice between Mecca and modernisation. Local businesses—particularly capital-intensive ones such as transport and manufacturing—were dominated by Jews and Christians who were allowed to opt out of Islamic law.]

Further, a core assumption of Islamists of all varieties is that the Koran is the final and irrevocable word of Allah; this is one reason the Muslim world has been completely ossified for over a thousand years and one reason why the Muslim world has had so much difficulty adjusting to modernity.  This also contains an implicit weltanschauung that is inescapable:  Islam, as currently understood by both the Islamists and the Militant Islamists, does not allow for the possibility that the ills that are pervasive in the Muslim world are caused by any aspect of Sharia.  In other words, the backwardness of the Middle East, the "long divergence", must be caused by others, enemies of Islam.  This means that whether we are discussing Islamists or Militant Islamists only matters in their short term propensity to use violence against non-Muslims.  Sharia is directly violent against Muslims, as noted; both would also definitively demand violence against any dhimmis under their control who object to being relegated to dhimmi status.

Despite my argument, I do think it is extremely important to maintain a distinction between the "Islamist Mensheviks and Islamist Bolsheviks."  The Mensheviks will not send suicide murderers crashing planes into skyscrapers and for that reason can live in peace with their neighbors when times are good; the Bolsheviks will use violence whenever they see an opening, int times good and bad.  The problem then becomes that since Islam requires an externalized enemy who can be scapegoated and blamed for all their ills, when times are difficult (and with most Muslim lands having been ethnically cleansed of minorities) they will, of necessity, look outward.

One more point that should not be forgotten: the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is Islamist but not Militant Islamist is highly debatable.  The MB has a long history of violence and mayhem; to believe they have changed is fine but that requires remaining deaf to their own words.