Category: philosophy & politics

Here’s how the world works

Telegraph | News | Here’s how the world works
A new catchphrase is buzzing its way around the political salons of Washington and New York. Move over, “tipping point”.

The “J curve” is an explanation for the way the world works that is so simple that you can draw it on the back of a paper napkin.

Meanwhile, the J curve fascinates the dinner-party bluffers who, five years ago, bored everyone senseless by explaining Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point (a groundbreaking study of social epidemics which was able to explain why, for example, American teenagers suddenly rushed to the shops to buy Hush Puppies).

J curve graph

How does the curve work? The J is suspended between a vertical axis, “stability”, and a horizontal axis, “openness” (to both political and economic reforms).

At the top left of the graph are totalitarian dictatorships. North Korea is the classic example. At the top right are Western democracies, such as the United States and Britain. “Think about the presidential election here in 2000,” says Bremmer. “The other guy got more votes, the result was decided by a controversial Supreme Court vote, and what happened? Nothing. That’s stability.”

The world would be a much safer place if countries could leap across the top of the graph, staying stable while introducing democracy and free markets. But that is not what happens. Although dictatorships can be amazingly stable – Castro has been in power since Eisenhower’s presidency – the moment the prison door swings open, things fall apart.

Authoritarian states or command economies typically move down the J curve once their citizens taste freedom. And the downwards slope is usually pretty steep. The climb to the sunny uplands of free-market democracy, by contrast, is a painfully slow business. The slope may be gentle, but the journey can take decades, if it is completed at all.

The state that really worries Bremmer is Iran. A few years ago, Teheran seemed to be moving from the bottom of its curve towards democracy: liberals won seats in parliamentary elections, while young people were visibly embracing Western values. “It’s hard to believe that, not long ago, Iran was the third most liberal regime in the Middle East,” says Bremmer.

Nothing covers up a surreptitious slide back up the J curve more effectively than an outbreak of popular nationalism. But Iran remains a semi-democracy – which means that Ahmadinejad and the mullahs must work hard to sustain the mood.

China thought it could beat the J curve, jumping from closed stability to open stability. Now it is finding out that this is not possible, and the smell of panic is spreading. “The state employs 50,000 security officials whose sole charge is to monitor chat rooms and to police the internet,” says Bremmer. “But they’ll be busy. There are 100,000 new internet users in China every day.”

And that brings us to the tricky subject of Russia. “After the end of the Soviet Union, Russia seemed headed towards the right side of the curve,” says Bremmer. “Then, thanks to a combination of mismanagement in Moscow and lack of commitment from America, we lost the plot. Putin has led Russia back to the left-hand side.” Towards stability? That depends. The scariest passage in The J Curve is where Bremmer discusses Russia and terrorism.

“Russia is the only country in the world with the combination of unaccounted-for radiological material, specialised scientists who are significantly underpaid, and well-organised terrorist groups,” he writes.

In other words, pundits who expect the world’s first “dirty bomb” to explode in an American city centre could be looking in the wrong place. No wonder the Russians are rediscovering their taste for authoritarian government.

“What we need to realise is that, if the world moves faster, then the speed with which things go wrong picks up,” explains Bremmer. “Terrorists need less and less space in which to operate – and the people who commit atrocities are by no means highly trained operatives enmeshed in a global conspiracy.”

 

The war of the world

Telegraph | Entertainment | The war of the world

Historian Niall Ferguson’s latest book, The War of the World, examines a century of history and finds that the West is well on the way to being eclipsed by Asia. Ferguson tells Steve Inskeep that it’s a destiny that was set a long time ago was recently featured on NPR

Niall is a regular contributor to the UK’s Daily Telegraph. The link at the top of this post goes to a book excerpt.

I identify ‘the descent of the West’ as the most important development of the 20th century. Powerful though the United States was at the end of the Second World War – the apogee of its unspoken empire – it was still much less powerful than the European empires had been 45 years before. The combustible character of ethnically mixed borderlands; the chronic volatility of mid-20th-century economic life; and the convulsions that marked the decline of Western imperial dominance.

A hundred years ago the West ruled the world as result of centuries of overseas conquest and colonisation. Now little remains of Western imperialism, aside from America’s waning military presence in the Middle East and Asia. Then, the frontier between West and East was located somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now it seems to run through every European city. That is not to say that conflict is inevitable along these new fault lines; history suggests that there may be as many clashes within civilisations as between civilisations in the years that lie ahead. But it is to say that, if the history of the 20th century is any guide, the fragile edifice of civilisation can very quickly collapse even where different ethnic groups seem well integrated.

Benard Lewis – Visionary Historian

It sounds like an Oxymoron, but Professor Benard Lewis understands the axiom thet “Those who don’t learn history are bound to repeat it”. In February of 1998, he read in an obscure Arabic paper, which was published in London, Bin Laden’s American Jihad declaration.

In 1990, The Atlantic published his prophetic warning to the West “The Roots of Muslim Rage”. He just happened to have his book “What went Wrong” come out at the time of 9/11, which catapulted him from academic obscurity to the best seller list and controversy.

The rage of Islam was no mystery to Mr. Lewis. To no great surprise, it issued out of his respect for the Muslim logic of things. For 14 centuries, he wrote, Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a “series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.” For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand. Continue reading “Benard Lewis – Visionary Historian”

The moral flaws of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth

The moral flaws of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. By Gregg Easterbrook
This raises the troubling fault of An Inconvenient Truth: its carelessness about moral argument. Gore says accumulation of greenhouse gases "is a moral issue, it is deeply unethical." Wouldn't deprivation also be unethical? Some fossil fuel use is maddening waste; most has raised living standards. The era of fossil energy must now give way to an era of clean energy. But the last century's headlong consumption of oil, coal, and gas has raised living standards throughout the world; driven malnourishment to an all-time low, according to the latest U.N. estimates; doubled global life expectancy; pushed most rates of disease into decline; and made possible Gore's airline seat and MacBook, which he doesn't seem to find unethical.

The big question is how can we alleviate global poverty and its associated ills while simultaneously trying to avert the consequences of global warming?

Muslims and the West: Antipathy and mistrust

Muslims and the West: Antipathy and mistrust – Europe – International Herald Tribune
Muslims view people from the West, especially the United States and Europe, as selfish, immoral and greedy. People from the U.S. and Europe view Muslims as arrogant, violent and intolerant.

The deep divide between Muslims and the West was clearly illustrated in the findings of a new 15-country poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Solid majorities in Indonesia (65 percent), Turkey (59 percent), Egypt (59 percent) and Jordan (53 percent) said they do not believe the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States were carried out by groups of Arabs. Even in Britain, 56 percent of the Muslims surveyed did not believe that Arabs carried out the attacks; only 17 percent said they believed it. The results show that many Muslims are still in denial about something that even Osama bin Laden has acknowledged.

Open or Closed

Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Open or Closed

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times [“Changing Bedfellows”] summarizes the philosophical tension he believes polarizes modern American politics. He eschews the labels “liberal” and “conservative,” believing they no longer adequately describe the emerging political landscape. On one side he places “populist nationalism” on the other “progressive globalism.” The value of Brooks’ column is that he shows the appeal of both political philosophies.

This insightful blog’s commentary on Brooks, who is the NY Times’ token Conservative, supports the increasingly unpopular “Open” Foreign Policy, which encourages the connectiveness of Globalization in the face of the historical American Isolationist tendency.

Why Ann Coulter Matters

TIME.com: Viewpoint: Why Ann Coulter Matters
The same day I was reading Ann Coulter’s book, I read Margaret Talbot’s excellent New Yorker piece from last week on Oriana Fallaci, the Coulteresque Italian journalist who is not intimidated by the

“penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.” She has written that the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Fallaci has said that Muslims “breed like rats,”

As it happens, it’s illegal in much of Europe to say such outlandish things: Fallaci currently faces trial in Italy for defaming Islam. At least in the U.S., Coulter is not threatened with prosecution for being Coulter, but as I read Talbot’s piece I wondered why the de rigueur intellectual response to Coulter in the U.S. is to dismiss her automatically.

America’s obsession with loving or hating Coulter is a psychological phenomenon almost unique in our culture. Her various epigones on Fox News can’t quite match her ability to induce people to take deeply seriously what is obvious satire. I’m not saying Coulter doesn’t believe what she says — if you talk with her mother, who’s even more conservative, you’ll know that she does — but she knows that outrage is the blunt cousin of argument, that irony is more accessible than a thousand position papers. She knows that saying what no one else would dare to say will get her attention.

Islamic Imperialism: A History

All or Nothing by Theodore Dalrymple
In his new book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Professor Efraim Karsh does not mince words about Mohammed’s early and (to all those who do not accept the divinity of his inspiration) unscrupulous resort to robbery and violence, or about Islam’s militaristic aspects, or about the link between Islamic tradition and the current wave of fundamentalist violence in the world. The originality of Karsh’s interpretation is its underlying assumption that Islam was, from the very beginning, a pretext for personal and dynastic political ambition, from the razzias against the Meccan caravans and the expulsion of Jewish tribes from Medina, to the siege of Vienna a millennium later in 1529, and Hamas today.

Contrary to its universalistic pretensions, Karsh argues, Islam has never succeeded in eliminating political power struggles within the Muslim world, where, on the contrary, such struggles have always been murderous. Islamic regimes, many espousing in the beginning the ascetic principles of what one might call desert Islam, invariably degenerate (if it be degeneration) into luxury- and privilege-loving dynasties.

EU is at a turning point

Los Angeles Times: EU is at a turning point

In Britain and Poland in the last month, nationalistic parties uneasy with integration into the European Union have scored major advances. The EU constitution, rejected last year by France and the Netherlands, is dead in the water. Economic nationalism and protectionism are surging. The French, Italian, Spanish and Polish governments recently have taken steps to protect national industries from foreign takeover.

On a continent that dreamed of eliminating national borders, hostility toward immigrants — especially those from Muslim countries — is causing national boundaries to spring back to life.

In short, political life across Europe is being renationalized, plunging the enterprise of European integration into its most serious crisis since World War II.

This is a Saudi textbook. (After the intolerance was removed.)

This is a Saudi textbook. (After the intolerance was removed.)
Religion is the foundation of the Saudi state’s political ideology; it is also a key area of Saudi education in which students are taught the interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism (a movement founded 250 years ago by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) that is reflected in these textbooks.

Scholars estimate that within the Saudi public school curriculum, Islamic studies make up a quarter to a third of students’ weekly classroom hours in lower and middle school, plus several hours each week in high school. Educators who question or dissent from the official interpretation of Islam can face severe reprisals. In November 2005, a Saudi teacher who made positive statements about Jews and the New Testament was fired and sentenced to 750 lashes and a prison term. (He was eventually pardoned after public and international protests.)

The passages below — drawn from the same set of Saudi texts proudly cited in the new 74-page review of curriculum reform now being distributed by the Saudi Embassy — are shaping the views of the next generation of Saudis and Muslims worldwide. Unchanged, they will only harden and deepen hatred, intolerance and violence toward other faiths and cultures. Is this what Riyadh calls reform? Continue reading “This is a Saudi textbook. (After the intolerance was removed.)”