Violating The Prime Tribal Directive

"Bear in mind, further, that Islamist terrorism against the West, feeds not only on Western weakness of will, but on this Muslim internecine strife. The most practical argument of the Islamists, to all their co-religionists, being: “We could unify ourselves if we all agreed to attack the West. We might even be able to destroy the West, because it has no idea how to defend itself.”

It follows from this that a secret hope, not quite expressed in print (though sometimes expressed in the blogosphere), is vain. This is the hope that if Muslim fanatics are left to get on with killing each other, they will leave us alone. Like so many glib ideas, it sounds so plausible, but is the exact opposite of the truth.

To grasp this fully, a reader must enter a little into the thinking process of President Bush. (Alas.) He has not yet quite given up on his original insight: that democratization in the Middle East would put an end to Islamist, tribal, and Islamist/tribal violence.

It is true that democratization could, and maybe even will, perform this service eventually. It certainly worked that way, historically, within Western nation-states. The weakness, in this line of thinking, is to be found just over the margin. It is that democratization largely consists of putting an end to tribalism. It cannot solve anything of itself. Or rather, it is a bit like the sugar pills the medical researchers give out in double-blind tests. They may occasionally cure someone, but only of diseases that were psychosomatic.

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In the West, too, the schism became somewhat tribal, as little states converted or reverted en masse, each led by the example of its ruler. In the very nature of Islam, where tribal successions from ancient Arabia are acknowledged and indeed celebrated, the case is more complex. It would be oversimplifying to say that while Christianity expressly rejected the tribal principle, and enforced this by a celibate priesthood, Islam expressly embraced the principle and it is written into the Koran. But only if there are different ways of reading the Koran.

Just because one rejects tribalism, doesn’t mean tribalism goes away. For whether or not it is written into any holy book, it is written into human nature. The West’s own struggle against tribalism continues to the present day, and verily, we are currently losing it through the triumphant emergence of “multiculturalism” -- which is just tribalism, by another (postmodern) name. [ I disagree a bit with Warren's terminology. What he calls "multiculturalism", I would call (similarly pejoratively) "cultural relativism" or in some cases "bi-culturalism". But I will also admit that multiculturalism may not be the right description for what I do everyday working in a multinational corporation with R&D teams spread around the world. We do try to draw the best from everyone and their requisite cultures and we do try to adapt -- for instance in HR practices such as promotional structures and rates -- in some ways to local cultures. But we don't sit around questioning whether capitalism is a good thing, corporations are necessary or whether there's good reason that English is the world-wide language of high-tech -- which certainly a lot of academic multiculturalists do... -ed. ]

Now, this is just where what I have to say gets very tough to digest, for any mind that has embraced “multiculturalism” as a motherhood issue. Democracy itself, with all the word implies of constitutional order and separations of powers, is an unambiguously Western invention. The Islamists are right when they identify it as such. It could itself appear only in a culture that had explicitly rejected tribalism, and such notions as “one man one vote”, or “equal before the law”, or even “separation of church and state”, are themselves absolutely anti-tribal.

It follows that, in trying to impose democracy on the culture exhibited in Iraq, there is going to be at least a little more resistance than in imposing it on, say, post-war Japan, which had its own distinctive anti-tribal traditions. And where, especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few still opposed democracy in principle.

In a world where there was not a huge Muslim diaspora spread through the West, and there were not what we call weapons of mass destruction, the fact of essentially tribal convulsions throughout the Muslim domains could have been ignored. I wish we could ignore it now. We can’t."