George Will joins the debate promoting strategy that attacking Iraq to
activate domino theory political change is in everybody's interest,
especially Europe's - while using Friedman's sociopolitical economics for
support. In answer to Brad's question about what is a modernist, in this
context, it is users of birth control, a "novelty" item I would certainly
include in Hudson Economics affecting poverty and the rise of the middle
class globally.
Vive la difference. - Karen
A Mideast Specter: Modernity
By George F. Will @
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19837-2002Aug14.html
Thursday, August 15, 2002; Page A25
EXCERPT: Saddam Hussein's regime, founded on fear leavened by cupidity, will
soon learn the value of those as substitutes for popular consent in infusing
people with a willingness to die. During preparation for Desert Storm, an
Israeli official, after being briefed by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf on the war
plans, said: Too many hospital beds, too few prisoner-of-war pens. He was
right: Iraq's army was overrated.
...The House of Saud almost certainly is a dead regime walking. Saudi
Arabia's male unemployment rate is 30 percent. Its population growth --
birth control is disapproved -- is among the most rapid in the world (3
percent per year). Eric Rouleau, a French diplomat, writing in Foreign
Affairs ("Trouble in the Kingdom"), says that since the overthrow of the
Taliban, Saudi Arabia is the Islamic world's most rigorous theocracy:
"Universities require male professors teaching women's classes to give their
lectures through a closed-circuit one-way television system . . . 30 to 40
percent of the course hours in schools are devoted to studying scripture."
Furthermore, the marriage rate is dropping sharply:
"Unable to afford the traditional dowry, many young Saudi men are now doomed
to a prolonged celibacy. At the same time, growing numbers of young women
are refusing to marry men chosen for them by their families, men whom their
would-be brides are not allowed to meet before their wedding night. As a
result, an estimated two-thirds of Saudi women now between 16 and 30 years
of age cannot, or will not, marry."
Sooner or later, and probably sooner, all this will meet its match in
modernity. America's reluctant semi-allies in Europe should support American
actions that hasten that day. Demography is, if not destiny, at least a
shaper of nations' fates, and Francis Fukuyama of the Johns Hopkins School
of Advanced International Studies notes demographic trends that give Europe
a huge stake in the transformation of the Middle East.
Barring a surge of immigration into Europe, which the political climate
there precludes, by 2050 the median age in Europe will be approaching 60.
But in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, the median age
will be about 21 -- which, Fukuyama notes, is what has been normal through
most of history. "So you're going to have this little island of well-to-do
elderly people surrounded by vast numbers of people who are a good deal
younger and poorer, all wanting to move to the island."
If Iraq's next government derives its powers from the consent of the
governed, the entire region may be changed. "Brazil," according to a
familiar jest, "is the country of the future -- and always will be." Many
people too pessimistically believe that the Arab world is next on the list
of regions to experience democratization -- and always will be.
Brad wrote:
What is a "modernist"? I continue to argue that a modernist
is one who understands that his or her project in life is to give
ever better accounting for whatever he or she believes and does, and
ever again to self-reflectively overcome whatever his or her current
position happens to be. An investment banker or a particle
physicist is not necessarily any more modern than a "savage",
and each probably disdains the other for good reasons.
As Emmanuel Levinas urges, there is something important
in judiasm: The personal accounting for oneself:
"Here I am."
And there is something important about the classical
Greeks:
the form of human community in which each
individual is an end in himself -- a peer
dialogical, as opposed to hierarchical
form of life. Neither leaders nor followers.
