Syriana
Today: we start with the section on American foreign policy, in particular as it relates to terrorism and the Mideast. As you will see, the Cold War permeates much of this history, so you need to understand what the Cold War was. Yet I don’t want to present it like I do in American Foreign Policy or World Politics; rather, I want to talk about it in a way that connects with the themes of this course, especially the differences between the West and the Mideast. So today is background.
The West and the Mideast
Europe conquered the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, though if you had gone back in time to about 1000 AD, that idea would have been seen as laughable. Europe’s empire (Rome) was in the past, and now the barbarians that destroyed the empire were caught up in the Dark Ages. But it was an era defined in particular ways:
1. Augustine and the Roman Catholic church. Life was about the afterlife, and progress was in the past. Hard for us to imagine what this would be like.
2. Aquinas and the marriage of faith and reason. Aquinas had focused on Muslim scholars like Avicenna and Averroes, who were Aristotelians who were trying to mesh rationalism with Islam. For awhile (as we’ll see) they had the upper hand, but when the Ottoman Empire took over the Muslim world, they’d push aside the rationalists in favor of very conservative traditionalists. This is important for the current situation in differences between the Mideast and the West.
What do these terms mean? The West: The world of the Christian tradition, which would embrace Greek thought and develop a rationalized Christianity. We can see Rome as the real birth of the West, with Christianity helping marry Greek traditions (which the Romans had copied as well) with Hebrew thought, especially that of the Jewish sect of Christianity.
Until 1600 or so, the West was barbaric and backwards compared to the Mideast, or the Islamic world. But Aquinas victory where the Muslim rationalists failed set the course in different directions. Aquinas would yield a church doctrine that faith and reason co-exist, and by 1600 scholars like Galileo, Francis Bacon, and others started to overthrow church doctrine and yield the enlightenment or modernism.
Key point: There is a tendency by us in the West to think that our way of thinking – enlightenment rationalism, modernism – is the natural way to think, and others should adopt it as well. In reality, it’s a particular cultural development, caused by the way Christianity developed – even though it would ultimately lead to the church being challenged. While we can believe this is a very good way to live and think, we need to understand it as a culture that can look very strange from the outside – sex, drugs, lack of tradition, lack of traditional morals, etc., can look very scary. Accepting homosexuality, having a very materialist view of life – money matters far more than spirit, family, religion or a variety of things for most people. Even if they deny it, look at how they live.
Islamic world: never adopted that modernism. We’ll see they kept a very conservative religion-oriented view. If their rationalists had won, we’d have had a very different world (or if Aquinas had lost).
Enlightenment: This was a particular world view which said: a) reason and rational thought can determine the difference between right and wrong, how we should be governed, and our knowledge about the world; b) material, measurable entities are what matters – falsifiable hypotheses. Spirit, emotion, and intuition distrusted in comparison to rationality and measurable, objective material entities. Thus to this day, if you come up with a clear argument, based on reason and hypotheses that can be tested, you’ll be taken seriously. This disadvantages religious thought (look how the church has lost power, Europe has been “de-Christianized,” and religion relegated to a niche for most people), sentiment (sentimental or emotional reactions looked down upon, you got to be tough), and unmeasurable activities (spiritual insight, intuition, mysticism is distrusted).
Issue one: Is this western materialist/rationalist penchant best – who would one critique or defend it?
Ideologies: One thing the enlightenment gives us is intellectual efforts to explain the world and how things like government, individual rights, and the like should be defined. In reality, these ideologies reflected real material interests: the emerging middle class develops capitalism and democracy (often called liberalism), the emerging working class embraces socialism. The Cold War would reflect a battle of these ideologies.
Liberalism: Founding principles of the US, rejection of divine right of Kings to rule, belief in human equality, emphasis on democracy and individual rights of life, liberty and property. Led to democracy, capitalism.
Conservatism: defended tradition, the church. Ultimately lost. We call ideological liberals “conservative” these days in American political jargon. But ‘social conservatives’ closest to traditional conservatives (e.g., Mike Huckabee).
Socialism: Workers exploited. Karl Marx developed a very scientific theory which traced history, had core assumptions about how history developed, and argued that the only way to have true freedom was to end exploitation and share ownership of everything. He said liberalism was sham freedom, because in capitalism the wealthy control everything.
All of these were permeated by another enlightenment belief: social Darwinism. No longer a dominant belief, capitalists, socialists, and fascists were all affected by its assumptions. Capitalists: don’t let the poor breed, millionaires are the result of natural selection. Socialists: an evolution of the system from one of exploitation to one of total liberty, without exploitation. Nazis: a competition of races.
This led to two major developments setting up the Cold War, and the problems in the Mideast:
Colonialism: The Europeans took over the globe. Well, why not, they were superior weren’t they? Survival of the fittest, they destroyed existing political cultures and became the dominant civilization on the planet. The Ottoman Empire, which didn’t modernize because it had rejected fusing Islam with rationalism, fell behind, and soon was penetrated by the Europeans.
The Ottoman Empire finally died after WWI, and the Europeans came in to try to control the region. That led to resentment and anger which is part of what is felt there today. And the three great ideologies stood in conflict: Fascism, which was a rejection of enlightenment rationalism in favor of an emotional emphasis on nationalism, power, and strength, saw war as necessary and heroic. Thus Nazi Germany felt it natural to try to take over Europe and exterminate “inferior” races within. The two other ideologies were reeling. The Great Depression made it seem that capitalism and democracy were weak failures, while the Soviet Union used socialist control to industrialize and rapidly modernize. Russia was a pathetically weak power in WWI, but emerged from WWII – a war which saw the capitalists and socialists ally against the fascists – as a world power.
So the fascists were defeated, but the Socialists and Liberals (capitalist democrats) vying for their view of the future, based on their ideology. This is the framework of the Cold War. The Mideast, left out of the development of modernism, would have these ideologies forced on them in the Cold War, see a need to modernize, but recognize that their own cultures were not a good fit for these democratic ideals.
Discussion question 2: In the Islamic world capitalism and socialism are seen not so much as ideologies but secular religions – the West sacrificed it’s soul, it’s religious faith, for a cold set of assumptions and beliefs about the world, building an idol – an artificial faith. Thus ideologies are no better than religions, beliefs about the world based on assumptions that cannot be proven. Indeed, philosophically one can not prove any ideology right or even better than others, unless one stacks the deck ahead of time with assumptions and core values they plan to work from. Nonetheless, who can look at the horror of Soviet or Chinese communism, compared to the material prosperity and freedom of Europe and the US during the Cold War, and simply say these are equivalent ideologies. What do we make of ideologies? Is there a “right” ideology? How does one judge between them, and are those Muslims (and many Christians) right who simply dismiss ideologies as ‘secular religions.’