Say Anything Blog

For those inclined to rigorous calisthenics of the mind, Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club has a fascinating post up examining Stanley Kurtz’ Weekly Standard summary of Philip Saltzman’s study of tribalism in the Middle East.

Salzman argues that a knowledge of tribal society is at least as important in understanding the conflicts of the modern world as a study of Islam. In fact, Islam itself can be seen as a code within which the dynamics of tribal society can be acted out.

Kurtz, in turn, understands the significance of Muslim tribal society.

In the absence of state power and formal political hierarchies, no man of the tribe can, by right, command another. All males are equal, free to dispose of their persons and property and to speak in councils that determine the fate of the group.

Which, as Fernandez points out makes a perfect structure for low-level distributed warfare… Jihad.  Fernandez, again,

The implicit assumption in many studies of the jihad is that societies which are “failed states” must evolve into functional states similar to those found in the West. That in other words, the direction of progress is away from the chaotic tribal millieu toward the orderly nation state. But what if the trend was in the reverse? And there is reason to believe that it might be. Philip Bobbit argued in the Shield of Achilles that the nation state was evolving into a “market state”; and the trend towards the establishment of online “tribes” (sometimes in the guise of social networking communities) suggests that one’s neighbors no longer live next door. Even in countries that traditionally emphasized the Melting Pot, like the United States, the process of “coming together” has subtly been redefined in terms of drifting apart. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talk about uniting the nation, they really mean they must divide it first—the unstated preliminary for admission into the Big Tent is a prior alienation—into blacks, whites, latinos, women, gays, lesbians and transgendered. No one enters America simply as an American.

As usual, there is at least as much meat in the comments section as in Fernandez’ original post.  Some samples:

…while tribalist societies can have constant, dangerous raiding parties, for the most part they can build very little in the way of ever increasing lethality weapons. Yes jihadis can eventually nuke Western cities. Eventually, the better resource mobilization of the West will respond in eradicating in that case tribal societies to the last man. The Roman approach. They made it a desert and called it peace.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the Black Swan, recounts how nobody in Lebanon saw the Civil War coming. It was a total surprise…

He (also) recalls how Niall Ferguson, in his War of the World, a chronicle of the mega-wars of the 20th century, used bond price records to demonstrate how, up until the very end nobody could see the catastrophe of 1914 coming… Very often the past, even the most recent past, is no guide to the future.

One profession which has had long dealing with the surprise is that of arms. And the fact that every general through history has kept back a reserve is an acknowledgement that no commander, however far seeing, can predict the future—and knows it. A reserve’s existence is testimony to the inevitability that what we least expect is certain to be met.

And finally,

Tribalism reduces degrees of freedom. It places limits on what we may join, do, say or think in many subtle ways. Where once was an individual whose mind could range across the possibilities unchecked, there emerges in its place something modified, hyphenated, qualified by identity. You could not change the wording “all men are created equal” in the Declaration without losing something of its vision of liberty.

And that’s why enlistment in identity paradoxically diminishes the individual. Your category becomes more than yourself. Today, when a man who has graduated from Columbia Law School and Harvard; who lives in a mansion and earns more than a million dollars a year and is a United States Senator and yet describes himself primarily as a member of a particular ethnic group he has thrown away a great deal of information. It’s those blinders that set us up for unanticipated surprises; it’s that kind of reductionism that reduces our collective capacity to meet—and cope with—the Black Swan.