The Kindness of Stangers

By Robin Fox, from an essay in the September/October issue of Society. Fox is a professor of social theory at Rutgers and the author, most recently, of Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life. His “Human Nature and Human Rights” appeared in the April 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Since Laocoon’s warning to his fellow Trojans went so tragically unheeded, the course of history has been strewn with the corpses of ungrateful nations which, despite the misery that stemmed from their inability to govern their own affairs, bitterly resented and actively resisted the firm and forceful help of others. The stranger’s gift of peace, order, and prosperity is lesswelcome to us than the death, chaos, and poverty that are our own doing. For in the end they are our own, and that is what matters to us. Like truculent adolescents, we do not want to be told how to do things or have them done for us; we want to make our own, even fatal, mistakes. We will take what we can use from what is offered, but we want, at last, to do it ourselves: to manage our own lives, however badly. The main thing about the stranger, after all, is that he is strange. He is not like us; he will never understand us. Our greatest fear, perhaps because the possibility is often so seductive, is that we will become like him and lose our selves. The stranger’s gift never comes without strings, and we do not want to be tied.

We of the post-Enlightenment Anglophone West are among the most earnest of the givers. We are not, like our medieval Catholic ancestors, really proponents of the Crusade and the holy war against the heathen. Weare at heart Protestant missionaries: We want to bring the good news and the benefits of civilization to the benighted of the earth. And if they don’t want it, then like Protestant parents, and entirely for their own good of course, we must sternly make them accept it. Certainly, we hoped to make profits and attain political power in the process, but these were small prices the benighted had to pay for the incomparable gifts we had to offer. Critics of colonialism miss the point if all they see is the profits and the power. Our civilizing mission was, and still is, as dear to us as the jihad is to Muslims. Even when it is not Protestantism per se that we are offering, it is the children of the Protestant Ethic that we know as democracy, liberty, equality, and the free market. Our learned men tell us we are the foreordained bearers of a truth so fundamental that with its triumph history will come to an end, there being nothing left for mankind to achieve. If this is so, how can the benighted so stubbornly, and even violently, refuse our gift of a free leg up onto the stage of world history?

There is no question that we went into Iraq to defend our oil interests: that, at least, was the rational part. But the holy warriors of the White House saw a far greater opportunity. They could plant the banner of liberal democracy in the heartland of Arab totalitarianism, and thus change the world for the better. To do this was to collaborate with the inevitable progress of mankind-a sure winner of a policy. We would simply give the inliberevitable progress a friendly shove in the right direction. The “Iraqi People” (much invoked) would greet us as liberators and gratefully accept our gift of free elections. How could they possibly prefer the savagery of Saddam and the hegemony of the, brutes of Baath? Once rid of these monsters, the “Iraqi People”-like people everywhere, as “lovers of freedom”-would set up a representative democracy modeled on our own. Ballot boxes and purple finger paint would be provided, political parties would be free to form, the press would be unrestricted. This model democracy would stand as a rebuke and an example to the monstrous regimes in the Middle East, which would gradually succumb to the same happy fate. What is more, it, would be an Arab democracy, thus saving the Arabs from the embarrassment of Israel being the only democratic state in the region. Since democracies are inherently peaceful, the more of them in the region the better, and the better for our “national security.” And above all, as the guarantors of this liberal democratic paradise, we would have a continuing benign influence in the area, which would, incidentally, protect our oil interests.

For the missionaries this was a chance too good to be missed. Saddam’s regime was ripe for the plucking. There was no way its army could stand up to the superior Western forces, and once the army was disbanded, the criminals tried, and “de-Baathification” completed, the grateful freed “People of Iraq” would take it from there. They would need help and firm guidance from the missionaries, of course. They would make mistakes, and there would be all the baggage of dictatorship to unpack. But it had been done in Japan and Germany with startling success (both totally misleading examples, as it happens), why not in Iraq? To suggest otherwise, said George W. Bush, was to suggest that the “Iraqi People” were inherently incapable of “freedom and democracy.” That was to be condescending and colonialist. Everyone everywhere wanted these benefits, and only wicked regimes prevented them from realizing these universal human goals, toward which, we must not forget, mankind was inevitably evolving anyway.

I am not caricaturing this position. Those who would see the ideology as a cynical cover for the arms industry, Halliburton, and Big Oil are missing what is truly at issue here, and what is much more frightening. The colonial powers always look out for their economic and strategic interests; it would be foolish of them not to. But they have also always believed the “civilizing mission” to be just as important.  This was justified partly by religion bringing Christianity to the heathenbut was also seen as an end in itself: the production of an industrial, peaceful, democratic (sometimes socialist) world.

As societies evolved from military to industrial institutions, so would peace and democracy spread around the globe. Free-trade advocates repeat it today: the more we are dependent on each other through trade, the less likely will we be to fight each other. Trade requires the rule oflaw, the rule of law promotes democracy, and democracies don’t fight each other-we know the logic. This’ is the fundamental belief of the missionaries. We have a precious gift that we can give the nations of the world, and whether they want it or not, we are going to give it to them. If they think they don’t want it, then they must be re-educated, with force if necessary, to realize that they do. History is going to end in universal liberal democracy, so they might as well learn to cooperate with the inevitable.

The problem for liberal and radical critics of Bushism in the West is that they really believe this too. It is no longer fashionable to think that some form of communism or socialism will be the inevitable end product, but some kind of democratic open society is seen as the only alternative for the decolonized peoples of the world. It is hard to find any fervent postcolonialist who will agree that, having thrown off the imperial yoke: the ex-colonial peoples should be free to choose dictatorship, theocracy, tribalism, nepotism, clitoridectomy, or the rule of warlords. Respect for “indigenous cultures” goes only so far. The leftliberals assume as fervently as the Bushites that people everywhere aspire to a state of liberal democratic polity where human rights and the rights of women will be assured and tolerance and religious freedom will be institutionalized. It is to their constant embarrassment that this does not happen, and fifty years later the excuse that the failure lies in the pernicious aftereffects of colonialism is wearing thin; they do not really believe it themselves. (They have substituted neocolonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, transnational corporations.) But the alternative is hard to bear for the progressive mentality that assumes we can indeed write our own script and exclude all those factors of “human nature” that seem so stubbornly to resist our enlightened blandishments.

Against this naive optimism of the missionaries of whatever stripe, we can set an opposing view that is historical and what we might call naturalistic. It sees that the institutions we so prize are not the product of a freedom-loving human nature but the result of many centuries of effort to overcome human nature. However desirable they may be, they are not natural to us.We maintain them with constant vigilance and the support of hard-won economic, political, legal, and social structures. These have taken literally thousands of years to put in place. In England universal suffragehad to wait until 1928, when women under thirty were finally ineluded. In the United States it was only after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that we can be said to have achieved true democracy. Far from being a fact of human nature, the voluntary ceding of power afrer elections, the basic feature of liberal democracy, actually flies in the face of nature. It is selfevidently absurd. Our political opponents are always disreputable and their accession to power will be the ruin of the country. Listen to the rhetoric of campaigns: allowing the opponents to take over amounts to almost criminal malfeasance. Yet that is what we do afrer a mere counting of heads–cede control to the villains and incompetents.

The cynic will say that we allow this to happen only because we know there is no real difference between political parties in these systems, and so we join in a conspiracy of the willing to take our turns. Even so, this willingness that we take for granted is an amazing, unusual, and fragile thing. Our Western democracies still struggle with nepotism and corruption whose energetic persistence should tell us something. How could we believe then that we could walk into a country like Iraq and do in a few months, or even a few years, or even several decades, what millennia had failed to evolve spontaneously? Because the “Iraqi People,”like everyone else, “loved freedom”?

For a start, there are no “Iraqi People.” The phrase is pure rhetoric. Iraq as a “nation” (like the “nation” of Kuwait) was devised by the compasses and protractors of Gertrude Bell when the British and French divided up the Middle East after World War 1. We know well enough the ethnic-religious division into Kurd, Sunni, and Shiite. But what is not understood is that Iraq, like the other countries of the region, still stands at a level of social evolution where the family, clan, tribe, and sect command major allegiance, and the idea of the individual autonomous voter, necessary and commonplace in our Own systems, is totally foreign, and would not make I sense to the “average Ahmed.”

I received a call in 2003 from a New York Times reporter, John Tierney, who was baffled by what he discovered in his Baghdad hotel. Each week there was a lavish wedding in the dining room and ballroom. It looked very Western until he discovered that the bride and groom were inevitably cousins, and, more than that, they were most often paternal parallel first cousins, as the jargon has it; they were the children of two brothers, and if they were not that close, then the bride was usually from the same paternal clan as the groom. Occasionally, a woman from the mother’s paternal clan was married, as in the case of Saddam Hussein. When questioned about this, the young people told the reporter, “Of course we marry a cousin. What would you have us do, marry a stranger? We cannot trust strangers.” Such a system of close-cousin marriage, the commonest form of preferred marriage in Arab society, literally keeps the marriage in the family. These groups are inward-looking and suspicious of strangers. It is the “Mafia solution” to life:never go against the family. Trust is only possible, ultimately, between close relatives, and preferably those of the paternal clan, The idea of voluntarily doing anything for strangers has to be worked at. It is another of those things we in Western democracies do every day without thought. It is “human nature” for us. We give large sums of our money to complete strangers to distribute to other strangers for purposes often unknown to us. This is taxation. It is everywhere hated, but absolutely necessary to run a complex society. We trust strangers to do things absolutely essential to our lives and welfare. We take it for granted they will do them: they are doing their jobs. But this is as foreign to much of the world as our odd acceptance of the relinquishment of power. And to that same world it borders on the immoral as well as the insane. In those places where the state cannot be trusted with the welfare of individuals, they turn to the older and wiser certainty of kinship.

When there was no electricity in Baghdad, the reason was that as soon as copper cable was laid, the Iraqis came out in the night and stole it. Copper brought a good price. When the troops expostulated with those caught and tried to make them see that their theft was against the “Iraqi People,” the indignant thieves demanded to know who these “Iraqi People” were who stood between them and the feeding of their starving families. They were responsible not for some mythical Iraqi People but for their kin: their cousins who were their spouses. The few ambulances in Baghdad cannot function properly to get the injured from bombings to the hospitals. The armed clansmen of the injured commandeer the ambulances and turn out the unrelated wounded. Firefights often break out between armed groups competing for the ambulances. Remember the graphic scene in Lawrence of Arabia when the tribal chief Auda, played by Anthony Quinn, is told he should join in the attack on the Turks in Aqaba for the sake of “the Arabs.” “What tribe is that!” he asks. He recites the tribes he knows, but demands to know what tribe is “the Arabs” that he should sacrifice for them. “The English” he understands as a tribe he can ally with against his enemies, including the Turks if it suits him. Thus some of the sheikhs in Anbar ally with the Americans against Al Qaeda and its allies if it suits them. But their and Auda’s sole concern is with their tribal advantage. This was Auda’s highest moral imperative. And Auda loved freedom above all other things.

If this tribal “mentality” is closer to the default system of human nature than is our cherished individualistic democracy, then we ignore its appeal at our peril. The marriage of close cousins may appear to us backward, unhygienic, or immoral, but it is the pattern that has dominated the world until fairly recently. If we could get into God’s memory, we would find that the majority of marriages throughout history have been with close cousins. In the West we had to move from tribalism, through empire, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution to reach our present state of fragile democracy (shrugging off communism and fascism along the way). We were helped in the shedding of dominant kinship groups by the relative individualism of the Angles and Saxons with their emphasis on the independent nuclear family, and then by Christian monogamy and the banning of cousin marriages by the Church. And we had to do it by our own efforts, to pull ourselves up by the social bootstraps, to make it stick. We have seen in Germany, in Italy, and in Spain how fragile this really is. Russia never did make it. France is always problematic. Latin America and the Balkans continue to be a mess. But in making this move we had to change the entire communalistic, ritualistic, kinshipdominated society that is natural to us. We had to transform “nepotism” and “corruption” from tribal virtues into criminal offenses, and we have to keep at it all the time. I live in New Jersey and I stare into the pit.

The future is hypothetical. The old formula “no bourgeoisie, no democracy” still holds. What independent professional class there was in Iraq, with its need for the rule of law to guarantee contracts, was destroyed by Saddam. It is something we cannot re-create with any amount of aid or surges, nor can we force it upon the “Iraqi People.” The price of failure, says Bush, is too high. But failure was written all over this enterprise from the start. The goals set, beyond the toppling of Saddam, were impossible, and the real mystery is why our leaders ever thought they could be achieved. The administration may, by increased force and bribery (the “Iraqi People” understand both very well), patch up some kind of “order” for a while. But it cannot create the whole civil infrastructure and the sea change of values that underpin a functioning liberal democracy. To do that you have to turn tribesmen into citizens.

These White House children of the Protestant Ethic should understand how hard won is the open society we live in, how much it is the work of centuries of struggle and suffering, how fragile it is, and how we had to do it for ourselves. Our fundamentalist Islamic opponents have on their side the atavistic attractions of the closed society, and we should take them at least as seriously as they take us. Before we try to make them over in our image, we should remember how unnervingly recent was our own makeover, and act with becoming humility and caution. A helping hand here and there may not be amiss, but we should never be surprised at the rejection of the stranger’s gift.

Harpers (Subscription Required – I think my subscription to Harpers was $15 bucks for the year. Well worth it!)