RUTHFULLY YOURS

Can American conservatism be saved from hysterical fear-mongers? My image of a true conservative is of a bold, honorable, responsible citizen, with just a touch of the swashbuckler. But that image is fading as so many conservatives insist on seeing bogeymen under every bed, cot, sleeping bag and beach chair. Supposed Mayan predictions of the end of the world in 2012 seem mild compared to the daily onslaught of warnings from my fellow conservatives that everything just sucks and America’s plunging into a black hole. And of all the subjects that excite exaggerated fears, terror of Islam takes the moldy cake.

Let me be clear: I agree with the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (no conservative, that boy) who characterized Islam as “a barracks religion” that stymied cultural growth. Nor do I have the least sympathy with Islam’s apologists, subversives or litigious jerks. But let’s get a grip, folks. Far from taking over the world and making obese Americans stop drooling over internet porn, Islam is pathetically weak, plagued by myriad failures and, especially in the case of Arab Islam, unable to compete successfully in any sphere of organized human endeavor. The Arabs are even flopping at terrorism, which a decade ago, was their sole growth industry: Since 9/11, we’ve been terrorizing the terrorists. The terrorist response? Slaughter their fellow Muslims by the tens of thousands.

How can American conservatives impute overpowering strength to a religion-crippled civilization that, in the 21^st century, not only cannot build a competitive automobile, but can’t even produce a competitive bicycle? If I were to list the top security threats to the United States of America, Islamist terrorism might barely squeeze into the top ten, while Islam itself wouldn’t make the top 100. Militant Islam is an ugly annoyance, but its victims, here and abroad, are primarily Muslims (for the record, my top five security threats, in order of gravity, are obesity, lack of personal responsibility, China’s economic war against us, Iran’s drive for nuclear hegemony in the Persian Gulf, and narco-trafficking).

The latest outbreak of conservative goose-bumps comes from the success of Islamist parties in elections in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. I do not see these election results as good news—but they’re bad news primarily for Muslims, who once again have chosen the path of cultural stasis, social dysfunction and failure. Islam prevents populations from establishing gender-neutral meritocracies (or meritocracies of any kind), while imposing social constraints that choke off the sort of dynamism that allowed the West to surge to global leadership. While election results in Egypt, for example, may disappoint Americans, they condemn Egyptians to continued failure and misery. Islam did have some answers for desert-dwelling primitives in Mohammed’s day, but it has no practical solutions for chronic underdevelopment and creative bankruptcy today.

For over half a century, dictatorships froze social progress in the Middle East. Here, the military feared and obstructed progress; there, a royal dynasty used oil wealth to chauffeur tribal primitives in limousines. But none of the Arab models built healthy economies or healthy societies. Objectively viewed, their lack of development and progress on the human and cultural levels is simply stunning: All that oil wealth, and the Arab world still doesn’t have a single world-class university of its own; exports no in-demand manufactured or technological goods; has effectively zero research-and-development capabilities, and loses its best and brightest to emigration. Trillions of dollars disappeared into the sand (or produced a few gaudy hotels), and the ruling classes throughout the Arab world still fly to Europe or America for medical care. How, exactly, is this catastrophically failed civilization going to take over Europe and America? By producing more illiterate children in slums? Folks, that isn’t how the real world works.

Let’s stay with Egypt: A strong performance by Islamist parties was inevitable, even if its final strength was a surprise. During the country’s long military dictatorship, Nasser, Assad and, finally, Mubarak prevented the rise of secular opposition parties, but allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to lurk at society’s fringes. Thus, when democracy came, only Islamists of varying degrees of severity were organized for political action—or were viewed by the common man as the legitimate opposition.

So what happens now? First, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Nour party have to produce results—economic progress, above all. And they’re nervous because they don’t know how to do it. Being in deep opposition was relatively easy, but demonstrating tangible progress in an utter wreck of a country is another matter. Far from sponsoring terrorism against Methodists in Milwaukee, Egypt’s Islamists (who vary widely in their political philosophies, by the way) are going to be mired in internal problems for many years to come.

Instead of seeing an expansionist Arab world, we’re going to see one that is increasingly introverted as new democratic and semi-democratic governments struggle to come to grips with devastating levels of underdevelopment. As for those Islamists in government, well, charitable programs notwithstanding, Allah ain’t going to feed hundreds of millions of kids or provide jobs for the multitudes of the unemployed. And excuses have a limited shelf-life.

Nor will these failed societies in hidebound states prove a greater threat to Israel. On the contrary, military budgets are going to decrease (and Arab militaries were incompetent to begin with). Egypt’s military knows it would be defeated catastrophically were it to take on Israel again—and Syria’s military is splitting into factions and cannot even subdue a largely unarmed political insurgency. Even Hamas and Hezbollah are lying low, terrified of losing their sponsors and mortified that their calls for revolution have resulted not in anti-Israeli, pan-Arab militancy, but in the insistence of hundreds of millions of Arabs on the establishment of democratic systems. The most important strongman in Hamas, Khaled Meshal, recently announced his effective retirement, and Hezbollah faces the loss of Syrian support and protection—perhaps even the loss of Iranian sponsorship. What’s a poor terrorist organization to do? Worse, Saudi Arabia (the one piggish, virulent and unscrupulous state whose actions in our own country deserve uncompromising scrutiny and strong regulation) and the Arab Gulf states are as eager as Israel for military action against Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. When the wealthiest Arab states and Israel face the same existential threat, Hamas and Hezbollah not only take a backseat, but end up hitchhiking in the desert.

On our end, I see two immediate problems. First, we’re hypocritical. Under President George W. Bush, conservatives were all for Arab democracy. Under President Obama, suddenly Arab Democracy is the greatest danger since Communism. And how is it that we conservatives could accept generations of American support for the monstrous Islamist fanatics of the Saudi royal family—the initial sponsors of al Qaeda and backers of Islamist subversion in our own country–but panic at Tunisian election results? Second, and of far greater importance, we have to get over our insistence on instant gratification. The Arab world has been in decline not just since the rise of Europe five hundred years ago, but since the thirteenth century, when first Mongols, then various Turkic peoples subjugated the Arabs (the Crusades were a tiny historical blip and Arab whining about all the damage they did is just more counter-factual propaganda: Their fellow Muslims shattered Arab civilization, not a handful of unwashed Knights Templar).

The point is that last year’s “Arab Spring” revolutions offer only a faint chance at incremental progress over generations. A civilization that’s been on its butt for 800 years isn’t going to become the next superpower anytime soon. We face an entire century, if not a longer period, of the morally inept and culturally backward Arab world searching clumsily for a way forward, for a means to begin to compete with civilizations, from Chicago to Shanghai, that have left the Middle East in the dust—or sands—of history. I do not know how, on a practical level, this pathetic wreck of a civilization will ever catch up.

In closing, let me return to Levi-Strauss’s description of Islam as “a barracks religion.” Writing in the mid-20^th century, he was even more right than he knew. Islam is, indeed, inherently militant (although that doesn’t make it strong in the post-modern world—quite the contrary). Those five mandatory prayer sessions a day? As a former soldier, I recognize roll-call formations when I see them. Faced with the challenge of controlling unruly desert tribesmen, Mohammed simply did what any competent first sergeant does: He made everybody show up and be counted. Great tool for seventh-century Arabia, not so good for a post-modern world that demands uninterrupted productivity. Islam’s initial focus on obedient warrior cadres also helps explain the long passivity of Arabs under military regimes: Islam is, above all, a disciplinary religion where you shut up and follow the orders of the chain of command.

We often hear claims that “Islam is stuck in the seventh century.” But other than those formations and a few other primitive practices, the charge isn’t applicable. While Islam has developed painfully slowly, it has made some progress and is now up to the precise point that Christianity reached in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the age of paralyzing theological scholasticism (“How many mullahs can dance on the head of a pin?”) and of a monopoly clergy’s insistence on doctrinal conformity. The obsessions with heresy and the fanatical concern with public behavior and regimentation are also essentially identical. The Arab world even has our high-medieval problems with clerical corruption behind the walls of its mosques and madrassahs.

It took the society-rupturing effects of the Black Death, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the triumph of the scientific method, the maturity of contract law, enormous improvements in education, and the maturation of capitalism to get us to where we are today (imperfect as our society remains). The Arab world is still murdering blasphemers and stoning witches to death. Arabs are, occasionally, a deadly annoyance to us, but they’ve been an immeasurable disaster to themselves. In the 21^st century, Islam is a cultural suicide pact.

I’m in far graver danger from an American teenager texting while driving than I am from the entire Arab world. And so are you. This doesn’t mean we can ever let our guard down. But it does mean we should stop being afraid of the dark in other people’s bedrooms.