Israel:The Arab Spring, Nuclear Weapons and Pan-Arabism
What does this blog say about Israel and The Arab Spring?  Why spend time here? Those of you who have spent some time here will have picked up central themes that you probably will not read elsewhere.
First, there is a biological basis to IQ scores that is made visible by the process of industrial development. Second, the advantage that Northern Europeans had over much of the world for 5 centuries partly  reflected the fact that Northern Europeans have been educating their children for centuries. It did not reflect an innate IQ advantage that was so dramatic that it would protect Northern Europeans from a nuclear threat once most of the peasantry began educating their children. For my demonstration of points #1 and #2, read my long paper on Italian Americans.

Third, the development of a school system inevitably advantages certain ethnic interests at the expense of other interests. For example, when the Chinese economy outside the urban areas was limited to an endless series of separated isolated family based illiterate villages practicing a subsistence peasant agriculture, it is possible to imagine a Tibetan village a  mile or so from a Han village with very little interaction and no need to choose which language would be used in the school system.

The introduction of a school system and the beginnings of industrialization changes that. One cannot avoid a brutal, and inevitably racist, choice. Someone’s language will be privileged, other languages will be crowded into corners.

We can say with confidence that Chinese will be one of the great world’s scientific languages in a hundred years. The Chinese are simply too smart to admit of any other possibility.  Chinese  parents will see this. They will not allow their child’s progress to be truncated by a UN decree that they have to use Tibetan in their school system.  Chinese parents will not be dissuaded by appeals to universal values. American pioneers would not have been dissuaded by universalist appeals to use Cherokee in the classroom.

Now, take these three insights and drive them into the Middle East:  1. The development of a school system makes visible IQ realities.  2. Most of the students in the new Arab school systems will be undistinguished. Some of the students  will be very very good. 3. The Arab school system will present Arab students with a certain history. What is interesting; crucial even, is whether the history will be nationalistic; Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, etc., ethnic; Arab, or religious, Islam..

Fifty years ago most observers who were seriously concerned with Israel’s security would have identified Gamal Abdel Nasser and what he represented, as the chief threat. Because Nasser led Egypt he held a very special position. Pan-Arabism without Egypt is a manageable problem for both the U.S and Israel.

Pan-Arabism led by Egypt is a threat which could blossom into a full blown Mid-East war should Egypt develop a nuclear capability. When he negotiated a settlement between Israel and Sadat, Kissinger reportedly said about the rest of the Arab world: “They may not make peace, but they can’t make war.”

One wonders how Egypt will develop. Sad Qutb, who has been called the most influential ideologue of the S Islamic Movement in the contemporary Arab world,” ( Social Justice in Islam, Introduction, p.1.) represents the analytic which would be most likely to be successful for a pan-Arabic political reality, which is also dominated by a serious commitment to islam. He obtained a master’s degree in education at the University of Northern Colorado, so he was acquainted with the ideas which Americans see as essential to modernization.  Apparently he saw these ideas as anathema to a modern, just and emphatically Islamic Arab civilization.

The kind of serious commitment to Islam that Sayyid Qutb reflects inSocial Justice  would require a specific religious authority and a bureaucracy ready and financially able to do its bidding. A post Khomeini Iran may be an example.

However, there is another  obvious alternative to the religious bureaucracy as a modernizing force that forces education into the village. That would be the same engine that operated in Fascist South America: the military. The military in Islamic countries like Pakistan or Turkey, shares a similarity with the military in South America. The officers which would direct the country toward education, urbanization and the industrialization which inevitably follows, are all members of the same religious structure as the larger population. Certainly, the generals in Argentina or Chile did not wish to pick a fight with the Catholic Church than the military in the Mid East wish to provoke the religious tradition that they themselves reflect.

Initially in Egypt, the Muslim Brethren and the military were allies in the struggle to evict Britain. But over time, the demands of the military as a secular modernizing force were not compatible with the specific Islamic goals of the Muslim brotherhood.  As the military succeeded, the Brethren were marginalized, and in 1954 the Egyptian government ordered the Moslem Brethren dissolved. On August 29, 1966 Sayyid Qutb was hanged. To his followers he was a martyr.

I believe that it is inevitable that the military throughout the Arab world will be a force against pan-Arabism. There are two reasons for this: First, the ability of America and Europe to pay salaries is obvious. Second the military’s push toward a more secular mode of development than favored by Islamists is reinforced by the general trend line operating in the society engaged in change. It is inevitable that an urbanized, educated, industrialized population will have more problems hewing to religious norms that were established in the peasant village.

What cannot be missed when one reads Sayyid Qutb is the man’s absolute commitment to the notion that there is an answer to the economic and social upheavals that inevitably accompany the trip of the peasantry to the industrialized city in a book, and an authoritative tradition that interpret that book. From the perspective of an outsider, which is of course anathema, to the tradition, what seems obvious is the improbable nature of it.

South America is developing. This is heresy in Protestant Anglo-America, but to the extent Argentina and Brazil are developing economically, reflects, in part, the generals commitment to a school system and an order that did not brook interference from religious authorities; although they were careful to treat the authority with respect.

I suppose that it is clear that to confront Israel and the U.S the Arabs would have to jettison the one factor that propels them together which could make them a formidable pan-ethnic force: their religious tradition. Moreover, the ethnic split between Iran and the Arabs would also be exploited by outsiders, either on straight ethnic grounds or on partly religious derivatives: Shia and Sunni.

But a confrontation in a military sense is out of the question. A “set-piece” battle of the sort that Americans prayed for in Vietnam is out of the question for the Arabs: The Arabs would be slaughtered.

Here one sees again how Nuclear Weapons as IQ scores  operate against the interest of America, and in favor of its poor, still partly peasant, opponent. I believe that the specific religious burdens of Islam will operate against the development of an efficient economy. But if the Islamic authority develops a nuclear weapon and the ability to deliver it to New York, the specifics of the economic debate will not be of much importance.