Thwarting Needed Cultural Changes

Mark Steyn writes an excellent piece today on the very subject I blogged about earlier -- multiculturalist whitewashing of terrorism -- but from a different and very intriguing angle. He agrees with Thomas Friedman that Moslem society must change fundamentally before the terrorist threat will subside much. But he adds that our overly-solicitous treatment of Moslems is not helping matters.

Terrorism ends when the broader culture refuses to tolerate it. There would be few if any suicide bombers in the Middle East if "martyrdom" were not glorified by imams and politicians, if pictures of local "martyrs" were not proudly displayed in West Bank grocery stores, if Muslim banks did not offer special "martyrdom" accounts to the relicts thereof, if schools did not run essay competitions on "Why I want to grow up to be a martyr".

At this point, many readers will be indignantly protesting that this is all the fault of Israeli "occupation", but how does that explain suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where there's not a Zionist oppressor for hundreds of miles? Islam has become the world's pre-eminent incubator of terrorism at its most depraved. Indeed, so far London has experienced only the lighter items on the bill of fare - random bombing of public transport rather than decapitation, child sacrifice and schoolhouse massacres.

Most of us instinctively understand that when a senior Metropolitan Police figure says bullishly that "Islam and terrorism don't go together", he's talking drivel.

Many of us excuse it on the grounds that, well, golly, it must be a bit embarrassing to be a Muslim on days like last Thursday and it doesn't do any harm to cheer 'em up a bit with some harmless feel-good blather. But is this so?

Why are we surprised that "Muslim moderates" rarely speak out against the evil committed by their co-religionists when the likes of Mr Paddick keep assuring us there's no problem? It requires great courage to be a dissenting Muslim in communities dominated by heavy-handed imams and lobby groups that function effectively as thought-police.

Yet all you hear from Mr Paddick is: "Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here." This is the same approach, incidentally, that the authorities took in their long refusal to investigate seriously the 120 or so "honour killings" among British Muslims.

Just as the police did poor Muslim girls no favours by their excessive cultural sensitivity, so they're now doing the broader Muslim community no favours. The Blair-Paddick strategy only provides a slathering of mindless multiculti fudge topping over the many layers of constraint that prevent Islam beginning an honest conversation with itself.

This is a very important point and it is intimately related to the concept of the "preference cascade," in which the public behavior of large numbers of people who hold a given conviction in private contradicts said conviction -- until some event causes these people to realize that their conviction is, in fact, widely held. To review this idea:

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it - but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers - or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they're also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

One interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing - with all apparent sincerity - that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.

Perhaps we should think about how to make it so.

By these lines of reasoning, the multicultural, Pollyanna-ish front our public officials keep putting up after terrorist attacks might be worse than merely annoying: It might be preventing some sorely-needed cultural changes among Western Moslems by forestalling the rise of the so-far elusive "moderate Moslem" on whom such changes, if they are to occur any time soon, will depend. Until it becomes clear that terrorism -- and our society's reaction to it -- are threats to all Moslems, there will be no serious discussion of the issue in the Moslem community. Our governments, by dropping the multiculturalist pap, would make this clear sooner, and, in the process, would let the moderates know that their own government stands behind them.

Yes. I think that Steyn has finally answered the great riddle of why there has been, numerically speaking, so little terrorism from Moslem populations in the West so far, and yet also, so little vigorous condemnation of what terrorism has occurred. Clearly, most Moslems are not terrorists. It's probably even a good bet that large majorities of Moslems within the West hold that simply killing people you happen to disagree with is wrong. More of them should become aware of that fact. Consequently, I fully agree with the points Mark Steyn raises and also think the British government would do well to heed the advice he gives in closing.

Once again, we see that honesty remains the best policy.

-- CAV