Afghan woman in full burka (credit: AlfredoGMx, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Fall of Kabul
As I write today, Afghanistan
is falling to the Taliban, an Islamist group that wishes to impose a hard
version of Sharia law upon the people there. They were in power before 2003 and
are returning to power once more. In spite of literally trillions of dollars
(twelve zeroes in a trillion) worth of military gear, training, and so on, the
Afghan army collapsed almost immediately when the American forces there who
were backing that army began to leave. The Afghans had the gear and the
training, but apparently not the will to fight hard for their own country. The
will back in the U.S. to go on with this distant war that was taking so much money
and still costing American lives had basically given out.
The terrorist Osama Bin
Laden who had found safe refuge in Afghanistan under the old Taliban regime and
who had planned the attacks on the U.S. in 2001 had been tracked down and
killed during the years when the U.S. was in control of Afghanistan (he was
actually found and killed in neighboring Pakistan, in a fairly remote border
location). The will in the U.S. to continue the Afghan war – to go on fighting
for a nation that was divided, confused, and full of graft and corruption – has
eroded almost completely. In short, most of America just wants out. Americans
are sick of their young people coming home in body bags, sick of spending tax
dollars on what appears more and more to be a hopeless cause. The basic weaknesses
in the Afghan nation that made Western-style democracy so difficult there –
especially graft and corruption from the top to the bottom of their society –
were apparently not going to change at any foreseeable point in the future.
Gradually, America gave up.
But does that mean that
the West and its way of life have begun to lose in what has often been called a
“clash of civilizations”? I don’t think that the rise of an Islamist state in a
remote, poor (though beautiful) country indicate anything of the sort. In the
view of society that I call “moral realism”, I believe that a solid case can be
made for the view that this is just a temporary recursion in the long struggle
between the fundamentalist ways of several world religions of the past and the
more modern way of life we call “Western”.
Niall Ferguson (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Niall Ferguson thinks
that the “killer apps” that the West has mastered and incorporated into its
whole way of life are competition, science, private property, consumption, medicine,
and hard work. And he is only one modern thinker who has looked at this puzzle.
Other historians have had other theories.
In fairness to the
Afghanis and to Islam more generally, I don’t think that the clear advantage
Ferguson claims the West enjoys in all these aspects of national life is as
clear as he makes it out to be. The Middle East was the civilized world during
the times of the Crusades. The society that lived by the tenets of Islam in those
times was superior to the peoples of Christian Europe in medicine, the consumption
that comes via larger markets and more trading partners, science, and several
other aspects of their societies’ ways of life. And I know that debates about
who had more open markets or better work ethics could go on endlessly.
But I’ll skip ahead to
what I see as the bottom line.
In the moral realist view
of what is happening now in Afghanistan, the Taliban will eventually,
inevitably lose out again to the West.
Why? Because their view
of what an ideal society should be is fundamentally flawed. In the moral
realist view, all societies live in, and must answer to, the physical universe.
In that universe, uncertainty is a given for all societies and, in fact, all
life forms, including the individual and whatever larger entities, like societies
(or colonies of bees or herds of buffalo), that individual may be part of.
In this quantum universe,
events are not locked by the laws of that universe into unchangeable sequences,
as the determinists would have us believe. But events aren’t just random chaos
either.
The events of our universe happen as probabilities gradually favor one event more and more over all other possible events that might occur at any moment in time that we might be considering. The hurricane’s landfall site in Florida or South Carolina is not knowable two weeks in advance of it hitting the coast. In fact, the storm’s growing to hurricane strength is not knowable that far ahead. Our best weather experts can only tell us odds and keep re-calculating those odds day by day and hour by hour.
And we can’t predict for certain where a new virus will emerge,
or a drought will wipe out a crop. We have similar difficulties with predicting
which kids in a kindergarten class will end in prison and which ones will have
largely successful lives. We don’t know any of these outcomes for certain. But
we can assign them fairly reliable probabilities based on our past experience with
similar events.
We can say days in
advance of its making landfall that a hurricane is now likely to be a 3 or a 4 on
the Saffir-Simpson scale and often say, with good probability of being accurate,
that it will hit the Miami area or the Charleston area or wherever our models
indicate by 4 p.m. two days from our prediction.
The events of the physical
universe’s unfolding are governed by probabilities, not certainties, but they
are not chaos either. We humans have learned over the generations to intervene
in the sequences of events and improve the odds of outcomes we’d like to see
while we decrease the odds of outcomes that will be bad for us. Within degrees
of freedom. I can’t stop the hurricane, but with good warning, I can get out of
its path. And I can work hard to plant, weed, harvest, and process food crops,
and to prevent the spread of disease, and affect the odds of many possible
futures for myself, my family, and my nation.
Once we grasp this fact,
we can look separately at the ways humans respond to this physical universe/reality. How do we
deal with living in such a challenging place?
We begin by believing in
our own free will. I can’t do everything, but I can almost always do some
things, and I can choose among those somethings and pursue a path that I
predict will lead to good outcomes for me and my family.
Why would I want to worry
that much and spend so much time planning and working that hard? Because if I
do, I am more likely to live and to pass on my beliefs and customs to my
children. If I become utterly resigned and cynical, my odds of surviving and of
my children and my culture surviving drop. Over generations, societies that
teach their kids to keep the knowledge acquired from their forbears and to keep
using and adding to that knowledge, outbreed and outproduce the less free and knowledgeable societies they are competing with.
So in my view, Niall
Ferguson is at least partly right. A society’s morés and beliefs are ultimately
what make it a tough competitor in the survival game. He is seeking a model that explains events and trends in history by looking at different nations' and civilizations' worldviews and belief system. Software explaining the actions of hardware. In that effort, he has set his sights in the right direction.
But Ferguson does not
explain why his six “killer apps” have worked, and the “apps” he talks about
are not the heart of the matter. On the other hand, moral realism does explain the workings of these deep roots of
our “ways of life”.
The uncertain, probablistic
nature of reality ensures that a society that works to accommodate and adapt to
that basic fact of physical reality is going to win out over all competing
societies in the long haul.
What morés does a society
need to have in place in order to accommodate or adapt to this basic fact of
reality? Moral realism maintains that a society adapts to the probabilistic
nature of the physical world by keeping among its citizens as high a degree of variety,
of varied talents and lifestyles, as it possibly can.
It helps a society to encourage
kids to be versatile. Be a scholar, an athlete, a musician, and a leader, my
child. But even more, a society’s odds of surviving go up as it teaches its
kids to welcome and encourage diversity in their towns and nations. When a challenge
hits a society, as is guaranteed in this uncertain world, that society has
better chances of adapting successfully to the challenge if it contains many varied
kinds of people than it would if its people were more uniform.
The evidence of history, most
of the time, supports this moral realist view. The homosexuals in Nazi Germany almost
all went into deep cover after the “night of the long knives” when the leaders
of the SA, who were mostly homosexuals, were all assassinated in a single
night. Hitler saw the SA as an unmanageable element in his society that he had
best eliminate. But the German public were told a different story. These men’s homosexuality
was given as the excuse for their being so suddenly and ruthlessly murdered. That drove gay men to stay low profile.
In the meantime,
homosexuals in England were more tolerated. Alan Turing, in particular, who was
openly homosexual, probably did the most of any person in those times to win
the war for the Allies. (The shameful way he was treated after the war is a topic for another post.)
The Americans cracked the
codes being used by the Japanese in the Pacific. They had in their ranks many who could speak and write Japanese. The Japanese never cracked the
Americans’ main code because it was Navajo. Only a few thousand people in the
world spoke Navajo, they were all loyal to the U.S.
Many of the twentieth
century’s challenges that came not from war but from famine or disease were
solved by the citizens of the pluralistic West. The vaccines for polio,
smallpox, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and whooping cough all came from the
West. American crop scientists first bred the grains that led to the massive
increases in yields called the “Green Revolution”.
I could go on, but the point,
I think, is clear. A society’s being pluralistic is a huge help in its struggle
to survive. Its being largely monochrome lowers it survival odds.
Thus, to come to the case
we are currently considering, the Taliban in Afghanistan
are doomed to lose to the West and vanish into the footnotes of history because
they are going the wrong way. They want more and more uniformity in their
citizens. That is counter-productive over the long haul in the survival game.
A simple example of this
mistaken view in action lies in the Taliban’s policies regarding women and
girls. Once the Taliban are fully in power, they have said clearly that girls
will not be allowed to go to school, and women will have to stay in their homes
unless they are accompanied by a male of their household if they go out, and
then they will have to wear the full burka costume. The Taliban, in this competition
that I keep speaking of, are about to bench half of their team. Half of their
fine minds in science, mathematics, literature, and for that matter politics –
in short, in every field – happen to be female. Women are just as likely to be
good at writing computer code as are men. And finding cures for diseases and running
businesses and government departments and on and on.
Bottom line: moral
realism predicts that the Taliban will lose, though it may take a decade or
two. A decade is very small in the scale of history.
The Taliban will
eventually lose because they are wrong. Morally wrong? We could never in a millennium
convince them of that. But they are wrong in their view of hard, physical
reality. They will lose. Their society will decline into poverty for reasons very similar to the reasons for the defeat
of Islam in previous centuries. Too many rules. Too many restrictions on the
lives of citizens. Too little variety. Their smartest, most productive
citizens will begin to exit the country well before desperate poverty sets in.
They are even now as I write. They feel that the life they are being
forced into is out of touch with reality in a deep way. Which it is.
Does Afghanistan look
pretty discouraging to Western eyes in these days? Yes. But moral realism says that the situation
will turn around. Reality guarantees it.
In the shadow of the
mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a hopeful day.
Taliban fighers, August 2021
(credit: VOA, via Wikimedia Commons)