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)