"Editor-in-chief emeritus" – and still no better at fact-checking
Check out this gem in Marty Peretz’s most recent TNR editorial:
…it is not Islam per sebut the very restraints on print and the idolization of language, among other factors, that are responsible for the benighted state of intellectual achievement in that orbit.
Peretz has mastered the art of turning a seemingly highly culturally-aware observation into a complete non-fact uninformed by, well, anything (and certainly lacking any understanding of basic cultural relativism). Perhaps he’s forgotten that the Islamic world gave us, you know, the foundations of algebra and chemistry. Those are kind of important.
The rest of the article is similar. Peretz says lots of things I agree with, lots I don’t, and still manages to come off sounding like a pretentious Western intellectual supremacist.
Updated: light grammatical editing.
And the scientific discoveries of the Muslims, since, well, the Renaissance, boy?
The first that comes to mind is Abdus Salam‘s development of the electroweak unification theory.
1/ Zzzzt. Wrong. Salam was an Ahmadiyya Muslim which virtually all Muslims consider to be non-Muslims. Sort of like calling Jews for Jesus to be a branch of Judaism (except Jews don’t generally go around killing Jews for Jesus).
http://www.alislam.org/library/salam.html
Try again.
2/ For a good example of Islamic science in the last 500 years there’s aways the story of the Taqi al-Din observatory in Istanbul. First the Turks built it. And then 3 years later they destroyed it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_observatory_of_Taqi_al-Din
come off sounding like a pretentious Western intellectual supremacist
He would be much more effective if he learned to do otherwise, and he knows it, but this has been his style for decades and he can’t help himself. Those who’ve worked with him have just gotten used to it, largely because he’s fiercely loyal and he pays the bills.
Not a true Scotsman, eh Boxhead?
Also note that Peretz is measuring one culture’s “accomplishments” by another culture’s metric. The fact that I can call him out on this stuff is a testament to how basic it is – I have exactly one semester of a survey cultural anthropology class under my belt, and his argument still seems grossly inappropriate and Western-centric to me.
That’s not a very persuasive point. The world revolves around structures (economic, social and political) which if not originating in “the West”, have been systematized in “the West”, along with the metrics developed to manage these structures.
Saying that the “Arab world”, or more specifically, say Egypt, is woefully undeveloped, economically, has nothing to do with disrespecting Egyptian culture, and everything to do with objectively evaluating its economic output in relation to other factors.
I’m not disagreeing that those metrics are in fact what we, as Westerners, use to evaluate the world. I’m disagreeing that it’s the proper way. Furthermore, saying that Egypt is underdeveloped is very different than attributing some made-up lack of Islamic intellectual achievement to a fundamental “flaw” in the culture.
lack of Islamic intellectual achievement to a fundamental “flaw” in the culture
If all speculation and generalization were done away with, we wouldn’t have opinion journalism. Similar kinds of gross “cultural” oversimplification articles are written about youth pregnancy, abortion, gun ownership/violence, Bush’s wars of “imperialism” etc. in the US.
Bottom line, if you’re an Arab in Damascus, and you look around the world, what do you see? Thirty and forty years ago, the masses of Chinese and Arabs were on equal footing, in terms of development. Everyone is moving forward, every region of the world, even Africa, often without the curse and blessing of oil. Everyone but the Arabs. And if you talk about the “progress” they have made, everything you see, everything in the Gulf, all those fancy buildings, it’s all being built by Asian labor, and managed by European and American expats. There are 5 million foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, in a population of just 20 million, running that country’s entire economy.
Have you ever looked at the non-oil GDP figures for Arab countries? They’re insane. If you exclude energy revenues from Arab economic output, Israel’s economy (based on a labour force of 6 million people, give or take) is larger than the economies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and many of the Gulf Arab states, combined, totally some 150-200 million people.
We can talk about a lack of education, but there’s plenty of unemployed, highly educated people in Egypt, as in every other Arab country. We can talk about corrupt governments, but developing economies in Asia had equal levels of corruption, in addition to huge obstacles (South Korea was a dictatorship until just recently, Japan was got nuked and was under occupation for decades, Vietnam’s entire economy was based on agriculture) yet still managed to develop modern market economies.
Everyone is moving forward. Why can’t the Arabs, even with the incredibly gift of massive oil revenues?
To bring this home, why CAN’T culture, faith and “state of mind” factor into this conversation any more than discussion of access to education and government policies?
You make the point that non-oil GDP is incredibly low in Arab states, but that’s not a result of Arab cultural laziness. It’s a cause. The Middle East has been systematically exploited by Western imperialism (and now capitalism). We prop up dictatorships when they behoove us (see Mubarak, Hosni and Hussein, Saddam) and ditch them when it’s politically expedient to do so (see Mubarak, Hosni and Hussein, Saddam).
why CAN’T culture, faith and “state of mind” factor into this conversation any more than discussion of access to education and government policies?
They certainly can. I just think they tend to be brought up as an easy way to avoid talking about the underlying problems.
Did you just say that Arabs are culturally lazy because their societies don’t have sufficient economic development as a result of capitalism?
That’s incomprehensible.
No, I said that I think what you and Marty Peretz are describing as laziness is more related to the circumstances under which many Arabs live, and that Western capitalism is a significant factor, though not the only one, in the perpetuation of those circumstances.
When did I bring up Arab “laziness”?! Don’t put words in my mouth. I don’t know what Arabs you know, but the ones I’m acquainted with are anything but lazy.
the circumstances under which many Arabs live
This phrase is so general as to be meaningless. WHY are Arabs living in these circumstances which inhibit development? Your answer is Western capitalism. Apparently, capitalism as an instrument in economic development is not much of a problem for the other 6 billion people in the world. So this isn’t a real answer. Neither is it the answer for the Arabs. For example, capitalism is not a factor limiting economic development in Saudi Arabia. 5 million expatriates are employed in Saudi in capitalist enterprise.
Furthermore, your focus on capitalism doesn’t make sense, because millions of Arabs who have come to western societies have flourished in western capitalism markets.
Jesus, Victor, no one’s trying to put words in your mouth. I’m restating what I understand to be your argument for the purpose of highlighting a disagreement, not trying to make you look bad.
WHY are Arabs living in these circumstances which inhibit development? Your answer is Western capitalism.
As I said, it’s one significant factor, not the only one.
Apparently, capitalism as an instrument in economic development is not much of a problem for the other 6 billion people in the world.
First off, I’d disagree with that – capitalism has been very good to a very few people, tolerable and generally beneficial for many, and downright awful for many others.
Secondly, I’m not blaming the problems in Arab states on whatever capitalistic structures exist within those societies. I’m blaming it on our own form of expansionist capitalism. Again, I’m not claiming its the only factor, just that it can’t be overlooked.
At heart, I consider myself a capitalist, but there’s a difference between essentially believing in people’s right to make business transactions and believing that societies should have no conception of a common good, and regulations structured around that conception. I’m not claiming that you’re an economic libertarian, I’m just saying that one doesn’t have to be in order to be a “real” capitalist. This is why I feel comfortable calling myself a capitalist while still acknowledging some of the fundamental problems in using it as a system to organize society.