Order in politics (established mainly by compulsion)
If one of them lessens, the other feels more necessary.
Democracy in America 2.1.5: “I doubt that man can ever support a complete religious independence and an entire political freedom at once: and I am brought to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.”
The Hoare essay recalls the phenomena of early modern times when the aristocracy of different countries had more in common with each other than with their own countrymen even to the absurd level of speaking French better than their native language. That, of course, came to a spectacular end with the French Revolution. The thought of a French Revolution with modern technology and nukes is one of the more frightening scenarios I can come up with. Biden has already threatened a nuclear Vendee.
I always appreciate your essays, and the one on enlightened Sheikhs it’s particularly close to home in my current situation. I suppose I should get off the metaphorical couch and participate in a bit, even if it is several months late.
The GCC is changing quickly and reputation lags reality. It is a much nicer place to live than most Westerners would want to admit.
You raise a question along the lines of ‘can liberalism grow and flourish without Christianity?’ I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that’s not the relevant question. If the question is reframed to “can these rapidly modernizing gulf Islamic countries give rise to a culture that rivals the west in its desirability and quality of life?” then I believe the answer is yes. I once heard an axiom that politics follows culture and culture follows religion. In the past, Islam has been able to sustain civilizations that have rivaled the west, and in the right conditions it could do so again. Perhaps a more pressing question is if the West continues to convert to a non-theistic religion of nihilistic postmodernism, what elements of liberalism, if any, can it retain? Despite the West’s massive lead in financial and cultural capital, in a contest between civilizations based on the West’s successor ideology vs moderate Islam, I believe time would favor the civilization based on moderate Islam. At the very least Islam offers a paradigm more workable than the pure chaos of postmodernism.
One challenge aspiring nations face, and one concern I have for the GCC countries, is discerning what traits to use adopt from the West. There is a danger of confusing civilizational position with its first and second mathematical derivatives. They must look to the traits that made the west great over the past few centuries, not the traits it has adopted once it reached its pinnacle and begun its decline. If they choose unwisely, they will import our decadence rather than our power.
So much attention has been spent on the trajectories of the economic behemoths of the West and China, and I wonder if we haven’t missed less prominent, but perhaps more hopeful, players located in the geographic middle. The GCC countries are perhaps further along the path of development than others, but I see striving and hope everywhere in this part of the world. India faces immense challenges, but it’s demographics, economy, and aspirations are all pointed in the right direction (at least for now). Even central Asia is shaking off the abyss of the 1990s and starting to liberalize and grow, albeit with substantial obstacles.
And then there’s the cultural strengths of this geographic middle. Every time some Pakistani man serving my child ice cream reminds them to thank their father for working hard to provide such luxuries, I smile but ponder how uncommon that message might have been in the United States. Every time an Indian tour guide tells my kids to study hard because they will eventually compete against an ambitious and hungry global cohort, I say a prayer of thanks, but also worry for the future of my home country.
On a positive note for humanity; last year my wife called me to the window of our hotel in Uzbekistan before we got the kids ready for the day. On the street below we watched hopeful families, working, striving, and bonding. I didn’t see neon hair, body mortification, corpulent “body positivity”, gender ambiguity, heads buried in phones, vulgarity printed on clothing, or visible sequela of drug use. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Yes,” I thought, it all looked so wonderfully…human.
"Educated Americans were in fact so sensitive that they didn’t have the ability to debate anything except by indirection."
A spot-on observation, and a sad commentary on what intellectual discourse has become in this country. Especially in the realm of Politics, which continues its encroachment toward being about Everything (and vice versa.)
Regarding the Middle East, Peter Turchin's new book End Times shows pretty definitely that polygamous societies integrative periods are much shorter as elites multiple quicker leading to faster destabilization
We already have a digital currency. The money in your bank account exists digitally.
Central banks could simply eliminate cash and ensure every citizen can have a free bank account, free touch debit card and be able to make free transfers to other account holders
Banks are already required to keep records and report balances to authorities- require the same of any digital wallet (Venmo, crypto, etc)
No need to create a new infrastructure- a lot simpler to force the existing infrastructure to comply at its own expense
We already have a digital currency. The money in your bank account exists digitally.
Central banks could simply eliminate cash and ensure every citizen can have a free bank account, free touch debit card and be able to make free transfers to other account holders
Banks are already required to keep records and report balances to authorities- require the same of any digital wallet (Venmo, crypto, etc)
No need to create a new infrastructure- a lot simpler to force the existing infrastructure to comply at its own expense
Religion, in earlier times, functioned as the glue that bound society together, because a) its description of the world satisfied its adherents—it satisfied them that religious orthodoxy was TRUE, and b) this description gave religious orthodoxy the authority to regulate social norms. However, the religious description of the world has been vanquished by SCIENCE. The world wasn’t created in 7 days; woman was not created from Adam’s rib; Jesus was not born of a virgin. Because the religious description of the world is now so obviously FALSE, or to be more generous, resides in the realm of mythology, religious orthodoxy has lost all authority to regulate social norms: if you lie about falsifiable things, only fools will take you seriously. You can talk all you want about the God-sized hole in our psyche; all you want about how we evolved as members of religious tribes. This phenomenon of highly educated former atheists discovering religion because it is socio-politically USEFUL is very disheartening, and rather elitist and patronizing: essentially, they advocate for religion because the proles need it—otherwise social anarchy results. People are religious because they believe it to be TRUE. I am as anti-woke as they come, but this embrace of religion by national conservatives really alienates me. And, as a gay man, the idea that the regimes of Saudi Arabia or Iran will enforce civil order but stay out of my bedroom, I find patently absurd.
My blog is related to all this, as these are all symptoms of spiritual crises, but this happened because philosophy and reason were used to vanquish spirituality. I write about this collision at times, most recently in this one:
How extraordinary that anyone with even the most basic intellectual awareness would giddily embrace a Saudi social experiment completely absent of democracy, what you call a “relatively stable liberal authoritarianism” without mentioning the murder and dismemberment of the American journalist Jamal Khashoggi? Are you really so excited about the return of “religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards” that you would happily place absolute and unlimited authority in the hands of a leader who would order such an extraordinarily brutal act as this kind of murder?
It is comical that conservative thinkers are dazzled by authoritarianism in Hungary or China or Saudi Arabia, hoping to bring back some vanished traditional and religious social value structure, when the force that has “cannibalized the prior substructure of Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms” is simply capitalism, which provides only profit as its highest human value. The merchants of Boston pressured the Puritans in the 17th century to tone down their sermons regarding social justice as presented in the Sermon on the Mount, and the Puritans agreed, and so it goes. In our modern society, because of capitalism, everything is for sale, nothing is of a truer value than money and material success. The fundamental Christian concepts of sacrifice and self-denial are the opposite of commercial marketing. Advertising and brand influencing dominate our public space and imagination, not because of some liberal nightmare, but because it is making money for corporations. Goodbye “Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms” hello porn industry, opioid crisis, fossil fuel industry and so on.
And all this cringing at the “run-away liberal-progressive nightmare” which continues to animate American conservative politics, suggests that there really isn’t any bigotry and racism in our culture, whether directed at black people, immigrants or homosexuals, that it is all made up by the Woke Industrial Complex. Except that anybody with half an ounce of awareness has seen this bigotry at work right in front of their nose, in politics, real estate, the criminal justice system and most of American society. Go ask a black person if he or she has ever been stopped by the cops, or ask a gay person if he or she has ever been hassled and see what they say.
Robert if you think I'm admiring, advocating for, or otherwise "giddily embracing" Saudi authoritarianism here, you've totally misinterpreted me. And we're not discussing a "return of religious tradition" either, but its opposite: liberalization, and without even democratization.
Hey, you were the guy who published this stuff. Sure sounded like an enthusiastic endorsement to me, a lot of your ink for a terrible idea. And never a mention of Khashoggi. But don't engage if it gives you comfort.
It's not an "idea" or proposal either way. It's a description of the facts as they appear and a prediction. Those of us who are not progressives do not believe we have to make a moral pronouncement on absolutely everything, and if we don't we're somehow sinning. This is exactly what I do mention above. Sure, the killing of Khashoggi was terrible, but that's not going to change anything I've written about here.
"Khashoggi was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi assassins. His body was dismembered and disposed of. Khashoggi's final moments were captured in audio recordings, transcripts of which were subsequently made public." Well, no point in making any moral pronouncement about such an ordinary event. Only a sad progressive would feel moved to such showboating when there are so many more worth outrages to comment on, like trans people in the bathrooms...
It might be helpful to know why you want me to mention Khashoggi here exactly. You could have read what I wrote and then made some claim relevant to the discussion, such as:
An argument for why it challenges my claims, like: "You say liberals will be attracted to Saudi Arabia as it liberalizes, but this is mistaken because the murder of Khashoggi will remind them that this is a brutal illiberal regime and they won't be fooled by reforms."
Or a broader philosophical claim, like: "You have neglected how the murder of Khashoggi shows that the Saudi regime won't ultimately be able to liberalize without fundamental political reform."
Or even a moral claim, like: "Saudi Arabia may liberalize, but we should not support them in any way because we have a moral duty to hold them accountable for the murder of Khashoggi and others."
But you haven't made any particular such claim at all. Instead you seem to be implying I had to bring Khashoggi up, in any capacity, as some kind of moral declaration - in other words you want him to serve as a kind of totemic amulet against moral contamination, which may emanate from the very act of discussion of Bad People without the speaking of proper magical wards. I would warn you that this is not only crazy (if unfortunately commonplace today), but absolutely characteristic of a totalizing ideology ; it is not remotely normal or healthy...
Really, you should not respond to thread hijackers. When I think about Khashoggi at all I have a hard time deciding whether his Muslim Brotherhood identity or his ComPost identity is more offensive. At any rate, he is totally peripheral to your interesting article. For the record, I am not sure I agree with your points about KSA but it is worth thinking about given the degradation of the West.
I am afraid this conversation confounds me. You are clearly a thoughtful and intellectually engaged writer, and a lot of what you present has to do with moral questions from a conservative point of view, questions relating to the moral decline of the west, for instance. You write in this post about “Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms” having been destroyed by Western liberalism. That is a statement of moral observation. And yet you provide an enthusiastic platform for another writer to gush about the potential for Saudi Arabia to “be better positioned than former-Christendom to Make Liberalism Work Again”. But for all of this yet, you think seem to think the kidnapping, murder and dismemberment of an American Journalist as directed by this very Saudi prince is not worth mentioning in this context. I really don’t know what to say. I do thank you for your concern about my mental health, however.
America has killed more innocents and many more regime opponents without due process than the Saudis ever will. Quite often by drone.
Biden murdered a family of innocent Afghans by drone in 2021 out of pure politics- trying to look “tough” after his disastrous/botched withdrawal resulted in deaths of US soldiers. Was anyone in the US held accountable for those murders? Did anyone even lose their job?
Where is the part where Biden sent a team of assassins into a foreign country to kidnap, murder and dismember a journalist? Funny how you guys on the right try to wiggle away from that. No matter how much stardust and horseshit you want to throw up, the Kashoggi killing is a high water mark for bad. But God bless America anyway, my fellow patriot...
Truly! As if extrajudicially killing an enemy of the regime via in-person dismemberment is worse than extrajudicially dismembering an enemy of the regime by drone, let alone the killing of innocent neighbors of the alleged enemy as “collateral damage” or killing innocent children by drone as Biden did, simply to win a day’s news cycle.
State murder/assassination without trial is bad. But America is quite good at it, making the KSA look like pikers. The Saudis score quite highly when it comes to punishing shoplifters, though.
I can see why Kashoggi's killing could be significant in the relationship between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and I could see why it would be significant to members of the press. Certainly it could be seen as indicative of the relationship between the state and dissenters. But calling it a "high water mark for bad" seems like hyperbole.
Why is that the one single act you view as defining the nature of the Saudi government? Trotsky was killed with an ice axe, does this represent an inflection point in the nature of the Soviet system?
To be clear, this piece on Saudi Arabia describes Europe and the US in this way “increasingly totalitarian societies, in which it is no longer enough even to refrain from speaking out against Big Sister; no, you must love and affirm Big Sister, and all her values and beliefs, and all her progressive works, and you must say so constantly and at high volume or be instantly suspected as a dangerous, hateful, reactionary threat not only to the regime but to all humanity.” And at the same time suggests that his vision of Saudi Arabia, a “Muslim society with strong traditionalist roots only recently exposed to the all-consuming fire of liberal-modernity [might] be better positioned than former-Christendom to Make Liberalism Work Again”. And the the writer makes this statement without mentioning the Kashoggi incident, even as a cautionary aside. That is, he uses a metric tone of negative rhetoric to describe the west, while Saudi Arabia remains a conservative dreamscape, where “there would be a lot more religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards”. Now setting aside their history, which is bad enough, should we really ignore Kashoggi in this context?
Is it is really perfectly acceptable to give total and unfettered control of an entire authoritarian political structure to a single man, who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to send 15 security agents to a foreign country to kidnap, torture, kill and dismember a journalist whose only crime is criticizing him (for things, incidentally, which are legitimate points of criticism) so that we can have more religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards? Is that a good trade-off? Is it intellectually honest?
I agree with your skepticism around the use of the Saudi state as a sort of model for the relationship between government and the individual. They'll liberalize in the ways that provide a benefit to the state and ruling family but surely would walk the reforms back the moment it became useful to do so. Any sort of private sphere that exists does so only as long as it doesn't threaten the legitimacy or power of the ruling family.
But the nature of the Kingdom has been clear for decades. If Olaf Scholz or Emmanuel Macron ordered the extrajudicial killing of a journalist in an overseas embassy for criticizing their rule then THAT would be grounds for a serious reconsideration of the nature of the German or French state. But your fixation on Kashoggi gives the impression that but for this killing, you'd have little objection to the Saudi system of government. In the bigger picture his death was well within the realm of possible actions for an oppressive, authoritarian state and shouldn't have surprised anyone.
In the interest of full disclosure I should say that, not only am I a liberal, and I live in a small town in Vermont where Bernie Sanders regularly comes down to march in our Fourth of July parade (where we display American flags) I am also a retired journalist, so I have an understandable bias against the murder and dismemberment of journalists. That is, I believe that journalism is a critical factor in the survival of democracy (as the constitution suggests too). As a journalist I have traveled extensively in the Islamic world and I have spent time in the Persian Gulf and I don’t have a lot of illusions about these cultures. I also recognize that journalists (particularly liberal journalists, which are the majority of them) are a source of annoyance to many conservatives, unless they are writing opinion pieces for the Wall Street Journal.
I do find it very odd that this grotesque murder is somehow questioned as a significant event in the context of this piece. Should we really have different standards of extrajudicial killings in European nations as anywhere else, particularly if we are rhapsodizing about the potential for Saudi Arabia as a wonderland of order, stability, religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards? I am sure the trains will run on time too.
Perhaps this is part of the denial that allows many conservatives to see school shootings as regrettable, but preferable to gun control, I don’t know. I’m sure if it was your uncle Bud that was kidnapped, tortured, murdered and chopped up into suitcase-friendly pieces, you might see it differently (assuming that uncle Bud was not a liberal journalist).
Is there an inverse law at work?
Order at home (established mainly by religion)
Order in politics (established mainly by compulsion)
If one of them lessens, the other feels more necessary.
Democracy in America 2.1.5: “I doubt that man can ever support a complete religious independence and an entire political freedom at once: and I am brought to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.”
The Hoare essay recalls the phenomena of early modern times when the aristocracy of different countries had more in common with each other than with their own countrymen even to the absurd level of speaking French better than their native language. That, of course, came to a spectacular end with the French Revolution. The thought of a French Revolution with modern technology and nukes is one of the more frightening scenarios I can come up with. Biden has already threatened a nuclear Vendee.
I always appreciate your essays, and the one on enlightened Sheikhs it’s particularly close to home in my current situation. I suppose I should get off the metaphorical couch and participate in a bit, even if it is several months late.
The GCC is changing quickly and reputation lags reality. It is a much nicer place to live than most Westerners would want to admit.
You raise a question along the lines of ‘can liberalism grow and flourish without Christianity?’ I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that’s not the relevant question. If the question is reframed to “can these rapidly modernizing gulf Islamic countries give rise to a culture that rivals the west in its desirability and quality of life?” then I believe the answer is yes. I once heard an axiom that politics follows culture and culture follows religion. In the past, Islam has been able to sustain civilizations that have rivaled the west, and in the right conditions it could do so again. Perhaps a more pressing question is if the West continues to convert to a non-theistic religion of nihilistic postmodernism, what elements of liberalism, if any, can it retain? Despite the West’s massive lead in financial and cultural capital, in a contest between civilizations based on the West’s successor ideology vs moderate Islam, I believe time would favor the civilization based on moderate Islam. At the very least Islam offers a paradigm more workable than the pure chaos of postmodernism.
One challenge aspiring nations face, and one concern I have for the GCC countries, is discerning what traits to use adopt from the West. There is a danger of confusing civilizational position with its first and second mathematical derivatives. They must look to the traits that made the west great over the past few centuries, not the traits it has adopted once it reached its pinnacle and begun its decline. If they choose unwisely, they will import our decadence rather than our power.
So much attention has been spent on the trajectories of the economic behemoths of the West and China, and I wonder if we haven’t missed less prominent, but perhaps more hopeful, players located in the geographic middle. The GCC countries are perhaps further along the path of development than others, but I see striving and hope everywhere in this part of the world. India faces immense challenges, but it’s demographics, economy, and aspirations are all pointed in the right direction (at least for now). Even central Asia is shaking off the abyss of the 1990s and starting to liberalize and grow, albeit with substantial obstacles.
And then there’s the cultural strengths of this geographic middle. Every time some Pakistani man serving my child ice cream reminds them to thank their father for working hard to provide such luxuries, I smile but ponder how uncommon that message might have been in the United States. Every time an Indian tour guide tells my kids to study hard because they will eventually compete against an ambitious and hungry global cohort, I say a prayer of thanks, but also worry for the future of my home country.
On a positive note for humanity; last year my wife called me to the window of our hotel in Uzbekistan before we got the kids ready for the day. On the street below we watched hopeful families, working, striving, and bonding. I didn’t see neon hair, body mortification, corpulent “body positivity”, gender ambiguity, heads buried in phones, vulgarity printed on clothing, or visible sequela of drug use. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Yes,” I thought, it all looked so wonderfully…human.
"Educated Americans were in fact so sensitive that they didn’t have the ability to debate anything except by indirection."
A spot-on observation, and a sad commentary on what intellectual discourse has become in this country. Especially in the realm of Politics, which continues its encroachment toward being about Everything (and vice versa.)
Regarding the Middle East, Peter Turchin's new book End Times shows pretty definitely that polygamous societies integrative periods are much shorter as elites multiple quicker leading to faster destabilization
We already have a digital currency. The money in your bank account exists digitally.
Central banks could simply eliminate cash and ensure every citizen can have a free bank account, free touch debit card and be able to make free transfers to other account holders
Banks are already required to keep records and report balances to authorities- require the same of any digital wallet (Venmo, crypto, etc)
No need to create a new infrastructure- a lot simpler to force the existing infrastructure to comply at its own expense
One would be wise not to trust any regime where personal liberties and property rights are not respected.
Everything belongs to the sheik. Best not forget that.
We already have a digital currency. The money in your bank account exists digitally.
Central banks could simply eliminate cash and ensure every citizen can have a free bank account, free touch debit card and be able to make free transfers to other account holders
Banks are already required to keep records and report balances to authorities- require the same of any digital wallet (Venmo, crypto, etc)
No need to create a new infrastructure- a lot simpler to force the existing infrastructure to comply at its own expense
Religion, in earlier times, functioned as the glue that bound society together, because a) its description of the world satisfied its adherents—it satisfied them that religious orthodoxy was TRUE, and b) this description gave religious orthodoxy the authority to regulate social norms. However, the religious description of the world has been vanquished by SCIENCE. The world wasn’t created in 7 days; woman was not created from Adam’s rib; Jesus was not born of a virgin. Because the religious description of the world is now so obviously FALSE, or to be more generous, resides in the realm of mythology, religious orthodoxy has lost all authority to regulate social norms: if you lie about falsifiable things, only fools will take you seriously. You can talk all you want about the God-sized hole in our psyche; all you want about how we evolved as members of religious tribes. This phenomenon of highly educated former atheists discovering religion because it is socio-politically USEFUL is very disheartening, and rather elitist and patronizing: essentially, they advocate for religion because the proles need it—otherwise social anarchy results. People are religious because they believe it to be TRUE. I am as anti-woke as they come, but this embrace of religion by national conservatives really alienates me. And, as a gay man, the idea that the regimes of Saudi Arabia or Iran will enforce civil order but stay out of my bedroom, I find patently absurd.
My blog is related to all this, as these are all symptoms of spiritual crises, but this happened because philosophy and reason were used to vanquish spirituality. I write about this collision at times, most recently in this one:
The Mole
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-mole
Which would be on how, in a certain light, the mystical is empirical.
How extraordinary that anyone with even the most basic intellectual awareness would giddily embrace a Saudi social experiment completely absent of democracy, what you call a “relatively stable liberal authoritarianism” without mentioning the murder and dismemberment of the American journalist Jamal Khashoggi? Are you really so excited about the return of “religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards” that you would happily place absolute and unlimited authority in the hands of a leader who would order such an extraordinarily brutal act as this kind of murder?
It is comical that conservative thinkers are dazzled by authoritarianism in Hungary or China or Saudi Arabia, hoping to bring back some vanished traditional and religious social value structure, when the force that has “cannibalized the prior substructure of Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms” is simply capitalism, which provides only profit as its highest human value. The merchants of Boston pressured the Puritans in the 17th century to tone down their sermons regarding social justice as presented in the Sermon on the Mount, and the Puritans agreed, and so it goes. In our modern society, because of capitalism, everything is for sale, nothing is of a truer value than money and material success. The fundamental Christian concepts of sacrifice and self-denial are the opposite of commercial marketing. Advertising and brand influencing dominate our public space and imagination, not because of some liberal nightmare, but because it is making money for corporations. Goodbye “Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms” hello porn industry, opioid crisis, fossil fuel industry and so on.
And all this cringing at the “run-away liberal-progressive nightmare” which continues to animate American conservative politics, suggests that there really isn’t any bigotry and racism in our culture, whether directed at black people, immigrants or homosexuals, that it is all made up by the Woke Industrial Complex. Except that anybody with half an ounce of awareness has seen this bigotry at work right in front of their nose, in politics, real estate, the criminal justice system and most of American society. Go ask a black person if he or she has ever been stopped by the cops, or ask a gay person if he or she has ever been hassled and see what they say.
Robert if you think I'm admiring, advocating for, or otherwise "giddily embracing" Saudi authoritarianism here, you've totally misinterpreted me. And we're not discussing a "return of religious tradition" either, but its opposite: liberalization, and without even democratization.
Hey, you were the guy who published this stuff. Sure sounded like an enthusiastic endorsement to me, a lot of your ink for a terrible idea. And never a mention of Khashoggi. But don't engage if it gives you comfort.
It's not an "idea" or proposal either way. It's a description of the facts as they appear and a prediction. Those of us who are not progressives do not believe we have to make a moral pronouncement on absolutely everything, and if we don't we're somehow sinning. This is exactly what I do mention above. Sure, the killing of Khashoggi was terrible, but that's not going to change anything I've written about here.
"Khashoggi was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi assassins. His body was dismembered and disposed of. Khashoggi's final moments were captured in audio recordings, transcripts of which were subsequently made public." Well, no point in making any moral pronouncement about such an ordinary event. Only a sad progressive would feel moved to such showboating when there are so many more worth outrages to comment on, like trans people in the bathrooms...
It might be helpful to know why you want me to mention Khashoggi here exactly. You could have read what I wrote and then made some claim relevant to the discussion, such as:
An argument for why it challenges my claims, like: "You say liberals will be attracted to Saudi Arabia as it liberalizes, but this is mistaken because the murder of Khashoggi will remind them that this is a brutal illiberal regime and they won't be fooled by reforms."
Or a broader philosophical claim, like: "You have neglected how the murder of Khashoggi shows that the Saudi regime won't ultimately be able to liberalize without fundamental political reform."
Or even a moral claim, like: "Saudi Arabia may liberalize, but we should not support them in any way because we have a moral duty to hold them accountable for the murder of Khashoggi and others."
But you haven't made any particular such claim at all. Instead you seem to be implying I had to bring Khashoggi up, in any capacity, as some kind of moral declaration - in other words you want him to serve as a kind of totemic amulet against moral contamination, which may emanate from the very act of discussion of Bad People without the speaking of proper magical wards. I would warn you that this is not only crazy (if unfortunately commonplace today), but absolutely characteristic of a totalizing ideology ; it is not remotely normal or healthy...
Really, you should not respond to thread hijackers. When I think about Khashoggi at all I have a hard time deciding whether his Muslim Brotherhood identity or his ComPost identity is more offensive. At any rate, he is totally peripheral to your interesting article. For the record, I am not sure I agree with your points about KSA but it is worth thinking about given the degradation of the West.
I am afraid this conversation confounds me. You are clearly a thoughtful and intellectually engaged writer, and a lot of what you present has to do with moral questions from a conservative point of view, questions relating to the moral decline of the west, for instance. You write in this post about “Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms” having been destroyed by Western liberalism. That is a statement of moral observation. And yet you provide an enthusiastic platform for another writer to gush about the potential for Saudi Arabia to “be better positioned than former-Christendom to Make Liberalism Work Again”. But for all of this yet, you think seem to think the kidnapping, murder and dismemberment of an American Journalist as directed by this very Saudi prince is not worth mentioning in this context. I really don’t know what to say. I do thank you for your concern about my mental health, however.
America has killed more innocents and many more regime opponents without due process than the Saudis ever will. Quite often by drone.
Biden murdered a family of innocent Afghans by drone in 2021 out of pure politics- trying to look “tough” after his disastrous/botched withdrawal resulted in deaths of US soldiers. Was anyone in the US held accountable for those murders? Did anyone even lose their job?
Kashoggi? That’s all you got?
Where is the part where Biden sent a team of assassins into a foreign country to kidnap, murder and dismember a journalist? Funny how you guys on the right try to wiggle away from that. No matter how much stardust and horseshit you want to throw up, the Kashoggi killing is a high water mark for bad. But God bless America anyway, my fellow patriot...
Strange hill to die on
Truly! As if extrajudicially killing an enemy of the regime via in-person dismemberment is worse than extrajudicially dismembering an enemy of the regime by drone, let alone the killing of innocent neighbors of the alleged enemy as “collateral damage” or killing innocent children by drone as Biden did, simply to win a day’s news cycle.
State murder/assassination without trial is bad. But America is quite good at it, making the KSA look like pikers. The Saudis score quite highly when it comes to punishing shoplifters, though.
I can see why Kashoggi's killing could be significant in the relationship between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and I could see why it would be significant to members of the press. Certainly it could be seen as indicative of the relationship between the state and dissenters. But calling it a "high water mark for bad" seems like hyperbole.
Why is that the one single act you view as defining the nature of the Saudi government? Trotsky was killed with an ice axe, does this represent an inflection point in the nature of the Soviet system?
To be clear, this piece on Saudi Arabia describes Europe and the US in this way “increasingly totalitarian societies, in which it is no longer enough even to refrain from speaking out against Big Sister; no, you must love and affirm Big Sister, and all her values and beliefs, and all her progressive works, and you must say so constantly and at high volume or be instantly suspected as a dangerous, hateful, reactionary threat not only to the regime but to all humanity.” And at the same time suggests that his vision of Saudi Arabia, a “Muslim society with strong traditionalist roots only recently exposed to the all-consuming fire of liberal-modernity [might] be better positioned than former-Christendom to Make Liberalism Work Again”. And the the writer makes this statement without mentioning the Kashoggi incident, even as a cautionary aside. That is, he uses a metric tone of negative rhetoric to describe the west, while Saudi Arabia remains a conservative dreamscape, where “there would be a lot more religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards”. Now setting aside their history, which is bad enough, should we really ignore Kashoggi in this context?
Is it is really perfectly acceptable to give total and unfettered control of an entire authoritarian political structure to a single man, who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to send 15 security agents to a foreign country to kidnap, torture, kill and dismember a journalist whose only crime is criticizing him (for things, incidentally, which are legitimate points of criticism) so that we can have more religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards? Is that a good trade-off? Is it intellectually honest?
I agree with your skepticism around the use of the Saudi state as a sort of model for the relationship between government and the individual. They'll liberalize in the ways that provide a benefit to the state and ruling family but surely would walk the reforms back the moment it became useful to do so. Any sort of private sphere that exists does so only as long as it doesn't threaten the legitimacy or power of the ruling family.
But the nature of the Kingdom has been clear for decades. If Olaf Scholz or Emmanuel Macron ordered the extrajudicial killing of a journalist in an overseas embassy for criticizing their rule then THAT would be grounds for a serious reconsideration of the nature of the German or French state. But your fixation on Kashoggi gives the impression that but for this killing, you'd have little objection to the Saudi system of government. In the bigger picture his death was well within the realm of possible actions for an oppressive, authoritarian state and shouldn't have surprised anyone.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
In the interest of full disclosure I should say that, not only am I a liberal, and I live in a small town in Vermont where Bernie Sanders regularly comes down to march in our Fourth of July parade (where we display American flags) I am also a retired journalist, so I have an understandable bias against the murder and dismemberment of journalists. That is, I believe that journalism is a critical factor in the survival of democracy (as the constitution suggests too). As a journalist I have traveled extensively in the Islamic world and I have spent time in the Persian Gulf and I don’t have a lot of illusions about these cultures. I also recognize that journalists (particularly liberal journalists, which are the majority of them) are a source of annoyance to many conservatives, unless they are writing opinion pieces for the Wall Street Journal.
I do find it very odd that this grotesque murder is somehow questioned as a significant event in the context of this piece. Should we really have different standards of extrajudicial killings in European nations as anywhere else, particularly if we are rhapsodizing about the potential for Saudi Arabia as a wonderland of order, stability, religious tradition, family structure, and unconscious community standards? I am sure the trains will run on time too.
Perhaps this is part of the denial that allows many conservatives to see school shootings as regrettable, but preferable to gun control, I don’t know. I’m sure if it was your uncle Bud that was kidnapped, tortured, murdered and chopped up into suitcase-friendly pieces, you might see it differently (assuming that uncle Bud was not a liberal journalist).