international conflict » Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog

Eating Your Enemy’s Heart…

American Foreign Policy, civil unrest, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 4 Responses »

May 192013

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The video of Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade commander Abu Sakkar cutting out the ‘heart’ of a dead Syrian government soldier and then appearing to take a bite out of it has certainly stimulated intense debate and much criticism right around the world. (An edited version of the video can be played above this paragraph.) So much so the Free Syrian Army (FSA), to which the Brigade is affiliated, has been bounced into issuing a statement that: “Any act contrary to the values that the Syrian people have paid their blood and lost their homes to will not be tolerated, the abuser will be punished severely even if they are associated with the Free Syrian Army.” It has been reported by John Hall in The Independent that ‘wanted’ posters have been put up in rebel-held areas, calling for Sakkar to be brought to justice ‘dead or alive’.

Quite what Sakkar hoped to achieve when he staged the gruesome stunt - it was, in fact, a lung - is questionable. According to TIME’s Aryn Baker (2013a), in a Skype interview Sakkar (real name: Khalid al-Hamad) said it was a response to material found on the dead soldier’s mobile phone. “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.

However, Sakkar also boasted to Baker: “I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing another shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones.” Sakkar also explained that even though both sides of the conflict in Syria are using video clips of their own brutal actions to intimidate the other, he believes his clip would have a particularly strong impact on the regime’s troops. “They film as well, but after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.”

If Sakkar hopes that his ghoulish act will strike paralysing terror into the government troops and the regime’s Shabiha militiamen, he may be miscalculating on 2 levels:-

Firstly, evidence of rebel troops committing atrocities undermines those in the West who are trying to persuade their leaders to allow arms to be sold to the rebels. The Saudis and Qataris, who are already providing ‘lethal aid’ to the rebels, can control, to some considerable extent at least, their populations and what they see. In contrast, the Western ‘democracies’ have more limited control over public opinion and the stories the media presents to them.

Poll showing support for arming Syrian rebels, March 2013. Copyright © 2013 Pew Research Centre

According to a Pew Research Centre poll this March (Bruce Stokes, 2013) – see left - there is already little appetite among the general public in the West for arming the rebels amid political concerns that weapons supplied to moderate FSA groups could all too easily end up in the hands of al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists like those of the al-Nusra Front. Seeing and reading about Sakkar – who has also been filmed firing rockets indiscriminately into a Shi’ite village in the Lebanon border area, killing at least 2 villagers - will only make it more difficult for FSA supporters in the West to make their case.

No wonder the FSA are talking about bringing Sakkar in for trial ‘dead or alive’! His video is doing massive damage to their cause and they need to limit that damage fast.

The conflict in Syria has been ongoing for so long now that, short of truly dramatic news like Sakkar’s stunt, it rarely makes the headlines more than once or twice a week. Yet the Sakkar incident has been followed in rapid succession by headline-grabbing allegations of more chemical weapons use by Government forces, Russia supplying state-of-the-art ‘ship-killing’ missiles to the Syrian Government, Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries now officially topping 1.5 million and leading international figures from to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to our own David Cameron trying to get the Russians moving on an international peace conference. Clearly the situation is getting a lot worse - and a lot more dangerous - but could it just be a coincidence that a number of stories portraying government brutality and the intransigence of their Russian backers have arrived in rapid succession to kick Sakkar out of the headlines…?

The second way Sakkar’s stunt could backfire on him is that it ups the ante for committing atrocities. Aryn Baker (2013b) reports that fighters from both sides no longer simply brag about their exploits on the battlefield; they film them and share them, competing in a gruesome game of one-upmanship. Rami Abdel Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Baker that this trading in trophy atrocities, played up for the camera and passed from phone to phone, has a desensitising effect. When such gruesome footage - eg: rape, torture, amputations, even a 13-year-old boy beheading a man – is passed around like trading cards, it escalates the cycle of honour-driven revenge. Each atrocity published demands a response from the other side. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch adds: “When people see these acts of brutality and mutilation, it leaves deep scars – and there will be a temptation to replicate it in revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Quite a few fighters in Syria interpret that literally.”

The Beast in Man
I first wrote about war releasing the ‘beast in man’ for Prisoner Abuse and the Mess in Iraq back in 2005. I also wrote about ‘berserker rage’ in Munir Hussain and the Wrong Messages of Judge John Reddihough (2009).

In sociopsychological terms, this is the work of the RED vMEME set free from all BLUE/GREEN constraints of behaviour in the battlefield. Sigmund Freud (1923b) would have seen it as the work of Thanatos, the death drive of the Id. The RED vMEME can be seen as the most extreme vMEMETIC expression of the if-it-feels-good-do-it motif of the Id – the Pleasure Principle, in Freud’s construct. Thus, RED/Thanatos will carry out the most barbaric cruelty because, in the moment, it gives pleasure.

If Sakkar is to be believed, it seems to have given him pleasure to cut his enemy’s heart out and appear to eat it, partly as revenge for what he found on the dead soldier’s mobile and partly because he clearly enjoys thinking of himself as someone who fills his enemies with fear. Viz: “…after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.” Talk about RED bulling itself up to be the ‘Great I Am’!

That RED/Id was driving Sakkar in his gruesome pantomime is also indicated by the fact he clearly hadn’t thought through the potential consequences of his actions. He was too ‘in the moment’, as Tad James & Wyatt Woodsmall (1988) would put it.

There are neurological correlates in this sociopsychological explanation of Sakkar’s ghoulish actions. In Freud, the Ego and the Superego repress the Id to keep it under control. Clare W Graves, on whose work Spiral Dynamics is based, saw it as the role of BLUE and higher vMEMES to compensate for and, if necessary, constrain RED in its more dangerous self-express moments. Mark Solms (2000) has carried out research to indicate the Superego and Ego functions are located in the frontal cortex and the Id function in the limbic system. Similarly Svenja Caspers et al (2011) found evidence for ‘cool’ vMEME activity to be associated with the frontal cortex while ‘warm’ vMEMES were more defined by limbic system activity. Key inhibitory circuits are known to be in the frontal cortex - which would fit with the constraining and self-sacrificial/conformist functions of the Ego/Superego and the cool vMEMES. Correspondingly, the limbic system is associated with desire and emotional responses which fit with the self-expressive nature of the Id and the warm vMEMES. (See A Biological Basis for vMEMES…? for further details.)

Freud (1926) saw dreams as the leaking out of repressed Id desires as the Superego is dormant during sleep and the Ego virtually dormant. In terms of neurological correlates, Solms found that the frontal cortex is relatively inactive during dreaming while the limbic system is highly active. While research has yet to demonstrate this, it is highly likely that, in the moment of wanton brutality the perpetrator’s inhibiting frontal cortex is a lot less active than the self-expressive limbic system.

A further neurological correlate lies in the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine, activation of which is highly rewarding on the meso-limbic pathway. From her work with fighting amongst mice, Maria Couppis (2008) has postulated that some people intentionally seek out aggressive encounters because of the rewarding sensations, caused by the increase in dopamine from these encounters.

So intense aggression, rabid destructive urges freed from the constraining inhibitions and rules, can be very rewarding and pleasurable.

A personal anecdote: I remember the last fight I got into, around 30 years ago…feeling my fist crunch into my opponent’s face, the flesh on his face giving way and the cheekbone beneath seeming to bend beneath the force of my blow. To recall that sensation today still gives me a little thrill of pleasure. (Karma: I lost the fight in the end and was quite badly beaten up!)

Of the ‘pleasure’ aspect of committing atrocities in conflict, Roland Weierstall (2013) writes: “About one third of all former combatants in our studies said that to some extent the violence and the struggling of the victim could be fascinating, emotionally arousing and even linked to excitement. In these cases, blood must be shed as the victim is killed.”

All of which brings me back to Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck telling a HemsMESH meeting in October 2000: “When a country goes to war, its government had better prepare the people for tales of their troops committing atrocities.

What Sakkar did is, of course, by civilised standards, deplorable. But he and others like him are not operating in a civilised world. They’re in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war where deep trusts have been betrayed, safety is an all-but-impossible ideal and living on the edge, ‘in the moment’ is often the only way to be because there may be no moment after. We may be dismayed by Sakker’s grisly video but we should not be surprised.

Almost inevitably worse is yet to come – as Weierstall confirms: “…the Syrian case should not surprise anyone. We should rather be surprised that the extent of human right violations we should expect to happen in Syria is kept secret.”

Ethnic divisions facilitate dehumanisation and derogation of ‘others’
Facilitating such atrocities is the dehumanisation and derogation of the enemy because they are not-of-our-tribe. This has been noted as typical of the first 2 stages in Social Identity Theory (Henri Tajfel & John Turner, 1979) in which the ‘others’ are castigated, blamed for ‘our tribe’s problems and consequently demonised. This then permits action of some kind to be taken against the ‘others’ in the third stage, Social Comparison.

This is the way the Nazis built up the persecution of the Jews to the point where they could perpetrate the Holocaust, is typical of both Serbian and Crotian ethnic cleansing strategies in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and was a hallmark of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

A number of commentators have expressed concern at the way the Syrian conflict has become increasingly polarised along Shia vs Sunni sectarian lines. Sunni Saudia Arabia and Qatar are arming the rebels while Shia Iran funnels weapons through to the regime of Bashar al-Assad - Assad is an Alawite, Alawites being an offshoot of Shia Islam. Meanwhile, according to BBC News, both Shia Hezbollah fighters and Sunni militants are coming across the Lebanese border to fight for the respective sides. Even Sakkar’s grisly pantomime has an alarmingly sectarian element to it: according to Peter Bouckaert, in the unedited (and so far unpublished) version of the video held by Human Rights Watch, Sakkar exhorts his men to “slaughter the Alawites and take their hearts out to eat them”.

Sectarian divisions essentially emerge from the PURPLE vMEME’s differentiating of ‘our tribes’ from ‘others’ in its quest to find safety-in-belonging. If the BLUE vMEME is also activated – for example, by differences in religious belief, even very minor ones – then a PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic is created. Thus, the difference in beliefs between Sunni and Shia add an extra driver to tribal and ethnic differentiations and make the ‘others’ even more different. As BLUE cannot tolerate any deviation from ‘the one true way’ even those with the slightest difference in belief easily become categorised as ‘heretics’. And, if the ‘heretics’ cannot be converted, they must be destroyed to prevent contamination of the ‘true believers’. Thus, a dreadful combination of xenophobic PURPLE, over-pious BLUE and RED in a Thanatos mode lead to the kind of atrocity against ‘others’ that Abu Sakkar and others like him are revelling in.

Erwin Staub (1999) has studied a number of recent conflicts where mass killings and other atrocities have taken place. All the issues discussed in this Blog are among those he identifies as contributing factors to genocide. However, Staub identifies an additional factor: the passivity of bystanders to the process.

Whereas it can be argued that the international community got over-involved in Libya’s 2011 civil war, with NATO effectively acting decisively as the rebels’ air force, the United Nations has been paralysed by disagreements between the West, hesitantly on the rebel’s side, and Russia brazenly bolstering Assad’s position on the other.

The result has been inaction by outside powers, other than arms sales, with the consequence that the conflict has become more and more dangerous and more and more violent and brutal. Peter Weierstall is almost certainly right: we shall see much worse than the kind of atrocity Sakkar committed as the conflict drags on.

Moreover, the direct involvement of Lebanese factions, the overt support for Assad from Iran and the semi-covert support for the rebels from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar poses a real risk of the conflict spilling across Syria’s borders and mutating into a regional conflagration. That undoubtedly is one of Israel’s reasons for destroying convoys of hi-tech arms Assad intended sending to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Modern missiles launched across its northern border would be on a completely different level from the paltry salvos of home-made or outdated rockets employed by Hezbollah and, in Gaza, Hamas so far. Israel would feel obliged to react with massive force which would risk bringing in Iran and uniting the Arabs (Sunni and Shia together) against the common enemy: the Jews. Samuel Gaertner et al (1993) identified this coming together of sworn enemies to battle a common threat as the Common In-Group Identity Model.

You could almost argue it’s in Israel’s and the West’s interests to let the Sunnis and the Shias engage in sectarian conflict right across the Middle East – and Samuel Huntington (1993), with his theoretical division of the world into near-incompatible cultural zones, would almost certainly advocate such a course of action.

There are at least 2 major problems with that approach.

Firstly, there are too many outside parties with interests in the Middle East to just let them slug it out. From Israel desperate to maintain its security and possibly expand its borders, to a large part of the world’s dependency on oil from the Middle East, to Iran and several Arab states tacitly – or not so tacitly! – providing support to al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements - outside countries have good and often competing reasons to meddle in the Middle East. Plus, of course American and Russian arms manufacturers have a live war in which to try out their latest death toys for a sizeable profit - only that very easily degenerates into a proxy war between their respective governments.

Secondly, the way the Western media works means that, in ORANGE’s desire to make more and more money, it will ramp up the ‘atrocity factor’ by coming up with ever more gory, outrageous and scary stories to sell. The ‘desensitisation factor’ results in eventual boredom in the audiences, meaning the media have to find even more gory, outrageous and scary stories to continue making money. This gives the RED/Thanatos-driven extremists on the ground in Syria an external and ever-more demanding market for their filmed atrocities.

It’s certainly given Abu Sakkar his ’15 minutes of fame’, with several major league interviews and lead stories in international media last week.

For Barrack Obama, Syria presents a damned-if-I-do-and-damned-if-I-don’t challenge. The situation is so complex, both non-intervention and intervention (at any level) present dangers from virtually every angle. No wonder he is clearly procrastinating! But the intense public reaction to every new outrage that is worse than the one before puts more and more pressure on him and other Western leaders to act. The reaction, of course, fades with the desensitised ‘boredom factor’ until an even worse outrage sneaks its way on to YouTube.

While the political leaders of the Western world ring their hands and wonder rather helplessly what do, the next Abu Sakkar is carving up his next victim, all the while hamming it up for the camera.

24 Iraqi lives are not even worth 3 months in prison

American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Middle East, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 1 Response »

Jan 272012

This Tuesday past (24 January), Lieutenant Colonel David Jones passed judgement on Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich for ‘dereliction of duty’. Normally, the maximum penalty open to an American military judge for this conviction would be a 3-month jail sentence, 2/3 forfeiture of pay and a demotion to the rank of private. Jones did not sentence Wuterich to jail. He did dock his pay but did not cut it by the maximum permitted 2/3 as the divorced father is solely responsible for the upkeep of his 3 daughters. He did demote Wuterich to the rank of private.

Jones’ sentencing of Wuterich would appear to have finally brought the long-running ‘Haditha Massacre’ case to an end in the military legal system. However, in the way he and the American military prosecutors have done this, they may well have sentenced to death hundreds of American soldiers and many more civilians of various nationalities.

From the evidence presented by prosecutors, Wuterich is directly responsible for the deaths of 9 innocent Iraqi civilians and indirectly responsible for the deaths of 15 others killed by the men in his command.

There is no doubt Wuterich is responsible for the 24 deaths. According to Al Jazeeera TV (2012), military spokesperson Joe Koppell said: “Staff Sergeant Wuterich accepted responsibility … and agreed and admits that he gave a verbal order to shoot first, ask questions later, or don’t hesitate to shoot, and words to that effect.” The victims of Wuterich’s orders included 10 women and children killed at point-blank range. 6 people were killed in one house, most shot in the head, including women and children huddled in a bedroom. An elderly man in a wheelchair was another fatality.

The original charge against Wuterich was murder which was then reduced to 9 counts of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault. The American military prosecutors this week allowed Wuterich to enter a plea of guilty to the lesser charge of dereliction of duty. As Jones found out, when passing sentence, under the terms of the plea bargain authorised by Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, he was not able to jail Wuterich.

Of the men under Wuterich’s command at Haditha, one was acquitted and the cases against the others were dropped on legal technicalities.

The relatively small amount of attention paid in the Western media to the Wuterich verdict and sentencing indicates a lack of appreciation of how it will be perceived in non-western cultures. The headline playing out across the Muslim world will be something like: ’24 Iraqi lives are not even worth 3 months in prison’.

Ali Badr, a Haditha resident and relative of one of the victims, called Wuterich’s sentence “an insult to all Iraqis” and “solid proof that the Americans don’t respect human rights” (Al Jazeera, 2012). Awis Fahmi Hussein, who survived Haditha after being shot in the back, told the Associated Press’ Julie Watson (2012): “I was expecting that the American judiciary would sentence this person to life in prison and that he would appear and confess in front of the whole world that he committed this crime, so that America could show itself as democratic and fair.”

According the Los Angeles Times Tony Perry (2012), Waldhauser will offer no public explanation of his decision to accept the plea bargain and stipulate that Wuterich receive no jail time.

To add insult to injury, the convicted criminal keeps his job and, at some time in the future, may again be in a position where he has innocent civilians in the sights of his automatic rifle.

For the likes of al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamist groups, the farce of Wuterich’s trial is yet more proof that Muslim lives are nothing like as important as American lives. It’s more justification for the view that Muslims are oppressed by the Americans and their infidel allies – which makes it another rallying point for previously-uninvolved Muslims to come to the defence of their brothers, as indeed the Qur’an (Sura 2:191, 193) instructs them to. Those who are deeply religious and with the BLUE vMEME dominating in their selfplexes may feel compelled to do their duty if fed the appropriate provocative material from radical imams.

Lieutenant Colonel Jones and the Lieutenant General Waldhauser have given al-Qaeda a wonderful cause for a recruitment drive. Which is why Jones may well have sentenced more American soldiers and innocent civilians to death.

The ‘Fog of War’ and the ‘Animal in Man’
The prosecutors argued that, on the day of the killings in November 2005, Wuterich lost control after seeing a friend blown apart by a bomb, before leading the soldiers under his command on a murderous rampage. His defence said he did the best he could in the ‘fog of war’ and that his squad truly believed they were on a search for insurgents. However, Wuterich’s former squad members testified during the hearings that they did not receive any incoming gunfire nor find any weapons at the scene of the killings.

A marine with dead bodies at Haditha - thought to have been taken with another marine's phone.

Wuterich told the court: “When my marines and I cleared those houses that day, I responded to what I perceived as a threat, and my intention was to eliminate that threat in order to keep the rest of my marines alive. So when I told my team to shoot first and ask questions later, the intent wasn’t that they would shoot civilians, it was that they would not hesitate in the face of the enemy.”

His assertion that “…I never fired my weapon at any women or children that day” was contradicted by a former squad mate who said he joined Wuterich in firing in a dark back bedroom where a woman and children were killed.

It appears, essentially, that Wuterich led his men on a brutal murderous rampage against innocent civilians because one of their own had been killed in front of their eyes.

Hot-blooded revenge in a state of, fright shock and high physical arousal…?

It would be far from the first time in recent history that atrocities and massacres have been committed by soldiers in a war context. And while Iraq in 2005 was far from being a full-scale war, American troops were fighting a ruthless and brutal insurgency that was killing and wounding men from their ranks on an unpredictable but scarily frequent basis.

I’ve talked before about contexts such as war which release the ‘animal in man’ – most notably in ‘Prisoner Abuse and the Mess in Iraq’. In terms of Spiral Dynamics (Don Beck & Chris Cowan, 1996) this is the RED vMEME doing what it wants in that moment of time without constraint or thought of consequences. In his Psychoanalytic Theory Sigmund Freud (1920) would see Haditha as the Thanatos element of the Id unleashed to fulfil its death instinct. Don Beck (2002) has cautioned that countries going to war should prepare their populations back home for stories of their troops committing atrocities.

What about the aftermath?
If, then, atrocities such as Haditha are inevitable from time to time – no matter how much we try to minimise their likelihood – questions then come as to how we deal with survivors, relatives and perpetrators in the aftermath.

If we accept that atrocities will happen in contexts such as war, when traumatised soldiers get carried away temporarily in their bloodlust, then it can be argued that reducing the charges against Wuterich from murder to involuntary manslaughter is appropriate.

After the shootings, Wuterich clearly knew he and his men had done wrong. (The BLUE vMEME – Freud’s Superego – kicking back in.) The sergeant lied to his commanding officers by stating that 15 of the dead Iraqi civilians were killed in the same explosion that led to the incident. Few outside of the immediate scene knew about the killings and the American military first attempted to downplay the killings until a local human rights activist went public with video footage of the aftermath. A subsequent investigation by Time suggested that most of the dead were shot by Marines – and in March 2006 a criminal investigation was begun.

With regards to the survivors and the relatives, should the American military pay compensation? As yet, there is no indication that this will happen. The American military does not routinely pay compensation for foreign nationals innocently killed or injured in its operations in their country. However, it is possible for survivors and relatives to pursue compensation claims through the American courts – assuming, of course, that they could muster the considerable financial resources required to do this!

This,and the fact that Wuterich will not serve even a day in prison following his sentencing, really does appear to show that the Americans do attribute lesser value to Iraqi lives than American lives. (No one who has been convicted of killing Americans walks free from an American court.

Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (197 ) Social Identity Theory – see Prejudice & Discrimination – offers a powerful explanation for this discrimination (which is racism in all but name). Simply by categorising ourselves into ‘us’ (American liberators) and ‘them’ (Iraqi Muslims) – we end up absorbing the norms and values of our in-group and stereotyping and demeaning their out-group in the worst possible way. Thus, out-group Iraqi lives are worth nothing like as much as American lives.

It is, of course, the PURPLE vMEME’s tribalism which is behind this not-of-our-tribe discrimination. It’s also how, in part at least, the Nazis were able to manipulate the German people (‘us’) into nationwide complicity in the persecution of the Jews (‘them’).

If the Americans want to avoid being seen as hypocritical, partial, tribalist and racist, then they need to rethink substantially the way they deal with the aftermath of atrocities like Haditha.

The difference between war and counter-insurgency
Before we leave this brief study of the tragedy of Haditha, it’s worth considering the kind of situation those American troops found themselves in.

They were combat troops trained for straight forward battle but tasked to take on insurgents using guerrilla and terrorist tactics in a crowded, residential areas. From the British Army in Malaya in the 1950s, through American troops in the South Vietnamese cities in the 1970s and Russian troops in Afghan villages in the 1980s, the use of regular battle troops in such neo-policing operations has a bad history. Atrocity, murder, torture, rape and the widescale alienation of civilian populations have tended to characterise such operations. Again, it’s the PURPLE vMEME’s tribalist discrimination at work; but the more different ethnically and racially the civilian population have been from the soldiers, the more the soldiers have tended to abuse them.

From an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, I would argue that a different time of man is needed for urban counter-terrorist operations than for an outright battle. If we use Hans Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament construct, then someone high in Psychoticism is more likely to make the kind of soldier needed for a battle. So compulsive and impulsive they are effectively fearless is very much what’s desirable. Ruthless brutality towards the enemy is also quite welcome.

Hunting out insurgents hiding amongst a civilian population is a very different game to slaughtering your enemy on the battlefield and requires a different sort of mindset. Yes, the soldier still needs to be lightning quick in their reflexes but the ability to slow yourself for that vital second or two under extreme provocation, such as the bomb blast at Haditha, is essential for successful interactions with the often equally-terrified civilians. Self-restraint is not a trait of Psychoticism; so men high on that temperamental dimension are not the right kind of people for neo-policing operations. When RED wants revenge, as it did in Wuterich, then it’s much more difficult, if not impossible, for BLUE to restrain it if the person is high in Psychoticism.

Of course, there are other factors which predicate the inhibiting or disinhibiting of behaviour. But, if we can at least get the right kind of soldier temperamentally suited to the task at hand, then we are more likely to minimise the risk of massacring of civilians in counter-terrorism operations.

While, unfortunately, there will still undoubtedly be outright battles in wars between countries in the decades and centuries to come, the guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist element of warfare has increased substantially since the end of World War II. Military planners, in who they recruit and how they train those recruits, need to have more diverse resources to deploy to different situations.

David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 3 Responses »

Feb 082011

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘”Radical Islam” and the Return of Tony Blair’)

Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation.

In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multi-culturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its own cultural practices and traditions. Anti-discrimination legislation had protected the minorities – though arguably not so much the majority - leading to a failure to integrate into ‘mainstream British culture’. Then the very existence of multiple cultures - multiculturalism - with each one given equal due meant no one culture could dominate, leading to a diminishing of mainstream British culture - with a sense of loss of ‘Britishness’ and even confusion as to what ‘British identity’ might actually mean.

Cameron’s attack is certainly not new or isolated. The formal identification of multiculturalism as a source of racial, ethnic and cultural divisions began with Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, commenting on the reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001. He told The Times (Tom Baldwin & Gabriel Rozenberg, 2004) that multiculturalism was out of date and no longer useful – not least because it encouraged ‘separateness’ between communities. He said that multiculturalism – one of the founding principles of his own organisation - “means the wrong things…. We are now in a different world from the Sixties and Seventies.”

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, said in a speech last year that the concept of multiculturalism had been developed to create a more tolerant society – one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. However, multiculturalism’s message ended up becoming: “There is no need to integrate.” Further, Sacks saw multiculturalism as dissolving national identity, shared values and collective identity which “makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into”.

I’ve touched upon the undermining of national identity via multiculturalism in Blog posts such as ‘Is restricting Immigration discriminatory?’…while Jon Twigge has taken the issue fully head-on in the Blog ‘The Curious Case of Being British’. There is little doubt that Cameron is describing, not theorising or speculating. Inevitably, though, for a politician trying to play the ‘populist card’, Cameron has oversimplified the issues.

Then there is the conundrum: if we accept that multiculturalism has led us to become a Britain of ‘divided tribes’ and the majority have lost much of their unique sense of Britishness, then what do we do about it?

What is the ‘British Identity’ and what are ‘British values’?
If we want to embody or become something, it’s a good idea to spell out just what that something is. So what is ‘British identity’ and what are ‘British values’?

On Saturday Cameron said: “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism [which] believes in certain values and actively promotes them…. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality. This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe those things.”

That’s helpful. But the values the prime minister espoused are pretty much those formally held by any modern western democratic state. It hardly informs us what ‘Britishness’ is.

To expect people to adopt values unrelated to their identity is a fallacy. As Robert Dilts’ Neurological Levels model shows clearly, truly-held values come from the identity you hold in relation (contextually) to the environment you are in.

So, for people to cherish ‘British values’, they must have a ‘British identity’. When people wholeheartedly see themselves as ‘British’, then they are much more likely to hold British values.

Just over 18 months ago the inaugural Centre of Human Emergence - UK event featured Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck leading us through an exploration of the British character - see: ‘”Britishness” at the Regent’s College Summit’. What we came up with was:-

Leaders in many, many ways
Great innovators
Quirky and eccentric - often precursors to innovation
Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threats
Humour-full -– we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

In large part our assessment was based on the past - our recent history from the days of Empire, through the Blitz to the ‘Swinging Sixites’ - though an echo of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ was acknowledged in the carry-on attitude displayed by many Londoners in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

Of course, in identifying Britishness, we can’t simply go back to the 1960s before multiculturalism really began to take hold. That was then; this is now. As noted children’s author Rosemary Wilkie said at Regent’s College: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.” So we need a new sense of Britishness, one that does indeed draw on Britain’s illustrious past but one which also takes stock of the peoples we are right now and one which can inspire us as a nation into our future.

Britain is not the land of white anglo culture it was 40 years ago. A walk along the high street of most towns will reveal a plethora of Asian, Chinese and Thai restaurants and takeaways – with the occasional West Indian or North African nestled in between them. These establishments couldn’t stay in business without substantial patronage from amongst the white majority.

This fact alone should tell anyone with the ability to view these things objectively that you can’t just turn the clock back 40 years - just imagine: no Chinese or Indian eating houses or takeaways! So the British National Party (BNP) pipedream of shipping 2nd and 3rd generation Asians and blacks off to some place their grandfather came from is just that: a fantasy pipedream. Short of the BNP being able to impose a totalitarian state in Britain and pursuing the kind of 10-year blame and dehumanisation strategies the Nazis employed against the Jews which eventually enabled them to pursue the ‘Final Solution’, black and Asian Britons are here to stay.

Even with the will to integrate, it is inevitable that many of them will be bi-cultural: they have the culture of the land they live in and belong to now and the heritage of the land their grandparents came from. On the one hand, it is essential to developing Britishness that they do assimilate into the mainstream; on the other hand, from their heritages, many ethnic groups have much to offer beyond eating houses.

So we need a ‘British identity’ that not only draws inspiration from the past but also incorporates, to some degree at least, the amount of diversity found these days in Britain’s streets.

Another factor to take into consideration in developing a new British identity is that Britain is, in fact, composed of 3 nations in a United Kingdom with Northern Ireland. While the Welsh and especially the Scottish contributed much to the explorations and innovations that developed Empire, ‘Britain’ all too often meant England and ‘England’ meant Britain. That code was particularly prevalent in foreign portrayals of the ‘British’ or the ‘English’ - the terms being effectively interchangeable. Just look at the way Hollywood movies portrayed us in the 1930s through to the 1960s. The Welsh hardly got a look-in and Scots were only usually included if it was to caricature the ‘wild highlander’!

That simply won’t do now. With Welsh nationalism an ever-strong presence in the Welsh Assembly and a minority Scots Nationalist Government in Hollyrood, any new sense of British identity must incorporate sufficient elements of ‘Welshness’ and ‘Scottishness’ to appeal to those more assertive and confident peoples no longer prepared to acquiesce compliantly to the Englishness.

Creating the new ‘Britishness’
Back in 2004, Trevor Phillips said: “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness…. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values.”

The question then becomes: how do you create that integrated society Phillips talked about?

A strategy Tony Blair’s Government introduced in 2005 in an attempt to inculcate knowledge about Britain into immigrants applying for British citizenship (or long-term residency) was the mandatory ‘Life in the UK’ test. It covers issues such as Britain’s constitution, the originating countries of previous UK immigrants, family life in the UK and where dialects like Geordie, Scouse or Cockney come from. Knowledge of practical matters such as the minimum age to buy alcohol and tobacco and what services are provided by local authorities are also covered. Finally, the test requires a certain level of fluency in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.

Last May the Home Office revealed that a third of applicants fail the test.

Out of interest, I gave my GCSE Sociology classes the following mini-version of the test:-

What is the Queen’s official role and what ceremonial duties does she have?
What is the role of the Prime Minister? Who advises them and what are the main roles in the Cabinet?
What is the Opposition and what is the role of the Leader of the Opposition?
What are MPs? How often are elections held and who forms the government?
Do women have equal rights in voting, education and work - and has this always been the case?
How is political debate reported? Are newspapers free to publish opinions or do they have to
remain impartial?

Close to a half failed the test. But, as several students - all of them white anglo – protested, their parents would probably have failed too and they were undoubtedly British!

As Dilts’ Neurological Levels model demonstrates only too clearly, it’s much more likely that identity leads to the values which make you want to acquire relevant knowledge than being fed knowledge shapes identity. The high level of failure in the Life in the UK test would indicate many applicants don’t value the knowledge…and the reason for that is almost certainly because they don’t really see themselves as British. Forcing knowledge at people in the hope they will ingest it does not mean they will. Ask any teacher!

By all means, from Phillips through Blair to Cameron, there needs to be pressure to integrate on the basis of the old proverb: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. But that pressure alone - which comes from BLUE’s do-what’s-right thinking – will not produce integration. Indeed, in immigrant communities where the acculturation strategy - as identified by John Berry (1997) – is to marginalise (have only minimal contact with the majority culture) or, even worse, separate (avoid contact altogether) to preserve the purity of the immigrants’ cultural identity, such pressure may even lead to extreme separation, a sense of persecution and deep-felt alienation from the mainstream culture. And that can only fuel the radicalisation of young Muslims in such immigrant communities.

What Government strategies life ‘Life in the UK’ miss is the need to target the PURPLE vMEME as well as the BLUE vMEME. What also needs to be understood by the strategists is that PUPRLE naturally differentiates between ‘my tribe’ and ‘your tribe’ - with race/colour, religion and ‘ethnic dress’ being the more obvious markers of difference – see: ‘Is Racism Natural?’ in the Society section of the main site.

If tribalism is natural and the markers of difference are needed to distinguish the tribes, how then can integration ever be possible?

The answer is that complete integration is likely to take generations as people grow beyond the boundaries of their tribal areas – and there are signs this is starting to happen naturally, led by one of the most powerful instincts of all: sexual love. While at the above-mentioned Regent’s College Summit in June 2009, I was impressed with how many white/black and white/Asian couples I saw in the pubs around cosmopolitan Finchley where I was staying. Around the same time last year, I attended the wedding of a white friend’s daughter to a Muslim man.

Using techniques adapted from sociopsychology, this process can be manipulated and accelerated. Muzafir Sherif et al ‘s famous Robber’s Cave Experiment (1954) demonstrated that you can create super identities with shared values if you create challenges which are so daunting, it is only by working together that they can be overcome. In 1984 G Andreeva, to all intents and purposes, repeated Sherif et al’s study but in a different culture - Russia – and this concept of uniting the tribes via common challenge (or threat) is at the heart of Samuel Gerners’ Common In-Group Identity Model (1993). However, while Gerner expressed concern that there could be a reversion to tribal identities once the challenge was accomplished, an interesting study by Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found it effectively impossible to turn the lesser identities against each other provided there was a potential for the super identity to endure and there was a moral element to the identity. In this case, the super identity was boy scouts, the study was carried out on different scout groups brought together and the moral element was the Boy Scouts Code of Honour.

Of course, it is difficult - if not impossible (short of genocide) - to eradicate tribal identities entirely and those tribal identities will always require managing. Just think how PURPLE tribalism tore apart Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union’s successor Russian Federation once the repressive BLUE controls of the Communist state were removed! But, if the memetic focus is on shared/common values, desires and needs, then the tribes can be brought together to work on achieving shared/common aims. After all, most people, whatever their tribe, want a decent income, good schooling for their children, freedom from crime and the fear of crime, value for money local services and amenities, etc, etc. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ concept, if presented correctly, could actually stimulate inter-tribal co-operation. After all, if government does less, then the people need to come together to do more.

Last Summer, working with Councillor Darren Reynolds of Burnley Council, he and I tentatively mapped out how gatherings of seemingly-disparate tribes might work together in that ‘race relations hotspot’ to achieve things the Council could not.

Who do you belong to: God or the State?
This, for the devout – Christian, Jew or Muslim- is always going to be an issue if the state’s laws and/or requirements conflict with religious duty. For the devout, at the end of the day, it is usually God who wins. Eg: for the Christian, Acts 5:29 says simply: “…obey God rather than men…”

Thus, national identity needs to be constructed in such a way that it is not at odds with mainstream religious teaching.

David Cameron’s linking of a failure to become ‘British’ with extremist Islam is only valid if other causes of radicalisation are acknowledged and strategies put into place to deal with them.

For Muslims, there is a duty to fight with other Muslims against oppressors – viz:-

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

All too easily radical imams have been able to turn the Anglo-American blunders in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq and insensitivity to untold numbers of civilian lives lost or ruined into tales of the West oppressing Islam.

Thus, it’s difficult for a Muslim to be ‘British’ if the British are perceived to be carelessly slaughtering Muslims. The PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic of loyalty and duty tells them they should be standing alongside their brothers and sisters fighting the oppressor.

In terms of whether young Muslims can be reconciled to a British identity, the Government has been losing the propaganda war since 2002 and first talk of invading Iraq. And there’s no sign yet that the new Government has any better idea than the previous one of how to win the war of hearts and minds. No wonder MI6 is predicting ‘an unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers’!

For young Muslims appalled at Anglo-American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to be reconciled to being British, their BLUE need to be told by those with high authority as Islamic scholars that violence is not the way to express disquiet and disgust. Rather, that their voices can be heard through the British political systems.

I’m still baffled why so much more was not made of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa last year denouncing terrorism and stating suicide bombers could not go to Heaven - see: ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ As one of the most scholarly texts based on Islamic scriptures in recent years from one of the religion’s leading thinkers, it was literally an instruction to Muslims not to commit violence against civilians whatever the cause.

Yet it was largely ignored by western leaders.

The works of ul-Qadri – an appropriate teacher for the BLUE of many Muslims – and similar scholars should be being promoted through the mosques as the correct interpretation of Islamic scripture. With such memes forming their schemas, it is then possible for young Muslims to be British and use our democratic systems to articulate their needs, desires and dissatisfactions.

Could Bernard Jenkin and Iain Duncan Smith be 2nd Tier thinkers?

Afghanistan, charity, community, government, international conflict, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 3 Responses »

Oct 192010

Maybe there is some hope of 2nd Tier thinking emerging amongst UK politicians….?

I was greatly heartened yesterday to hear Bernard Jenkin, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme call for strategic thinking to create a “deep and sustained analysis of what kind of country we want to be in 10 or 20 years time.”

Jenkin, Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC), was being interviewed about the Committee’s report, ‘Who does UK National Strategy?’, published mere hours before the first part of the Government’s Strategic & Security Defence Review.

The Committee’s report suggested there was a tendency for Whitehall to “muddle through”. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were cited as examples where there had been a lack of over-arching strategy.

The report also warned that the UK’s capacity to think strategically had been undermined by assumptions that its national interests are best served by its relationship with the US and economic links within the European Union – “Uncritical acceptance of these assumptions has led to a waning of our interests in, and ability to make, national strategy,”

Unfortunately Foreign Secretary William Hague attempted to make political capital from the report, saying it showed a “chronic lack of strategic thinking in Britain’s foreign and security policy” in recent years. In other words, it’s all Labour’s fault! Perhaps Hague’s response was inevitable, given the fractious relations between the Coalition Government and Ed Milliband’s increasingly left-leaning Opposition; but I could have hoped for better from a politician who has often displayed a high complexity of thinking alongside rough and ready practicality.

In spite of Hague’s rhetoric that: “Under this government there is a proper mechanism for the bringing together of strategic decisions about our security, defence, diplomacy and development, after years of ad-hoc thinking and poor decision- making.” – he was given only guarded approval by Jenkin in his Today interview. Jenkin acknowledged Hague’s vision in foreign policy but lamented that very little was being done in Whitehall to make it effective.

The need for strategic thinking
Bernard Jenkin is a rather controversial character. A seemingly-tireless self-promoter who got hurt in last year’s parliamentary expenses scandal, he wears his convictions on his sleeve (limited integration with the EU, anti-proportional representation) and appears to expect everyone else to treat them as the only sane option. Nonetheless, he is absolutely right about the need for strategic thinking and the tactical way in which he has exposed the lack of it without overtly undermining the Coalition Government smacks of a certain brilliance.

While the remit of its report is defence, the PASC yesterday caught the whole of Whitehall in its sights: “We welcome the new Government’s aspiration to think more strategically, but when we tried to find out who actually does UK National Strategy, virtually all the evidence we took suggests the answer is ‘no one’. Ministers are in danger of announcing a Strategic & Security Defence Review that is anything but ‘strategic’. Whitehall has fallen out of the habit of strategic thinking. Different departments think about strategy in different ways, often at cross-purposes.”

In his Today interview, Jenkin expanded on this: “…we’ve lost the art of strategic thinking…. There needs to be much better cross-departmental working. For example, the Treasury, their strategy is clearly deficit reduction but it’s not the only strategic imperative facing us….”

A key element in Jenkin’s brilliance has been to say all the traditional assumptions should go under the microscope and to call for truly radical thinking which takes into account the resources available. For example, he told Today: “If we’re going to have to live in a much smaller envelope, how do we completely reorganise the way we do defence? Instead it’s been about Okay what do we have to cut?”

This very much reflects my ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the Vision?’ Blog when I wrote: “…what kind of Britain do Cameron and Clegg want us to become? Do they know? And, if they do, when are they going to tell us?”

The Big Society sounds like it might actually result in effective taking up of some of the slack as the public sector is shredded in the coming years…but what will the Big Society look like? What kind of people are expected to inhabit it?

When Jenkin asks, “…what kind of country we want to be in 10 or 20 years time?” – he’s going along very similar lines.

Having the capacity for strategic thinking
That David Cameron and Nick Clegg, together or separately, have yet to articulate a vision of transformed Britain beyond the most woolly philosophy, may not just represent the difficulty in bringing together 2 very different political traditions. It may also reflect a lowered capacity within government to develop strategic thinking.

As Jenkin told Today: “You need the research and assessment staff who are going to do the analysis and assessments…. There used to be… a six-month course at the Civil Service College for strategic thinking. Now there is a one-week module. It’s that kind of reduction in the importance of strategic thinking that’s being denied.”

It’s perhaps telling that the minister who most completely has a vision for his area of responsibility and who had the arguments so well prepared he managed to get the key points through the Treasury’s slashing was Iain Duncan Smith. His Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank, outside of the Whitehall malaise, has been researching and proposing options on social policy reform for years. Duncan Smith has had the benefit of substantial strategic thinking resources.

While the CSJ undoubtedly has a PURPLE/BLUE ‘family values’ bias in its fundamental assumptions about how society should work, there are clearly GREEN empathies both in the unrelenting distaste for poverty that underpins everything it does and in the way it connects up with so many charities. That it could guide Duncan Smith into preparing for a totally different way of thinking about welfare demonstrates the radical, daring thinking Jenkin calls for right across Whitehall. Again, one might well attribute 2nd Tier thinking to Duncan Smith and his team who have included the likes of psychologists Rod Morgan and Lawrence Sherman and maverick Labour MP Frank Field.

The Cuts…from the BLUE vMEME or 2nd Tier thinking?
As the country braces itself for the most savage spending cuts since the early days of the Great Depression, there is no doubting the need to cut the defecit. Labour will say they’re much too soon, much too broad and much too deep – but Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were starting to head in a similar direction before their election defeat (if not at the same frantic pace!).

The question, to me, is: are we just cutting, cutting and cutting – driven by the BLUE vMEME’s drive to do ‘what’s right’, regardless of the human cost – or is there a vision for the shaping and reshaping – social construction – of a different kind of, hopefully better society. If it’s the latter, then it needs to come from 2nd Tier thinking – the kind of dazzling, daring thinking that’s comng from the CSJ.

Unfortunately, as Jenkin, indicates, it seems highly unlikely that kind of thinking is widespread in Whitehall. It needs to be.

In his interview, Jenkin at one point was savaged by Today regular James McNaughtie for seeming to suggest that he was advocating the training and development of strategic thinkers at a time when Whitehall was meant to be cut back. Jenkin denied that he wanted to create a new department as such but, as with the report, advocated an investment in the development of training and resources in strategic thinking.

Jenkin, again, is right. If we cannot develop – re-develop? – longer-term strategic thinking, then we risk being limited and trapped by myopic short-termism.

‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 8 Responses »

Sep 072010

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

A growing Spiral Dynamics influence in the Middle East

international conflict, Middle East, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 1 Response »

Aug 222009

As proud as I am of Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) , as grand as our ambitions are – and partially redesigning the United Kingdom is pretty ambitious!! – as committed to them as I am and as daunting as the challenges we face are, it seems at times relatively ‘small beer’ compared to what the Center for Human Emergence Middle East (CHE-ME) is up to.

Our members don’t live in a semi-hot war zone, with the ever-present threat of real violence (whether terrorist activities – suicide bombers and rockets – or heavy-handed military responses such as in Gaza at the start of this year). The UK might be bothered about corruption in government, desperate to recover from what is being labelled as the worst recession since the 1930s, very unsure of itself as a multi-cultural society in certain parts of the kingdom and iffy in its relations with the EU whilst at the same time being uncertain as to the changing constitutional relationship between its 4 constituent countries. But CHE-ME is faced with a real and frequently violent conflict between one country (Israel) and the stateless land of a dispossessed people it occupies (Palestine), with that stateless land split both geographically and politically. CHE-ME is faced with 2 wars – Israel vs Palestine and Fatah (aka Fateh) vs Hamas – both in fragile ceasefires that threaten to boil over into murderous warfare at any moment.

So it’s a pleasure for me once again to draw attention to the work of Elza Maalouf and CHE-ME – which, it should be stressed, is strongly supported by Integral Israel. In the 5 years since Rafael Nasser first invited Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck to present to Integral Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, enormous progress has been made behind the scenes – particularly in terms of building Palestinian capacity for self-government so that Palestine can be a full and competent partner to Israel in designing a viable and sustainable 2-state solution.

As Elza reports in her article for the Common Ground News Service, ‘6th Convention Fateh’s and the Building of a Nation’, the Convention has made clear recommendations to the Fatah-led government of President Mahmoud Abbas that a new national agenda needs to be designed based on economic development. Many of those who voted for positive change at the Convention had been through some form of training and/or briefing by Maalouf & Beck.

What it seems CHE-ME is beginning to bring about is a major shift in sections of the Palestinian consciousness. That shift is from the old anti-Israeli/Palestinians-as-victims ethos PURPLE and BLUE had got them locked into – which RED demagogues have so ruthlessly exploited for the past half-century and more – into the first stirrings of an ORANGE-driven entrepreneurial culture. The old Palestine, an alienated and divided society embittered with hatred towards Israel and split into its own warring factions, all but invited Israel to occupy and suppress. A new Palestine geared towards the well-being of its people and the economic prosperity of the region must be an attractive proposition as a trading partner for Israel.

The emergence of the ORANGE vMEME, as Beck lays out in his development of Muzafir Sherif’s Assimilation-Contrast Effect, breaks up the log jam of intractable positions by working towards a new and better future.

But, in her big picture perspective, Maalouf knows that Hamas can’t be left out of these developments. So, in her Common Ground article, she points out that the olive branch needs to be offered to Hamas. (Though their work to date has been mostly with Fatah, she & Beck have made some inroads into Hamas and know that there are potentials for change and voices of reason all too often missed in the Western media’s portrayal of that terrorist organisation.)

So, some wonderful news of progress in one of the world’s most troubled and dangerous regions!

For those interested in progress in the Middle East, may I also recommend Bitter Lemons, an EU-funded site dedicated to helping Israelis and Palestinians understand each other’s points of view on the issues which are seen to divide.

Afghanistan: sex or starve! What’s the issue?

Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics No Responses »

Aug 172009

If the stories are true - and there does seem to be some confusion in the accounts – then Hamid Karzai’s government sneaked into law on 27 July an amended version of the Personal Status Law for Afghanistan’s minority Shi’ite population. (Around 15% of the country’s 30 million citizens – the vast majority of whom are Sunnis, to whom the new law does not apply.)

The coming into law of this measure certainly does seem ‘sneaked’. With the likes of Barrack Obama, Gordon Brown, France’s Human Rights Minister Rama Yade and NATO boss Jaap de Hoop Scheffer joining the international chorus of protest against the original version of the bill in the Spring, Karzai promised to review the measure before implementing it. Now, just days before the increasingly tightly-contested elections, he appears to have sneaked it into law with some different words but the same meanings.

Human Rights Watch says it has seen a copy of the final law that requires Shia women to satisfy their husbands’ sexual appetites at least every 4 days, an article which critics have said could be used to justify marital rape. It enshrines a husband’s right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to comply with his sexual demands. (Cue: Western media frenzy about frustrated husbands starving their wives…!)

The law also requires women to get permission from their husbands to work and grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. Additionally, it is claimed that it effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

The law was designed, initially in secret, by a powerful, hard-line Shia leader, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, and is supported by conservative Shia leaders in parliament. And it is clearly the votes of Shia fundamentalists Karzai is hoping to win with this measure.

The fact the new law is actually in flagrant contravention of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban constitution simply doesn’t seem to bother Karzai. Small wonder that the Pashtun people, who comprise most of the Taliban’s cannon fodder, regard Karzai’s people as far less trustworthy than the fundamentalists.

Which leads to the question: has the West once again, through an inability to understand cultural differences - different memes for the BLUE vMEME - inappropriately backed unhealthy, corrupt RED? (In recent history just think: the Shah in Iran…Saddam Hussein in Iraq….)

Perspective needed?
Of course, to Western GREEN, Karzai’s new law is horrendous – a betrayal of both the rights of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban women (supposedly protected by the constitution) and the democratic values the West’s costly military mission is meant to support.

But maybe some perspective is needed here…?

Certainly Karzai’s regime is riddled with corruption. The man himself appears neither to have the dread authority of a feudal lord nor the understanding of Western-style Democracy and the commitment to make it work. As such, he seems unfit to lead Afghanistan through the transition from primitive theocracy vs warlord banditry (pre-2001 invasion) to multicultural Democracy, the West’s avowed aim for this society. Yet the West, by its espousal of the bloodstained warlords of the Northern League and its use of their men as its footsoldiers in the 2001 invasion, approved corruption, blood lust, rape, torture, war crimes, etc, by small-minded leaders. What kind of people did the West really expect to emerge from the dust of battle to assume power in its new regime?

Karzai’s record shows him to be a formidable operator but he seems completely at sea at times in mastering his own government. It’s not beyond possibility that he personally is relatively clean; it’s just that his regime, born from the Western-backed excesses of the Northern League, seems irredeemably corrupt.

If Karzai is becoming more and more a weakling desperately trying to cling to power through foul means or fair, then let’s not forget WHERE he came from and WHO put him where he is.

As to marital rape - and Mohseni denies his law explicitly authorises this as Islam is against women being forced to have sex – how ever offensive the very concept might be to sophisticated Western thinkers in the first decade of the 21st Century, let’s not get too precious about this. It was only in 1994 that the Criminal Justice Act made marital rape illegal in the UK.

Though there’s a good deal of no-consequences RED driving decisions at the personal level – eg: the recent expenses scandals – at the strategic/policy level British political thinking tends to have been dominated post-1960s by the BLUE, ORANGE and, increasingly, GREEN vMEMES. Afghanistan is largely dominated by the PURPLE, RED and, to some extent, BLUE vMEMES. So it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect Afghans overall to share the same values as a modern Western democracy. On the Spiral their thinking overall, as a society, is just not where much of the West is…yet.

(Which is not to say there aren’t individuals and even sections of Afghan society with much more complex thinking, just as there many parts of Britain where PURPLE and RED dominate the thinking of local populations, rather than BLUE or ORANGE.)

Using the Lower Quadrants of 4Q/8L, therefore, we can see that, if there is to be balance - homeostasis – then the thinking of the people in terms of what is socially acceptable behaviour (Lower Left) – has to be reflected in the laws under which they are governed (Lower Right). Actually, when you think of the Personal Status Law in these terms, Karzai has matched a law specifically to the sub-culture concerned. How ever offensive GREEN-led Westerners might find this law, in terms of 4Q/8L, it may not be too bad a match.

As to males having exclusive guardianship of children, as any Social Anthropologist will tell you, pre-industrial societies in Africa and the East often have had ways of managing descent and parenting which seem at odds with modern Western values - yet these ways have worked successfully for their societies for generations.

When the Western media work themselves up into the kind of outraged frenzy they have over the past 48 hours, it does nothing for the causes of our troops and diplomats in Afghanistan. All it does is drive another wedge between the Afghan government and the West and convince the hardliners that we have no understanding or respect for their values.

Of course, the Personal Status Law should be reported on - as should the marches against it in Kabul in April by women protestors (and the rough treatment they received) - but in ways that seek to understand it in terms of their culture primarily, rather than ours. Otherwise, we operate from what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t.

Afghanistan has greater priorities – first things first!
In the grand scheme of things, allowing a smallish ethnic minority to conduct their marital relations in a way many Westerners consider offensive these days is proverbial ‘small beer’.

What is ‘big beer’ is defeating the Taliban militarily while sucking their less ardent supporters into more mainstream politics. Using the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, we need to draw the moderates into consensus, not drive them into the arms of the extremists by condemning their values.

Does that mean I would condone a woman being faced with having to give in to her husband’s demands or going without food? Does that mean I want women being controlled by men?

Not a bit of it! But I don’t have to share Ayatollah Asif Mohseni’s values to appreciate that they are what we have to work with for that group of people.

From Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) through the Graves Model (1971) to Spiral Dynamics (1996), the principle is clear: lower level needs and aspirations need to be met before people can move onto higher level needs and aspirations. First things first! PURPLE tribes need safety and security and good intra-tribal health which their leaders’ RED does not abuse to the point where trust in them becomes compromised. BLUE needs to really get into the machinery of the state to make it more efficient and less corrupt. BLUE also needs to dump the RED-BLUE zealots out of the mosques and make sure what is taught is focussed on those Pillars of Islam, such as Zakah (charity), which build up community cohesion.

Then ORANGE entrepreneurship can get on with wealth creation and the development of future-focused leaders, allowing GREEN to start to work its way through with the egalitarianism which will undermine male control of women and eventually outlaw marital rape.

Working through 4Q/8L’s Lower Quadrants, we need to make sure every level is developed healthily…organically. We can’t jump levels or apply incredible pressure and expect it all suddenly just to fall in place. Each level needs to be nurtured to its nodal peak and then encouraged to give way to the vMEME which is next.

Thanks to Don Beck’s MeshWORKS (1998) concept, it is possible to work with multiple vMEMES at once, thus making the process both faster and much more integrated. But close attention still needs to ensure that, as one vMEME’s health is developed, it supports the development of the health of the next vMEME above it on the Spiral.

Thus, from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, through gritted teeth, we can let Hamid Karzi introduce his ‘obnoxious law’ as a means to an end, knowing the respect it shows Shia traditions and values will help to minimise drift to the Taliban. And we know also that, eventually, GREEN will be strong enough in Afghanistan to dissemble that law.

But only if we work with the values those people have now – what is – rather what we think they should be. As John Berry undoubtedly would say, healthy cultural development is grown, not imposed. It’s a mistake the West has been making for 600 years – and it’s time we stopped!

Why we must win in Afghanistan

Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, government, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 11 Responses »

Jul 152009

The West simply cannot afford to lose its war in Afghanistan. As the soldiers’ bodies come home in ever-increasing numbers, pressure will inevitably grow for a withdrawal. Already an unpopular war in continental Europe, it will become increasingly difficult for the American and British governments to keep their resolve if media and public pressure focus on the costs in terms of lives and money and there is little sign of real progress.

Unfortunately military experts anticipate 2-3 years of hard combat and several more years of Western military presence if the South of the country is to be stabilised. But, if we don’t pay those costs, then the Taliban are likely to take over government again in Kabul. It is thought that, in spite of their apparent significant defeat in the Swat Valley, their eyes are set next on Islamabad and the prize of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Even if Pakistan doesn’t fall, Afghanistan will continue to flood the West with heroin (in spite of the Taliban officially being against opium production!) and it will almost certainly go back to being a training camp for al-Qaeda terrorists.

What do we need – another 9/11 or 7/7 – to remind us what British and American troops are fighting and dying for?

Part of the problem: the nature of the Taliban
When the Americans smashed the Taliban in 2001, they were perceived by many Afghans to be liberators. The Taliban’s 5 year regime had been brutal, repressive (particularly for women and non-Muslims) and economically disastrous.

What should have been the opportunity for the West to be seen as helping the Afghans rebuild their shattered country was fumbled when George W Bush decided to bring down Saddam Hussein. American energy went into first of all justifying an assault and then pursuing a war that turned into a bitter, costly and lengthy occupation. Not only did the reconstruction of Afghanistan go very much on the back burner; but increasingly the war in Iraq was seen as an anti-Muslim war in most Muslim countries – with the result that many young Muslims from relatively moderate backgrounds were radicalised. The mess in Iraq helped breathe new life into the Taliban who began to creep back in force while the Americans were too busy trying to prevent outright civil war in Iraq.

What also helped the Taliban come back was that the government structure the West helped set up and is now trying to sustain is demonstrably corrupt – arguably from Hamid Karzai down. It needs to be remembered that many officials, especially in local government, were once the bandit leaders of the Northern Alliance which the Americans used as their ground troops in 2001. Using the Northern Alliance that way certainly saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives but it also opened the door into legitimate government for those who were ruthless robbers and murderers. In Spiral Dynamics, terms the RED vMEME was given the opportunity to use BLUE structures for its own ends – so all but inevitably it lined its own pockets! In the South of the country locals say they prefer to use Taliban judges rather than their government counterparts because they are more honest.

In the South (and across the border in Pakistan) the Taliban are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the Pashtun people. The Pashtun tribes are a good home for the Taliban. For the most part, rural, poor and religious, the Pushtans have little in common with the urban elites of Kabul – looking to gain from the Westernisation of their country – or the other tribes from the North. The Pushtans are primarily dominated by PURPLE tribalism, undoubtedly led by leaders with strong RED while the mullahs peddle a RED-BLUE hardline form of Islamic zealotry. The BLUE-ORANGE-GREEN values the West wants to promote of respect for human rights, gender equality, religious moderation and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy simply don’t fit with the Taliban/Pushtan mindset. The values mismatch is huge.

When the Americans smashed the Taliban, they drove out what little BLUE culture there was in Afghanistan. As we know all too well, when BLUE goes, RED steps into the vacuum. No wonder Afghanistan is a violent and corrupt place! When the Taliban started to creep back, they offered some sense of order against the corruption and secularisation emanating from Kabul. If the Americans had hoped ORANGE-driven modernisation would take root in Kabul and spread from that centre, it was a clear lack of understanding that, for healthy ORANGE to grow, there needs to be foundation of strong, healthy BLUE. Although they were very different countries, the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Yugoslavia did not open the door to ORANGE’s MacDonaldisation strategies; instead the loss of that BLUE superstructure let loose RED gangsterism and PURPLE tribal enmities. If anyone in the White House or the Pentagon had thought it through, what has happened with the resurgence of the Taliban was, in fact, predictable.

The problem with the convergence of ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pushtan’ is that the Pushtans comprise around 40% of Afghanistan’s population and are the largest single ethnic group. That’s an awful lot of people to fight.

Part of the Problem: the West is confused
What do we want in Afghanistan – other than for our soldiers not to be killed and our much-needed money not to be haemorrhaging away? (It is estimated that the war will cost Britain £3.4 billion this year alone.) And once our objectives are clear, do we know what we have to do to achieve them?

Beyond ‘winning’ – presumably meaning breaking the Taliban for good? denying al-Qaeda the use of Afghanistan? – and getting out, it’s not entirely clear just what the objectives are. Certainly, as in Iraq, not enough thought has been given to the post-invasion reconstruction – and what thought has been given has been based on erroneous assumptions. Ie: that with a little money and a little effort, we can make them just like us – capitalist consumers. It’s a mistake the West has been making repeatedly ever since Walt Rostow (1960) came up with his 5-stage Modernisation Theory for saving the Third World from Communism.

What Spiral Dynamics shows us is that we have to work with where people are at – and, if the Pashtuns aren’t ready yet for gender equality, then we need to put that on the back burner until they’re ready to grow into it. Offending their values is just going to get them reaching for their AK47s.

Our objectives need to include helping develop an Afghanistan where the tribes can co-exist peacefully, where people can take pride in being Afghan, where there is respect for a universal and fairly-applied legal system. Gender equality and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy can come further down the line. What matters now is that people feel safe, have respect for themselves and others and there is confidence in the government and the law. And, of course, that law needs to be compatible with a form of Islam that emphasises charity, faith and order. Such an Afghanistan would be distinctly unappealing to the Taliban who feed on dissatisfaction.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg recognised some of this when he said NATO should not be over-ambitious “by trying to import overnight a Western-style democracy in a country that has never had a functional government” but instead should aim to stabilise Afghanistan “to provide a space for the state to grow.”

If we are clear on our objectives, then can we implement the strategies to achieve them?

Because it contributed significantly to the relative calming of Iraq, the concept of high visibility patrolling the streets with the overtly-stated aim of protecting the ordinary citizens from the insurgents (Taliban) is being tried now in Afghanistan. High visibility, of course, means easy target – and that’s one of the reasons the British casualties have increased. (Apart from the fact the troops claim to be significantly under-resourced – attributed by many commentators to be result of big cuts in defence spending. (A lack of big picture thinking in BLUE-ORANGE short-sighteness!)

Lord Paddy Ashdown, himself a former royal marine, thinks the protect-the-citizens strategy is an error – saying: “The army’s job in a war is to find and kill the enemy.”

Actually we need both strategies. Protectors of those who are reasonable and want to be safe and proud. Killers of those who are determined to kill us and cannot be reasoned with. But no more robot drones wiping out innocents at wedding parties! Thankfully, all of this – including avoiding civilian deaths – is endorsed by the new NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

We must find ways of removing the dissatisfaction that the Taliban feed off. Strong support in Afghanistan for an Islam that emphasises charity and justice for all. Rebuilding the physical infrastructure. Redeveloping the economy, including crops that are a viable alternative to opium poppies. Creating hope. Building a sense of national identity. Etc. Etc.

As part of building a national identity, we need to find ways to demerge ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pashtun’. As a people the Pashtuns have a proud and ancient heritage, their traditional Pashtunwali code of honour promoting self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness and tolerance. It’s a stain on that code that they allow the brutal and repressive ways of the Taliban to influence them to such an extent. Like many peoples in our troubled world, the Pashtuns need to rediscover themselves.

Some of what is needed in Afghanistan, I have mentioned above. But what is needed really is a full MeshWORK analysis, looking through 4Q/8L at the health of all the vMEMES in play and then deciding what needs to be done. Multiple strategies will need to be employed simultaneously so that nothing is missed. And, as much as possible, the decisions and actions need to be undertaken by Afghans – otherwise they are the work of an occupying force. And, if the decision-making isn’t ‘democratic’ but the Afghan way (tribal/feudal), then we westerners need to allow them to be that way.

Yes, it will be hellishly expensive – in both money and lives – but we are in a war and wars are costly. The sooner Britain and the United States – and Europe, for that matter – accept we are at war, the better. Plus, it is a war we have to win. But it is a war of hearts and minds as well as bullets and bombs.

‘Britishness’ at the Regent’s College Summit

community, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, regeneration, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics 27 Responses »

Jun 302009

Down in a basement meeting room of the Holiday Inn Oxford Circus…that’s where the Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) was born on the afternoon of Friday 26 July 2009. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck, Jon Freeman (author of ‘God’s Ecology and the Dawkins Challenge’), Rachel Castagne, Lynne Sedgemore CBE, Ian MacDonald of the Integral Centre, the veteran activist and author Rosemary Wilkie and myself harmonising an intent – creating a spirit, if you will. That intent is to build MeshWORK alliances to design natural solutions to local problems in the context of a globalised world.

The next 2 days, Saturday 27th – Sunday 28th, saw CHE-UK host its first event, ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ at Regent’s College. Don, Rachel and Jon led the event and old HemsMESH colleague Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke flew in from Switzerland to lend his talents to a task-and-feedback session on the Sunday. About 50 people joined us to get a feel for what the real issues are confronting the UK and what we might do about them.

The general consensus was that in the UK a lot of the positive influence of the BLUE vMEME has been diminished by the emergence of GREEN (a not-uncommon pattern in much of North America and Western Europe). This weakening of BLUE has had a number of negative effects – ones especially noted were:-

the lack of discipline in our culture, particularly amongst young people – resulting in RED excesses such as binge drinking and violent rowdiness on our city centre streets at weekends
the collapse of effective regulation in our financial markets, resulting in toxic ORANGE taking the kind of foolish gambles on debt and investment which have brought the banking systems to their knees
the RED, thoughtless greed of many politicians milking the expenses system to and beyond its limits – with some clearly having committed fraud

The ‘expenses scandal’, it was generally agreed, served as the tipping point for so much anger amongst the general population that has been building up, suppressed and simmering, for so long. The occupants of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, the cradle of modern Democracy, are now perceived far and wide to be ‘on the take’ just like the officials of those corrupt regimes our government used to be so fond of criticising. That only about a third of MPs have been exposed in this way and the actual sums involved are piddling in the grand scheme of things – eg: National Debt estimated at £1.3 trillion!! – are beside the point. As a kingdom, we are humiliated and in one hell of a mess.

As Lynne commented, people are now genuinely outraged.

A deeper malaise?
There was a recognition that there was a lot of variation in just how far the recession was affecting people in different parts of the country. Ali Gibson made the point that in leafy Buckinghamshire £200-£300 on a new handbag was still a ‘normal’ purchase while in a neighbouring health authority hospital waiting times were way below national targets due in part at least to lack of funding.

As a northerner I was keen to stress the ‘disappearance’ of much the traditional male working classes in the north of England, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands and the effect on the health of PURPLE and RED that was having in their communities. For many in those classes, the recession began in the 1980s and has continued more or less since. (See my previous Blog, ‘The Thatcherite Era is ended. Whither Britain?’, for more on that.)

But, interestingly, in our discussion groups the sense of an even deeper malaise began to emerge as we talked about what it mean to be British…the nature of the British identity. The source of that malaise, it was felt, was the loss of Empire. Britain through the16th-19th Centuries was an invader and a conqueror. With our Empire eventually stretching over a third of the habitable globe, much of the world’s story in that time was our story. There was belief in ourselves and the religions we espoused – all those Christian missionaries! – which fed a stream of great innovations, from the road building of Thomas Telford to George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the medical breakthroughs of Joseph Lister and Edward Jenner to the astounding engineering feats of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A sense of: “We are British. We can do.”

As a trained historian very aware of the horrors of colonialism – knowing that many of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are rooted in the European boundaries which cut right through tribal territories and made artificial nations of unwilling tribal slices mixed with unwilling tribal slices – I found the thought that there could be any good in ‘Empire’ initially quite a challenge to my GREEN.

However, as Don pointed out, the rights and wrongs of what the colonialists did, in the context of our current discussion, were only relevant in that GREEN was still castigating us for the evils done. The question, then, is: does this castigation actually obscure the damage to our RED pride and BLUE nationalism by the loss of Empire…?

Add to that the fact that the once-mighty conquerors are increasingly looked upon as a liability by our military allies. Our army, having relied on American air support in Helmund province and still being unable to suppress the Taliban, American troops are now flooding in to do the job we can’t.

Discussion then raised the issue that, as an island nation, not invaded since 1066, do the recent waves of immigration constitute an invasion of sorts? Thus, the mighty invaders and creators of ‘Empire’ are now themselves diminished and invaded. For me, this was all a series of challenges that became ‘ah-ha moments’. I had previously tended to see racism and ethnic hatred as simply PURPLE’s rejection of those ‘not our tribe’ – especially when security (jobs) are threatened. But, for the British at least, is there also an element of invasion and loss of national pride involved?

What made these discussions particularly astonishing were that there were people in the room from the former Empire – Asians, West Indians, etc – whose grandparents and great-grandparents would have been subjects of British rule and its many indignities. But nobody got upset. Nobody got overly-emotional. Nobody wanted to decry the Empire and rake over the ‘evil coals’. Everybody was completely focussed on the collective character of the British psyche, where it was now and why and what needed to be done to lead that British character to a new place.

These were truly 2nd Tier discussions that transcended personality and history. Truly, truly astonishing!

Of course, not everyone there was well-versed in Spiral Dynamics. But a couple of brief-but-potent presentations from Don gave everyone enough of a flavour to contribute to the discussions. Another pleasure of the weekend for me was seeing so many people get turned on to the power of the Spiral Dynamics model to explain human motivation.

Hope from the mess
In discussing the nature of the British character, we also identified many positives. We are and remain:-

Leaders in many, many ways
Great innovators
Quirky and eccentric – often precursors to innovation
Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threat – eg: the ‘Blitz Spirit’ being rediscovered in the aftermath of the 2005 terrorist bombs in London. (See Dave Lowe’s comment on the Blog ‘Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber’) Under pressure, the identity of the tribe expands to include all on our side.
Humour-full – we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

These exercises gave us the sense that there is still much Britain has to give the world; but, to do that, we have to sort out our current problems and believe in ourselves again. As Rosemary put it: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”

We need strong RED proud in the BLUE frame of responsibly ’doing your duty’ as just the start of creating that new story.

But our new story has no place for the prejudices, discriminations and abuses that have sometimes sullied our past. One of the most interesting tales of the weekend was one with which Rachel effectively closed the summit. She had been to a folk festival recently. One of the performers, the traditional singing legend June Tabor, had asked the audience what it meant to be English. After some repartee and banter, Tabor answered her own question: “If you love this land, then you’re English.”

Of course, there is no single homogenous English identity. And there certainly isn’t a British one – just ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish! But there is a sense of being English…and there is a sense of being British, whichever of our 4 constituent countries you come from. And, using Tabor’s definition, if you’ve just arrived in this kingdom for the first time but you love this land, then you’re one of us.

At the end of the 2 days, we hadn’t come up with magic solutions. We didn’t have an agenda to present to Government. Those things will come in time; but we had made a start on serious work.

And there were a lot more of us at 5 PM Sunday than there were at 5 PM Friday. Welcome. Juliana. Welcome, Denise. Welcome, James. Welcome, Jon (Twigge). Welcome, Willa. Welcome, Ali. Welcome, Faheed. Welcome, Richard. Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome, Carragh. Welcome, Dave. Welcome, Julian. Welcome, Laura. Welcome, Eileen. Welcome, Shaun. And so on…and so on…and so on…and so on…..

There will be 4 more summits to follow on from this weekend and then there is the EuroConfab at Gatwick 23-25 October – the first time the Confab has been held in the UK. If you’ve a mind to understand and a heart that loves this land, then please join us!

[For a more formal description of the founding of CHE-UK, see: ‘From Rule Britannia to Cool Britannia to Integral Britannia’.]

Obama a 2nd Tier thinker?

American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism 2 Responses »

Feb 252009

Since shortly before his election last November, I’ve seen a number of articles putting forward the view that Barack Ombama is an advanced thinker. I’ve even seen it proposed by some on the Spiral Dynamics e-lists that he is a ‘2nd Tier thinker’. Even that the TUQUOISE vMEME is activated in his head.

Alongside the jubilation in many parts of the world at his election was the expectation that now things would be different – things would change. Obama would make America better and that would help make the world better. I doubt there has been so much excitement and so much expectation of an American president since John F Kennedy. The anticipation has been of almost of messianic proportions!

And Obama got off to a great liberal electorate-pleasing start. On his second day in office, he signed the order which will effectively close Guantánamo Bay. From there, he went on to do another electorate pleaser – by blocking the bonuses of many of the ‘fat cat’ bankers whose greed has all but brought Capitalism to its knees.

And now he’s stumbled. Badly.

Last Friday’s decision to stand by the position of George W Bush’s administration that the so-called ‘enemy combatants’ held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase have no legal right to challenge their detention is astonishing – especially since the decision was made public on the day Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made it clear she would raise human rights violations with the Chinese government on her visit there.

How can the United States castigate China on the issue of human rights when it is plainly denying them to its own detainees?

Last Summer the US Supreme Court gave al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects held at Guantánamo the right to challenge their detention there. On the back of that, the relatives of 4 Afghan citizens held at Bagram petitioned the Washington DC District Court that the US military was holding them without charge and repeatedly interrogating them without any means for them to contact an attorney. The Bush White House supported the military’s response that the detainees were ‘enemy combatants’ whose status is reviewed every 6 months, taking into account classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.

When Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it would stand by Bush’s argument. In a 2-sentence filing last week the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airbase cannot use US courts to challenge their detention. Effectively Obama’s White House has said the detainees have no constitutional rights.

Or, as Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, put it: “They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law.”

The risk of dissipating goodwill

I’ve actually no idea whether Obama thinks in TURQUOISE. Since politicians in elections usually talk bollocks in their efforts to get elected, I’ve not paid Obama’s words that much attention prior to him taking office – preferring to see what he actually does once his hands are on the levers of power.

And this is a myopic blunder of enormous proportions that might seriously derail Obama’s train before it’s even got fully out of the station, crashing Obama’s reputation with it.

Human rights attorney Tina Monshipour Foster summed up the disappointment: “The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped. We all expected better.”

And what message will the Bagram decision have on the millions of people in other countries who’d hoped for a new America that really would be the good guy it claimed to be, rather than the dangerous, overbearing bully it had become during Bush’s second term?

Obama’s election generated an enormous amount of goodwill right around the world, particularly from Muslim moderates and liberals trying to restrain their anti-American radicals. How easily could that goodwill be dissipated if Obama is perceived to have the same contempt for Asian and Arab lives that Bush had?

The fact that Obama is black/mixed race will actually work against him if he sanctions actions which are perceived to be racist. He will be the ‘Uncle Tom’ who sold out to the ‘Crusaders’.

If Obama does think in the 2nd Tier, then there will be a healthy dose of pragmatism to balance out his idealism. 2nd Tier thinking would have no hesitation in sacrificing a few for the good of the many. There may be tears in its eyes and a heavy sigh of the heart but it would do what needed to be done. The CIA and the military may well have presented evidence to Obama to convince him that they can’t just let very dangerous men walk free out of Bagram.

But keeping them outside of any recognised judicial system in a place associated with torture and other human rights abuses under the Bush administration is not the answer.

Guantánamo was a public relations disaster for the Americans. How many more recruits al-Qaeda picked up as the memetic allegations of mistreatment and torture (often evidenced) spread around the world time and time again will probably never be known – but after 8 years of the Americans’ concerted action against it, there seems to be no shortage of passionate and embittered young men (and women) all too ready to die if they can kill Americans (and Western Europeans) doing so. As for wiping the Taliban out of Afghanistan, they are now acknowledged by military experts to be stronger than at any time since the invasion at the end of 2001.

The fact that the Americans could only muster enough evidence to convict 3 Guantánamo detainees in any kind of recognisable legal process while the Pentagon today announced that 1 in 10 of the detainees freed so far has been involved in anti-American/terrorist activity certainly shows the failure of the detention process at Guantánamo. The Pentagon has tried to present the 1 in 10 figure as recidivist – ie: they were going back to what they did before. An alternative interpretation was offered on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands: some of those 1 in 10 will not have been previously involved in terrorist activities – if the Americans had proof, then why weren’t they put on trial? But they will have been so radicalised by their treatment at Guantánamo that they have since turned to terrorism. Of course, strongly suspecting something and offering a degree of proof acceptable in a court of law are not the same thing – but Sands’ argument seems equally, if not more, valid to me than the Pentagon’s.

With Guantánamo closing, more and more attention is likely to be turned to Bagram which already has an extremely toxic reputation. By supporting Bush’s policy on the Bagram detainees, Obama really does risk being tainted with its poison.

Speaking to vMEMES

There are ways of presenting messages which can speak to multiple vMEMES. Just think of Hilary Clinton’s statements about her talks with the Chinese. Yes, she was most definitely going to raise human rights violations with the Chinese – thus, appeasing GREEN to some extent – but that was not going to get in the way of the United States and China focusing on bettering trading relations between the two economic giants – thus, pleasing BLUE in its need to manage systems – as one strategy in turning the global economy back on the right path – thus, stimulating ORANGE’s striving to achieve targets. Plus, there is a promise of a trickle-down of greater financial security for PURPLE’S safety needs. Clinton – not usually someone to whom 2nd Tier thinking is ascribed – actually pulled of a good balancing act, hitting a number of buttons quite effectively.

Last Friday Obama – who, in his methodology, had seemed such a unique and effective communicator in the election campaign – looked a dullard by comparison.

For all I know Obama does have TURQUOISE in his vMEME stack. He may turn out to be a great American president – perhaps he will become as inspirational a statesman as Nelson Mandela. But he needs to consider how his actions are perceived.

It is one thing to know what to do in the interests of your own people. It is another to consider how your actions may be perceived by other peoples and what effect that perception may have on those peoples’ attitudes towards your people.

Obama’s blunder puts me in mind of the blunders of another man to whom TURQUOISE thinking has been attributed at times: Prince Charles. The man is a true visionary – a would-be philosopher of sorts – who has made a positive difference in the lives of thousands upon thousands through the work of the Prince’s Trust and been involved in developing models of sustainable farming and rural life. Yet he has alienated politicians he could have influenced, with his nagging letters and is caricatured in the media as an eccentric who talks to plants and maltreated his first wife. The phrase “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly use” would be unkind but his seeming inability to get the right messages out to the right vMEMES has significantly undermined what he could have achieved.

Obama needs to recalibrate and recognise his need to speak to multiple vMEMES. He also needs to recognise his blunder and find a way back from it before he replaces Bush as the best recruiter al-Qaeda ever had.

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