Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

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
 

Frank Wuterich arriving at court. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

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.

Northern Ireland…quiet for now?

 community, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jun 282011
 

It all seems to have quietened down again but the explosion of sectarian violence in east Belfast last week was truly shocking - both that it happened at all and the scale of it. Petrol bombs and pipe bombs are deadly enough but when guns are used…as local MP Naomi Long told the BBC: “When you have guns back on streets, it is very clear that the intent here is to take life. There is no other reason why people would bring a gun onto the street…”

The violence must be deeply disturbing for the majority of people in Northern Ireland who will dread a return to ‘The Troubles’. And it will be truly alarming for many politicians, economists and business people who thought, 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, that the peace process was too deeply embedded in Northern Ireland culture for the province to regress back to open and large-scale sectarian violence.

But how ever shocked, disturbed and alarmed we may be, we should not be surprised. Nor should we be lulled into a false sense of security by the news that east Belfast has been mostly (though not completely) quiet since last Monday (20th) and Tuesday (21 June). There were plenty of young men from both sides of the divide on the streets Wednesday night (22nd) but community stewards were proactive in discouraging them from further violence.

The underlying problem is that relatively little has been done in those 13 years since Good Friday to address the deep-rooted tribalism which underpins the sectarian divisions and has its foundations in history.

The large-scale settling of the northern 6 counties (Ulster) by Scottish Presbyterians in the 17th Century inevitably led to the further disadvantaging of the (mainly Catholic) indigenous Irish, already subjected to stern (and often brutal) rule by their English colonial masters following the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690). It also led to a sense of 2 large tribes, marked out by different religions and different racial/national characteristics, in competition for the same territory. That tribal competition has gone on now for over 4 centuries, sometimes in open conflict, sometimes in festering tension. The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, for the indigenous Irish, made getting rid of the Scottish (now British) invaders synonymous with getting rid of their English (now British) rulers.

The history of Nationalist/Catholic-Unionist/Protestant conflict in Ireland is, of course, much more complex than portrayed in this paragraph; but, nonetheless, it does set out the core issue: there are 2 large-scale tribes competing for the same territory. There is a distinct timeline from 1707 to Good Friday, with such punctuations as the Fenians, the Irish Republican Army and the Provisionals on one side and the various Unionist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force on the other.

Until the issue of tribalism is dealt with, the peace in Northern  Ireland will always have the kind of fragility that the violence last week  exposed so unequivocally.

Failing to deal with tribalism – sophisticated politics and populism
Time and time again tribalism has caught sophisticated political rulers out, often resulting in barbaric tribal warfare. In recent times, just for starters, we’ve seen the tribal genocide of Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, Yugoslavia torn apart by a level of barbarity and ethnic cleansing not seen in Europe since Adolph Hitler’s storm troopers marched East, the former Soviet Union wracked by various tribal rivalries that frequently resulted in large-scale bloodshed - see ‘Tribal Warfare in South Ossetia’ as an example – and the Americans’ decidedly-vague post-invasion plans for Iraq shredded (in part at least) by Sunni-Shia internecine warfare . On a smaller scale, Spain has similar problems with the Basques that the UK has had with the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Tribalism is all around us. As Desmond Morris (1981) pointed out, it’s in the chants on the football terraces when the teams play and in the streets around the football grounds when the rival groups of fans clash. We also see tribalism in the not-always playful rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire, deriving its ethos from the Wars of the Roses over 600 years ago. When I lived in Hull, triabalism manifested itself in the divisions between East and West Hull and on the huge, sprawling Bransholme estate on the northern edges of the city, where the North Bransholme, South Bransholme and Kingswood tribes each guard their territory from the others. Even in my current hometown of Harrogate, one of the most wealthy and affluent middle-class towns in the north of England tribalism is unavoidable - with gangs of kids from the secondary school tribes arranging mass fights on the Stray (the lawned common land that runs around the edges of the town centre), one school versus another.

It may even be demonstrated soon, via Alex Salmond’s plans for a referendum, that a majority of Scots want their tribal independence from England!

One of the most socially-unacceptable forms of tribalism in a modern Democracy is racism but tribalism is at the centre of the formation of every in-group and the demonisation of every out-group.

Tribalism is driven by the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging. For this vMEME, knowing who you belong to and differentiating your group from groups you don’t belong to is critical and totally normal – which raises the ugly question: Is racism natural…?

Abraham Maslow (1943) established the need to affiliate as coming before the need for self-esteem and this fits with Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory - see Prejudice & Discrimination – which proposes that it is our investment of our self-esteem in our in-group which leads us to compare our group with others and to seek to dominate or drive out other groups. Muzafer Sherif et al’s (1954/1961) Robber’s Cave Experiment is just one of a number of studies which shows how competition over resources (such as land, food supply, weapons, etc) can amplify the In-group/Out-group Effect. The formation of strategy to dominate or drive out the other groups requires both leadership and management - thus, the need for the RED.vMEME to take assertive, or even aggressive, action to ensure the investment of individual self-esteem is protected through the success of the group.

Leaders need to be strong to impose their vision on the group and they must be seen to be at least protecting and preferably advancing the interests of their group. If the leaders are on the Psychoticist side in their temperament, then this RED-Psychoticist centre of gravity is likely to be ruthless and cruel in their treatment of the out-group. It’s perhaps no coincidence that some of the greatest wartime leaders have been utterly ruthless in their treatment of the enemy. Hitler’s war crimes speak for themselves but Winston Churchill connived all too willingly in the firestorm bombing of Dresden while US President Harry Truman not only sanctioned the atomic bombs being dropped in on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in 1948 advocated nuking the Russians. Even Barrack Obama made sure he was photographed in the White House operations room earlier this year, watching live the execution of Osama Bin Laden from a soldier’s helmet cam.

Thus, the nature and vision of the leader are critical to how and in what direction tribalism is exploited.

So why then, if tribalism is such a fact of life and leaders need to be strong and biased in the interests of the tribe, do tribal divides catch the political leaders out so often?

The answer lies in the fact that much of the political and philosophical elite in countries think in the higher, more complex and more sophisticated 1st Tier vMEMES most of their time in public office. BLUE (do the right thing), ORANGE (individual material progress) and GREEN (egalitarianism) either despise PURPLE and RED thinking as retrogressive or simply don’t understand it. No wonder commentators frequently record that ordinary voters feel disconnected from leading politicians and the political process. The more populist politicians are often despised by their more sophisticated political colleagues…but, in fact, the populist politicians are actually better able to understand the (PURPLE/RED) concerns of the ‘common man’. Accordingly, it is usually a more populist politician who is to be found leading and/or exploiting tribal aggression. Recall Slobodan Milošević’s rousing speeches to Serbian farmers in Kossovo in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the perfect example of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism to build up his own power base.

Tribalism is alive and thriving in Northern Ireland
The ongoing problem of tribalism in Northern Ireland is recognised by some social and political commentators. For example, The Workers Party (2005) stated: “The people of Northern Ireland are now more deeply divided than ever. Sectarian antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants are as intense as ever. Recent studies show that sectarian attitudes and practices are present even among children as young as 5 or 6 years. This is at the root of the current political instability….”

A couple of years ago Johann Hari (2009) wrote in his blog: “The Good Friday Process has - from the beginning - been focused on the small elite of politicians at the top. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness have been sitting together – inspirationally - but in the streets and estates beyond Stormont, Northern Ireland has been becoming even more divided. Dr Peter Shirlow, of the University of Ulster, has conducted the most detailed survey of inter-communal relations in Northern Ireland – and found an almost completely segregated society. Only 5% of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68% of 18 to 25-year-olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from ‘the other side’. The young are more likely to fear and hate the ‘Prods’ or ‘Taigs’ than any other group. We have been fixing the ceiling, while the foundations fracture.

You can see this when you visit Belfast or Derry. To a British person, they feel like any familiar CloneZone town - except they are layered with a strange hatred you cannot grasp. Taxis will either take you to green or orange areas - never both. Even the KFC is covered with a mural memorialising a centuries-old battle. The cities are sliced by vast 40ft tall steel walls, keeping Catholics and Protestants apart. And there are more of them now than ever before. Talk to the kids, and they will gleefully tell you the other side stink, or are stupid, or lazy. We are currently spending £1.5bn a year keeping the two sides physically apart.”

In this Sunday’s Observer, writing about the violent flare-up in east Belfast, Sean O’Hagan added in another factor: “Like their Republican counterparts in towns like Lurgan, where support for the Real IRA is strong, the youth of Protestant east Belfast feel that they have somehow been sold out by the mainstream parties that claim to represent them. They are economically disenfranchised, have little hope of ever finding meaningful employment and, in many instances, live in communities in which they have been brought up to hate the police and distrust their tribal opposites.”

O’Hagan neatly links the tribalist traditions to the economic disenfranchisement: “For most of the time, save for these sporadic outbursts of violence, they are also bored. For many young people in these areas, the worst years of the Troubles have been mythologised to the point where many feel they have missed out on the one thing that gives their lives any real meaning: the chance to fight for a cause they believe in. They provide fertile fodder for extremists.”

Again the hopelessness of these young men’s economic circumstances destabilises PURPLE’s drive to attain safety in belonging, You can hardly feel ‘safe’ in your community when the community is blighted by poverty, unemployment and despair. And, when PURPLE is destabilised in this way, unhealthy RED will rise up to fight the perceived threat. If the populist leaders then threw in a bit of ‘duty’ and ‘cause’ to feed justification to whatever nascent BLUE might on the vMEMETIC horizon of their audiences then the followers transform into that most dangerous of men: the RED/BLUE zealot….

How then to deal with the 2 factors: tribalism; and the populist leaders who exploit that tribalism?

We could, of course, ‘take out’– jail, assassinate – the leaders and that can certainly have a powerful short-term effect. It is rumoured that one of the reasons the Provisional IRA started serious negotiatons with the British Government in the early 1990s was the degree of success the British Army and secret services had had in taking out high level Provo leaders.

But the tribalism will still be there for the RED vMEME of some other would-be leaders to exploit. In fact, positively-oriented RED leadership – RED in a vMEME harmonic perhaps with ORANGE or above – can have a profoundly-beneficial effect for the community. It’s said that Northern Ireland first minister (unionist) Peter Robinson got directly involved in the negotiations with east Belfast community leaders after last Tuesday’s violence. Certainly the RED of the ‘community stewards’, who calmed the would-be rioters on the Wednesday evening in what were quite dangerous circumstances, must have been very strong!

But, if unhealthy, exploitative RED can be a real problem in situations such as east Belfast, it can only exploit what is already there or has the very real potential to be there.

PURPLE tribalism is the deeper issue.

Dealing with tribalism, honouring tribalism
From one point of view – the GREEN vMEME’s point of view – tribalism is wrong because it discriminates against those who are ‘not of our tribe’ and does not treat everyone as equal.

You can see this viewpoint underpinning The Workers Party paradigm when they
write: “There is a need to create a new political space which is neither Unionist nor Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic. This should be the political priority…for all those concerned with the future of Northern Ireland.”

The problem with this theoretical foundation is that, when the PURPLE vMEME is dominant in the culture, then tribalism is natural. People who think they can eradicate tribalism are deluded. It’s a natural consequence of a certain pattern of psychological development.

Repeated, peaceful exposure to those of another culture certainly has been shown to reduce stereotyping and, consequently discrimination – and this is a principle reason why Hari advocates developing a programme of integrated schools in Northern Ireland. He writes: “A major 6-year study by Queen’s University, Belfast, has looked at the long-term consequences of being schooled alongside ‘The Enemy’. They interviewed adults who attended these schools – and found that, whatever their parents’ attitudes, they were ‘significantly more likely’ to oppose sectarianism. They had more friends across the divide, and they identified as ‘Northern Irish’, rather than ‘British’ or ‘Irish’. Their politics were far more amenable to peace: Some 80% of Protestants favour the union with Britain, but only 65% of those at integrated schools do. Some 51% of Catholics who went to a segregated school want unification with Ireland, but only 35% of those from integrated schools do. The middle ground - for a devolved Northern Ireland with links to both countries, within the EU - was fatter and happier.”

Hari’s evidence most definitely shows a reduction in sectarian attitudes – but the bigots are still in the majority. Integrated schools will only provide a partial solution – and that solution is fragile and likely to crumble if placed upon sufficient pressure. (They had integrated schools in Bosnia and Chechnya!)

Rather, what is needed is a recognition of the tribes and that tribalism can be healthy. An honouring of these things, if you will. After all, to feel safe in your community, proud of it and your identification with it can only be beneficial, both for the individual and the group. That element of tribalism, surely, is healthy! What is needed, though, is the means to minimise inter-group strife which, Tajfel & Turner tell us, is a natural output of Social Identification.

Ways to do this might include:-

  • Facing the tribes with daunting challenges that they can only overcome by co-operation. This was how Sherif et al resolved the Robber’s Cave tribal conflicts. This concept is at the heart of Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993) Common In-Group Identity Model.
  • Creating common umbrella identities into which the tribal identities can fit - eg: English and Scots are both British identities. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) failed to reproduce Sherif et al’s inter-team conflicts with different boy scout groups because the different groups not only saw themselves as sharing the common super-identity of ‘scout’ but they also bought into scouting values. Tyerman & Spencer even found it relatively easy to increase co-operation between the different scout groups!
  • Facilitating the tribes learning from one another – so that they can see value in the ‘others’ and what they do. An example of this in Northern Ireland could be inter-community forums where solutions that one tribal group found to a problem such as getting the local council to spend money on maintaining children’s playgrounds are shared with other groups.

Preferably such strategies should be played out together as they can be mutually reinforcing.

With any attempt to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism, there needs to be the understanding that, once there is healthy, co-operative tribalism and a reduction in sectarianism, the struggle to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism is not over. As they learned in the former Yugoslavia, after more than 40 years of Marshall Tito’s particular version of totalitarian Communism – as we in the UK are learning in the Scottish independence debate - tribalism may be subsumed into a larger identity…but it doesn’t go away.

Therefore, there needs to be constant monitoring of the state of the tribalism and periodic adjustment to the strategies needed to keep the tribes co-operating rather than warring.

Well, are the Arabs ready for Democracy?

 Afghanistan, Africa, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international relations, meta-programmes, Middle East, morality, NLP, politics, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

On 22 February David Cameron, in an address to the Kuwaiti parliament, hit out at suggestions the Middle East “can’t do democracy”, saying: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism.”

Even at the time it was blatantly clear that such statements were part of his and French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to approve military action against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi viciously and bloodily repressing pro-Democracy rebels across Libya.

A little over 6 weeks later, as NATO tries not to apologise for bombing the hell out of the first armoured column the hard-pressed Libyan rebels have been able to assemble in what is now a de facto civil war…as revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt wonder what on earth to do next now they’ve gotten rid of their dictators…and Syrian security forces exterminate yet more pro-Democracy protestors on the streets of Deraa, I’d argue it could be construed as racist not to ask the question: “Can the Arabs do Democracy?” After all, thousands of Arabs have died over the past 3 months in the name of Democracy. If we’re not to devalue their lives, we have to ask whether their sacrifice for their cause is justified. We’d certainly ask it if thousands of demonstrators were being killed systematically by the police in cities across Europe!

So, are Arab peoples significantly different in their genetic make-up from the Europeans and North Americans who do do Democracy? Certainly, from the huge amounts of evidence analysed by the likes of Elliott Sober (2000) in the past 20 years, it would appear not. In which case, if there is a difference in the potential for Democracy, it has to lie primarily in cultural factors.

It’s interesting that it’s generally accepted that, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Arabs not only kept Hellenic science alive in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and Philosophy but added to many of the ancient Greeks’ works. It’s even of note that some attribute the first flourishings of European science coming from the Moorish invaders of Spain bringing Arabic science to the continent. From there the European Renaisssance developed and eventually the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Meanwhile, Arabic science – and, with it, Arabic culture largely fossilised. This digression into the development of science is important because, while the link between cultural and scientific development is extremely ‘rough and ready’, there does indeed seem to be an unexplored correlation. Many commentators – eg: Norman Tebbitt in his August 2005 remarks on the 7/7 bombings – attribute the fossilisation of Arabic science and culture in the late Middle Ages to the increasing stranglehold of Islam on Arabic thought. Others attribute it to the political systems in place. Yet others attribute it to the cumulative effect of a plethora of small things such as the Arabic failure to adopt a patenting system as the Europeans did which made science potentially profitable for its exponents.

Whatever, over an 800-year period – arguably starting with the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – the Europeans made a slow and tortuous progress to modern Democracy while the Arabs changed little other than for some of their national borders to be imposed upon them (eg: Iraq, Libya) and to accept some of the benefits of Western science and engineering (medicine, transport infrastructure, etc) during the ‘days of empire’.

In terms of political systems, very little has changed. Some countries like Saudi Arabia still have absolute monarchies while others – eg: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – had their kings replaced with autocratic dictators who were either military leaders or sponsored by the military.

These are, of course, generalisations – Lebanon, for example, stands out as different in many ways – but the post-colonial history of that country is far from being that of a stable, democratic, unified nation.

In terms of cultural vMEMES, Europe could be generalised in the late Middle Ages as being dominated by RED-thinking despots with a power hierarchy of lords and nobles, with the Roman Catholic Church providing some semblance of BLUE structure and PURPLE clan networks largely suppressed and/or dying out in terms of influence. Now Western Europe (and North America) can be generalised as largely dominated by BLUE political structures (democratic systems) exploited by ORANGE-driven political achievers and business corporates – with some sheen of GREEN influencing moral thinking in social matters, particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

In contrast the Arab nations have largely remained ruled by RED despots, with Islam providing a BLUE veneer of conscience and duty. The PURPLE clan (tribal) networks still flourish in many of the Arabic countries but have been quite suppressed in others – eg: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The army generals in these countries function in a similar way to the Mediaeval European king’s lords.

So where have these intense campaigns for Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa come from and what does Democracy really mean to the protestors?

Complex ideas for simpler worldviews…?
I’ll never forget, in late 2000, during the HemsMESH project, hearing Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck talk about irresponsible, profit-oriented ORANGE beaming television images of high value/high status items into homes where the thinking was largely in PURPLE and RED. The danger in this, as Beck saw it, was that RED would drive many of those people to do anything to get those items. As they lacked BLUE disciplines and ORANGE planning and RED has no concept of time other than NOW, some of those people would deal drugs, commit burglaries, extort others and prostitute themselves to get what they saw as necessary for the ‘good life’ – Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ criminalised. Those whose thinking was more dominated by PURPLE would most likely feel more alienated than ever from the ‘others’ – those who have the ‘good life’ – effectively Bauman’s ‘repressed’.

Beck was talking about the residents of the South-East Wakefield former mining villages where, until the mines closed, life for a couple of centuries had been little more complicated than going to school to get the basics of reading and writing until you were old enough to go down the pit (males) or get married, have children and look after the household (females). Until the mines closed, their ‘life conditions’ didn’t require thinking more complex than PURPLE and RED. Then, in less than a generation the mines were gone and incomes severely reduced while ORANGE consumerism tempted them endlessly with the ‘good life’ they simply couldn’t have legally without a substantial upgrade in thinking.

Beck’s concerns can be applied in large measure to the peoples in the Arab states whose life conditions, for perhaps centuries, have required little beyond PURPLE and RED. Where more complex thinking has emerged, it has tended be isolated to the universities or repressed or both. It’s no accident that it’s largely been imported workers from the West (management and technology) and places like the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent (more manual labour) who have got the wealth-producing oil out of the ground in those Arab states which have the ‘black gold’.

But especially with the advent of the internet and more especially with the development of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc), the Arab peoples have been exposed to complex concepts previously rarely experienced by the average Arab in downtown Benghazi or the backstreets of Deraa. Like the former coalminers of South East Wakefield, many Arabs are being exposed to ideas with which they do not yet have the mental and cultural sophistication to fully understand and assimilate.

The result has been the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – an angry outpouring of long-suppressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regimes which have ruled them largely through the shadowy terrors of a police state. They are driven by a RED contagion that flies in the face of the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the baton charges and all too frequently live ammunition. In spite of the appalling injuries and sometimes death inflicted upon their fellow-protestors right by their side, they come back time and time again, more and more determined to get rid of their autocratic rulers.

Apart from the sheer level of violence inflicted by the state upon the protestors - most obviously in Libya but Syria, Bahrain and the Yemen have also seen levels of violence by the state that are totally unacceptable to most North Americans and Western Europeans – there is a problem in understanding what the protestors want and how they might get it. They certainly know what they don’t want – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, etc – as if a collective move-away-from meta-programme was running their heads…. But do they know what they want beyond some ephemeral idea of ‘Democracy’…?

This is where there seems to be a clear lack of charismatic, ‘big-vision’ leadership. There are no Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas - not even a Gerry Adams! – to articulate what the new Tunisia or the new Egypt might look like…what model of Democracy they might actually try to implement. So far the Arab Spring revolutions seem to be composed genuinely of the ‘little people’ who had simply had enough of the ‘bad guys’ terrorising and exploiting them and got some ideas of what to do about it from the internet.

So the problem of the lack of leadership also leads to what might be termed a ‘vision vacuum’.

History shows that, where there is chaos and a lack of leadership and vision vacuum, then the vacuum can be filled very easily by those who offer quite an unsavoury vision as long as it is a vision that offers hope and order from the chaos and is accompanied by strong leadership. Just think of what Adolph Hitler offered bankrupt and depressed Germany in the 1930s. Just think of what the Taliban offered ravaged Afghanistan after the failed governments that followed the Russian invasion and withdrawal.

Fortunately – so far, at least! – the Arab Spring seems to be running a move-away-from fundamentalist Islam meta-programme. But how long can the vision vacuums last before people became desperate for strong leadership and someone or something to give them vision?

The West is right to be concerned that al-Qaeda or their ilk could take advantage of the vision vacuums.

How Democracy works
Using 4Q/8L it’s possible to take a sociopsychological analysis of the way Western Democracy works.

Firstly the structure (Lower Right) is largely BLUE in that the political systems are tightly controlled, very bureaucratic and centred on the principle of one (free adult) person/one (secret) vote. The cultures of the Lower Left are all over the Spiral’s 1st Tier but the vast majority of the population’s thinking is in the PURPLE, RED and BLUE zones. There isn’t that sizeable a proportion of the population thinking in vMEMES beyond BLUE. (In 1983 Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg et al found only marginal evidence – around 5% of his samples – of thinking at Stage 5 – the equivalent of ORANGE – in his Stages of Moral Development.) Thus, the ORANGE thinking of key individuals (Upper Left) is able to manipulate less complex thinking in the Lower Left to vote in elections (Lower Right) to their advantage. A prime example of this was the way Tony Blair fought to get and retain Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour because he knew The Sun - Britain’s most widely-read newspaper – was one of the most powerful weapons in his election armoury. Gordon Brown lost Murdoch’s support in 2009 and the following year Labour lost the election.

Western Democracy is far from being the fair, just and egalitarian concept the West likes to portray it as. Marxists have no hesitation in pointing out how it largely preserves elites. But it does facilitate some social mobility, it does factor in some capacity for change and most people in the Western democracies find it more or less acceptable – and certainly they see it as better than any form of totalitarian or authoritarian government!

If we apply 4Q/8L to the Arab states, we find the Lower Right structure is BLUE enough for the government’s police systems to work but they run on RED power and coercion. There is little BLUE in the Lower Left – in fact, it’s largely fear-conscious PURPLE-dominated. All of which enables RED-led individuals in the Upper Left to use the Lower Right to dominate the Lower Left…until very recently. Now we have an explosion of angry RED in the Lower Left.

Just how much the protestors are driven by RED (and, to some extent, PURPLE) is illustrated by the Libyan rebels who appear mostly incompetent as would-be soldiers and are far too disorganised to take on Gaddafi’s forces who have a strong dose of BLUE military discipline among them. The only time the rebels seem to have real success is when Gaddafi’s forces are reeling from United Nations/NATO airstrikes.

The above analyses of both the Western democracies and the authoritarian Arab states are, of course, full of generalisations. In reality, there are many, many variations which make those generalisations flawed. Nontheless, as a generalisation it can be said that Arab culture and state structures have some way to go before they are ready for Western-style Democracy.

Democracy is said to require:-

  • People be informed enough to take an interest in how they are governed. This assumes a degree of education and intelligence amongst the electorate. Plus, they must have the time and resources to take the interest.
  • It also assumes media, free from government interference, communicating information on the key issues for people to develop an informed opinion. Communicating on issues to the electorate forms a powerful check on what governments do, putting them under scrutiny by the electorate. (Which is why so many leading politicians cultivate the media magnates to win their support.)
  • People doing things the government can’t control. Much in the lives of British citizens is beyond the direct control of governments. Families, religious organisations, clubs and societies, for example, facilitate discussion and debate about public concerns…yet in the UK it is difficult for government to influence them very much.
  • Little desire for radical alternatives. In the UK there is not that much difference between the parties. Those supporting losing parties usually don’t need to fear that their lives will be ‘turned upside down’ as a consequence of their favoured party losing.
    Eg: in the wake of the 2010 general election in the UK, while the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an average cut of 25% in public sector costs, the losing Labour Party conceded that they intended cuts of around 20% – though at a slower pace of implementation.
    Because there is a maximum term a government can serve in a democracy before another election – 5 years in the UK – the losing party have little incentive not to accept defeat. They will get their chance again at the next election.

Clearly there are a large percentage of Arab populations who are poorly educated, with many illiterate. They are not used to having a free media – though much is being made of the ‘free’ rebel radio stations in Benghazi! Plus, there is a minority – hopefully still rather small – who would like to see the revolutionary states dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.

For Democracy to be sustainable, it also has to be embedded as a cultural norm. And there the strong PURPLE tribalism running throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa presents a real problem. A central concept in Democracy is that, after all the attempts to influence and buy influence, the voter should make up their own mind. In PURPLE tribal cultures, there is effectively no secret vote. You vote how your tribal elder tells you to vote.

It would be wrong to say Arab cultures and structures couldn’t very quickly become democratic…but the seriously-flawed experiment in Democracy in Iraq should serve as a warning that change is unlikely to occur quickly, smoothly or painlessly.

Even more the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2006 is a cautionary tale on how Democracy can go badly wrong if the ground is not properly prepared. The campaign was marred by tribal and gang political violence but the election itself was judged fair by the UN.

And let’s never forget Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in 1933!

What now?
It’s a pity the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring have tried to drive out all politicians associated with the old regimes and have refused to accept gradual transfers of power and interim arrangements.

Given the brutal, exploitative and deceptive natures of the old regimes, the mistrust of anyone associated with them is understandable. In light of this, the proposals being put forward today by Jacob Zuma’s African Union delegation to the Libyan rebels are clearly inadequate. The government remains in power, their military entrenched around Ajdabiya and Misrata and able to regroup, and NATO airstrikes are halted. In return for which, the rebels are invited to talk to Gaddafi’s government about a transition to Democracy. No wonder Gaddafi endorses the proposals! Given his past record on broken ceasefires and ruthless repression of opponents, the rebels would be crazy to accept.

However, transitional arrangements, if firm, transparent and monitored by, say, the United Nations, could give the Arab states the breathing time they need to put in at least some of the educational and cultural development programmes they need to create the groundwork for Democracy to begin to work.

Don Beck’s (2000) concept of Stratified Democracy - see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – posits that the form of government (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) has to be in line with the cultural level of thinking (Lower Left). Thus, Western Democracy (BLUE with an ORANGE leading edge) is a step too far for peoples whose thinking has mushroomed suddenly from cowed PURPLE to furious RED. What is needed is an interim form of government which rules with some semblance of the old, familiar iron fist but is sympathetic to the concept of Democracy and has committed to a clear and transparent process of transition. But that process may take time – bearing in mind that Walt Rostow (1960) reckoned it could take a century to develop a largely tribal African nation into a Western-style consumerist society – and the process will need to be managed and monitored very carefully indeed.

In this sense, the Egyptians may actually be on their way to getting it right. The interim military government seems committed to turning Egypt into a modern democracy; but, rather than rushing at it, they seem determined to take the time to develop a system that is right for Egypt and sustainable in the long term. Of course, the military government also appear to be using some of the old regime’s secret-police-and-torture repression methods and the violence against demonstrators in Tahrir Square this past Friday night (8 April) does not bode well for the future. But the calls of the demonstrators illustrate just how difficult the transition process may prove. The demonstrators were not telling the government what they wanted for the future of their country - a visionary move-towards. Rather they were telling the government more of what they didn’t want – a nihilistic RED move-away from - getting rid of more old regime members of the government and stopping Hosni Mubarak hanging onto the wealth he amassed from exploiting Egypt.

In  thinking about how the Arab states progress towards Democracy, it may  be salutary to consider the former totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Many of them. such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, have successfully morphed into liberal, capitalist democracies over a 20-year period – though not without much turmoil. They also had, under Communism, much stronger BLUE in the systems and structures of the Lower Right, giving them a more advanced starting position when their totalitarian regimes collapsed.

Nonetheless, many of the challenges the post-totalitarian Eastern European states faced will be similar to those the post-autocracy Arab states will confront in the coming months and years.

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.

Is Britain really broken?

 celebrity, community, crime, government, morality, politics, prejudice & discrimination, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  6 Responses »
Jan 222010
 

 As part of his pre-election manoeuvring, Conservative leader David Cameron, according to the BBC, has today accused Labour of ‘moral failure’ and presiding over a country in both economic and social recession.

He has said the UK rewards parents who split up and is a place where professionals are told to follow rules rather than do what is best.

As an example of what he calls ‘broken Britain’, Cameron talked about the case of 2 brothers sentenced today for brutally attacking 2 other boys in South Yorkshire.

The brothers, aged 10 and 11 at the time, attacked their victims in Edlington, Doncaster, last April. They threatened to kill their victims, then aged 9 and 11, stamped on them and attacked them with broken glass, bricks and sticks. The brothers admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

While stressing that the case is not typical, Cameron cited it as a shocking example of what he calls Britain’s broken society, one of the key themes of the party’s campaign but a diagnosis rejected by the Government which said the Doncaster case was “uniquely terrible and extremely rare”.

In a book of interviews with him by GQ editor Dylan Jones, published this week, Cameron is quoted as saying: “I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer, and radical social reform is what this country needs right now.

“Margaret Thatcher in her time realised that the big challenge was reviving Britain’s economy, and we should recognise that the challenge for the modern Conservatives is reviving our society.

“It’s dealing with the issues of family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime, and the problems that we see in too many of our communities.”

In fact, the ‘broken Britain’ theme is not new. Several years ago, Cameron tasked former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith with creating a ‘think tank’ to investigate and report on what was wrong with Britain, with a particular emphasis on social factors. Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has produced several very interesting reports since and has been using the term ‘broken Britain’ since at least July 2007. The concept began to capture headlines in a big way in February 2009 when Duncan Smith used the outraged headlines around 13-year-old Alfie Patten fathering a child by 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman to hold up the under-aged parenting as prime example of “what’s wrong with broken Britain”.

So is Britain broken?
Well, our kingdom has a hell of a lot of problems – just think:-

  • Struggling to make any sustainable progress out of recession when many other comparable countries are clearly on their way to recovery
  • Saddled with a national debt, the paying  back of which will take decades long-term or, short-term, cripple much of the public sector through severe cuts and/or hamstring the private sector through raised taxes
  • High rates of petty crime, drug addiction and alcoholism compared to the rest of the EU
  • The highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Western world
  • Unsustainably high rates of male unemployment
  • A growing problem with gun crime and knife crime
  • Rising ethnic tensions as multi-culturalism is acknowledged to have failed and the Government fails to deal with high rates of immigration – see the Blog: ‘Is restricting immigration discriminatory?’
  • The gap between rich and poor being acknowledged by the Office of National Statistics to be greater now than it was when Labour came to power in 1997
  • Politicians widely perceived as corrupt for lining their own pockets via the public purse and permitting the bankers to outrightly rape the public purse to pay their own bloated bonuses
  • The very union under attack as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish campaign for more powers for their devolved governments

But is it worse than it was? It’s interesting to note that in 1996 Tony Blair used the James Bulger case to attack the Conservative government of John Major in a similar way to Cameron attacking Labour today. Blair said: “We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions … These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.”

Qualitatively, I doubt that Britain is more ‘broken’ than it was when Blair cited Bulger but quantitatively maybe…. There have always been horrible, shocking crimes against children – just think of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the ‘Moors Murders’ back in the early 1960s. There have always been ruthless, brutal criminals – again, think the 1960s and the Kray Twins. Under-age pregnancy and alcoholism are millenniums-old problems and highly-addictive recreational drugs have long been available, if you knew who to ask. And racism, at root, is just a manifestation of tribalism.

2 things, though, have changed dramatically over the past 50-60 years:-

  • Firstly, the sheer scale of these problems across Britain is mind-blowingly larger than it was back in the 1950s. While Britain’s post-war, pre-Americanisation ‘Golden Age’, as depicted so charmingly in the Ealing films of the era, was a manufactured myth, the scale of crime, corruption, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy we experience today would have been unbelievable to most British citizens of the time.
  • The wide-scale spread of these problems – once largely the sinful preserves of the more wealthy classes – has permeated right through the ‘ordinary’ people – what used to be considered traditionally the working and lower middle classes. These ‘salt of the earth’ types generally held higher moral codes than many of their so-called social betters. I’m making huge mythical generalisations, of course; but, as generalisations and allowing for many exceptions, they pretty much hold true. For example, when I was a snobbish middle-class teenager in the late 1960s, my friends and I thought it was ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ to smoke cannabis. However, our working class peers thought it was disgusting and anything to do with hippies was morally depraved. Nowadays, the use of cannabis amongst working class teenagers is commonplace. Whilst the older brothers of my working class peers considered it good sport to bonk a girl in the alley outside her parents’ house late at night, they thought the middle-class hippie couples living together openly without being married was going to lead to societal meltdown!

Where’s the morality gone?
Back in 1999, when I was involved in putting together the HemsMESH project under the watchful eye of Spiral Dynamics ‘guru’ Don Beck, I remember Don talking about how the British churches didn’t do BLUE any more. In other words, they weren’t projecting strong moral codes on how people ought to live, treat each other and relate to society. In Don’s view, the British churches had become dominated by liberal GREEN thinking, with its motif of whatever fulfils the human spirit and doesn’t overtly harm others is OK.

If that sounds similar to some of the hippie mantras of the 1960s or rave lyrics of the 1980s and 1990s, then you’re hearing the same codes in action. GREEN undermines BLUE disciplines and releases RED to indulge as much as it likes without restraint, aided and abetted by ORANGE technology facilitating unlimited internet gambling and beaming uncensored violence and explicit pornography into your 10-year-old’s bedroom. It seems like an absurdly simple diagnosis of the causes of our ills – and there is, indeed, much detail to fill in – but, as an overview, it’s as simple as that.

Don Beck, from ‘Bible belt’ Texas, would, of course, be highly sensitive to the failings of the British churches; but the United States is generally acknowledged to be a much more religious country than Britain. Of course, the US has many of the same problems we have and often in more extreme versions and concentrated pockets – East Los Angeles makes Brixton look relatively idyllic! However, as percentages of national populations, the problems are on nothing like the same, overwhelming scale as here. The American churches by and large make a good fight against the ‘sin’ – though it’s clear GREEN is starting to undermine BLUE in the controversy over the ordination of gay bishops in the East Coast Anglican Church.

But, in seeking to resolve Britain’s problems, we can’t just re-engineer large-scale religious BLUE and expect it to work.

You only have to look at the opposition to the so-called ‘Islamification’ of Britain. It’s all but impossible, of course, but if you could factor out the extremists and their ideologies and discount the racist antipathy towards Islam simply because most of its practitioners have brown skins… then Islam offers much the same kind of solid BLUE values for living that Christianity traditionally has.

And a very sizeable part of the British people simply don’t want that. The proverbial RED-GREEN harmonic of it’s-good-for-you-to-do-as-you-like is now too embedded in British culture. As an example, for all that The Sun moans and whinges about Britain’s moral decay, it’s not prepared to do away with its page 3 girl or stop publishing photographs of various celebrities in indiscrete poses. Why? Because that’s what a sizeable number of people want, as verified by the paper’s sales and visits to its web site. There’s enough BLUE left in society at large to recognise the mess; but not enough to embrace the disciplines necessary to get out of the mess.

So, what Spiral Dynamics calls a 2nd Tier approach is needed – the ability to look at all the competing codes and their values and take action in the interests of the whole, meeting all needs as far as possible within that paradigm but even being prepared to sacrifice some freedoms to establish the paradigm.

David Cameron is to be praised mightily for putting his party’s emphasis on social factors. But, if he simply wants to bring back certain disciplines, it’s going to mean as little to current British culture as John Major’s (PURPLE-BLUE) ‘back to basics’ campaign did in 1997 against Tony Blair’s (RED-ORANGE) ‘let’s make money and live the good life’ ethos.

Is restricting immigration discriminatory?

 community, cross-cultural, government, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  29 Responses »
Jan 072010
 

At last, it’s starting to become OK to talk about immigration. Of course, it’s been a hot topic for the British National Party (BNP) , their British National Front predecessors and the far right for years – in fact, decades really, stretching right back to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech back in April 1968. The GREEN vMEME’s staunch opposition to anything that could possibly be associated with prejudice and discrimination has inhibited rational discussion of these issues. Now, thanks to the emergence of the cross-party Balanced Migration Group (BMG) , led by Frank Field (Labour) and Nicholas Soames (Conservative), the barriers to acknowledging the problems that immigration is creating for the United Kingdom are at least beginning to crack.

Over the past year, from interacting with Jon Freeman and Rachel Castagne at June’s ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ to dialogue with staunch BNP supporter Man of the Woods in the comments on ‘Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?’, I’ve come to have much more of an appreciation of how a number of people feel really passionately about this kingdom…as Man of the Woods calls it, ‘my ancestral land’. The real eye-opener for me, though, with regard to how attitudes are changing towards immigration, was Matthew Kalman’s contribution to that Blog. Matthew, someone I’ve long thought of as a self-challenging visionary more than capable of 2nd Tier thinking, appeared at first glance to be reflecting BNP concepts. Then I realised Matthew was reflecting the fears, concerns and aspirations of those he deals with and that this was leading him on something of a journey to question the GREEN-sponsored multi-culturalism which has led to ethnic minority identities being celebrated more than national identities over the past decade or so.

In terms of what the BNP wants set against the general consensus of the mainstream political establishment, acknowledging some simplification of the issues, this can be reduced basically to a values conflict – between the PURPLE tribalism espoused by the BNP and the GREEN egalitarianism of the political establishment. The earlier half-hearted and cack-handed attempts of the Government to develop policies on citizenship and immigration and now the emergence of the Balanced Migration Group are slowly but surely beginning to move us beyond GREEN’s presupposition that, if you want to restrict people of a different ethnic origin from entering this country, then you are prejudiced. As a kingdom, we are heading (hopefully!) towards being able to debate these issues rationally.

With it being said that that one new immigrant arrives in Britain every minute, a new British passport is issued to an immigrant every 3 minutes and every 6 minutes a new home needs to be built for an immigrant, clearly immigration is exerting substantial pressures on both the physical and sociopsychological infrastructures of the United Kingdom. In that context, it’s hard not to empathise with the BMG’s declaration yesterday urging the parties to make policy statements in their manifestos for the upcoming General Election to prevent the British population reaching the projected level of 70 million-plus by 2029. (The bulk of this anticipated population explosion is anticipated to come directly from new immigrants and indirectly from the children of immigrants being born in this country.)

A population of 70 million-plus and continuing to rise would almost certainly make the UK the most crowded member of the European Union.

So we have 3 pressures of concern regarding these issues:-

  • the seemingly-unstoppable rise in immigration
  • the increased support for the BNP and the far right emanating from the real fears and concerns about this amongst the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK
  • the effect of BNP and far right hostility towards ethnic groups stimulating some members of those groups towards anti-social behaviour – eg: the Anti-Nazi League and, far more worryingly, radical Islamic fundamentalism

Is it always wrong to discriminate?
That it is wrong to discriminate – because that means not everyone is treated equally – is one of the GREEN vMEME’s presuppositions.

But, from a 2nd Tier perspective, could it sometimes be in the interests of the whole to discriminate against a part?

And is discrimination inevitable anyway?

Simply to categorise people  - eg: into ‘British citizens’ and ‘residential non-British citizens’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘Lancastrians’ and ‘Yorkies’, ‘English’ and ‘Scots’ – invites discrimination, according to Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979). Categorisation leads to identification with your own ‘in-group’, absorbing its values and norms, while demonising the out-groups via derogatory stereotypes. In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, this is the PURPLE vMEME’s building of the tribal identity. Then, because RED finds its self-esteem invested in the in-group, it pushes the in-group to be superior to the ‘out-groups’.

As Muzafer Sherif et al (1961) showed in the classic Robber’s Cave Experiment, competition increases in-group/out-group rivalry substantially. Moreover, Marilyn Brewer & Donald Campbell, in their 1976 study of East African tribes, found that competition over basic resources such as land and water, really ramps up the hostility.

As its population threatens to mushroom completely out of control, the UK is faced with an enormous debt problem that means, whichever party wins the election, we shall see the promised ‘swingeing cuts’ in public services. With the UK economy showing few signs of emerging from recession, the cuts are likely to be long and deep. Thus, as standards of living fall in real terms, rivalry – even outright hostility – will grow as in-groups look to target out-groups for the blame. Differences in names, language, colour of skin and ethnic origin make it easier to tell who’s not in your in-group. It’s not racism per se because racism is really just a manifestation of tribalism. And tribalism, by default, is ethnocentric. It’s perhaps no surprise that Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his support for the BMG declaration, is talking about ‘Christian heritage’ and that immigration policy should have “a bias towards Christian values”. Obviously as a churchman, it’s Carey’s job to promote Christianity; but he’s also making the point that Christianity traditionally is the religion of the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK. It’s a sort of other-side-of-the-coin to the English Defence League’s stance against the perceived ‘Muslimisation’ of England. Unfortunately it all too easily slips into a kind of pastiche of the neo-Christian white ‘indigenous’ Briton vs the Muslim Asian immigrant.

Underneath the rhetoric and bluster, if we use the Spiral Dynamics map, we can see RED-driven firebrands like Nick Griffin and some of the more radical imams manipulating the PURPLE anxieties of their communities and using sheens of BLUE nationaliism and religion to do so.

Of course, if we’re to going to follow the BNP down the ‘race route and judge the priority or superiority of one group of people over another group of people by the colour of their skin and their ethnic origin, then the ‘whities’ had better be careful. For 40 years overt racists have used the lower IQ scores of Afro-Americans on Stanford-Binet tests – first brought to prominence by Arthur Jensen (1969) – to justify discrimination by whites (average: 100) against blacks (average: 85). The problem with this is that we now know Asians score higher than whites – especially East Asians (average: 106 – J Philippe Rushton & Arthur Jensen, 2005)!

Heck, not only do they breed faster than us – but they’re smarter too!

There are, of course, huge controversies around both the concept of race and the concept of intelligence – and neither concept may turn out to be as valid as claims make them out to be. Nonetheless, the higher IQ scores of Asians on white-originated IQ tests certainly knock claims by whitey to be superior.

So, on what other basis can there then be discrimination? If you go down Man of the Woods’ route that these are our ‘ancestral lands’; then, while I’ve got a lot of empathy with that concept…if a land really does belong to its ‘indigenous people’, then what the hell were the Europeans doing during the ‘Age of Empires’, invading other peoples’ lands and subjugating them – if not outrightly enslaving them?!?!?

(NB: I’ve put ‘indigenous people’ here in inverted commas because the English are, of course, one of the most bastardised peoples in the world in terms of racial stock, counting Celts, Picts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and Jews amongst our distant ancestors. Who exactly were the original ’indigenous peoples’? Smallish waves of Poles, Slavs and more Jews came to these shores as refugees during World War II – and that’s before the docking of the Windrush in 1948 started the trickle that became a flood of Afro-Caribbean, African and Asian immigarants!)

From a 2nd Tier perspective, we have to say that, if there is to be discrimination – which seems to natural to all the 1st Tier vMEMES until the emergence of GREEN – it should be primarily in the interests of the majority and the health of the kingdom as a whole. Therefore, if imposing a cap on immigration – as the BMG is urging – is discriminatory, then so be it. There are far more people in this kingdom who primarily espouse PURPLE values than espouse GREEN values. So keeping the kingdom safe for the majority of its people and ensuring they have the resources to feel safe and secure is important. Allowing our population to grow beyond the 70-plus million will inhibit those vital measures. So a cap or other similar restriction is necessary.

The opportunities an immigration restriction measure will create
In a sense we have the BNP to thank for forcing this debate upon a reluctant, GREEN-led political establishment. The BNP has acted like a lightning rod for all the seething discontentment amongst the PURPLE-dominated traditional white working classes; and the party has channelled that discontentment into a significant electoral force.

However, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we know that all life has value – that all humans have value and that GREEN is basically right in its drive to create equal opportunities for all. What GREEN doesn’t get is that, while everyone might be ‘equal in the eyes of God’, not everybody is equal in practicality; therefore, there need to be multiple opportunities tailored to different needs. What GREEN also doesn’t get is that the lower vMEMES don’t see the world its way. Which is why we need 2nd Tier thinking to create and manage precarious and shifting balances between the competing needs and values of different vMEMES.

An immigration cap and/or other restrictions might be said to discriminate against those who want to come to this kingdom; it might also be said to discriminate against those who are already settled in this kingdom and wish to see other people from their country of ethnic origin settle here. Interestingly, however, it should be noted that increasingly pollsters are claiming support for restrictions on immigration amongst the ethnic minorities.

A substantial reduction in immigration would give us the breathing space to deal with the effects of 50-plus years of large-scale immigration. In 2004, in the wake of reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001, Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared multi-culturalism dead. “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness,” he stated.

If the vision of multi-culturalism – distinct plural cultures living side by side in harmony – is indeed dead, then what kind of Britain should we aim for in our multi-ethnic land…and what role would the assertion of ‘a core of Britishness’ play in it?

It was to address these sorts of issues that the Centre for Human Emergence UK was set up last June. However, time is not on our side. As the BMG acknowledge, it will take several years to get immigration back down to manageable levels. In the meantime PURPLE’s need for stability and security is being ravaged by the recession, with the rate of job losses and house repossessions only decreasing very slowly. These ingredients mixed together have the potential to create a social powder keg – which could be ignited by some pretty short fuses!

Culture Clash – Why China Meets Africa’s Needs

 Africa, community, human rights, international relations, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Nov 262009
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

The following is a ‘guest blog’ by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

It was a few weeks ago that I read on the BBC that the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, had praised the way that China deals with Africa.  Apparently, unlike the West, China invests in Africa and trades with it which helps it build up its infrastructure.  The West on the other hand, according to the Rwandan president, is more likely to offer aid and to tie it more to conditions.

Kagame – seen below with American president George W Bush – went as far to say that European and American involvement was polluting Africa.

Why would that be?

It immediately struck me, from a Spiral Dynamics point of view, that we are seeing a values clash here.  Essentially we have 3 different cultural sets of values that interact in different ways.

From a very simplistic and generalised point of view we could summarise the relevant aspects of the 3 different cultures.

Africa
Much of Africa still lacks good infrastructure and is based on agriculture far more than many other places in the world.  Tribal and power based organisation and values are still very common.

The next stage in Spiral Dynamics evolution terms is for Africa to build much more solid infrastructure and government.  This will allow them to build beyond the tribal and power based society towards a more centralised and organised government and control that will allow individuals the safety to work for their families and wider communities more effectively.

China
China has already got strong infrastructure in many areas, although this is of course by no means universal.  This has allowed them to more recently engage in rapid commercial growth in many sectors. China has a booming economy with rapidly expanding exports and is looking to build strong trading partnerships with other areas of the world.

A strong relationship with parts of Africa is ideal for China to expand their economy into with large investments looking purely towards their own commercial growth and success.  This investment fits in very nicely with Africa’s need for inward investment to help them build up their own infrastructure.

There is in fact a natural resonance between China and Africa with China sitting just one level ahead of Africa on the Spiral journey first described by Clare Graves.  With a mix of values close enough together to allow profitable interaction the relationship can blossom.

The West
A much more complex set of societies than either of China or Africa, the West has a mix of different values driving its industry, growth and social equality.  As the strength of liberal equalitarianism acquires ever greater power in western society, more and more rules are added dictating what is right or moral including in business and government.

Despite a healthy clash in the way that the values of the west re China are expressed, Communism vs Democracy, the underlying vMEMETIC values being expressed are close enough that the western consumer is happy to buy the results of Chinese industry and commerce.

The Clash
However, when we try to put the West together with Africa, we see a different kind of relationship arise altogether.  Without a healthy African industrial engine producing goods the western consumer has nothing to buy from Africa.  In the wake of a strong trading relationship Africa is seen, to western eyes, as needing help.  After all, Africa’s lack of basic infrastructure and western values is interpreted as a lack of civilisation.

Western governments and NGOs alike try to help Africa with charitable monies and aid.  However, seeing this basic lack of civilisation the aid is often tied with calls to get organised and put things in order.  Human rights and democracy come high on the reform agenda.

The trouble is, generally much of Africa is simply not ready for these things yet.  Based on the need to meet the life conditions that they find themselves in, there simply is not yet room in their lives to take on board these idealistic western values.  First they must build infrastructure and secure their industrial future.

Too much uninformed western interference and demands are indeed counterproductive and polluting.  Surface implementations of western morals and values in cultures that do not yet have social stability can only lead to even more corruption and failure.

A Difficult Road
From a liberal western point of view this is indeed a difficult dilemma unless the nature of the Spiral of values is recognised.  We have to put aside our ideas of absolute equality and rights to allow Africa to grow its own way.  Eventually, given time and support, and a stable infrastructure and then economy Africa will find its own ideas of equality and rights for all.

If we do not learn these lessons then in time, our relations with much of Africa and the Commonwealth will be replaced with African/Chinese relations.

We should listen more closely to Paul Kagame, before it is too late.  Otherwise democracy may one day follow the same fate that the British Empire did and be left behind in terms of world relevance.

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.

 Older Entries