Triangulating

It is the Pesach of the "Arab Spring", and both coincide with the publication of Frank Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order. I hear echoes among the three.

As to Frank's book, first, I read the whole thing in manuscript some months ago. I am thanked in Frank's acknowledgments, along with many others, so I do not intend here (or anywhere else) a review. I made a bunch of suggestions back them, some structural and presentational, a few substantive and bibliographical. It'll be interesting on reading the finished book to learn which suggestions, if any, Frank considered seriously. It'll also be worthwhile to read the book again anyway, because it's just that kind of book: It takes a while, a second reading at the least, to absorb the argument and the evidence in tandem. It's a big book, with a big set of ideas, based on some large premises.

I had little of core relevance to say to Frank after I first read the manuscript because I did not disagree with most of the premises, and the one I am agnostic about I knew it was pointless to raise again, because Frank and I have had this conversation several times over the past decade and more. It has to do not with what is similar between Sam Huntington and Frank, for there is a lot, but what is different, and that is temperamental, not analytical, at base. And here I intuit more like Huntington than like Frank. Frank sees a direction in history, if not an overarching teleology. I am not so sure; we may, for all I know, just be seeing some very long cycles that look like they don't curl back on themselves but actually do. I don't know if history is going anywhere in particular, or if it is that it's a destination I want to arrive at.

Anyway, let me get to the essence of the book, and then try to show how Pesach resonates with Frank's argument (which Frank does not know or care about, most likely). Then, after I have done that, I will talk briefly about the Arabs in this joint context.

First the premises (there are three, I think), one of which can be proven and two of which probably cannot.

The first premise is that humans are social animals and always have been. This matters enormously, and I think it is proven by evolutionary biology and affirmed by what we know from cultural anthropology. This reason why this matters is that Western political philosophy is based on a different premise--that of primordial individualism. Among other things, proving this premise places the subject matter right smack into the lap of sociology, not psychology, and it presupposes a kind of primordial politics based on what we know about human emotions and particularly about recognition and dignity. I think this is obviously correct, and long before I read Frank's manuscript I wrote about it myself, including in my Jewcentricity book. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I'm foreshadowing what all this has to do with Pesach...

That leads to the second premise: that politics is an autonomous domain, not an epiphenomenal one rooted in economics, for example. Ideas matter, and they may be freely formed. They are contingent--not infinitely so, to be sure, but they may vary widely. It is a plastic domain.

To me, this reminds of the late Daniel Bell, who, like Nietzsche, distrusted all monadic systems and systematizers, and saw culture, economics and politics as obviously intertwining but essentially separate realms. So does Frank, and I agree. This does not mean that the ideas have to be "right"--just that they matter and develop according to their own logical syntax. Indeed, some of the ideas that have sustained democracy in the West, and in the United States especially, are not right when laid against the teachings of evolutionary biology, and this does create a kind of problem in the book, perhaps. But we will get to that later.

Where I hesitate, however, is with the implicit teleology of this approach. Maybe I'm simplifying too much, but I think Frank really does still believe in a materialist teleology, that things are trending in a certain broad, positive direction even if slowly and unevenly and subject to temporary regression. I'm just not sure this is the case. If we step back far enough, I think we can see epochs in human history where human culture got very sophisticated, and in which exchanges among cultures were quite robust. I think, for example, that if you look at the Mediterranean world before Justinian's plague you could make the case that this was a highly developed international system, and that its wealth, stability, and order were on a par with our own today. It may not seem like that because our machines, our technology, are so much more sophisticated than anything that existed centuries ago. But I think that is a special conceit, or special kind of bias, that may blind us to what is essential about cultural sophistication. And that world back in the second and third century of the common era fell apart. One could even argue that the medieval civilization that covered much of Europe and the Middle East before the Black Death was also a highly sophisticated civilization that people at the time thought represented a permanent advance over anything that came before. But it too collapsed. Of course, we have the capacity now to learn from what went before because virtually everything can be put in writing and studied, as was not the case, say, in the second century. I'm still not persuaded that setbacks in civilizational terms are necessarily temporary. I wonder what Sam would say.

How I think about one or two of Frank's premises isn't really important. What's important is the argument itself. The argument is about the origins of political institutions, and the kinds of political cultures that result from differing patterns of origin. Frank is really interested in three institutions whose combination gives us current best-practice political reality.

The first concerns the origins of the state; in other words, how different societies made the transition from primordialism, or what Huntington called associational ties, to the impersonal authority of the state. Put more simply, it's a question of how people come to trust those to whom they are neither related nor particularly friendly.

The second, which seems to me pretty closely related but need not be, has to do with the rule of law. By rule of law, Frank means a written code of conduct in which the enforceability of law trumps the will of persons. Now in a way, it follows that the state must precede the rule of law, because it implies a means to enforce the law. But this isn't so necessarily. Law can exist in a political order characterized by primordialism in the form of religious law. Religious law can be written, it can be enforced, and it can be legitimate in the eyes of those to whom it applies even before there is a state.

The third institution Frank takes an interest in concerns accountability. How is it that the rulers can be controlled in such a way that they are accountable to those they rule? Now again, it seems that there is a very intimate connection between rule of law and accountability. Accountability, as most of us understand it, is a subcategory of the rule of law. Yet this, too, is not always so. One can have accountability, or forms of accountability, in tribal societies which are pre-lawlike in the sense we have defined it.

All that said, the fact that it makes sense to articulate these three goals in the order that Frank articulates them, namely, first the state, then the rule of law, and then accountability, seems to me to indicate that these three kinds of origins are quite entangled. Frank does a good job making the case for their being considered separately, and I think the most brilliant part of the argument consists in his demonstration that the order in which these three qualities of political development occur plays a definite role in shaping the character of the political culture that emerges. This aspect of the argument reminds me of Alexander Gershenkron's concept of path dependency. Except in Frank's hands, path dependency is not a one-dimensional concept, but a three-dimensional one set in relative flux--so really four-dimensional, I suppose. As far as theory goes, what Frank is up to is Einsteinian compared to Gershenkron's more Newtonian version.

But I am allowing myself to be carried away with detail here, and that was not my intention. So let me now just backtrack and say how Pesach resonates with Frank's premises and arguments.

First the premise that human beings are social animals. This resonates with Pesach because the story is really all about the creation of the Jewish people as a people, or as a nation. (These are not exactly the same but for present purposes let's assume they are.) This holiday is not about individual freedom, as many Jewish Americans think it is. It is about a corporate endeavor, namely the Jewish people. It is very hard to find any evidence of primordial individualism in the five books of Moses or in the rabbinical tradition. Even when we confess our sins on the High Holy Days we do it in the plural tense. As I already mentioned, in my Jewcentricity book I specifically show how Hobbes and Locke were more alike than different in the sense that both believe in a fixed human nature, but the rabbinic attitude is that there is no fixed human nature except in so far as its potential lies within broad parameters formed by free choice. It is not, as Hobbes said, that people are violent and society restrains them, or that society is corrosive, as Rousseau held, and that the individual would otherwise be pure. To the rabbinical mine these are two versions of nonsense. Human nature is malleable; we make of it what we will, but we don't do this as individuals. We do it as a society.

Frank's second premise is that politics is autonomous and primary, and that has to do with our collective emotional life and particularly our concern about recognition and dignity. Pesach is really very interesting compared to the holidays of most other major religions in that it is self-consciously rooted in a historical narrative. The story is not technically history as we think of it today, but at the time it was indeed an attempt to write history, a history in which the natural order and the divine order were co-mingled to create the context for political order. The idea here is that significant things happen in history because of ideas, whether they are good and reliable ones revealed by God or ideas hatched at lower levels of reliability by humans. They do not happen because of economic patterns submerged below any possibility of conscious awareness or control. The ideas we have about the way the world works and should work matter; indeed, they take pride of place. That is the bias within rabbinic Judaism, that the world can be improved, and that it can be improved by directing our volition to practical ends. That is why in Deuteronomy Moses tells the people that they have a choice between life and death, and so therefore choose life. This is also why Jews are so often commanded to remember (as in "Remember what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt") because it is in our capacity to remember that abstract ideas about right and wrong become embedded in our moral calculus.

Now it is true, I think it is fair to say, that the Haggadah is not a manifesto for political action. On the contrary; its bias is that the Jewish people did nothing to deserve their own redemption. God took them out of Egypt, and had he not done so, the story says, we would still be there, regardless of whatever effort we may have made on behalf of our own freedom in the more than 3000 years since. But I think this is too simple a reading, because Pesach is connected inextricably to Shavuot. The first holiday represents the freedom from; the second the freedom to. The former is incomplete without the latter, and the latter is all about accepting the yoke of heaven in the form of the Torah. This is something that requires volition and it is something that the community must do together. It is something that requires the presumed supremacy of ideas over circumstances.

So Pesach is a starting point, or launching pad, in a way not entirely different from the story of the Garden of Eden. It is a set up story that allows a more complex and mature narrative to develop after it, and that narrative is all about moral choice in a collective context. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible and nowhere in rabbinic literature is there any sense that material patterns of economic development or anything like it predetermine human moral choices. There is nothing deterministic anywhere. People choose, God either does or does not intervene, and stuff happens--rather little of it, if you examine the text hermaneutically, at all predictable. The story rather accumulates and has emergent properties both morally and phenomenologically. It does not suggest cyclical ebb and flow like most other ancient narratives; it goes somewhere. In this sense, I think that the premises of the Pesach story and what follows it parallel exactly Frank's insistence on the autonomy of politics and the progressive development of social and political institutions.

The third premise, now that we come to it--the one about political life going somewhere--is also echoed in Jewish thinking in other ways. Judaism is a messianic faith. It believes in the progressive development of history leading to an idealized endpoint. Passover, in this light, is once again a kickoff point for this development. In rabbinic tradition Passover will be the herald of the coming of the Messiah; that is what the symbolism of Elijah is all about. And let me say that, just as I have trouble with the idea that history has a definite positive, evolving direction, so I have trouble with taking the rabbinic idea of messiah literally. I wish I did not have such trouble, but I do. I actually think that all forms of end-of-history thinking and all idea of a messiah amount to really the same idea, one in traditional and one in secularized terms. I distrust both instinctively (though I am not sure why), and will be delightedly shocked if either one turns out to be true. I am not against other people believing such things and I see the broad social functionality of hope and optimism, of course. I just can't help my skepticism.

Now let's get to the arguments. The key political institution is the state. Without the state is hard to have a sustained rule of law and it is hard to have reliable political accountability. Without the state it is certainly hard to have democratic accountability in the sense that we understand it today. Pesach celebrates, as I've already said, the birth of the Jewish people, or nation. Before the Exodus, there were families and tribes, whether free ones before captivity in Egypt or during captivity in Egypt. The experience of liberation turns the Israelite tribes into a nation. That is what we are made to understand through this story, and that is what the rabbis have told us is the preeminent meaning of the story. We call this holiday the season of our freedom, "zeman herutanu" in transliterated Hebrew, and there can simply be no doubt that the root word involved here, herut, means freedom in a political sense. It means being free from the oppression or control or rule or sovereignty of others. It has nothing to do with personal, individual freedom or what some call these days self-actualization. It is not really properly translated as liberty in the Founding Fathers' sense; it means freedom.

The parallel, I think, lies in the fact that just as one cannot easily imagine progressive and sophisticated political development without the state, so one cannot imagine the world of religious law described in the Torah coming into being without the fundament of a political order beneath it. The purpose of the state is to administer justice, first and foremost. We see a vivid example of this not long after the revelation on Mount Sinai when Moses's father-in-law Jethro advises him to create judges and courts for the purpose of administering the law. The state is a means toward a nobler end, but it is an essential means.

To me, this is a most realistic way of thinking. Those who think one can achieve great moral and social ends by doing away with or trying to go around politics are wrong. This applies to lighter than air libertarians in one realm and it applies to NGO do-gooders in other realms. It even applies to clueless Californians who think that they can use gimmicks to overcome their basic political disagreements (an argument made by Bruce Cain in the next issue of The American Interest, just by the way).

It is true, of course, that after the destruction of the second Commonwealth the Jewish people did not have a sovereign base politically upon which to pursue their moral vocation. But this was no virtue, and the rabbis, at least, never pretended differently. Surviving in exile was difficult, and very risky. The Jewish people did it by creating a trans-territorial network to substitute for the function of the state. This has shaped Jewish history ever since, and though it has been a history of considerable achievement, it has certainly not been a happy history on balance. One can therefore, as I do, affirm the experience and even the necessity of the exile in history and still affirm the Zionist project, not as a harbinger of messiah (which, as I have said, is an idea I have trouble pouring myself into), but as a necessary protection for the security of the Jewish people.

There is one more note to add here. The state requires overcoming the attraction of kinship. In the book Frank shows how different civilizations––Chinese, Indian, Muslim, European––managed to achieve this. In one case, that of the Muslims, the institution of slave soldiers was required. The Jews did it a different way. They created a meritocracy of scholarship. Although the Exilarch was of course an inherited position, it became completely theoretical in exile. What mattered was the rabbinate, and one rose in that hierarchy as a function of integrity and scholarly merit. It didn't matter who your parents were. You could not pass on rabbinical status to your sons either. Primordialism among the Jews was downgraded in importance, of course, because of the convulsions of the first exile, the Babylonian exile, and then of the second. The autonomy and integrity of the tribes were destroyed at the hands of others. But that does not take away from the achievement of transcending tribalism through meritocracy. It is quite an interesting example. The only thing close to it that Frank describes in the book is the achievement of Chinese civilization in creating the first merit-based civil service to overcome the power of patrimonialism in Chinese politics, something that, as he shows, it never did completely.

Then there is the question of accountability, Frank's third focus. Again, I think Pesach echoes this consideration. In the first place, as is well known, the Haggadah radically downplays the role of Moses. His name is not even mentioned in the story except in passing and within quotations of prayers that are said later in the service. So the potential for tyranny or despotism is dealt with rather summarily in this fashion. But more than that, it is clear from the very beginning in rabbinical thinking, and even before that, that God and the law are sovereign. The King or the leader is an instrument of God and of the people, and he is not above the law. Indeed, for every Saul there is a Samuel, and for every David there is a Nathan telling them what they can't do. There is in the Jewish political design a separation of powers. There is separation between the leader and the law, represented by the prophets and the judges. And there is another kind of separation between the priesthood and the political order. This is not accountability in the Western sense, but it is arguably a precursor to it. It certainly looks like a pre-modern version of checks and balances.

And now finally, though this has taken much too long I admit, let us come to the Arab spring. On this season of Pesach we celebrate freedom, and so there is no way that a Jew, looking upon the energies being directed against authoritarianism and tyranny (they are not the same) in the Arab world, can feel anything but hope and even some pride of historical authorship. Until one thinks about it, that is. There are outcomes one can imagine from all this upheaval that would not be good for Israel, for the Jews, or even for the people of the Arab world––at least not in the short term (of which more just below).

But we can learn from what we see that the social dynamics going on clearly trump all other dimensions of these events. We are seeing sociology in motion, and ideas in motion too. We are also seeing how individuals cannot, in the end, control political reality in the absence of some sense of law and accountability. The Arab regimes have become brittle to the extent that they have become personalistic. That is certainly the case in Egypt, and no less so, really, in Syria, Libya, and in most of the other cases. Some have regressed from republics into virtual dynasties, as was nearly the case Egypt, as has been the case in Syria and that was planned to be the case in Libya. This proves, as Frank contends, that political decay is a very real force. Looking at Arab history over the centuries since about the 9th, and certainly the 13th, we see a particularly vivid example.

We can learn, too, from what Frank has to teach that there is a wide gap between overthrowing on authoritarian regime on the one hand and developing better political institutions on the other. P.J. O'Rourke once put it like this: "It's one thing to burn down the shit-house, another to install plumbing." The Fukuyama approach is a little less dramatic. Liberal democracy, he says on page 4, " is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power law and a system of checks and balances." These institutions do not just pop into existence overnight. They take a long time to mature. Political institutions are rooted deep in the mores and habits of society, of everyday face-to-face social relations. Where those roots are shallow and those habits are weak, one cannot expect the kinds of institutions that sustain democracy to exist with any surety, and one cannot fabricate them quickly.

Frank also stresses the innate conservatism of human political institutions. Even when the circumstances that gave rise to them change, institutions are resistant to change because some of the more powerful and wealthy come to have vested interests in their perpetuation. That is why change, especially in a more liberal democratic direction, is almost always a struggle and almost always bloody. That is why, one may surmise, too, God took the children of Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders and, not least, with the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn. There was plenty of blood. Presumably, God could've taken the children of Israel out of Egypt without any of that fancy and colorful stuff. But I think the Holy One was trying to prove a point, point about history, a point Frank makes very well in his book. And of course the Arab regimes are proving the point again and again and again just about every day we pick up the newspaper. Non-democratic institutions are resisting change and they are spilling blood to do so. No one should be surprised. Significant social change doesn't happen without politics, liberating change doesn't happen without struggle, and political decay ensures that such struggle will often be violent.

Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the state is a prerequisite in most cases for stable rule along and political accountability. The problem with the Arab states is that they have always been weak relative to sectarian identity and ethnic identity. Frank describes the Muslim Arab experience as one of political decay, the decay of institutions from the days of the great Muslim empires when the problem of primordialism was temporarily overcome. And I think this is accurate. This is why those who expect, or have expected, the upheavals in the Arab world directed against their authoritarian regimes to result in the quick establishment of stable liberal democracies are bound to have their expectations dashed against the realities of the region, and the differing realities of individual societies.

All this leaves observant and educated Jews in a strange position. On the one hand, we wish Arabs who seek freedom well, even though in most cases they are not revolting against foreign oppression as in the Pesach story, but one of several domestic varieties. Yet because the rule of law has fallen on such hard times, and because political accountability is so scarce on an institutional basis, we should not allow our hopes to mislead our expectations. Americans are a very forward-looking, can-do, optimistic people. That is a lesson from our experience as successful immigrant society almost desperate to leave the depredations of the Old World behind. Jews, on the other hand, at least to the extent they take their own traditions seriously, are taught to remember, and thus to take tradition and history very seriously, to revere the past and to take care never to sever the bond with the past. Americans lack a sense of tragedy in history, this despite the very great tragedy of the Civil War. Jews do not lack such a sense of tragedy; indeed, that sense of tragedy has, if anything, been magnified in the cauldron of the 20th century. That is why when Americans look upon the events in the Arab world in recent months, they see the "creative" side of creative destruction. But peoples steeped in tradition are just as likely to see the "destruction" side of that phrase. They are therefore more likely to be skeptical of the well-worn but still very dangerous phrase, "Well, things can't get any worse." Of course, they can, and they often do.

This also helps to explain why the more conservative elements in many Arab societies are leery of the upheavals that have been taking place. This is particularly true in Egypt, where the less educated rural segment of the population was definitely not with the young middle-class revolutionists of Midan al-Tahrir back in the winter.

A further note on this point: It is well-established that contemporary anti-Semitism has migrated to the Middle East, and particularly to the Arab world. A host of polls show that most Arabs have very negative attitudes toward not just Israelis, but also Jews. In many places negative attributions exceed 90%. That is certainly so in Egypt, where the government has encouraged such attitudes as a means of deflecting popular discontent away from itself. It seems to me, and I would presume also to others, that the only way this disease of the mind can be cured is to change the context of Arab politics itself. Only when Arabs are free to educate their children and to make their own choices in the fullness of knowledge are they likely to overcome the kinds of superstitions and conspiracies that afflict them today, superstitions and conspiracies that hurt them far more than they hurt the Jews. This will take a very long time, no doubt, but it has to start sometime. Maybe that time is now.

So this defines a common problem: the way back is the way of failure and stagnation, but the way forward is an uncertain path fraught with unknown dangers. The only way to a better future, however, is to take a deep breath and walk forward. This means short-term anxiety, frustration, and peril all for the sake of an elusive, and perhaps unattainable, longer-term benefit. It's hoping that what may look like a pier is really a bridge. Of course, one can never know for sure until you try the crossing. Unless, of course, you have God to make a path of dry land through the midst of the sea.

This brings us back, finally, to the question of teleology in Frank's book and in religious cosmologies. Suppose one day the world really is a qualitatively and irreversibly better place, with freedom and human rights and dignity and peace and prosperity and health and fulfillment pretty much guaranteed for all. Will we say, looking back, this was a triumphal philosophy, of politics, of luck, of material determinism––or of God's will? If it ever happens, I'm reasonably sure that there will be violent arguments over the ultimate cause, because there is no rule to tell us how to distinguish between the possibilities, which of course lie in incommensurate domains. All of us, of course, will have long since turned into compost by then. I, for one, am not about to lose any sleep worrying about it.