« Have you seen the latest Mad Max film? | Main | Will Michael Bloomberg challenge Hillary Clinton? »

June 01, 2015

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Autoguy

Well, I'm going to agree and disagree...
I agree in general with your essay, and with a violent transition to "the adulthood of nations". I believe that you are underestimating the cultural factor though.
It also looks like other cultures can use 'colonialism' as a barrier to the transition, a la Mugabe. If you can blame all the violence on somebody else, you won't mature to adulthood. If your culture says that violence is a good thing, then you won't transition to adulthood. So I think there can be barriers. I also think that you can regress - like Turkey is threatening to regress. Kemal Attaturk dragged Turkey into the modern age, but Islam is arguably dragging it back.
Lastly, for those of you who think that the US War of Independence was a violent transition to adulthood, I would disagree for many reasons. That was realpolitik, pure and simple. Great Britain arguably went through that transition 150 years earlier with Cromwell and the roundheads.

Ted Zaharchuk

Like the previous commentator I will both agree and disagree. Your post is based on a presumption that the middle east is made up of nation states, which are the most modern expression of human organization. Yet, these countries are only nation states in form, and not substance. Dictators always reign in places where tribalism is the ruling social order. Modern Islam is a tribal expression, and until it goes through its reformation, just like Christianity some centuries ago, the current situation will prevail.

The comments to this entry are closed.

e-mail address

Blog powered by Typepad
Member since 02/2008

Blogging Tories

  • Blogging Tories