• "The Goal - Imperfect Instability"

The brief article below was published on the blog  samizdata. 

These guys have a strongly dynamist bent - hence their logo :

The Goal - Imperfect Instability

by Taylor Dinerman

• Taylor passed this article about the falling dominoes of the Middle East on to me late last night his time and in the wee hours Zulu here on the right bank of the pond. Articles by Taylor appear here from time to time as well as in a few other publications like WSJ. - ed

 

Last year I was having a drink with a space guy from the Pentagon and we started talking about the Middle East, Iraq etc etc. He made some comment about the need to 'stabilize the region'. He is a great guy and definitely on the side of the angels but I had to tell him. The strategy is the opposite. Bush wants to destabilize the area. It is the only way there will be change. Stability is what brought us 9/11.

 

With what has been happening, with elections in the PA, in Iraq, and now in the instability in Lebanon; with the governments of Egypt and Syria floundering about and grasping at straws, the US strategy is beginning to work. It is going to be a long hard slog as our Rummy put it, but there is a sense that the corner has been turned.

 

You have to give Bush and the neocons credit, after the attack my first instinct was to say that these people deserved to have self government taken away from them. The administration chose the opposite path, they were going to try and inflict real self government on the Muslim and Arab world.

 

It is an imperfect and messy process and democracy by itself is not necessarily a friend of liberal human rights. Over time, if they keep it up they will soon find themselves practicing some form of grown up politics. That process will eventually dry up the pond of paranoia and rage which the terrorist scum have thrived on for the last three or four decades.

 

We, less than perfect human beings, make progress in the oddest and least likely ways. The bombs in Tel Aviv and Hilla are not going to stop this process. For the moment give Wolfowitz and the neocons credit, they did not let their anger after the attack blind them to the essential humanity of the Arab and Muslim people. Reagan used to hammer home the idea that Americans and Russian wanted pretty much the same thing, the giant Communist stone was in the way of the Russian people getting it.

 

The realist move would have been to get even deeper into bed with the Arab and Muslim despots: instead they chose to take a big chance and bet on democracy and on the people. For a while it looked like they would over reached and gone too far. They certainly have got a long ways to go. Today however they deserve a pat on the back.

 

Bravo Zulu.

 

Following the article was a link to  The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled .

A very relevant lastsuperpower forum thread :   stability is a central issue  

If people want to know more about 'dynamism',  I'd suggest taking a look at Virginia Postrel's book:

"The Future and its Enemies"  

Parts of it can be read on-line  at dynamist.com  (scroll down past the synopsis to find several on-line chapters). Also check out the reviews at Amazon (click on the first link above) .

Here's a review that Barry York wrote for LastSuperpower in 2004:

Having just read Virginia Postrel's book, The Future and its enemies, I'd like to offer a comment. Unfortunately, this is a comment of the off-the-top-of-the-head variety but it's all I can manage at the moment.

 

I found the key concepts of stasism and dynamism very useful and enlightening. They help explain what the real ideological differences are, and go beyond the labels of Left and Right. Mind you, I am not suggesting that these labels ought to be rejected. Indeed, members of the lastsuperpower site have tried, and still try, to differentiate between the pseudo-Left and a real Left position. But, as Postrel points out, there are people who might normally be thought of as on the Right who can be dynamist in their thinking and those on what is commonly regarded as `the Left` who are out and out stasists. 

 

At first I wondered why not just use the concepts reactionary and progressive? But her view is that the new element is the technocratic elite. The technocrats are `progressive` in the sense that they support change but they only want change that is organised and directed in centralised and controlled ways. The dynamists support diversity and local knowledge.

 

The chapter on the nature of Nature is very good, as is the chapter on the importance of `play` as a creative, boundary-breaking, process. If you want to know why reactionaries (stasists) hate beach volley-ball read this book!

 

It's refreshing to encounter someone who embraces the processes of change with genuine enthusiasm. In light of the lastsuperpower's discussion of spirituality last year, I think it can be said that the book exudes a progressive spirit. The future is unpredictable - and ain't life great?

 

There's a movie called "Pleasantville" that also develops this theme. It's about a boy and his sister living in the 1990s who enter a 1950s sit-com, only to find that the idealized `golden fifties` were conformist and, indeed, `stasist`. The movie isn't consistent - I won't do a critique here - but it's conclusion is memorable. The main characters embrace the world of change rather than of conformity and nostalgia. Oh yes, I must mention: the 1950s portion of the film is made in black-and-white, which conveys the idea of the boy and his sister having entered a sit-com of the era. But then something strange happens: as individuals start to question orthodoxy, colour enters their lives. It's a technically mean feat, reinforcing the point that chaos, rebellion, unpredictability are preferable to certainty, dogma and stasism.

 

Back to Postrel's book, though. I had a couple of qualms. Nowhere is the `M` word mentioned. Yet Marxism must count as a significant dynamist outlook. The Communist Manifesto contains words that are poetic in conveying Marx's enthusiasm for the achievements of industrialisation. He compares them to the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman aquaducts, saying that the C19th industrial revolution surpassed such achievements. Of course, Marx does not stop there.

 

Which leads to my next point about Postrel's book. Whereas Marx saw the development of capitalism as creating the material preconditions for a better future, and the anatagonism of classes that can only be finally resolved through revolution, Postrel believes implicitly that capitalism will reproduce itself, adapt to the changing circumstances it helps create. This is the opposite of the Marxist view that sees the capitalist class as long redundant and capitalism as creating `its own grave diggers`.

 

But, to complete the circle: her point is precisely that the dynamist camp is a diverse and varied one.

Prof Glenn Reynolds, America's Instapundit, observes that "democratisation is a process, not an event". Far too often, it's treated like an event: ship in the monitors, hold the election, get it approved by Jimmy Carter and the UN, and that's it. Doesn't work like that. What's happening in the Middle East is the start of a long-delayed process. Eight million Iraqis did more for the Arab world on January 30 than 7,000 years of Mubarak-pace marching.

From Free Iraqi , a Baghdad based, Iraqi  blogger

The brave Lebanese did not wait for the American troops to be there nor did they wait for the Syrians to withdraw from their land, but I think it's obvious that Saddam's statue's falling shook the ground under Al Assad's statue and I doubt we would've seen such great picture if the American troops had not come to Iraq.