Our Righteous Minds

 Despite the scientific and technological advancements of the modern world, we humans are limited by cognitive and other psychological shortcomings that inhibit the capacity to obtain objective truth. One that many are familiar with is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to seek out and/or interpret information in a way that supports pre-conceived ideas. Another is group think: humans have a deep need to belong and to feel loved and accepted, and this often creates pressure to conform to others in terms of dress, behaviour, and belief. Finally, there is the basic fact that social and political reality is much too complex for our brains to fully grasp, and hence we create “shortcuts”, or filters, that make perception and information processing more manageable. One shortcut is ideology, which is a tool to simplify reality in a way that diagnoses a problem and that creates the motivation for political action. Another example is the use of stereotype. We categorize both people and objects into generalized ideas that help to simplify and prevent cognitive overload, and that contain often misleading assumptions that influence interpretation. This is particularly the case with the way we understand foreigners. When we meet someone who is not from our own national group, most of us will almost immediately place them into some national category that contains stereotypical assumptions (e.g., Canadians are polite, Italians are mobsters, etc.). It also frequently happens with gender; when meeting someone of the opposite sex we often make assumptions about them (women are like this, men are like that). This tendency to stereotype and simplify even when a more nuanced approach would be better is so widespread that one might even assert that it is part of brain’s (faulty) cognitive equipment.

So why, then, do many of us believe that we possess objective political truth in the cosmic sense? And why, as a corollary, do we tend to feel so confident of our beliefs and simultaneously think that political opponents who think differently are either selfish, dumb, or morally bankrupt? Jonothan Haidt’s Our Righteous Minds goes some way in answering those questions. In this highly informed and well written book, he shows the evolutionary basis of our politics. Evolution has equipped humans with the mental tools to adapt to a range of challenges. The formation of groups, and the difficulties and opportunities that inhere to being a member of a group, are particularly important in this regard. At the most basic level, groups have an adaptive challenge over solitary individuals, and this was especially true in the harsh conditions in which our primitive ancestors evolved. But in order for a group to enhance the reproductive success of its members, it had to function properly. This means, inter alia, that mechanisms for cooperation had to emerge, for they are necessary for everything from rearing the young, to obtaining food, to coordinating war efforts against other groups. It is this functional need for cooperation, Haidt shows, which led to the development of our emotional brains. The basic emotions that all experience, like fear, anger, love, desire, affection, disgust, and joy arose in our evolutionary past because they furthered the reproductive success of those groups that possessed them.

As humans organized themselves into larger and more complex social aggregations, they developed more sophisticated forms of culture and cognition which filtered our emotional universe. Humans not only developed concepts to name the emotions they felt, but also rules that influenced how emotions could be legitimately expressed. But in the long span of evolution, this phase of culture and cognition is just a blink of an eye. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in contexts where the immediate and automatic sensation of emotions was necessary for survival. The emotion of disgust, for example, evolved to steer humans away from rotting or infectious matter, and for it to fulfill its function it has to be felt immediately. Ditto for fear: in the savannah, the hunter whose sensation of fear was automatic at the sight of a predator would have certainly had an advantage over one who thought first and felt later.

This evolutionary account of emotions provides clues to the question of why people generally experience emotions in an automatic and immediate fashion. Anger, fear, love, and other primal emotions are rarely the result of interpretation or detached reflection. Rather, we feel these emotions first and then interpret the event or stimuli on the basis of these emotions. Both cognition and emotion are information processing mechanisms, but the latter is much faster than the former because we are physiologically built that way. And emotions’ precedence in time translates to its predominance in interpretation and in influencing human behaviour. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read the findings of neuroscience, nor to those who, like me, come from cultures and families that are unashamedly emotional through and through.

Haidt does not stop there. In Our Righteous Minds he also shows that our emotional dispositions provide the basis for morality. Evidence shows, for example, that people who have damaged the emotional parts of their brains are unable to make moral decisions in a functional way, highlighting the dense nexus between these parts of the brain. Haidt proposes a list of moral senses that appeal to, or trigger, primordial emotion: 1) care/harm, which was selected in response to the challenge of caring for children, 2) fairness/cheating, which evolved to improve cooperation and prevent exploitation, 3) loyalty/betrayal evolved to help form coalitions, 4) authority/subversion was necessary to help identify status hierarchy, and 5) sanctity/degradation provided the emotional basis of religious rituals. These traits exist in all groups, and although the diversity of their expression is immense, the emotions that they appeal to are evolutionary selected adaptations and hence universal to the human species.

The differences between small groups and larger ones are particularly stark. Smaller groups, especially hunting and gathering tribes, are more homogenous and hence the cultural expressions of emotions that are foundational for things such as religious rituals and rearing the young are more monolithic. As societies become more advanced, different moral matrices emerge, and herein lies the emotional basis of political ideology: the Left, according to Haidt, appeals the moral sense of care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right appeals to all five.

However, despite these differences between the Left and the Right, at the civilizational level there remain shared basic assumptions. The West is particularly relevant in this regard: Haidt shows that the philosophical liberal assumptions that most Westerners, consciously or not, presume—that persons are unique, autonomous, rational, responsible individuals who should be free to choose their own destinies provided that they do not harm others—are historically and civilizationally, in Haidt’s colourful acronym, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic). As most anthropologists and those who have travelled to non-Western countries know, other civilizations display more collectivist moral universes, which means that they conceive of persons as moored or tethered into an organic whole that emphasizes responsibilities rather than rights. This collectivist ontology is actually more consistent with our evolutionary heritage, according to Haidt, because our emotions are evolutionary adaptations selected at the group and not the individual level.

Within the scholarly discipline of evolutionary biology there has been a disagreement on whether our physical and mental traits evolved in individuals or at the group level. To some the debate has largely been settled; prominent members of the field, like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, for example, do not accept the idea of group-level selection. As alluded to above Jonathan Haidt disagrees and argues that our emotional brains could not have evolved at the individual level because their very function is to enhance the survival of the group by creating binding moral rules. Morality is intrinsically relational and group based, and hence if our emotions are the basis of morality, it suggests that our emotive traits are shared because they were selected at the level of the group.

I am not an expert in the field but I find Jonathan Haidt’s arguments to be more convincing. The need to belong, and to be loved and accepted seems to be such a deep and primordial attribute of all human groups. The Western conception of rational and autonomous individuals with natural rights reflects intellectual and cultural developments that are historically unique: medieval Church lawyers first conceived of the idea of natural rights based on their religious worldview of the importance of individual salvation (this contrasts with other religious worldviews which emphasized the need to create a more just political and social order). The scientific revolution that began in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the invention of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of secularism, the French and American revolutions, all contributed to the long term process whereby the religious idea of natural rights became the secular version of human rights that most Westerners (and many non-Westerners) take for granted as a natural part of the moral universe. These developments, in a sense, have taken us farther and farther away from the collectivist moral matrices that our brains are still equipped with, at least at the physiological level.

I would even hypothesize that these developments help to explain some of the pathologies that are endemic to rich and Westernized societies: depression, anxiety, ennui, and anomie. The founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, made this observation long ago. He wanted to understand why suicide was more prevalent in the rich Protestant countries compared to poorer Catholic societies, and he observed that the former’s more radical individualism led to a sense of alienation and a belief that failure was purely the responsibility of the individual person while poorer Catholics were still tethered to collective moral and social contexts which helped them to cope with their difficulties and shortcomings. The implication is that the distancing from the more group- orientated moral matrix that was ushered in by the Protestant Reformation also helped to weaken the sense of belonging and group feeling that were part of the human species natural habitat for millennia. I think Durkheim’s framework can explain many other phenomenon, not only suicide. For example, why do many young, educated Westerners go and fight and die for ISIS even though in their host societies they enjoyed all the goodies that Western standards of living provided? One reason might be a deep dissatisfaction with the materialist and individualist ethos that suffuse most Western societies. Many people feel this and deal with it in healthy ways, such as joining political and religious/spiritual groups or devotion to family and community, while others use alcohol, drugs, sex, or anti-depressants to numb their pain. For some, joining a religious militant group that is fighting to establish a collectivist Islamic utopia also fulfills this function. It is no coincidence that Islamists, in their recruitment propaganda, routinely denounce the secularism, liberalism, and materialism of the West. They are appealing to the frustrations of many, especially disaffected young men or those who reject to Western modes of living.

Although Jonathan Haidt is a left wing American liberal, his book subtly challenges liberals and libertarians who favour a political and social order organized around the metaphysical assumptions of rational, autonomous, and responsible individuals. His data suggests that the development of a liberal civilization is quite the achievement in light of the fact that physiologically our brains evolved emotional mechanisms that are more consonant with group-orientated moral matrices—an observation borne out by the fact that pretty much all non-Western civilizations are more collectivist, in terms of their conception of the universe and humans’ place within it. Thus the purported universality of Western political forms—like individual rights and democracy—are not universal at all and are rather historically and culturally contingent. This should give an attitude of humility when faced with others who think differently, especially for the liberal interventionists who often triumphantly proselytize their creed in international affairs.

Haidt’s book also councils humility about what we can truly know about the social and political realm. Our political and ideological frameworks are, at bottom, different emotional reactions to the organization of society, and these emotions are the product of an evolutionary history that is radically different from the contemporary era. Our primitive ancestors lived in conditions that necessitated emotions that were automatic and immediate and that influenced their interpretations of environments, not in the sense of providing objective truth but in terms of enhancing survival. Hunters had to feel certainty that the predator in the distance would kill them in order for them to flee, and this is true even if their perception was wrong. Hundreds of thousands of years later, we humans still interpret reality with certainty because, simply, our brains are designed that way. Applied to other social issues, this certainty translates into a self-righteous attitude that contributes to the tribalism of political life: the sense that we are right, the other is wrong (or dumb, or selfish, etc), and that’s that. This atavistic impulse towards tribalism has ironically been accentuated by the rise of digital media, suggesting that the techno-utopian vision of internet as some liberating and cosmopolitan force is premature.

Of course, Haidt’s argument that we are driven by emotion is not original. The ancient Roman poet Ovid said that “desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but I follow the wrong”. David Hume famously said that humans are “slaves to their passions”, an observation which contrasted with the veneration of reason professed by most of his contemporaries (especially in France). Haidt’s book shows, using plenty of data collected with modern scientific methods, that the insights of Ovid and Hume were right.

Jihad

It is the perfect day to write a blog post about jihad, as early this afternoon (Monday, Feb 2) I will be lecturing on the topic to my students at Trent. It also gives me something to do; at the moment it is 10 AM and I am on a greyhound bus, travelling from Toronto to Trent in Peterborough through a snow storm that has seriously slowed down traffic. The bus left Toronto at 7:30 AM and normally at this time I would already have arrived. It looks like I will be there by noon--more than two hours late.

But those are first-world problems (it is actually quite comfortable in the greyhound bus). There are folks all over the world who are dealing with much worse, especially in those countries that have become the main targets of Islamic extremism. Of course, the West is also a target; just a few weeks ago, the murder of cartoonists in Paris shocked the West to its core, as did the London bombings, the attacks in Spain, and, of course, 911. But these atrocities, as bad as they are, were relatively less severe than the attacks that take place almost daily in Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries that radicals have targeted. This points to a fact that is often ignored: Muslims themselves are the biggest victims of Islamic extremism, at least in terms of the sheer numbers of deaths and frequency of attacks.

Before proceeding, it is worth writing a few words about terminology. The title of this blog post is "Jihad", and I often refer to the extremists as "jihadists". There is a simple reason why I do this: the extremists themselves, as they remind us repeatedly in their media communiques, believe that they are carrying out jihad. Thus to call them "violent extremists" as the Obama administration has done has more to do with trying to be inoffensive than with scholarly objectivity. The analyst must aim to be precise and accurate, and this means, among other things, that when we discuss political actors, we pay attention to what they themselves say about their motivations. If, for example, an anarchist claims to carry out violence because he aims to create an anarchist society, we should take him at his word and call him an anarchist even though there are many anarchists who object to the use of violence. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, about jihad: the fact that many Muslims object to the use of violence for political ends does not mean that jihadists who do commit acts of terror should not be labeled according to their self-identifying categories.

The more interesting question is how to explain jihad, at least its modern variant. After 911, a flurry of books and articles were produced that aimed to answer that question, and some of the arguments entered the political zeitgeist and even influenced policy. One of the more popular ones that still resonates with many is that contemporary jihad is a consequence of poverty or the lack of economic opportunities in Muslim countries. The political version of this idea suggests that the lack of political openness, or democratic structures, also plays a role. The logic is the following: liberal democracies provide citizens with leaders who are accountable to their citizens' demand for economic growth and other goods. In contrast, authoritarian countries are seething cauldrons of cronyism and despotism, places where the masses of unemployed youths do not have mechanisms to express their disaffection. Many, as a consequence, turn to radical ideologies because, like the utopian ideas of yore, they provide simple explanations as well as a framework for political action to address the ills of their society.

This view is held by both the centre-left and and centre-right in the West. The theoretical foundations are liberalism: its assumptions of human nature are that people everywhere desire the same things, such as freedom, economic well-being, and autonomy, and for liberals, the only political structure that can realize those wishes is liberal democracy. One can understand why this idea would be attractive to many Westerners. First, it is amenable to policy and hence control. If it is true, then, of course, foreign policy should be orientated towards promoting liberal democracy. Second, it is seen as a confirmation that people are everywhere the same, or want the same things, which is a core assumption of the universalist ontology of philosophical liberalism. Lastly, it confirms the liberal theory of history as progress: radicals, with their willingness to kill innocents and die for their utopian fantasies, are perceived as backwards, remnants of a superstitious age when millions were willing to give their lives for God. Secularism will eventually seep into the culture of non-Western societies, and as that happens, there will be fewer people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their diety.

There is only one problem with this argument: it is not supported by evidence. Let's start with the attackers of the Twin Towers. The 911 hijackers were not poor or dispossessed. Rather, most were upper-class and university educated, some with graduate degrees. They all spent a considerable amount of time in Western countries, and hence had direct experience of the goodies of the West's political-economic model, but rather than becoming converted to the virtues of liberal democracy, they wanted and were able to inflict an unprecedented amount of damage to it. That fact compliments the results of research conducted by Marc Sagemen (which I will be presenting to my students) which shows, on the basis of a representative sample, that terrorists tend to be much more educated and well-off than average. In addition, poverty and despotism are not unique to the Muslim world. Both are or were present in many Asian and African countries, and yet they did not produce organizations like Al Qaeda. Despite all the evidence against this position, there are still prominent Westerners like Thomas Friedman who endorse it. Even the Economist, which usually produces analytically rigorous accounts of international political issues, expresses the idea that the only long-term solution to terrorism is liberal democracy in the Muslim world.

A more nuanced view comes from the French scholar of jihad Gilles Keppel. I assigned his book Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press) to my students because it is a well-researched and scholarly account of the subject, based as it is on his travels across the Middle East, his fluency in Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish, and on his many interviews of jihadists across the region. This large amount of data leads him to several conclusions. First, contemporary jihad has been propelled by decidedly modern circumstances, such as the failure of alternative ideologies to bring modernity to Middle East. Leaders such as Gamal Nasser, Hafez Assad (father of Bashar Assad), Saddam Hussein, and others have imported Western ideas, such as nationalism and socialism, that, it was hoped, would usher in modernization and increased standards of living. It did not turn out that way; in fact they brought in cronyism and despotism instead. Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, were able to capitalize on these failures, which explains why they were able to recruit individuals from various social classes, including urban professionals, merchants, and the slum dwelling masses, all of whom, in their own way, saw in the ideals of Islamism the potential vehicle for a better, more prosperous and just society. But these unmet expectations and frustrations can only go so far in explaining Islamism. As Keppel shows, the ideas of Islamists resonated because they were distilled from a culture where religion played an enormously influential role. Islamists' prescriptions of a more pure and just society flowed from a certain interpretation of the canonical texts--the Koran and the Hadith--and from the examples of Mohammed and his successors. This gave them an authenticity that Marxism, liberalism, and nationalism could not match. The social welfare activities of Islamists only added to their credibility especially when contrasted with a corrupt and inefficient state.

Islamic extremism is the violent variant of the phenomenon of Islamism, as both aim to create a utopia in the form of a caliphate, although they disagree on the means to that end: extremists are willing to commit violence, while Islamists take a more gradual approach.

To identify the evolution of Islamist thought, Keppel places emphasis on three thinkers in particular: Ruhllola Khomeni, Abul Mawdudi, and Sayd Qutb. All, in their own ways, expressed the narrative that Islam's place at the apex of global power was corrupted by elements that were alien to the religion, and all called for a return to the supposedly pure form that existed in the period of Islam's triumphant years. Just as early Muslims were able to conquer their much more powerful adversaries (the Romans and Sassanids), contemporary Islam could also defeat the global powers of the day, namely, the US and the USSR, provided Muslims embraced the original faith and discarded the corrupting elements that created disunity, weakness, and moral degradation.

Sayd Qutb was perhaps the most influential in the development of contemporary jihadists movements such as Al Qaeda. Qutb was an Egyptian bureaucrat who worked for the country's Ministry of Education. In the fifties he traveled to the US to learn about its education system, and, as this quote shows, he was appalled by the culture he saw, especially the role and status of women:

“the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it"

And this was in the fifties, that era that conservatives associate with sexual purity!.

This look outraged Qutb for its indecency

These and other observations led Qutb to the conclusion that the West was incorrigibly corrupt and strengthened his conviction that the Westernization of Egypt must be reversed. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, whose self-declared animating principle is:

"Allah is our goal, the Prophet is our leader, the Quran is our constitution,

Jihad is our way, and death for Allah is our most exalted wish"

Qutb went on to produce works, such as Milestones, that became standard reading for Islamists and jihadists. Both Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden were strongly influenced by Qutb's call for the full Islamification of society and the implementartion of Sharia law. The ultimate program would be to unite Muslims, cleanse their societies of corrupting influences, and lay the basis for the domination that existed during Islam's golden age. One could say that all of today's Sunni jihadists are in one way or another a legacy of the utopian political program articulately expressed by Sayd Qutb.

Thus when we watch ISIS establishing a Caliphate over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, they are attempting to put into practice Qutb's vision of utopia, although it is unlikely that the latter would support the barbaric methods being used for that objective. And in a sense, the program of Islamists to establish a Sharia-based Caliphate is more authentic and culturally rooted than the activities of their opponents. After all, the Caliphate was the dominant political structure in the Muslim world until it was abolished by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, a modernizer who detested religion and who brought the the first secular nation-state to a Muslim country. Subsequently, other states in the region which were provinces of the Ottoman Empire became nation-states. Gilles Keppel not unreasonably calls this episode very traumatic for Muslims; it confirmed Europe's dominance over them even though in previous centuries Islam oversaw golden ages emanating from Muslim empires with capitals in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. One could therefore sustain that ISIS's attempt to restore the Caliphate is an attempt to reverse this century old scar that still blights the region.

Unfortunately for ISIS, it is unlikely that their project will succeed, because the nation-state, for all its faults, is here to stay, and it is highly unlikely that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Gulf states are going anywhere. Although most of them are authoritarian, they enjoy a level of internal and external legitimacy that ISIS will never match. This does not mean, however, that the principles that motivate ISIS (and other jihadists groups) will be extinguished. As Gilles Keppel has shown, the desire for an Islamic utopia is deeply rooted and will continue to influence Islamist movements everywhere. ISIS is simply the most violent manifestation of that dynamic.

Greek Election

On January 25th Greece had elections that led to the victory of the anti-austerity party Syriza. I appeared in the media to provide analysis of it. An op-ed I wrote in the National Post can be found here:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/21/philip-giurlando-the-end-of-the-euro/

I was also on CTV news, and the clip of the interview can be found here:

http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=538031&playlistId=1.2205454&binId=1.810401&playlistPageNum=1&binPageNum=1

The election in Greece represents a serious turning point in the evolution of the seemingly interminable euro zone crisis, and it will be interesting to see how Germany responds. Stay tuned

Is State-Capitalism the Wave of the Future?

With the nineties now two decades behind us, and with the benefit of hindsight, some of the fashionable ideas of that era now seem quaint at best, and ludicrous at worst. One of beliefs of that era was that liberal democracy would be the wave of the future, and events during the same period certainly gave it credence: the collapse of the USSR, the democratization and marketizations of Eastern European and Asian countries, the economic success of the West which suggested that only its model could deliver the goods that most people wanted, such as comfortable living standards, economic opportunity, and good public services. These ideas, supported by much of the intelligentsia, seemed to be the conventional wisdom until 2007, when the sub-prime mortgage crisis that started in the US spread across the West and led to major recessions and huge job losses. This not only created a lot of misery, it also exposed the West's promotion of free markets as hollow, as governments of both centre-and centre-right, as well as other organs of the state used the levers of state power to combat the effects of the crisis. Whether it was George W. Bush sending checks of public money to all Americans, or Barack Obama's major stimulus, or Ben Bernanke injecting trillions of government backed currency into the financial system, Western policymakers showed a marked, and unsurprising, tendency to use the state to promote economic growth regardless of their ideological inclinations.

Whether these policies were effective will not be addressed here; reasonable people can disagree on the extent to which, or whether, the expansive monetary and fiscal policies worked, or whether they have only addressed the symptoms and created the conditions that will only delay the day of reckoning. The crisis that rocked the Western world matters for another reason: it undermined the West's triumphalist proselytizing of the virtues of liberal democracy and enhanced the appeal of an emerging alternative. State-capitalism is a political-economic model that has several features that clash with the Western liberal state, in particular, it relies on the wisdom of meritocratically chosen central planners rather than democratically elected leaders to direct both the market and society.  Democracy is shunned or contemptuously seen as short-termist and irrational, which supposedly contrasts with the long-term and enlightened decisions of non-elected central planners. At the same time, it is not socialist, since governments in state-capitalist countries aim to promote business and markets and embrace globalization. Their firms, although often state-owned, are run by professional managers with MBA's from leading universities in the English-speaking world.

Mao might be turning in his grave if he saw what China has become

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge tackle the question of state-capitalism head-on in their book The Fourth Revolution. They are very pessimistic about the West's liberal democratic model. The economic crisis is only the tip of the iceberg; there are, according to them, more fundamental problems that make the Western state unsustainable in the long-term. At the economic level, the aging of populations and extended life-spans mean that states will be liable for the health and pension costs of people who retire in their sixties and are likely to live into their nineties. This amounts to up to three decades of being dependent on the welfare state, a length of time that was not envisaged by the creators of publicly funded social services who assumed that retirement would be much shorter. This is exacerbated by the shortage of workers who will pay the taxes to fund these programs. When the welfare state expanded in the fifties and sixties, there were eight tax-paying workers for every senior. That ratio is now approaching two to one. Immigration is helping to plug this hole, but even that is not enough balance the implicit liabilities of many states. There are also, according to the authors, political pressures that are creating the need to restructure the state. Polling data indicates that most Westerners want the state to take on more and more responsibilities even while they simultaneously are unhappy with most elected officials. Favourable views towards politicians have never been so low, and yet these same voters want politicians to take care of them from cradle to grave; this creates a tension that is potentially destabilizing. Lastly, and perhaps most convincingly, are the pressures emanating from the international system. Globalization has unleashed a ruthless competition for investment and trade and economic growth. Large and growing economies are among the main elements of national power, and these things increasingly depend on the capacity of countries to attract capital and to produce goods cheaper than others. It is this that has been largely responsible for the decline in manufacturing in the West, where firms have production costs that are much higher than those in developing countries. These three pressures--economic, political, and international--mean, according to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, that the Western state must either reform or slide into bankruptcy, and if the latter happens, it will represent the triumph of the state-capitalist model.

The authors do not lay the blame on any one political faction; in fact their ire is directed towards both the centre-left and centre-right, since both have increased the powers of the state. The right has increased expenditure on the military and security apparatus, while the left has allocated more resources to social services. Both camps have been unable or unwilling to confront various lobbies and interest groups that increase the states' liabilities. For example, medical doctors who prevent nurses from doing the same tasks at a much lower cost, or the housing/constructing industry which favours tax exemptions on mortgage payments (and hence reduces the cost of housing), or the myriad other interests that successfully lobby the state for some tax reduction or increase in spending or monopoly privilege that usually favours the well-off. Although The Fourth Revolution is unsparing in its criticisms of the Left and Right, the writers are unmistakably more critical of the Left and endorse a solution that is more consistent with the Right: a smaller state. However, they qualify this position with the argument that smaller does not mean less progressive. In fact they argue that the current state, which consumes almost half of GDP, is hardly progressive since taxes and spending tend to favour the rich (the deduction on mortgage interests is a good example of that). They believe that the state does have a role in protecting society's weakest, such as the very poor, old, and sick, but not the middle class. Here, they are endorsing a restructuring of the state along the lines of the state-capitalist model, which also avoids entitlements for the middle classes and tends to target spending only towards those who need it most. However, they reject the authoritarianism that seems to be a key feature of state capitalism. They want to preserve democracy even while recognizing that voters' contradictory wishes and the activities of interest groups are part of the problem.

The book has much that will satiate the thirst of the intellectually inclined reader. One is that it divides the history of the modern state into four broad and recognizable eras that give a clear sense of how the state evolved. The first era is signified by the work of Hobbes, who was the first to theorize political power as a social contract rather than deriving from the divine right of royalty. The second was defined by the Victorian liberalism of Mill, who aimed to promote liberty in the sense of being free from external control, and equality in the legal sense of no one having legal privileges deriving from lineage. Another reform promoted by the Victorians was the priority of meritocracy rather pedigree in the selection of bureaucrats. The third major change in the states' evolution emerged from from the work of Sidney Webb, who successfully changed the meaning of freedom from the classical sense to freedom from want. The definition of equality was also changed; it now meant equality of opportunity, and since not all people were born with the same opportunities, it was the states' role to create the conditions for humans to flourish regardless of whether they were the offspring of professionals or chimney workers. This provided the intellectual foundation for the welfare state that persists to this day. The era of the seventies and beyond, which many would call neo-liberal, does not, according to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, constitute a major epoch in the evolution of the state because, although views among political elites changed--as represented by the resounding victories of Thatcher, Reagan, and other right-wingers--the state itself did not change much, since it continues to tax and redistribute around the same amount now as it did then.

The book also has some statistics that give pause, such as the following: when one takes account of tax deductions and other hidden forms of spending, the US spends around 27% of GDP in social services, more than Italy and Denmark. Denmark! This challenges the stereotypes of the US as some neo-liberal paragon which supposedly contrasts with Europe's more social democratic model. Or this one: Singapore has better health and education outcomes than Western countries even though it spends under half of what the West spends on the same services. Singapore plays an important role in the book because it is such a successful model of state-capitalism: in the span of fifty years, it went from a being an economic backwater to one of the world's most developed countries. Not coincidentally, China has adopted Singapore's mix of authoritarianism, market-friendliness, and professionalization of political elites, and the success of China, coupled with its increasing influence, have made state-capitalism more attractive to many countries. It is now being adopted across Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere where China is increasingly supplanting the US as the main trading partner and provider of aid and security.

Micklethwait and Woolridge say, as mentioned above, that the Western state must shrink if it is going to meet the challenge in this global struggle for supremacy. The authors recognize that this rather formulaic approach will have different applications in different countries. For some, privatizations will be more pressing, while increasing state power might be more relevant elsewhere. For example, they applaud Europe's single payer health-care system as preferable to the US's jumble of private insurance companies: it provides better health outcomes at a lower cost, implying that, at least in this area, the US needs more, not less, state power. Scandinavian countries get very favourable treatment in the book, and rightly so, since on many indices of well-being--competitiveness, social mobility and inclusion, public services, etc--they are at the top of the world rankings. What is more, the Nordics are successful even though their states are still large, consuming almost half of GDP.

The success of the Nordics points to a deep flaw in The Fourth Revolution. If the Scandinavian countries are a success, why not endorse their model rather than the classical liberal one? This raises a deeper question that there are no easy answers to: why are the Nordics more successful than others despite having a large state? My answer is that the quality of the state matters just as much, if not more, than the size of the state, in producing favourable outcomes. This is certainly one of the secrets of the success of Singapore, which recruits only the best into the public service, and it does this with salaries of up to two million dollars for leading bureaucrats. One also cannot ignore culture: a strong civic sense that Northern European countries are known for must play some role in the quality of the state in Scandinavian countries. This then leads to another conclusion. If the cultural and societal conditions for a competent state are absent, its size will not really matter; large or small, it will continue to produce dysfunction. Thus the notion that reducing the state will automatically produce sustainable growth is simplistic boilerplate. What matters more, it seems, are the societal and cultural conditions that produce both competent states and favourable economic outcomes. Unfortunately for policymakers, there are no easy solutions because these things cannot be exported: societies and their cultures are radically unique, reflecting distinct historical trajectories and contingent elements such as their geopolitical neighborhoods or former colonial masters. This makes it difficult to create formulaic political programs, such as the kinds proposed in The Fourth Revolution, that can be adopted anywhere and be expected to produce sustainable growth. Rather, each country, owing mainly to its uniqueness, must find its own path through trial and error. Those who find the right path will ultimately prevail in the struggle for economic supremacy that characterizes international politics.

My Turkish Bath

When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, they inherited many of the city's Roman customs. One was the public bath. When indoor plumbing was unavailable, people bathed very little--sometimes only once a year, other times for special events. The Romans turned bathing into a social occasion when men would meet and socialize, loiter, and gossip about the city's affairs. When their territories were conquered in the East, the public bath was preserved and enriched with elements from the culture of the new imperial overlords, leading to syncretic and distinctive forms that persist to this day. I therefore had to experience a Turkish bath because I wanted a sense of how the Romans bathed and how the conquering Turks added their own practices to the custom. It was a journey into the era when private showers and bathtubs did not exist, as well as a taste of a local custom that has persisted for thousands of years and that is basically foreign to anybody born and raised in North America (and most parts of Europe for that matter).

That is not me in the picture. But that closely approximates my own experience of a Turkish bath

I had two options: go to the touristic public baths and pay a hefty price, or go to the one in the Fatih neighborhood, the Islamic/conservative part of town where prices for everything--including baths--are cheaper and where there are few, if any, tourists. I opted for the latter option, not only because of the huge difference in price (40 Turkish lira rather than 120 that one pays in the tourist area), but also because it would be much more adventurous and perhaps authentic.

When I entered the place, the first thing I noticed was that none of the staff spoke a word of English. They could only express the numbers that referred to the prices of the services--20 lira for the bath only, and 40 lira for a bath and a massage. I opted for the latter. Despite the language barrier, I could communicate with the staff using hand gestures and other non-verbal signs. First I was led me into a small private change room and instructed to completely undress and cover myself with a towel, to leave my belongings there, to lock the door, and take the key with me (all of this was expressed with non-verbal communication and clearly understood). The staff member then led me into the bathing and steam room, which is an area that is completely marble--the floors, the walls, the sinks, everything except the ceiling, which seemed to be built of another kind of stone with patterned holes that allowed the steam to exit the room. The first thing I noticed was that there were about 10-12 local Turks bathing and talking, and I thought: why are these men paying to bathe here when presumably they have indoor plumbing? Maybe they were there because of the social aspect of bathing, or maybe they lacked hot water at home, or maybe--although very unlikely--some of them lived in homes that still lacked private showers and bathrooms. In any event, I had no idea what to do, and so I just made friendly eye contact and copied the others, who were sitting down--some completely naked, others partly covered in towels--beside steaming and marble sinks with hot water and plastic bowls; they would  fill the bowls with water and pour it all over themselves, lather their bodies with soap, and then rinse with the same hot water.

I did this for about ten minutes and then wondered when, and how, and by whom, I would get a massage. I was then approached by a fat, hairy, and middle-aged man who said something to me in Turkish that I did not understand. I said "massage"? And he nodded to express yes. He sat me down beside the sink, and proceeded to pour hot steaming water all over me. Then he put on a glove-like device and rubbed me all over with it (except the private parts), including my scalp. I later learned that this was meant to remove dead skin cells. He then took me to the middle of the room, where there was an elevated area where one could sit or lie down. He instructed me with his hands to lie on my back, and then he covered me with with soap and proceeded to give me a massage that was very rough and intense. Apart from his somewhat smelly armpits and the pain from his intense prodding, rubbing, and pocking of my thighs and upper body, it was an interesting experience. He then did a few things that anyone who has visited a chiropractor is familiar with: crossing your arms and twisting your torso while giving a hard pushes that cause snapping noises in your spine. At one point I heard a snapping noise in the right-side of my rib-cage, and since then I have had a slight pain in that area, making me wonder whether he broke a rib.  Whenever he would press too hard, I would grunt and groan and make eye-contact with him, presumably with an expression on my face that showed some discomfort; he stared and smiled at me with silent amusement, knowing that I was a foreigner who had never experienced a Turkish bath.

After the soap-filled and rough massage over my entire body (except my private parts), I was instructed to rinse myself off (again, only with hand gestures but perfectly understandable) and subsequently led into the private room where I initially undressed. Here I was covered with towels by the staff who continued massaging my back and scalp. After that, I stayed there until I was completely dry, and then exited the room. When I approached the cashier to pay, there appeared the middle-aged hairy fat man who gave me the massage 15 minutes prior, motioning with his hands that he wanted a tip. I gave him one of five lira, even though I suspected that he might have cracked my rib.

After the Turkish bath I went to have a delicious chicken dona (or "shawarma"; the food here--as in all Mediterranean countries--is delightful), and then walked all the way to the Chora, a Bynzantine Church with amazingly preserved mosaics and frescoes. I also walked along the Theodosius wall, which protected the city for 1 thousand years until the Ottomans, with canon and superior numbers, managed to destroy parts of it, allowing them to conquer Constantinople in 1453, destroy the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, impose their own Sharia system of governance, and change the course of history. Observing that part of the wall, and reflecting on the epochal and momentous events that transpired there was awe-inspiring. I have read about that event many times, but being at the actual place allowed the imagination to run wild. I could almost hear the yelling, the pounding of the canons that destroyed the wall, and see the corpses that littered the battlefield. I could almost sense the humiliation of the Romans at losing their historic capital and the triumph of the Ottomans at taking it. It would be roughly equivalent to a Chinese army conquering Washington D.C., destroying the American constitutional and political order, subjugating the inhabitants of the US, taking its territorial possessions and wealth, and imposing a new world order based on the Chinese system of governance. Wow is an understatement.

 Today--the day after--I feel the after-effects of the Turkish bath: minor and totally tolerable aches around my upper shoulder and the rib area where I suspect I may have a cracked rib. I also feel aches in my legs, but this is mostly because yesterday I walked for over 10 hours, although I think the rough treatment of my legs during the massage has something to do with it.

A Day With My Kurdish and Turkish Friends

The weather in Istanbul today was cold and rainy. I had planned to spend the day walking many miles to see an ancient Church with well-preserved frescoes, the wall built by the emperor Theodosius, and to experience a Turkish bath. But when I walked outside to go and get breakfast, the cold rain changed my mind, and I decided to instead stay in the hostel to get work done (mostly marking papers). Around mid-day, the owner of the hostel asked me whether I would like to accompany his son and his son's friend to a town a few hundred kilometers away. He had to go there to pick up some documents from the local university. I immediately decided to go because I saw it as an opportunity to spend the day with locals who I could query--about their lives, and their views on Turkish politics. I also thought it would be nice to get out of Istanbul for the day.

My new friends in Turkey. I am in the middle.

The trip was worth it. The locals who I was with spoke passable English. They are close friends who went to school together, and one is an ethnic Kurd, the other an ethnic Turk. Whenever the Western media speaks about the Kurds and Turks together, it is usually about the problems that the Turkish government has in its attempts to accommodate the wish of the Kurdish minority for more autonomy. It was therefore delightful to see these two young men interact as genuine friends and nothing more; their separate ethnicities did not seem to matter at all. They were very friendly and affectionate towards me and perhaps a bit intrigued about my genuine interest in their lives and beliefs. I asked them questions about their experiences as youngsters in Turkey, their religious views and political beliefs, and their life goals. This conversation took place during a two hour car ride to our destination, and on the way I noticed several things worth mentioning. The first is the sheer size of Istanbul; it took us almost three quarters of an hour to finally reach the city limit and get on the freeway that took us to the next town. Signs of Istanbul's breakneck growth and huge population are everywhere. There are cranes dotting the panorama which attest to the hundreds of new high rises being built, and this is on top of the sprawling and high density already-inhabited buildings and houses that mark the huge landscape. The darker side of this growth was evident as well: when driving on an elevated part of the road one could see clouds of smog below covering entire neighborhoods. I also saw truck drivers relieving themselves on the side of the road--twice. One defecated, and the other urinated, and they seemed pretty nonchalant about it, suggesting that it is considered normal. I am not surprised, since the traffic in Istanbul is so bad that it is easy to imagine a situation whereby nature calls and, because cars are crawling forward very slowly, one cannot wait to reach a toilet and hence must pull over and do their business.

We arrived at our destination and parked the car in a lot where cars seemed to be parked wherever it was convenient or where they could find space; it was not the kind of orderly parking someone from North American is accustomed to. When entering the university, the first thing I noticed was that there are pictures of Mustafa Kemal (or Attaturk, meaning "Father of the Turks") everywhere--in all the hallways, in all the offices, even in the eating area. It really gives the impression that Kemal and his successors built a cult of personality that even the current Islamist government would have a hard time extirpating. One of the questions I have asked people here in Turkey is what they think of Kemal, and the range of responses are interesting. My Kurdish friend told me that he does not like Kemal because he killed a lot of Kurds, while my Turkish friend said that he really liked him. The other day I had dinner with a professor of American origin, and his response was the most interesting. He told me that the omnipresent images of Mustafa Kemal are, to him, a comfortable reminder that Turkey is still a secular republic and that the legacy of Kemalism is one of the only constraints that prevents the current Islamist government from bringing Turkey towards an Iranian-style theocracy. He also said that the current government is slowly dismantling the Kemalist institutions that helped to preserve Turkey's secular political order, such as the army, which last year was purged of secularists and replaced with cronies of Erdogan who are sympathetic to his Islamist agenda. The most intriguing thing he told me was that if he starts to see the omnipresent images of Mustafa Kemal being removed, it would be a sign that the days of the secular republic are numbered and, at that point, he would have to leave the country.

As we were leaving the university, we said our goodbyes to some of the staff with a distinctive Turkish salutation that expresses affection in a very Mediterranean fashion. It is similar to the Italian way of greeting or saying bye: kissing twice on the cheeks while holding the others' hand and placing the other hand on the others' shoulder or upper arm. The Turkish version also has contact with the hands, but rather than kissing on the cheek, there is a contact of the temple area of each others' heads, just above and to the side of eyebrow. I did it for the first time, and it was a bit awkward because I was wearing my glasses, and the salutation ended up misaligning my glasses, forcing me to re-adjust them, but this was a minor issue. I rather appreciated experiencing this distinctive cultural practice which is not that different from the one I am used to using especially with other Italians.

The conversation with my Turkish friends went in many directions, and they mostly expressed the things that youth everywhere are concerned with: jobs, love, and security. They seemed to be cautiously optimistic about the future. One just graduated and was starting a new job, and soon to be married. The other just finished his first degree and plans on pursuing a doctorate in economics. They told me that they oppose Turkey's entrance into the EU. To my question of why, they responded that Europe is a mess and that they do not want Turkey to be liable for the problems of the weaker members. Ten or fifteen years ago, they said, it might have been a good idea for Turkey to join, but not now. I could not help but be amused at this response, because it was remarkably similar to the responses I received from some British euroskeptics who I interviewed for my PhD thesis two and a half years ago, who told me that most Britons want to leave the EU because "they could see what a fucking mess it is".

I just arrived back in the hostel, and soon I will be having dinner with an academic who teaches in the US and who happens to be in Istanbul for similar reasons as me. Tomorrow I will go and do the things that I had planned on doing today: seeing the ancient frescoes, the Theodosius wall, and getting a Turkish bath.

Turkey's Torn Soul

The much-maligned and sometimes misunderstood former Harvard professor Samuel Huntington proposed a thesis on the Clash of Civilizations which asserted that the post-Cold War world would be defined by conflict rooted in culture. Different cultural units, or civilizations, were defined by their religious traditions: Islamic, Western Christian, Eastern Christian, Confucian, Buddhist, and others were the main civilizations which would replace ideologies and the nation-state as the foci of political competition, struggle and domination.  He also proposed a category that did not neatly fit into his framework: "torn countries", that is, those states that are internally divided at the level of culture and hence had to make a choice on which side of the global struggle they would join. Torn countries included Mexico, Russia, and the country that will be the subject of this blog post: Turkey.

I arrived in Turkey last week, and since then I have walked around extensively, silently making observations about the people I talk to and the places I see. On this basis, I can confirm that Huntington was on to something when he called Turkey a torn county, because signs of a divided soul are easy to see. The first is the territorial division of Istanbul: the Western part of the city is in continental Europe, while the Eastern part is in Asia, and these sections of the city are divided by the Bosphorus waterway. Within both the Western and Eastern parts there are geographical divisions that coincide with different cultural expressions: Islam and the West. The hostel I am staying at is in the "European" part, both geographically and culturally. It is in a neighborhood characterized with features that are present in pretty much any modern Western city: Churches that reflect its Christian heritage, and the elements that reflect the secularism that most Christian societies have become: bars where people openly drink large amounts of alcohol, advertisements with scantily clad and food deprived models, couples--both gay and straight--openly displaying affection for each other, women seductively flaunting their features, some with style, others crassly.

The Islamic/conservative part of the city, the Fatih neighborhood, is about a 25 minute walk from where I am, and walking there gave me the sense of being in another civilization.The first thing I noticed was that there were fewer tourists, although I am not sure why, since there is a lot to see. There are also fewer European-looking people, more Arabs, more women with full length veils and face coverings, more men with beards and the traditional cap and Abayas rather than trousers. The stores in the European part usually have the names and prices of goods in English as well as Turkish. In Fatih the main language other than Turkish was Arabic. I did not see any bars or people openly drinking, although I am sure that alcohol is available. There are also more mosques. One of the more interesting experiences of being here is hearing the call to prayer, when the Muezzin reminds worshipers through loudspeakers from the Minarets that it is time to worship Allah. Although these can be heard across the city, even in the European part, in Fatih one hears a cacophony as many Muezzin from many Mosques simultaneously recite the call. The call to prayer there is louder but also more melodic and rhythmic, penetrating windows and walls so all can hear. Most people in public places ignore it, but for somebody hearing it for the first time it can have quite the effect, giving one a sense that here, religion continues to play a significant role in the public sphere. It creates the impression that Islamic belief suffuses even the minutiae of daily life; this strongly contrasts with the West, where in all but a few places explicit expressions of religion have been relegated to the margins of society.

The Hagia Sophia embodies Turkey's torn soul as it represents the clash between Christianity, Islam, and secularism. This Church was founded by Constantine the Great in the fourth century and remained the largest place of worship in Christendom for over a thousand years. Then it was taken by Muslims in the famous battle of Constantinople, who proceeded to turn the Churches, including the Hagia Sophia, into Mosques. It was from Istanbul that the Ottomans governed their huge and diverse empire, and their luxurious palace--the splendour of which rivals the palaces in Europe--is situated right next to the Hagia Sofia. One can picture the Sultan and other dignitaries praying in that Church-turned-Mosque as a symbol of their domination over former Christian lands. After the rise of Mustafa Kemal in the early 20th century, Turkey became a secular republic and, consistent with his contempt of all religion, Kemal turned the Hagia Sophia into a Museum. Today, it bears all the fingerprints of this tortured history. With the exception of the minarets, the external structure displays the typical form of a Byzantine Church. Inside, the main floor has been altered to suit the sensibilities of the Ottoman conquerors: depictions of prophets, angels, or any human form, whether pictorial or otherwise, have been expunged and replaced with large signs that dominate the main hall and with Arabic inscriptions that say "There is no god but Allah" and with the names of first Caliphs. On the second floor, there are the remains of the Christian frescoes that depict Christ and Mary, although these were, to my knowledge, only uncovered by restorations that took place in the 20th century. Now that the Hagia Sophia is a museum, it is no longer a symbol of imperial power--Christian or Muslim. It reflects to some extent the secularism that Kemal embodied: open to all regardless of creed and to be viewed and enjoyed as art from the temporal world, not as holy or transcendent. Out of the three worldviews that the history of the Hagia Sophia represents--Eastern Christianity, Islam, and secularism--it is the last two that currently represent the struggle for Turkey's soul at both the political and cultural levels.

The current government in Turkey clearly represents the Islamic side of this divide. Led by President Erdogan, the leader of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (the Economist uses the curious term "mildly Islamist" to describe the party), the government receives much of its support from the poor, religious, and conservative folks who crowd some parts of Istanbul and the hinterland. Many, perhaps most, vote for economic reasons--after all, under Erdogan Turkey has enjoyed very fast rates of growth. But others vote for religious reasons, which is odd when one considers that it is illegal under Turkey's secular constitution for political parties to openly call for a return to the Sharia law that provided the ethical and legal code for the Ottoman empire before it was disbanded by Mustafa Kemal. Many of the secularists I spoke to in Istanbul fear that Erdogan is bringing Turkey into an Islamic direction, and they cited many examples that justify their concern: Turkey's support for Islamist political movements across the Middle East, especially during the Arab Spring, controversial comments from the Minister of religious affairs which suggested turning the Hagia Sophia into a Mosque again, the introduction of mandatory religious instruction in schools, the attempt to make adultery illegal, high taxes and other punitive measures that make alcohol unavailable except in tourist areas, and retrograde comments on the status of women (Erdogan recently said that men and women are not equal).

At the cultural level the divide is equally pronounced. As mentioned above, the life and atmosphere of religious parts of the city seem to be worlds apart from those in the secular part. There is also often barely disguised contempt between the two sides. I have heard that one expression that secularists use when referring to women who wear the full face covering is "cockroaches". Many religious folks, on the other hand, view the lifestyles of secular Turks as morally degrading and corrupt. Of course, this polarization does not tell the entire story. There is a veritable kaleidoscope of orientations here, with various shades of belief and unbelief fluidly intermixing within families and friends. One common sight is groups of young female friends walking around taking selfies and enjoying each others' company, with one or two wearing the traditional Islamic garb while the others dress in typical European style. This cultural schizophrenia certainly exists at the individual level as well. One gets the sense that many of the people here expressing Islamic belief, either in dress or speech, engage in pre-marital sex and drink alcohol when their parents aren't looking, both of which are prohibited in Islam. In this, they are not that different from some of the late-modern Ottomans who were infamous for professing piety while engaging in all the sultry pleasures that their positions of power gave them access to.

Turkey's divided soul has important implications for one of the most important political questions facing the country: whether it should join the European Union. It is my opinion that Turkey will never join for the simple reason that Europe's great powers, France and Germany, do not want it to. Turkey's huge population and growing economy mean that, were it to join the EU, the influence of France and Germany would be greatly reduced (this is one of the cynical reasons for which Italy and the UK support Turkey's accession). But apart from these political realities, it is worth reflecting on whether Turkey belongs in Europe. Many of my secular friends here certainly think so, and in fact they support Turkey's attempt to become a member of the EU precisely because they believe (or, more accurately, hope) that Europe will bring their country closer to its civilization. What is more, as mentioned above, some parts of Turkey are unmistakably European, and there is also the fact that this was the centre of the Eastern Roman Empire for over 1000 years. This suggests that Turkey has the cultural and historical requisites for EU membership. 

However, officials in Paris and Berlin cannot but notice that Erdogan is pushing Turkey into a more Islamic direction. This trend certainly militates against Turkey's potential EU membership. Whether Erdogan will succeed in fully Islamicizing Turkey is open to doubt, however. If a major economic slump reduced his popularity, and the secular opposition were to unify, the political winds might change and the Islamists would be thrown out of office, which would halt or reverse many of Erdogan's policies. When or if that happens, Turkey might see a trend towards secularism and away from Islam, but the country would still have a torn soul, as Huntington accurately observed. Maybe this is not a bad thing, and perhaps it was meant to be this way; after all, the country has been and is the cultural and geographic cross road between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the far east, and even now the population is composed of a bewildering array of different sects and ethnicities that set their roots here at one time or another in the 9000 years that this land has been inhabited. Having a torn soul, in addition, in individuals as in countries, provides the diversity and creativity that makes life colourful and interesting even if it is chaotic and unstable. Besides, would Turkey be as interesting as it now is if it was more culturally homogeneous? I strongly doubt it.