Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 522

Toward a Post-Blue Retirement Model

We highlighted yesterday how strained our current retirement system is; others are thinking along the same lines. Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank, has an interesting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about the challenges many Americans are facing in saving adequately for retirement, and the measures some state governments are taking to devise new retirement models:

Although Social Security is a tremendously important program, and provides a solid base that retirees can depend upon, its $16,000 average annual benefit doesn’t go very far. […]

In response to this situation, Illinois is developing a state-run retirement program that will make it easier and cheaper for workers to save. Many other states, including California, are studying this option.

Although there are differences in proposals, the common goal is to create a publicly managed system that will automatically include workers whose employers do not enroll them in a plan.

Workers would have a modest amount (around 2% to 3%) deducted from each paycheck, although they could opt out if they chose. The money would then accumulate like a 401(k) during a person’s working years, with the option to receive a lump sum or draw a monthly payment at retirement.

We’re not always optimistic about economic policy experiments undertaken by states like Illinois and California at the urging of Left-of-Center economists, but these types of efforts strike us as both necessary and promising. The basic blue model retirement bargain, where workers stayed with one employer for most of their careers, then took advantage of generous defined-benefit pensions plans after age 65, is no longer tenable on a large scale (despite the best efforts of union interests to shore it up). Moreover, even if this model could be revived, it would not be desirable: In the twenty-first century economy, companies are more unstable and workers are more mobile. Tying pension benefits to employment is both risky (modern companies can rise and fall almost in the blink of an eye) and bad for worker flexibility and risk-taking (the old system discouraged job-hopping).

All this means that Americans are in the process of transitioning out of a retirement system that worked well for their parents, and creating one that works well for the twenty-first century. There will need to be several components of the new retirement system, but one key part is some kind of device to encourage private saving, like the mechanism Baker describes. The government role in such programs should be minimal—creating space for the system to work, rather than actually administering it. (We’ve seen what happens when the state tries to manage public pension funds). Still, ensuring that all citizens can save for a secure retirement is a public concern and an important function of the state. After all, it’s not in anyone’s interest for Americans to rely heavily on public assistance programs when they are too old to work.It’s encouraging to see states like California and Illinois start to experiment with portable retirement systems. Red states should think about how they can build on these ideas, perhaps by giving people more leeway to control their retirement accounts, or encouraging employers, rather than the government, to take a lead role in creating and sustaining the new system. At a time when economic anxiety among working class voters is creating a class war within the Republican party, it would behoove Right-of-Center policymakers to show that they are serious about making retirement secure for low- and moderate-income voters.

Biofuel Boondoggle Fails Another Green Test

Wild bee populations have been struggling of late, and in America’s bread basket these important pollinators have seen their numbers shrink dramatically. A new study suggests that the culprit for the decline may be the crops we’re growing, and it puts the blame on the dramatic increase in corn cultivation in the wake of recent federal mandates to blend corn ethanol into gasoline. The BBC reports:

[The study’s] results show that numbers of wild bees likely declined by 23% between 2008 and 2013 in key agricultural regions in California, the Midwest, in Great Plains states and in the Mississippi river valley.

The study also showed that 39% of US croplands that depend on pollinators are suffering a significant mismatch between the demand for pollination and the supply of bees. […]The most important reason for the decline in numbers according to the authors is the increased demand for biofuels, which has seen more land turned over to growing grains. US law requires that all gasoline sold contains at least 10% ethanol, mostly made from corn.

So, to recap: America’s biofuel mandates don’t lower emissions, they raise global food prices and starve the world’s poor, they cost drivers billions at the pump every year, and they decimate wild bee populations.

It’s rare that a policy comes along that offers so little to so many distinct groups of shareholders. In that respect, perhaps there is something impressive about the Renewable Fuel Standard: It’s found that elusive policy sour spot. The sooner these quotas are rolled back, the better.

The Thirteen Blogs of Christmas: 2015-16 Edition

T

he stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to do some good old fashioned Yuletide blogging.In particular, I want to blog about Christmas itself and what it means. Somehow my generation decided to leave this part out when we passed down the traditions and the lore we were taught to the next generation: We’ve bought a lot of Christmas presents, but we were too busy to think much about the meaning of the story or to teach the next generation much about this holiday and the religion that it defines. We did a great job teaching about Santa Claus and presents; nine in ten millennials celebrate Christmas. But, according to this 2015 Pew Poll, less than half of them think of it as, primarily, a religious festival.That is where we went wrong. On behalf of us all, I apologize, and this Christmas I’ll be doing my little bit to make amends.I’ve got some time to do it in. As most of us know from the song about the partridge and the pear tree, there are twelve days of Christmas. The season ends on January 6, traditionally celebrated as the day when the three wise men arrived in Bethlehem with those gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In Elizabethan England, the last night of the Christmas season was celebrated with special parties and feasts. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was written to be performed at that special time of year.Even today, the twelve (or thirteen) days of Christmas are more than a phrase from a carol. In much of the Spanish speaking world, January 6 is when kids get their presents. Jesus got gold, frankincense, and myrrh; they get video games and dolls. In New Orleans, January 6 marks the end of the season of Christmas holiday parties and feasting, and the start of the Carnival season of parties and feasting. When I lived there, I remember people bitterly complaining about how unfair life was; while everyone else in the country was going on post-Christmas diets, we poor put-upon people in New Orleans still faced a month of king cake parties and packing on the pounds.In the old days, people kept a Yule log burning during the holiday season; at Via Meadia, we’ve had a tradition from the start of a festive Yule blog. From now until January 6, I’ll be Yule-blogging: reflecting on Christmas in ways that I hope will make sense to Christians and non-Christians alike. The Yule blog is a work in progress; each year I try to make it a little clearer, a little more useful, a little less hopelessly inadequate at explaining some of the most important and mysterious truths there are.The meaning of Christmas is much bigger than the trite clichés that usually come up in this context; I won’t just be writing about the Importance of Giving and the Desirability of Being Nice. Christmas, at least the way I was taught, is a lot more than a merry interlude in the darkest, nastiest time of the year. It is more than getting or even giving. It is more than carols and candy, more than wonderful meals with the people you love best in the world. It is much more than the modern echo of the pagan festivities marking the winter solstice and the moment when the sun begins to reverse its long and slippery slide down the sky.For Christians, 77 percent of the American people according to a recent Gallup poll, Christmas is the hinge of the world’s fate, the turning point of life. It is the most important thing that ever happened, or at least the beginning of it, and we celebrate it every year because it is still happening now. Whether we know it or not, whether we appreciate it or not, we are part of the Christmas Event that has turned history upside down. There’s a reason why we date the birth of Christ as the year 1 and why traditionally the world’s history was divided into BC, before Christ, and AD, anno domini, the year of the Lord.Actually, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, the monk who tried to calculate it seems to have gotten it wrong; Jesus was probably born four to six years “BC.” He also did not know about the use of zero as a number; there is no Year Zero between AD and BC—which is why irritating pedants remind people at every turn of the century that the “real” new century or millennium doesn’t begin until 2001, for example, rather than on January 1, 2000. It’s also worth noting while correcting the math here that the Twelfth Night, traditionally celebrated on the evening of January 6, is actually the Thirteenth Night after Christmas itself. January 6 is its own, separate feast in the Christian calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany. I’ll get to it in due course, but that is why there are thirteen posts for the twelve days.Superficially, Christmas is a simple and user-friendly holiday: presents, tree, more presents, food, mistletoe, deck the halls, and fa-la-la. How hard is that? But if you look beyond the commercial hype and the pop culture celebration, Christmas is a complicated festival that expresses some of the core beliefs that shape the identities and worldviews of about a third of the world’s people. Non-Christians, including the 5 percent of Americans who adhere to a non-Christian religion and the 18 percent who either claimed no religion at all or chose not to answer the pollsters, need to know about Christianity as much or perhaps even more as Christians do, simply in order to understand the cultural foundations of the society in which they live.Religious education has pretty much fallen by the wayside in American life today. That’s a problem in more ways than one; I see the consequences all the time when students I teach—and policy makers and journalists I know—simply do not comprehend the cultural foundations of American politics and cannot understand the ways that so many people here and around the world are moved by religious values and ideas. I have taught a course on the relationship of American religious ideas to American foreign policy in some of our leading colleges, and I have had smart, well-traveled, and otherwise well-read students in that course who have never opened a Bible (or any other holy book) in their lives and simply had no idea why so many other people read and study sacred literature every day of their lives.For Christians, I hope these blog posts will enrich your experience of this special season. To believe in the truth of the Christian religion and to encounter Jesus Christ as the saving Son of God is just the first step of a faith journey; deepening your faith through reflection and understanding, appreciating faith’s resonances and mysteries, participating in the communion of saints and God’s own life, joining the story and not just reading it: That is what being a Christian is about. A study of Christmas isn’t a bad place to start. The mysteries of the Christian faith are woven into the lessons, the carols, and the prayers of this special time.I’m trying to blog as a vanilla Christian; that is, I’m trying to write about the elements of our faith that virtually all major Christian communities have historically shared. That puts me at odds with some of the more liberal trends in contemporary American mainline Protestantism; I think the historic statements of Christian doctrine as found in documents like the Nicene Creed make sense and give an accurate and compelling description of what it means to have a Christian faith. I’m an Anglican by conviction as well as by birth and that will inevitably influence the way I approach Christmas, but I won’t be trying to sneak in special little Anglican concepts here, and this won’t be about controversial ideas that divide Christians like infant baptism, predestination, the infallibility of scripture or, for that matter, the infallibility of the Pope. I hope that Christians of many denominations will find something here that captures what the holiday means to them, and that they will forgive any errors or misapprehensions on my part. These are deep waters, and even stronger swimmers than yours truly can be swept off course.Final disclaimer: I’m not really qualified to do this. I’m not some kind of spotless saint who has achieved deep spiritual insight through a lifetime of asceticism, deep study, and constant prayer. Much of what I’ve learned about the right way to live has come through experiencing the consequence of doing things the wrong way first, and my knowledge of God, such as it is, is more the result of experiencing mercy and forgiveness than some kind of reward for living right. To make matters worse, I’m not trained: As a layman, I have no special theological training and don’t speak with any ecclesiastical authority whatever. If something in this blog troubles you, you should consult with experienced and thoughtful Christians whose lives inspire you, or the leaders of your own church. Christmas is big, and understanding it is hard.However, we’ll keep things as simple as possible here at the Yule blog. After a few posts reviewing the basic story of Christmas, the Yule Blog will move on to the meaning of Christmas. That is the more complicated part; Christmas isn’t just the holiday that celebrates the birthday of the Founder of one of the world’s great religions. It’s the main reason so many of the world’s other great religions don’t like Christianity very much. Christians talk about that baby in the manger as God on earth. The monotheistic religions like Judaism and Islam find that idea blasphemous; polytheistic religions like Hinduism wonder why Christians think their own divine birth is so special while Christians look down on those who worship other divine babies born in other places and times. Christmas, a holiday that is supposedly about peace, is one of the most divisive holidays on the world’s calendar. I want to blog about why.Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to those of you inclined to celebrate that holiday, and seasonal greetings to everyone else. Whatever your faith or lack of it, however you understand the meaning and purpose of your life, may the next few days be a time of rest, relaxation, and healing reflection for you that brings you closer to those you love, more generous to those in need, and more in tune with that wiser, happier, richer, and more generous self that it’s your hope, your duty, and, with the help of a merciful God, your destiny to become.

ISIS vs. History

For many good reasons, professional historians mightily resist comparisons between recent events and the distant past. Our training teaches us to respect the principles of the 19th-century founder of source-based history, Leopold von Ranke, who professionalized the discipline to focus as much as possible on the past as it was. History, he believed, should be written for its own sake, not treated as a ghost of itself in service of the present, nor strip-mined for jewels of supposed relevance to current objectives or concerns.

We do not always succeed in this, but at our best we try to avoid the facile and misleading uses of history that non-historians all too readily deploy in the service of some other goal than good scholarship. Case in point: Not long ago, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina claimed that her bachelor’s degree in medieval history would help her “defeat ISIS”: “Every single one of the techniques that ISIS is using, the crucifixion, the beheadings, the burning alive, those were commonly used techniques in the Middle Ages.”Fiorina’s comments set off a rare storm of comment in the relevant halls of the academy. Not one medievalist, or any historian for that matter, supports her contention that the medieval past is particularly well described or defined by its level of violence. Most these days would argue that the concept of the “medieval past” is little more than an artificial punctuation to separate the period between the fall of Rome from the 15th century age of discovery and the subsequent rise of modern nation-states.A similar negative reaction attended a March 2015 Atlantic article by Graeme Wood, entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” The article similarly mooted a form of ISIS “medievalism.” That was enough to set the small and eclectic but wonderful world of medievalist social media atwitter in righteous indignation.The main problem with these comparisons, as Stephan John Stedman recently noted, is the lack of any careful or precisely drawn context for making them. The result is the all too easy use of wildly inaccurate stereotypes about particular past periods. In this case, the stereotype is that “everything in the Medieval past, especially medieval Islam, was brutal and violent.” But far from being an age of brutality, the “medieval period” of Islamic history was defined by its relative tolerance. One of the greatest of cities in 10th-century Europe was Muslim Córdoba. Astonished Christian visitors such as the itinerant German nun Hrostsvita of Gandersheim recognized Córdoba as an “Ornament of the World.” Its shine came from the fact that Córdoba had street lamps that glowed at night, reflecting the running water of fountains and the light of knowledge and science from a library that rivaled ancient Alexandria. Although lower in status under Islamic law, minorities were not only protected in Islamic cities like Córdoba but often ascended to positions of great influence, such as the Jewish leader, scholar, poet, and physician Hasdai ibn Shaprut, who served as de facto minister of foreign affairs for the blue-eyed Caliph of Córdoba, ‘Abd al Rahman III (the Umayyad Caliphs often intermarried with Gothic, Christian royal families in the north of Spain).Similarly, in “medieval” Baghdad the Jewish Exilarch, the leader of the Jewish community under the great ‘Abbasid Caliphs, had his own palace and was paraded through the streets on his daily business wearing the finest robes. Proudly aware of the role of Jewish exiles in Babylon in the Bible, the most powerful of Exilarchs and Gaons, heads of the Jewish academy, styled themselves as the Daniels of their age. Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike visited a shrine to the prophet Ezra, who was said once to have wandered into Basra, the Iraqi city unfortunately more famous today for its extreme sectarian conflict.Influenced by the translations of Greek philosophers by Nestorian Christians and others, including women scholars in the “House of Wisdom,” the great ‘Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mun nearly started a reformation within Islam by supporting a group of rationalist scholars (the Mutazilites) who argued that the Qur’an was revealed within an earthly context, and that therefore the holy book could be interpreted, not simply followed to the letter. These instances of Islamic power at its height show that economic growth, power, and success, along with a benign balance between creativity and stability, always seemed to attract cosmopolitanism, toleration, and diversity, which in turn then attracted more economic growth, power, and success. Before the Mongol catastrophes of the 13th century, that was the rule rather than the exception in Islamic civilization.Obviously Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIS, although he speaks to this pre-Mongol “golden age,” ignores the tolerance and diversity of the society the early Muslim Caliphs ruled. In fact, ISIS itself does not have the best relationship with history, either medieval or modern; it seeks to destroy the very context, diversity, and complexity that, for the most part, define the past. Medieval history conceived in its broadest sense as Islamic “Middle Ages” history, or any history that intervenes between the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the present or shows the role of non-Muslims, is abhorrent to ISIS leaders and to other extremist preachers. They have no interest in the past and its complexities. They care not about the context in which the Prophet lived, or about his desire to create a more just society. They know nothing about his determination not to allow a return to patriarchal violence in Arabia and beyond. In this way, they disparage history itself, wishing to dissolve it into abstruse doctrine and the overwhelming desire for the apocalypse.This is often what happens to “history” among extremist premillenarian religious groups, and there is nothing particularly contemporary, Islamic, or Middle Eastern about it. Examples populate history from many centuries and many places. History is destroyed and a purified vision of the past is put in the service of revelation, much in the same way National Socialism used history to shore up its ideology of the master race. ISIS is not interested in returning to the medieval past; it is interested in fusing past, present, and future into an apocalyptic alchemy of end times. By ignoring or even, in the case of Palmyra and other monuments or examples of tolerance and respect for diversity, destroying the past, not only have ISIS bomb makers failed to find the mythical Red Mercury, they failed to have any chance of creating a sustainable doctrine or ideology before they even got started. Not for the first time, Clio (the muse of history) has been chained and sold to Melpomene (the muse of tragedy).History can therefore be a victim of those who would strip-mine it and those who would immolate it. But comparing the past and present is not an entirely fruitless pursuit. Indeed, rejecting any comparisons is in a sense as absolutist and problematic as insisting on facile ones. Unfortunately, in search of ever diminishing returns from ever more sources, many historians have turned themselves into expert silos and echo chambers of obscurity, forgetting that context can also mean connecting one’s research to something of greater significance. Francis Fukuyama has shown in his most recent two books that it is not only possible but very useful to connect our current, political order with both the broadest and deepest understandings of the past. If we are sensitive to context, we can engage the past usefully; while history does not repeat itself, human nature (and especially human social nature) are stable enough to yield some discernable patterns through time.Hence it is with hopes of following Fukuyama and not Fiorina that I deign to compare—and certainly, yes, contrast—the Almohad Empire with ISIS. Both exemplify revolutionary millenarian movements, but one is a 12th-century, mainly Berber, theologically pan-Islamic movement and the other is a 21st-century Arab Sunni movement that has emerged only in the past decade or so. One of the greatest questions with which historians grapple is the relationship between religious belief and political behavior as it plays out in society. In comparing the present-day Islamic State of Iraq and Syria with the Almohads (Al-Muwahhidun in Arabic, for followers of the absolute unity of God), this is the relationship of principal interest.Rise, Routinization, and Fall of the AlmohadsOften demonized as destructors of the “Ornament of the World” and the tolerance that characterized Córdoba, the rise of the Almohads and their wildly successful spread in the 12th century from a small enclave in the High Atlas Mountains to Muslim Spain and control of much of North Africa must be seen within a specific historical and social context. The Almohad Empire started as a movement that promised to conquer the entire Muslim world, bringing the Apocalypse and the Day of Reckoning, but its leader was not a typical Arab Muslim cleric. The Almohad Mahdi, the one who will announce the end of times, was named Ibn Tumart—a Berber name, not an Arab one.The Berbers of the High Atlas Mountains had for centuries been ruled by a traditional system of lineage-based alliances. While women had high status in this society, they were not nearly as powerful as the women of the Saharan desert nomads, who often owned the tents and determined whom they should marry. Prominent men, in particular older patriarchs with knowledge of history and its tribal alliances, were mostly in charge of different mountain valleys. These were the Ugallids, a Berber word for “chiefs.” Ibn Tumart himself came from an Ugallid background even as he also professed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, making him a Sharif.Ibn Tumart traveled to the East in search of knowledge and even claimed to have studied under the great Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), although historians dispute this. Seeing that Islam had been “corrupted” by laws and practices that did not reflect the “origins” or “roots” of religion as depicted in the Qur’an and verified Hadith, Ibn Tumart took it upon himself to return home to the Maghrib (the Arabic name for western North Africa or, more poetically, the “Land of the Setting Sun”) to “command right and forbid wrong” for those who did not follow his interpretation of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s teachings. In one famous instance, he used his walking stick to break up a dancing party of “men dressed like ladies” in the streets of Bougie, a cosmopolitan port city in Algeria, and smashed his way through the market. Taken before the ruler of the city at the time, al-Nasir, the Almohad sources state triumphantly that Ibn Tumart embarrassed the decadent sultan, specifically criticizing him for purchasing an expensive, and probably elaborately decorated, ostrich egg instead of spending the money on his people.Ibn Tumart continued his preaching and was almost lost to the sea when his shipmates on a voyage threw him overboard. Alas, no whale appeared, as was the case with his prophetic predecessor Jonah, but Almohad sources say that Ibn Tumart was nevertheless miraculously saved from drowning; the people on board, seeing this, hauled him back on the ship and were converted to his mission. When he finally made it back to Marrakech, the nearest major city in the mountains, he publically lambasted the ruler for having a special prayer mat “dyed with dun” in a prominent position in the mosque, a mosque that the Almohads claimed was wrongly oriented away from Mecca—symbolic of the mistaken orientation of society in general.Miraculously escaping the wrath of the ruler in Marrakech after hiding in a cemetery and then heading for the relative protection of his own tribe in the Anti-Atlas Mountains, Ibn Tumart began his preaching among the Berber tribes. He taught in both Berber and Arabic and encouraged memorization of the Qur’an and the use of Arabic. He also created a “new brotherhood” based primarily on adherence to religious doctrine, not on blood. In this he followed the example of Mohammed himself. But Ibn Tumart’s methods also involved executing most of the older patriarchs of Berber society who resisted him. Tribal affiliation and identity were not completely lost. Ibn Tumart organized the tribes into a hierarchy or proto-government that was also populated by scribes and memorizers of the Qur’an, who would act as bureaucrats over a future empire. One of the most prominent of the Berber tribes, the Banu Hafs, went on to found their own great and long-lived dynasty of governors over what is now Tunisia.Although ostensibly a fundamentalist in many of his views of the Qur’an and the Hadith, Ibn Tumart did not resemble most of today’s fundamentalists. He claimed access to secret books of prophecy, especially the so-called Book of Jafr, a book that, like the Qur’an, was said to have been revealed exclusively to the Prophet Muhammad through Gabriel, but that was meant only for the chosen leader of the Muslims at any period of time to see. The book allegedly contained the whole future story of the universe in its pages. Ibn Tumart seemed especially aware of the fact that 500 lunar years had passed since the beginning of the Muslim calendar in 622 with the hijra. In Muslim theology, as in many theological interpretations of Christian apocalypse, the fact that the end of days did not ultimately come was not a failure but merely indicative of the fact that God understands time differently from man, or is testing man’s faith. Five hundred years could be the same as one year, or a day, in the mind of God.Ibn Tumart died before his movement could really take off. According to some chroniclers, his successors decided to keep his death secret. That is why there are different interpretations for his date of death (1128–30 CE). His body was left within his family’s house and messages from the Mahdi were sent or “heard” through the walls, usually in support of the destined conquest. While the decadent city of Marrakech, known to this day for its great, diverse, and vibrant way of life, was the first object of Ibn Tumart’s wrath while he was alive, the conquest had to wait until Ibn Tumart’s successor, ‘Abd al Mu’min, consolidated conquests elsewhere. Eventually, ‘Abd al Mu’min conquered Marrakech in 1147. The chronicles tell of one contingent of Marrakech’s soldiers being led by a woman, a princess who fought desperately to keep the Almohads at bay, ultimately to no avail.‘Abd al-Mu’min called for the purification of the city. Most of the previous dynasty’s buildings were destroyed and replaced. Jews and Christians, although debated with a long series of arguments, were ultimately required to convert. The justification for this, even though the Qur’an rejects compulsion in religion, was probably the idea that the Almohads were creating a new, pure, and holy land in the West, similar to the sacred ground in Mecca and Medina where non-believers are forbidden to enter.The Almohad movement spread across the crucial backbone of the Atlas Mountains, controlling valleys and mountains so daunting that even the Romans never tried to rule them. They held sway over a great, natural fortress and could control the rich, “decadent” cities they conquered. The Almohads also had almost complete control over the seas, and their Admiral Ahmad al Siqilli, originally from Sicily, was much feared by Christians. Acknowledging their superior power, especially on the waves, Saladin asked the Almohads for help against the Crusaders. Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, fell to the Almohads, and fear rose in Egypt that the empire would spread even to the central lands of Islam. Moses Maimonides—the Rambam—the great Jewish philosopher from Córdoba about whom Jewish scholars still say “from Moses and Moses there was no one like Moses,” lived for some time under Almohad rule, obscuring his faith until making his way to the court of the great Saladin in Egypt where he served as court physician. Interestingly, however, there were exceptions to the Almohad ban on non-believers even in this early period. ‘Abd al Mu’min even used Christian mercenaries at times.Almost as quickly as the Almohads conquered, however, their original fighting ideology ran out of steam. The promised end of days did not arrive and politics began to turn the charisma of the Mahdi into the routine activities of everyday governing. Corrupt Almohad governors drank wine and entertained with dancing girls in cities such as Granada, where such practices were common among the Almoravids before the Almohads came. Soon, the restrictions on Jews and Christians were lifted and Marrakech and other cities returned to their “natural” state as vibrant, cosmopolitan communities. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) flourished and his philosophy, even of the most rationalist kind, basically started the scholastic movement in Christian Europe.At the start of the revolution, the Almohads were radical monotheists, insisting on the creed of “absolute unity” or tawhid. But before long tawhid was soon again seen more in allegorical and spiritual light than in a political one. The Almohad Revolution, as one prominent scholar of the movement, Maribel Fierro has called it, created an opening for some of the greatest teachers of Sufism to create a form of Islam that is in many ways the mirror opposite Ibn Tumart’s method and preaching. Ibn ‘Arabi and Al-Shadhili, the great Sufi scholars whose followers would, over the centuries, spread with migrations and merchant caravans throughout the world as far as Java and even the United States, saw that the Almohad project was doomed to political quagmire. So they instead envisioned unity as something to be achieved in a spiritual realm. They even saw different religions as simply different paths to the same all-encompassing godhead. These Sufi thinkers have a far greater influence on Muslims today than does Ibn Tumart, whose apocalyptic promise is now largely forgotten, including by the leaders of ISIS.Over time, the Almohad Empire broke up as various governors sued for control of smaller and more manageable regions and territories. At one point the Caliph of the Almohads in Marrkech, heavily dependent on a large corps of Castilian mercenaries in armor sent to him by King Ferdinand, publically declared that only “Jesus was the Mahdi” and not Ibn Tumart. This was not a particularly radical idea, as many Sunni Muslims continue to believe that Jesus, as a prophet of Islam, was indeed meant to be the Mahdi, but that his followers deviated from the true path. A Bishop of Marrakech, a personal legate or representative of the Pope himself, was set up and a church filled with merchants and mercenaries rivaled the minarets.Thus, over time the vision of Ibn Tumart went through what Max Weber called “routinization,” or what Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), the great Muslim historian, called the cycle of history. Dynasties and empires can start with great charismatic figures such as Ibn Tumart. Over time, however, as generations become “corrupt” and distant from that original vision, the dynasty slowly dissolves until it ultimately dies. Most dynasties, in the view of Ibn Khaldun, have about the same maximum age as the human body—about four generations or eighty years. The Almohads maintained control of al-Andalus for only about half that many years. Indeed, as the Almohad Empire stopped expanding, as the end of times did not arrive, and as they had to actually start governing, the straightjacket of revolutionary theology and charismatic revelation no longer worked as a practical means of running an empire. Slowly but surely cosmopolitanism and tolerance returned and unitarian theology devolved into the beautiful dreams of the Sufis, contained in a message of patience, internal spiritual struggle, and peace.At the same time, returning to the success and worldly vision of the Almohads remained a tempting object for various successor kings and rulers who attempted to revive or reunite the Caliphate. All these attempts ultimately failed. Even as the remnants of the Almohad Empire fought one another, the Christian kingdoms of Iberia took advantage of the disarray and became ever more unified through dynastic alliance and intermarriage. At the 1212 battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the Christians defeated the Almohads because of an unusual unity between their normally jealous and bickering forces.Even as Christian rulers succeeded, Christian society prepared for a holy war of its own. The conflict with the Almohad remnants militarized Spanish Christianity, and early Almohad intolerance migrated into Christian Spain. As the Inquisition began, Christianity in Spain became ever more intolerant of people of other faiths, especially Jews. Conquering Muslim Granada in 1492, a holdout of Islamic rule on the peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile then expelled the Jews and also famously patronized Christopher Columbus, setting the stage for the beginning of the modern world and a traditional, if not entirely arbitrary, “bookend” between medieval and modern history.Rise, Routinization, and Fall (?) of ISISThere are many crucial differences between the rise of ISIS and the rise of the Almohads. First, the Almohads emerged from Berber society, while ISIS is largely supported by disaffected Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria, an outgrowth of a larger sectarian battle between Shi‘a and Sunni. Ibn Tumart, in contrast, combined both Shi‘a and Sunni theology to create something new from the mixture. ISIS is strictly Sunni and is not theologically innovative.Like the rise of the Almohads, however, it is important not to forget the social, economic, and lineage context of those who form the core of support for the Islamic State. Also, ISIS, although not nearly as revolutionary as the unique Almohad vision, does profess a largely apocalyptic and highly urgent view of time. Calls for an encounter with Crusader troops at “Dabiq,” a great battle that will usher in the apocalypse, resonates with Ibn Tumart’s access to a book of secrets and the notion of God intervening into time for the benefit of the movement.While al-Baghdadi may not ultimately be the main charismatic figure of ISIS, and while Sunnis, unlike the Shi‘a, reject the notion that the leader of the community must be a direct blood-descendant of the Prophet, he does seem to brandish his credentials as a member of the Quraysh, the family and tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. He appears to want to “check all the boxes” required for the legitimate rule of a Caliph as defined by scholars such as Abu al Hassan al Mawardi (d. 1058), who worked for the ‘Abbasid Caliphs. Of course, as stated earlier, there is a great gulf between the ‘Abbasid Caliphs and Al-Baghdadi. The four Rashidun (the four Caliphs that came after the Prophet who are considered the most respected) acted in way far different from Al-Baghdadi. ‘Umar refused to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem after conquest, fearing that later Muslims would try to turn the church into a mosque. Interestingly, many of the earliest Caliphs were determined to discourage too much conversion to Islam, since doing so would reduce tax revenue from the jizya tax for non-Muslims.Even if al-Baghdadi and ISIS claims to return to the time of the Prophet himself there are immediate problems, mostly with the moral and revolutionary intentions of the Prophet. The Prophet never preached “going back” in time, nor did he see his own time or social context as particularly commendable. If anything, his intention, as revealed in his last sermon and on many specific matters of legislation, was to transform society into a more just and equal one. All Muslims were equal according to Muhammad, not just one type of Muslim or Muslims from a particular background. Unlike ISIS, the Almohad vision and doctrine was based on a claim that it was restoring authoritative Islamic practice, and the Almohads claimed to support the teachings of Al-Ghazali. ISIS does not seem to be supported by any scholars, nor does it claim support from scholars with any wide recognition in the Islamic world.Perhaps the most interesting possible comparison between the Almohads and ISIS, however, is that the process of routinization—that is, the process of ideological compromise and moderation needed to practically govern as state—will probably begin soon. There is no reason to believe ISIS will not follow the path of so many religious and millenarian movements before it. In this case, the best long-term strategy for ISIS’s would-be targets and victims may be to wait for ISIS to destroy itself.At the same time, some may argue that a ground invasion would stop ISIS in its tracks and reveal the falseness of its apocalyptic teachings for all to see, deflating its recruiting. Even if a war is what ISIS wants, they surely do not expect or want defeat. I would not presume to assert what option, if any, would be the most effective. As a historian, however, I think it is important to note that extremism, over time, often, but not always, seems to pass into later, more mature stages. The question is whether one can tolerate those intermediate stages and the mayhem that may be created in cosmopolitan, constitutional societies based on secular law that are a target, but not the main target, of ISIS wrath.Some may argue that a strategy of waiting for ISIS’s appeal to crumble (this seems to be the hope behind much of President Obama’s pronouncements and explanations to hold off on sending U.S. ground forces) neglects the impact that ISIS is already having on societies far from its immediate area of control. If parties and politics in the West become increasingly intolerant and nativist in their reaction to ISIS, the West may indeed inflict more harm on itself than anything the charismatically apocalyptic minds behind ISIS could imagine.Comparing medieval Almohads with modern ISIS is problematic on many levels. This is especially true if one is making specific comparisons of events that were and are unique and particular. They are movements from very different times, and very different contexts. Besides, even comparisons that seem to “fit”—like the two-step leadership process from Ibn Tumart to ‘Abd al Mu’min matching that from Osama bin-Laden to Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, the first in both cases providing the spiritual core and the latter being the proto-state builder—are not particularly helpful.However, over a longer span of time, over the so-called “moyen durée” or “longue durée” (medium or long-term view of history) advocated by scholars such as Fernand Braudel, we can see perhaps more insightful points of comparison, and perhaps some clue, hopefully, to the ultimate fate of ISIS: a routinized and reduced shadow of radicalism that, over time, will see the benefits, both material and perhaps even spiritual, of not rejecting normal time or all the complexities and compromises typical of society and normal politics. Perhaps the members of ISIS will become, as most Muslims already are, those interested in joining the larger community of humanity, maintaining an identity in relation to others. As the British historian David Cannadine convincingly argues in his recent book, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences, interactions between people of different identities are far more common historically and ultimately far more successful over the long term. In this respect, history as a chronicle of the human drama can be seen as much as an example of hope as a litany of despair and absolutism.

Is America Really Moving Left?

In the current issue of the Atlantic, Peter Beinart makes an effort to revive a version of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis, arguing that demographic change and the rise of Millennial generation is pushing the country to the left, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Beinart makes a convincing case that the country is moving in a liberal—or perhaps more accurately, libertarian—direction on many social issues, including criminal justice reform, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights (even if it is moving right, or not moving at all, on other social issues, like guns and abortion). He also persuasively argues that the Democratic Party has shifted dramatically to the left over the last several years, a trend we’ve been following closely.

But on the question of whether Americans as a whole are growing more confident in the ability of government to solve the nation’s problems, Beinart’s essay does not persuade. Any leftward realignment worthy of the name (and Beinart compares our current moment to the great realignments of the 20th century—the New Deal and the Reagan revolution) would have to entail a sustained shift in public perceptions of government, a new openness to the idea of the state taking on a greater role in American society. And there is little evidence that such a shift is taking place. From a Gallup released Tuesday:

When asked to choose among big government, big labor and big business, Americans overwhelmingly name big government as the biggest threat to the country in the future. The 69% choosing big government is down slightly from a high of 72% in 2013, the last time Gallup asked the question, but is still one of the highest percentages choosing big government in Gallup’s 50-year trend. […]

This comes at a time when Americans name the government as one of the three facing the country and when 75% of Americans perceive widespread corruption in the government. […]Half of Americans say the federal government poses an immediate threat to rights and freedoms, and Congress’ job approval continues to languish — perhaps explaining why so many see big government as the biggest threat to the country.

Moreover, contrary to Beinart’s assertion that President Obama’s liberal programs have sparked “no public backlash,” the share of Americans naming government as the greatest threat to the nation’s future has on the whole risen sharply during the President’s tenure, and is now 16 points higher than it was in 2009.

This one Gallup trend doesn’t, of course, mean Beinart is wrong. Polling can be a tricky business, and predicting the political mood of the country always involves guesswork and intuition. Moreover, Beinart is right that constituencies like Millennials and minorities are more liberal than the rest of the public (though the gap appears to be shrinking, and there are good reasons to wonder whether it will last). The poll is useful, however, because it highlights what is likely to be the most serious obstacle to a major leftward push in American politics: Americans’ rising individualism. Progressives will surely be able to make progress here and there—especially on social issues—but the country’s increasingly libertarian bent means that those on the left girding for social democracy shouldn’t be holding their breath.

Putin to Firefighters: No Christmas Pay for You

It’s not a merry time of year for Russia’s firefighters. The Times reports:

Russian firefighters and other emergency services employees face a bleak Christmas after they were told that their salaries would go unpaid.

The workers were advised to take out bank loans. “The ministry has no money,” an unnamed accountant at the emergencies ministry told Russian media. “We should get some money in January but how much, we don’t know.”Russia’s economic woes are causing discontent and undermining President Putin’s assertion of financial stability.

When things like this start to happen, it’s a sign that the foundations of a government are weakening. These signs should encourage the West to keep tightening sanctions on Russia, wage economic war against Russian corruption and money laundering, shore up Ukraine, and stop letting Putin score any more cheap diplomatic victories abroad.

Lots of things could save Putin or give his regime an extended period—oil prices could go up, for example, or his Hail Mary diplomacy and overseas adventurism could keep scoring points against a divided West and a flatfooted Obama administration, boosting his sagging popularity at home. But the odds are against Putin’s grand strategy achieving the kind of success he needs, and if the West holds together reasonably well, the friction of continued economic pain will degrade and corrode the Putinocracy at home.We shouldn’t think this course is without risks and costs. If and when the Putin experiment in adventurous kleptocracy fails, Russia will be angrier, poorer, more corrupt, and sicker than ever. A weak Russia that is beginning to fragment around the edges, and in which criminal syndicates operate without a strong central government, would be even worse for the rest of the world than what Putin has been up to.The world needs a strong, united, and prosperous Russia. Gorbachev and Yeltsin (and the Western leaders of the day) failed to get that done in the 1990s, opening the door to Putin. Putin has made things significantly worse. People in the West, including Russian exiles and emigres, should begin to think about how, if and when Russia gets a second chance, the rest of us can play a more constructive role in the next high-stakes round of Russian state-building.

The Trespasser

On November 30, Fatema Mernissi passed away of cancer in Rabat, Morocco at the age of 75. Few Americans or Europeans have ever heard of her, I know. That is not likely to change with her death. Margalit Fox’s excellent feature obituary in the December 9 New York Times was the only significant literary eulogy to appear in the American press. Mernissi’s passing got somewhat more attention in France, since most of her 15 books were written in French, as befits her youthful attendance at the Sorbonne. But her doctorate was from Brandeis, and her first and perhaps most famous book, Beyond the Veil, was an adaptation of her dissertation, both written in English.

Why might Americans care to know about Mernissi? Because she lived her life doing what, now once again after the atrocities in Paris, Beirut, and San Bernadino, has returned under the guise of a call for a “war of ideas.” In the Western discourse on radical Islam, the same question keeps recurring: Why do traditional and serious Muslims not more avidly defend real mainstream Islam and urge reform within it in the face of radical challenges from salafi extremists? It’s not a bad question, but it is not as though no such voices have been raised. Fatema Mernissi lived her entire life on the front lines of that struggle. She fought that war of ideas long before 9/11. Without her, it is no exaggeration to say, we would be even worse off than we are.The first time I heard of Mernissi was at a gathering with family friends in Mosul in the late 1990s. A mere teenager then, the topic under discussion intrigued me: A well-known university professor had publicly chastised a female colleague over her knee-length skirt, which, he claimed, was a source of distraction for students and professors. The female colleague answered her accuser calmly: “A man your age, at your status, and of your piety, should perhaps not be monitoring women’s attire.” On-lookers reportedly laughed at her response during the incident, and we laughed again at our retelling of the event days later. But then one of our guests said, “…and then she started rambling about women’s rights!” That brought a few shouts of encouragement, the (very) rough Arabic equivalent of “You go, girl.” “Looks like Mosul has its own Fatema Mernissi now!” another guest remarked. More laughter followed, but soon another guest quickly identified Mernissi as a “Moroccan freemason who wants women to live in hedonism.”Even in the Mosul of the 1990s, accusations of submission to the “evil West” often chased anyone who had ideas; anyone who thought like Fatema Mernissi; anyone who dared to suggest, as she did, that there was no basis in the Qur’an for the subordination of women in Islam, that several well-known hadiths could not therefore be authentic, and more besides. One had to think twice, or more than twice, before uttering any such thing. After all, Mosul was the city that hailed Sayed Qutub, not Mernissi, not the pyramids, nor even Gamal Abdel Nasser, as North Africa’s greatest contribution to the world. Although conspiracies about Western agents sent to destroy the solid values of Muslims were quite popular and believable, even by the reckoning of my own younger self back then, there was still something that did not seem to me appropriate when a Friday sermon would revolve completely around the ill consequences of women plucking their eyebrows (this is not a joke; I wish it were). But we were “conservative,” and that entailed never objecting and never questioning religious authority—or men, for that matter.Mernissi became aware of the misogynist plague that Middle Eastern and Muslim societies suffered from at a young age. The opening paragraph of her book Dreams of Trespass—Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994) tells of her father, a nationalist, saying, “our problems with the Christians are similar to our problem with women: neither know how to respect boundaries.” The “Christians” were the colonial forces that occupied Morocco during the course of previous century—mainly the French and the Spanish, but there were other claimants, as well. The problematic “women” her father referred to were her mother, aunts, and sisters who dreamed of crossing the “boundaries” of their aristocratic harem to navigate the streets and markets of Fez; the town of Mernissi’s birth. This incident, she wrote, sent her on a mission to redefine boundaries for women who shared her skin tone and mother tongue.At 16 years of age, Mernissi—a student in one of Fez’s French protectorate schools—was smitten by Muhammad. But weren’t we all, and did we really have much choice? Most education systems in the Muslim world are built around idealizing the character of the Prophet. But a young Fatema saw an angle others had missed: She admired Muhammad the human, the lover who adored Aisha and named her his wife on Earth and in Paradise, thus preferring her to all the hur—the black-haired beauties; the same hur that motivates hundreds of young suicide bombers in Syria and Iraq today, who think they will meet such women in Paradise. Fatema was therefore heartbroken when her teacher recited a hadith that read, “Three things, if passing a man while praying, will invalidate the prayer: a woman, a donkey, and a black dog.” “How could Muhammad say something so hurtful? Why would he mention a woman in the same breath with a donkey and a black dog, and as a thing that invalidates a prayer?”, Fatema asked.She refused to believe it. Her refusal led her to revisit Islam’s most sacred books after the Qur’an, one by one, carefully examining thousands of pages of the sira and other literature. She studied the thirty volumes of “Al-Tabari,” poured over Ibn Hisham’s Biography of the Prophet, Ibn Sa’ad’s Al-Tabaqat, and Ibn Hujur’s Al-Isaba fi hayat Al- Sah’aba.” She read and searched and reread the hadiths compiled in the Sahih Al-Bukhari and the Sahih Muslim. Mernissi already knew that there was innate misogyny in her society, but she needed to find its source. On account both of what she found and, more important, what she did not find, she concluded that much of women’s submission in Muslim countries was political, due to the deliberate misinterpretations of religious texts. It was not an enshrined misogyny practiced by early Muslims and passed on as authoritative tradition reaching back to the Prophet.By the time Mernissi had finished her political science studies at the Sorbonne and earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis, she knew she had found her life’s calling. When her dissertation became Beyond the Veil in 1975, and word of it got back to the region of the Arabs, eyebrows rocketed skyward as they had never rocketed before. Here was a Muslim woman openly discussing sex. Not only that, but this Muslim woman was claiming that Muslim scholars in the old, traditional sources believed women to be highly sexual—like vaginas with teeth, as she described some of the pre-Islamic Arab folktales that, she held, still influenced social attitudes. Women were equal “partners” in sexual appetites, and that recognition led male Muslim jurists to fear the disruptive power of women on society and its morals. The sexual appetites of women had to be reined in for the good of everyone; thus did the Arabic word fitna come to apply as a virtual synonym for the disruption of which women were capable with all forms of non-right-fittedness and potential chaos in society.Once Mernissi understood this, there was no turning back. She could not have kept this realization bottled up inside her even if she had tried. She set the bar very high from the outset, perhaps too high; no other female writer has managed to equal her courage, one that infused scholarly excellence with an unmatched ability to break down the origins and evolution of the Islamic heritage into its basic social elements.In 1987, Mernissi published an Arabic translation of perhaps most her controversial book, Political Harem: The Prophet and Women, in which she attempted to debunk claims that Islam prohibited women from entering politics. The book was inspired by yet another incident a few years earlier in her hometown of Fez. Mernissi was shopping at a local grocery store when she asked what the grocer would think if a woman were to become the leader of an Arab country. “The man was so shocked, he dropped the bright white eggs I had come to buy,” Mernissi wrote. “Another bystander quoted the Hadith in which Muhammad says, “No people will prosper if they delegate their affairs to a woman,” and he was ready to spit.” Saddened by the experience, she traced back some of the most misogynist hadiths, questioning their context and shedding doubt on the validity of their narrator, Abu Hureira. How could a man who accompanied Muhammad for only three years narrate nearly 6,000 hadiths? Mernissi had passed, or trespassed on, yet another boundary.However passionate about change in Muslim societies, Mernissi avoided Western-born fanatical feminism, and she was never a misandrist, though she chose not to marry. She was born into a harem, but stressed that it was nothing like the harems seen in popular culture, where tens of beautiful young women gathered and awaited the masculine Sultan. The harem consisted of the women in her family. They were protected from strange men, so the boundaries were understood and often enough appreciated. Mernissi did not despise her culture, unlike many “Muslim feminists” today, but she rather embraced it so as to push it forward. She sought to exercise the Quranic principle of jadal (debate and argumentation), and she even helped popularize the noun jadaliya to emphasize the need for Arab societies to permit and encourage genuine open debate on a variety of subjects.Alas, Mernissi could not have predicted what would happen once the wall of enforced, obedient silence about important issues was breeched. Once it became possible to question traditional religious authority, some questioned and attacked that authority from the “religious right,” as it were—and we know what has happened since. Nevertheless, Mernissi’s approach showed that her cause was not women’s rights per se, but rather how to reintroduce women as equal partners of men for the benefit of society as a whole. She believed that women’s participation in an open and ongoing conversation with their male counterparts would lead to women’s freedom. But she was also realistic and patient: She did not aspire to compete with the works of Islamic jurists and historians, but rather to update the methodology of examining the heritage of Islamic civilization. She merely rejected the habit of regarding medieval concepts and interpretations as eternal, unquestionable facts, and never sought to reject Islamic texts or attack them, but rather to reintroduce and reinterpret verses and traditions progressively.Mernissi also never allowed herself to be drawn into political controversies as such from her position as a professor at a Moroccan university. Perhaps she idealized the Prophet too much to enter what many believe are “dark areas” of his life and times. She repeatedly stated that Islam, within in its historic context, was very progressive toward women. Context was key, and she would rather refer to time and place than to denounce incidents and practices that contradicted her principles. She found victory in the small places: women selling baked bread in public instead of behind closed doors; female television anchors sharing the news desk with male colleagues; young girls choosing their desired field of education, or the ones they wanted to marry.During her last decade or so of life, she spoke enthusiastically about Sufism. In one of her final television appearances last year on Al-Jazeera, she described Sufi teachings as a manifestation of the bridges she sought to build. She quoted Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the great Muslim Sufist and scientist: “We have been plagued with a folk who believe God has shown only them the right path”; and “He who knows does not express anger when witnessing evil, but feels empathy and kindly advises; not chastises.” These were the virtues that a mature Fatema Mernissi esteemed: Islamic virtues, through and through.This week, a young Nadiya Murad shared her ordeal of rape and torture at the hands of purveyors of the pinnacle of backward religious misogyny within her world. Her story, however, reflects the universal theme of the objectification of women. Anyone who is shocked at ISIS’s enslavement of Yazidi women yet proceeds to snap photos of unaware women is quite the hypocrite. What makes the tragedy of the Yazidis so painfully unique is that sacred texts were used to justify such heinous acts. This is what Fatema Mernissi, now gone, dedicated her life to fight. She had faith in youth and believed the time of successful reform would come—for humiliation, violence, and death can be tolerated for only so long.This past May, a female colleague and I attended a lecture about religious reform. The all-male panel repeated the phrase “our constellation of religious jurists” so many times that the word “reform” went missing in action. On one such repetition, my colleague quietly said to me, “Yes, the constellation of jurists that orbits around the black hole known as the vagina.” We both failed to suppress our laughter, which symbolized too many thoughts of trespass we both had entertained that day. I whispered to her, “That is something Fatema Mernissi would say. ”But it was no longer the 1990s in Mosul, so there was no one to cast aspersions and ridicule, nor to associate our trespasses with any hidden Western agenda. We were not ashamed to be witty, truthful, bold, and feminine. I would like to think that Fatema Mernissi would take some pride in what she helped to create. She was a great human being, a great woman, and a great Muslim.

Gray Lady Sings the Blues

The social safety net for the elderly is under strain in developed countries, according to the NYT:

As governments of most industrial nations try to restore long-term financial stability to their pension systems — raising the retirement age, linking benefits more closely to workers’ contributions and the like — there is a growing risk, as the O.E.C.D.’s secretary general, José Ángel Gurría, put it, “that future pensions will not be sufficient.”

This is hardly a shock: Demographics, like ocean liners, move slowly and can be spotted from afar. On top of that, the lackluster growth and high unemployment experienced across much of the Western world in the last few years is going to make it much harder for young workers who expect to retire around midcentury from accumulating enough money to sustain a decent living standard in old age.

That all raises a question that seems to be studiously avoided in polite policy conversations: Is old-age poverty going to pick up again?

In this story, NYT is facing what everybody knows: The retirement systems of the 20th century won’t work in the 21st. U.S. retirees will see declining social security payments after 2035, according to the story, and the private retirement system isn’t working for many people. Additionally, citizens of developed countries continue to do two things that make it hard for retirement systems to work effectively: live longer and have fewer kids. The problem is worse in Europe than it is in the U.S. But even here, without substantial changes in the way we handle old age, the current retirement system will not give millennials and even many Gen Xers the security they need.

It is a good sign that even a deep blue news source like the NYT acknowledges the retirement problem. The shift from the old way of organizing basic social institutions to something that can work in the emerging new world of the information age will only happen as partisan blues gradually and painfully face up to the reality that change is inevitable.

Judeo-Christian or Abrahamic?

On December 9, 2015, The Christian Century published an article, “One Abraham or three?”, by Ulrich Rosenhagen, a Lutheran theologian at the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions of the University of Wisconsin. Rosenhagen places this relatively recent shift from “Judeo-Christian” to “Abrahamic” in the wider context of the expanding religious pluralism in American society. Even before independence the British colonies in North America were religiously diverse compared with Europe and most of them gave up on projects to set up state churches. The Puritans tried in Massachusetts, the Anglicans in Virginia, but these projects failed because of the ineradicable heterogeneity of the immigrant population. When factual pluralism coalesced with the ideal of religious freedom, the new nation adopted the latter as one of its core values, enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. George Washington eloquently expressed this ideal in his letter to the synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and in his farewell address asserted that religion and morality provide “indispensable support for political prosperity.” At the time it was clear which religion he had mainly in mind: It was above all Protestantism which, in the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (a Roman Catholic), had created “a nation with the soul of a church.” These words were written in 1922; by then the massive arrival of Catholic and Jewish immigrants had made it much less clear which church had given its “soul” to the country.

World War II was an important turning point in the unfolding drama of American pluralism. Since hideously barbaric anti-Semitism was the core ideology of the Nazi enemy, the term “Judeo-Christian” served to describe the moral quality of the U.S. war effort; by the same token it deligitimated the genteel anti-Semitism which still persisted here and there in WASP America. Even the mildest expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice (say, in jokes told in upper-class country clubs) inevitably evoked associations with the horrors of the Holocaust. The “Four Chaplains” became a heroic icon of this postwar understanding of America’s “soul” and its relation to American Jews. [I imagine that this shift coincided with the triumphant ascendancy of Jewish humor in popular culture and presumably even in WASP country clubs.] The icon refers to a real event that occurred in 1943: A ship carrying American troops to Europe was torpedoed by a German submarine. Most of the passengers were still trapped below deck as the ship was rapidly sinking. Four army chaplains—two Protestants, one Catholic, and one Jew—were busy trying to help soldiers get onto the deck and then to get them into lifeboats. As the evacuation proceeded, the supply of vests gave out. The four chaplains, who had vests on, took them off and gave them to others. The chaplains were drowned. This act of heroism was celebrated in the press, in books, in a motion picture, and even in a postage stamp. A memorial chapel (originally located in the Brooklyn Naval Yard) was opened in a ceremony addressed by President Truman.The position of Jews and of Judaism in America has changed dramatically since then—socially, politically and culturally. An institutional marker: The National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in 1927, a pioneer interfaith organization combatting anti-Semitism (it persists under an even more inclusive name). An intellectual marker: In 1955 Will Herberg published a very influential book, Protestant—Catholic—Jew, in which he proposed the sociological thesis that this tripartite religious identification has been replacing previous ethnic identities (Swedish-American, Italian-American, and Jewish-American having become a still loose merger of religious and ethnic identity). A marker in academic usage (motivated by respect for Jewish sensitivities): The old division of history—B.C./A.D.—“before Christ”/”anno Domini”—replaced by “BCE”/”CE”—“before the common era”/”common era.”“Judeo-Christian” gained further traction during the Cold War—“Judeo-Christian” America opposed godless Communism. This, logically enough, intensified during the Eisenhower Administration. The late President was (to my knowledge) not a strongly religious man, and certainly not a sophisticated theologian, but a much-quoted sentence of his nicely expresses the national mood at the time (it was in an address to the Freedom Foundation): “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” The last phrase (although I doubt that Eisenhower intended this) gives a hint on how the alleged “Judeo-Christian” affinity might be further enlarged.So now we have “Abrahamic,” increasingly relevant as both American government and the American people are forced by events to think about Islam. Clearly there are other potential candidates for admission to the grand alliance—in addition to Muslims, a sizable number of Buddhists and Hindus (most of whom are naturalized citizens and thus legally entitled and, as good Americans, culturally inclined to sue for their First Amendment rights). Leaving aside numerous smaller religious groups, there are lots of so-called “nones” (who say in surveys that they have no religious affiliation) who will also protest their exclusion in federal court. The mind boggles as one imagines all future                                                                                                                                                                                                 religious representatives crowding presidential inaugurations. [They have already been pretty crowded since the beginning of the “Judeo-Christian “ dispensation. By the way, Herberg not only omitted Muslims. He also omitted Eastern Orthodox Christians. Somebody must have noticed (the Greek lobby?). They are now always present when American pluralism is celebrated, and they are always noticed: The tall black hats of their clergy dwarf all other religious headgear.] As Rosenhagen points out in his article, the term “Abrahamic” was coined by Louis Massignon (1853–1962), a distinguished French scholar of Islam, who wrote the influential paper “Three Prayers of Abraham” in 1949. In the United States, the term was rapidly picked up in the wake of 9/11. Right after the attack on the World Trade Center, George W. Bush declared that we were not at war with Islam (a morally and politically desirable declaration), adding that “Islam means peace” (which is not good Arabic—Islam means submission, not peace—but, I guess, President Bush’s credentials as a scholar of religion are as good as were President Eisenhower’s). The recent eruption of Islamist violence makes the distinction made by Bush all the more important politically: the present war against the terrorist threat will finally be decided by somebody’s “boots on the ground,” but it cannot be won without the support of powerful Muslim allies. (The Bush presidency will not be judged by his scholarly knowledge of Islam; neither will Obama’s, who has been singing from the same hymn book with more ardent wooing of Muslims, ever since his famous Cairo speech.)The sociological context of these develoments is religious pluralism—an empirical reality, whether one likes it or not. The political responses and the philosophical or theological assessments must be clearly distinguished from the empirical analysis. The latter, of course, is to understand what is actually happening in the world today, especially if one is to understand the phenomenon of radical Islamism. I have tried to do this in my recent work on pluralism as a sociologist of religion. Part of such a project must be an understanding of the place of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the dynamics of global pluralism. I cannot do this here. But I must, at least briefly, address two questions to which sociology cannot give answers. One: Are assertions of Abrahamic commonality useful in the development of American domestic and foreign policy? Does that commonality stand up in the philosophical or theological assessment of these three traditions?The concept of “Judeo-Christian” has been immensely useful in the integration of Jews as an ethnic group and of Judaism as a religion in America. I think it is fair to say that in no other country in modern history have Jews become as much part of the taken-for-granted landscape of the society as in America. Jews are not only accepted; they are esteemed. In a recent survey respondents were asked to name the religion other than their own they liked best, and the one they liked least. Muslims and Mormons competed for the least liked place; Jews were the most liked. Given the enormous capacity of America to integrate the most diverse religious and ethnic groups, there is no intrinsic reason (intrinsic, that is, to Islam) why the growing number of American Muslims should not go through the same process of indigenization. Of course the future course of radical Islamism will help or hinder this process. Thus far the concept of “Abrahamic” religion has been useful in countering the anti-Muslim sentiments stoked by the likes of Donald Trump. Could this change? Of course it could: It is not difficult to imagine any number of scenarios in which new horrendous attacks by radical Islamists could lead to an explosion of hatred against Islam in general and American Muslims in particular. But this is not an unavoidable future. In the meantime, both the actions of the federal government, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and those of the institutions of civil society have made impressive moves to protect American Muslim from being identified with the ideology and the atrocities of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Individual Jews, synagogues and Jewish organizations have been prominent in their support of these efforts.This post has been concerned with the expansion of the concept of Judeo-Christian religion to that of Abrahamic religion. I have circled around various questions raised about the key proposition, which is that the three religious traditions have distinctive commonalities. Let me now summarize three questions about the proposition.1) Is the proposition empirically understandable? Definitely yes. The underlying reality is the globalization of pluralism. Increasingly different religions, worldviews and moral systems co-exist in the same society. Everyone talks with everyone else, about religion and everything else. Where pluralism coincides with religious freedom, as it has in America at least since independence, all sorts of interactions become possible—including those between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Thus synthetic notions like “Judeao-Christian” and “Abrahamic” become plausible, and indeed describe the empirical reality of different faith communities. Fundamentalism can be sociologically analyzed as a program to arrest or reverse the pluralist dynamic. Today Islamic fundamentalism is the most important but not the only case of such a program.2) It the proposition politically useful? If one’s list of political desiderata includes civic peace and individual freedom, the idea of Judeo-Christian religion has been very useful in the successful entry of Jews and Judaism into American culture. Since the Second Vatican Council, it has been official Roman Catholic doctrine that the relationship of the Church with Judaism is different from that with any other faith community. It has just now been restated in the official decision to terminate all missionary activity specifically intended to convert Jews. That idea is most strongly held by Evangelical Protestants, who tend to have a very literal reading of what they believe is an “inerrant” Scrpture. Supposedly the covenant God made with Abraham and all who descend from him is still valid today, including the promise for possession of the Holy Land. This of course explains the strong pro-Zionist and pro-Israel sympathies of many American Evangelicals. [A recent survey found that a higher percentage of American Evangelicals than of American Jews believe that the entire Holy Land, even today, is promised by God to the modern State of Israel. I wonder how many have actually looked at the borders of the promised land, defined as including all the territory “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). This territory would include not only historic Palestine, but Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as chunks of Egypt and Iraq. I imagine that this prospect would worry even the most ardent advocates of Greater Israel.] In any case, the proposition that the three monotheistic faiths of western Asia have much in common, is useful for U.S. policies favoring peace between these religions both at home and in the Middle East.3) Finally, is the proposition true? I don’t mean “true” in the sense that the God proclaimed in the Quran, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament actually exists as the creator and ruler of the universe. I mean “true” in a phenomenological sense—that an objective analysis of these three religions will disclose many more common features than between any of them and, say, the religions originating on the Indian subcontinent. I have in the past proposed that if one looks beyond primal (once impolitely called primitive) religions, a fundamental cleavage is between the holy cities of Jerusalem and Benares—the city in which stood the Temple of Solomon, in which Jesus died and rose from the dead, in which Muhammad started his miraculous journey to heaven—and that other city in whose river one can immerse oneself in closeness to the gods, and where just outside it, in the Deer Park of Sarnath, the Buddha first preached the dharma to his earliest disciples. Of course I’m not suggesting that each of these traditions has an unchanging essence that has persisted over the ages. But if one looks out from a standpoint of one tradition to other traditions, one will see very sharply how they differ from one’s own. In a recent book directly relevant to the topic of this post, Jon Levenson (Harvard Divinity School) in Inheriting Abraham (2013) very ably shows that the notion of “Abrahamic religion” overlooks the important ways in which many of those who advocate the notion have torn Abraham out of his Biblical context and used him for their own Christian or Muslim agendas. Levenson is a highly competent Biblical scholar. From a standpoint firmly grounded in Judaism, he clearly sees how the Biblical Abraham has been subtly Christianized or Islamized to fit into the Abrahamic concept. Not for a moment would I want to, or be competent to, criticize his argument. One’s perception is influenced by where one stands. Levenson, so to speak, stands at the Western Wall and looks at Golgotha and the al-Aqsa Mosque. When you look at any concept in this or that perspective, it tends to fall apart. I would assume that Levenson uses the concept of “Christianity”, being very distinct from “Judaism.” Yet how can one subsume the Patriarch of Moscow with a Pentecostal preacher under the category of “Christian”—or a Hasidic rebbe in Brooklyn with the rabbi of a Reform temple in Manhattan, under the category of “Jewish.” A methodological generalization: The human mind has a very broad capacity to aggregate or disaggregate just about anything, depending on which aspect of reality it wishes to understand.

The Implications of Russia’s Mafia State

Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Moscow last week yielded a pile of optimistic pronouncements from the top U.S. diplomat on the likelihood of successful cooperation between the United States and Russia. “We see Syria fundamentally very similarly”; “The U.S. stands ready to work with Russia”; “Despite our countries’ differences, we demonstrated that when the United States and Russia pull together in the same direction, progress can be made.” That last statement in particular jumps out at the reader, as it appears to be grounded in a thoroughgoing realist foreign policy reading of Russia. Russia, that thinking goes, is a fairly normal autocracy, and as such can be relied on to be a predictable, if at times unsavory, actor on the world stage. Find common interests with it, and you find possible areas of cooperation.

But reality has never quite fit the realist reading. In truth, Russia is less an autocracy and more a mafia state—a nation run by and for a powerful clique that maintains close ties to, and is intertwined with, notorious criminals. A 2010 State Department cable, leaked by Wikileaks, detailed how criminals and organized crime groups enjoy secret support and protection by state officials, working to complement state structures to do whatever the government of Russia couldn’t acceptably do as a government out in the open. The bulk of the cable’s information comes from a candid presentation by Spain’s Special Prosecutor for Corruption and Organized Crime, José Grinda. Grinda is quoted as saying that, for Russia, “one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and organized crime groups,” and that there are proven ties between pro-Kremlin Russian political parties and “organized crime and arms trafficking,” including involvement in gun-running to the Kurds, “in an attempt to destabilize Turkey.” He also emphasized the “tremendous control” exercised by the Russian mafia over some strategic sectors of the global economy, including aluminum and natural gas, which was made possible due to the Kremlin’s collaboration with Russian criminal organizations.And there is much fresher evidence.Earlier this year, a 488-page document, the product of a decade-long investigation by Spanish prosecutors into the linkages between organized crime and the Kremlin, alleged that Russia’s Chairman of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, owes his political career to Gennady Petrov, a high-ranking member of the Tambov crime syndicate. The Tambov gang was the top mafia clan active in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, around the time when a young Vladimir Putin was active in the city’s government. Spanish wiretaps allegedly caught Bastrykin’s lawyer openly thanking Petrov for having arranged political promotions for his boss. And Bastrykin was hardly the only high-ranking official implicated: there were are at least a few Duma deputies, a former Defense Minister, and even a former Prime Minister.And just two weeks ago, the results of an investigation published by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny thoroughly shook up Moscow in revealing that the two sons of Russian Attorney General Yuri Chaika had engaged in a close business partnership with Russia’s criminal Godfather Sergei Tsapok. Tsapok, whose gang in Russia’s Krasnodar region operated with impunity for years and received protection from higher-level authorities, became known country-wide in 2010 after his goons killed a dozen of people, including women and children, in what became known as the Kuschevskaya massacre.The degree to which organized crime and the Russian state are intertwined has several important implications for Western policy.First: The extent of collaboration with Russia should be limited to avoid further penetration of criminalized networks into Western institutions. Policymakers should know that when any actionable information is provided to the Russians, it is also very likely shared with Russia’s criminal networks. Interpol officials already remain wary of revealing too much information to their Russian counterparts. Similar precautions ought to be followed in all other areas of policy-making.Second: Policymakers should not hope for autocratic brittleness to bring a hasty end to the current regime in Moscow. Though there are no clear lines of succession to the increasingly autocratic Putin, in the long term, mafia states tend to be more resilient than might appear at first glance. This is in large part due to the way they are organized: along family-style networks. Criminal authorities greatly emphasize members’ loyalty by uniting them through the bonds of blood and partnerships (see Chaika’s sons, above). Over time, these lineages extend over more and more “families” and are managed by a single head at the top of a pyramidal hierarchy. Mafia states differ from other regimes by the abundance of joint ventures owned by members of the “family” and family-like political elite members. The largest Russian corporations are often co-owned by direct or remote relatives of members of the elite (see the scandal involving Igor Shuvalov, First Deputy Chairman of Government, who in the late 2000s bought a sizable number of shares of Gazprom in his wife’s name, just ahead of a liberalization decree that sent the stock soaring). The family-like structure of the Kremlin-run networks ensures their quick reproduction in case they are disrupted. It also makes all of the corrupt system’s beneficiaries more critically dependent upon the survival of the system as a whole. Unlike in Argentina or Venezuela, where recent elections at least appeared to move the needle in a hopeful direction, elections in Russia are much less likely to make a difference. The elimination of such a system requires the complete destruction of its multiple criminal branches within and outside of Russia.The resilience of mafia state elites also has to do with their devotion to mafia codes of honor and omertà, which include demands of absolute loyalty to the mafia organization, unconditional subordination to the leader, emphasis on silence, and demands of non-disclosure. Whatever business is done within the elite circles, it should under no circumstances be exposed to outsiders. Of course, this tendency in Russia is not new. Winston Churchill likened the gyrations of the Soviet Kremlin to “bulldogs fighting under a carpet,” and today’s Russian elites abide by the same principles to resolve their disputes: private matters are managed in a strictly quiet and secret manner, with very few scandals leaking to the outside world. Final decisions tend to be announced without any pre-existing public debate. Be it the launch of a new war in Georgia in 2008 or the brazen projection of force into Syria in 2015, such decisions usually come across as sudden and unexpected to outside observers. And just like the Mafiosi they consort with, Kremlin insiders also primarily respect force and violence, use threats to test and scare off their enemies (witness the repeated airspace violations in the Baltics and beyond), and tend to see compromise as a sign of weakness.Finally, as Moisés Naím pointed out, mafia penetration fundamentally alters the behavior of states on the international stage. Mafia state elites are arguably more likely to gamble in situations where leaders of more normal states would chose a moderate stance and are more likely to engage in military escalation in comparison to other countries. Because in mafia states the national interest and the interests of organized crime are so inextricably intertwined, their governments might be more prone to use force when their access to profitable illicit markets is threatened. For example, the illicit trade in Abkhazia and South Ossetia might have pushed senior Russian officials, who acted as the criminals’ patrons and partners, to start a war against Georgia in 2008.All these observations suggest that Western analysts and leaders need to be more on alert when discussing the possibilities of partnership with Russia on Syria and other matters. The Kremlin neither understands nor respects compromise with its Western counterparts. Rather, it tends to perceive it as a sign of Western weakness and will betray its erstwhile earnest partners when circumstances allow and advantage dictates. The interests and values of the Kremlin elites differ from those of their Western counterparts in profound ways—ones that traditional international relations theories have a hard time accounting for. It’s an important thing to keep in mind the next time Putin’s Kremlin wrongfoots the West in an area that seemed so ripe for cooperation. Secretary Kerry, beware!