Why Are They Mad At Us?

Four Americans killed in a brutal assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

U.S. embassy in Cairo attacked and invaded ... angry anti-American demonstrations in Taher square

Enraged mobs in Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, even India ...

The wave of vehement, often violent, anti-American protests is deeply disturbing and very hard to understand for a lot of people.

Many of us feel betrayed as well as profoundly puzzled. Why are they so mad at us when we didn’t do anything?  It wasn’t you and I who made some cheap, tacky movie.  We condemn hatred and prejudice and don’t blame an entire group of people for the outrageous actions of a few nut cases. We don’t join murderous mobs or support violent protests.  We try to live by our principles and values and try to be tolerant and understanding of other people.  We support the right of free speech even for slimeballs and idiots who say disgusting things.  So why are they so mad at us?

It’s even harder to take the anger and insults when we shared the joy and exhilaration of the Arab Spring.  We were emotionally with the protestors in Tahir Square who brought down the Mubarak dictatorship.  We agonize over the innocent casualties of the Syrian civil war and hope that somehow Assad can be ousted.  We felt solidarity with the people of Iran in 2009 when their “green revolution” was ruthlessly crushed.  We’re on the side of the people ... how can they treat us like enemies?

 I do not intend to argue with anyone’s feelings of anger and betrayal.  To suggest ways we might understand these events is not, even implicitly, to justify or explain them away.  It is not cultural imperialism or insensitive ethnocentrism to say these reactions are way over the top and wrong.

I think there is a real danger that for many of us the positive image of people in the Middle East and elsewhere as being pretty much like us with some understandable difference will be replaced by the dark image of “The Other”: irrational, reactionary, seething with hatred and barely repressed violence.   Perhaps some analysis of the politics and psychology involved in this and similar mass reactions will be useful.

Among many possible questions these seem to me to be particularly important:

What are the protests really about?

Who are the protestors (and who isn’t protesting?)

Doesn’t this mean that those who warned us about an Islamist capture of the Arab Spring were right and we are in for a very dark time?

What are the protests about?

To phrase the question that way is lead us on a wild goose chase through the underbrush searching in vain for the “real” reason.   The simple answer that goes something like, “people saw or heard about this movie that grossly insulted the Prophet Mohammed and rationally (or irrationally) got very angry” is no help because it can’t explain why almost all the roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world did NOT rush into the streets to chant “Death to America” at the nearest U.S. embassy. 

Data from the several waves of the World Values Survey and from the 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims around the world suggest that widely held attitudes toward the West in general and the United States in particular include two sets of ambivalent perceptions.  One common dichotomy is the juxtaposition of good American people and bad American government.  A second dimension of ambivalence is the evaluation of the material and moral quality of life in the U.S.  On the one hand, our technology, material standard of living, political and personal freedoms are admired and applauded and envied; on the other hand our technology and wealth are a reminder (or product) of their comparative backwardness and poverty and our liberty looks more like indulgent license and immorality.  The more strongly a person holds the negative half of those dimensions, the more likely rumors of insults to Islam can become symbols that evoke these broader and deeper negative feelings about the U.S. or the West.

“Culture” is a sloppy and slippery term that resists clear or precise definition.   Nonetheless, there are three very common elements in the political culture of the Middle East and North Africa that make negative images and attitudes toward the U.S. easier to evoke.  Neither is unique to this setting but both seem to be more common here than other parts of the world.

The first element, held with varying degrees of strength, is a sense of being besieged by the outside world.  A recurrent theme in both formal education and popular cultured is 1200 years of Christian attempts to contain and thwart Islam and 300 years of oppression by Western imperialism. 

The second element in the Middle Eastern political culture is a tendency to see powerful, often malignant forces behind events. “Sh*t Happens” bumper stickers are very rare.   It is closer to “common sense”, easier to believe, that there are powerful forces acting behind the scenes to at least permit, if not instigate negative events.  Freud was not alone when he said there were no accidents.

The third element is a general and diffuse sense of frustration and disappointment with life. The idea of relative deprivation , the gap between what you feel you’re entitled to and what you have, is pretty well understood in political and social psychology.  It is not that people are grindingly poor ... people who are living on the edge of physical survival are not at all easy to mobilize for politics.  But people who feel that live has not been fair, that they have less than they deserve, tend to have an (unconscious) reservoir of resentment that can be manipulated and channeled.

So, for those who responded, when the video was described in highly provocative terms it became what could be called a condensation symbol -- an act of event that could tap into one or more underlying, deeper sources of anger and frustration.  The protests are about the video and they are about far more.

Who are the protesters?

The analysis above and what we know about this kind of political participation in general would lead us to expect that the majority of participants would be young men who were psychologically available to be mobilized because of their attitudes.  An additional factor is social: people who are members of a group, especially a small, face to face group, that shares and reinforces beliefs and attitudes are far more likely to engage in political action.

This emphasis on the fact that the vast majority of protestors have been people who were predisposed to respond to an opportunity to express frustration and discontent becomes even more important for understanding the meaning of their actions when we realize that most of the participants have NOT seen the video but only heard about it from someone else.  Only about a quarter of the people in Egypt have access to the internet and, not surprisingly, they’re the wealthier, better educated Egyptian business owners and professionals, along with university students.  Except for the students, these are the people least likely to recruited for a large, potentially violent demonstration.

The most critical players in mobilizing demonstrations are the imams.  Imams play the same roles that rabbis or ministers do in the U.S., leading religious services and preaching sermons, presiding over marriages and funerals, visiting the sick, offering advice and comfort to the confused and afflicted.  Particularly in working class or poor neighborhoods, the mosque is not just where you go on Friday to pray but the center of social and cultural activity.  Imams are trained and credentialed by recognized institutions. Some countries, for example Egypt and Iran, have well developed and historically renowned centers for clerical education.  As you might expect, the curriculum is narrowly focused on theology and law and heavily imbued with very conservative social values.  Other, smaller countries, do not have many locally trained imams and rely on importing imams from abroad.  A critical source of foreign trained imams for most of the Middle East and North Africa and, indeed, most of the broader Muslim world, is Saudi Arabia. This is an important factor in understanding why and how mosques can become focal points for mobilizing protests and demonstrations against the U.S. and the West.

As some of the readers already know, Islam in Saudi Arabia has a distinctive tenor.  The Wahabbi religious movement that began in the 18th Century was a highly puritanical, deeply fundamentalist reform movement on the Arabian Peninsula.  The Wahabbis combined calls for sinners to repent and be saved with the image of Muhammad and his followers as the model of  a perfect Islamic society.  If life in 19th Century Arabia seemed decadent and sinful to the early Wahabbis; 21st Century Saudi Arabia is even more sinful and immoral.  And beyond Saudi Arabia, the world gets worse and worse until one comes to the unimaginable cess pit of the West.  Saudi religious authorities feel a positive duty to send Wahabbi trained imams as missionaries to Muslims throughout the world.

I don’t mean to imply that all imams are ignorant of physical and social science, history and geography, or that all imams have a very limited education.  But many, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, do have a shallow and simplistic view of the world and little knowledge about anything outside their immediate experience. 

Islam is not a hierarchical religion with a structure of authority.  There is no equivalent of the Pope or the Southern Baptist Convention that provides authoritative guidance to members of a particular group.  There are distinctions among imams, based on perceived knowledge of law and theology, and the imam of the local mosque will look to a well known and respected man whose views he finds compatible for direction and leadership.  Relationships among those perceived leading imams can often be highly competitive and feature a certain amount of jockeying for position and efforts to maintain and expand one’s circle of followers.

Here is a central dynamic in protests.  Imams who are leaders of other imams can seize upon an event or person, frame it as a cause for great concern or celebration, and use it to rally and energize their followers.  (Huge caveat: the fact that this is what it looks like to you and me as an observer does NOT mean that people are necessarily cynical manipulators rather than honest and sincere interpreters of reality as they see it.)

Thus an event like the notorious 12 minute YouTube video or the news reports earlier of American soldiers (accidently) defiling Korans, or the wacky Florida pastor’s promise of a Koranic bonfire, can be presented as a mobilizing symbol through the social dynamics of the mosque. 

More insight into the political and social psychological dynamics of the protests comes from looking at who did not participate.  I’m thinking of enormous number of quite traditionally devout Muslims whose lives are reasonably stable and secure.  It is not that they are indifferent to insults to their religion and culture, but their reaction is not loaded with a lot of intensity and anger from other underlying issues.  

As far as we can tell at the moment, the killing of four Americans in Benghazi is a completely different phenomenon from the widespread demonstrations throughout the Middle East.  All the evidence suggests that an armed group more or less loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, planned a murderous assault on the American consulate and simply took advantage of a demonstration (that they may have had a hand in organizing.) 

Does this mean the Arab Spring has taken a terrible wrong turn?

Some people fear that the forces behind these demonstrations are part of a broader movement to replace the bad old dictators like Mubarak with bad new, Islamist dictators, much as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did. Some people believe that all politicians who look to Islam for values and guidance in running a country are part of an ominous “Islamist” movement that is inherently anti-democratic, anti-Western and hell bent on imposing theocracy in the Middle East and North Africa.  These are people who see no real differences between so-called moderates like the current President of Egypt and “salafis” more hard core, reactionary forces.  The passions and slogans of these demonstrations show that their political leaders are not interested in democracy, reject Western values, and are happily using elections to seize power and abolish elections.  Fortunately these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.

There are real and enduring differences between the wide range of people and parties marching under the banner of “Political Islam” and outpourings of what looks on the surface like religious emotionalism are not the prelude to the abject failure of these early stirrings of democracy, as I discussed earlier http://ir-comments.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-polticial-islam-really-so-scary.html

The great threat to political progress in the region remains what it has already been:  failure to deal with economic stagnation and threats to peoples’ ability to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living.  Economic development does not necessarily cause democracy but a democratic regime that does not improve peoples’ lives is extremely vulnerable to the siren call of some rigid and simplistic ideology.  The real threat to a democratic future in Egypt is the immense economic challenges facing the government.

Some people worry that these outbursts will make it impossible for local governments, primarily Egypt, to continue cooperating with the United States.  Certainly a government that has to pay attention to the anti-American and anti-Western feelings of some of its population is going to be more constrained to avoid the appearance of cooperating with the U.S.  But the most important area of cooperation is countering terrorism and it is in the self interest of all the governments in the Middle East except Iran to act against Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda look alikes. 

And some people are worried that these demonstrations reveal a deeply rooted, pervasive anti-American sentiment.  Even those of us who know that “they all hate us” is a grotesque over simplification, are likely to be disturbed by the idea that millions of people -- many more than actually protested – do not like us.  Here there is, I think, bad news and good news.

The bad news is that attitudes are not likely to change very quickly and, if the analysis here is close to the mark, we will see more incidents of apparent rage and searing expressions of dislike.  It is not that Middle Easterners or Muslims are more sensitive to insults than you and I nor is it that the United States pursues policies that are consistently opposed to the interests of the people of the Middle East (or the less developed world in general) or make their lives worse.  (I realize that goes well beyond the original goal of explaining events without a political slant but I think I can defend the assertion that, on the whole, U.S. foreign policy is more often than not on the right track.)  But if a central dynamic is the existence of a significant number of people who can be mobilized to load their underlying discontent and sorrow onto “bad America” as a symbol, that dynamic is not likely to change very soon.

The good news is that heated and dramatic cultural or religious conflict between you and me and our counterparts in the Middle East is not inevitable.  Forty years ago (yes, I know for some readers I might as well have written “Once upon a time, along time ago ...” but others will remember) Latin America was often rocked by anti-American demonstrations and we heard the same fears that if there were more democracy there would be more opposition to the United States and more open rejection of us and our values.

What happened?  I think the quick answer is economic development.  Standards of living have improved in Latin American countries.  There are still a large number of poor people but they are a smaller and smaller proportion of the population in the various countries and even the poor have some reason to expect that their lives, or at least the lives of their children, will improve over time. 

If things go well for the Middle East, meaning a combination of good policies on the part of governments and favorable dynamics in the global economy, one can see a Middle East more integrated into the global economy and experiencing sustained growth over a number of years.  That will lead to less frustration and less friction and more weight given to the positive aspects of images of the U.S. and the West.  It will also expand the possibilities for serifs dialog and clarification of the areas where Muslim and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the good person, the good life and peoples’ relation to God coincide and areas where there are deep and fundamental differences.