I AIN'T NO ESSENTIALIST BUT THE ZIONISTS ARE (PATAI DA FOOL)

Raphael Patai was trying to explain a historical survival strategy, not an innate cultural destiny. When you read him charitably, the core claim is something like this:

1. Repeated conquest → preference for kin-based security. 

Across the Arabian Peninsula and much of the Fertile Crescent, political authority was:

- frequently overturned  

- externally imposed  

- unreliable as a guarantor of justice or property  

- often extractive rather than protective  

In such an environment, impersonal public authority was not a stable bet. What was stable?

- your clan  

- your lineage  

- your reciprocal obligations  

- your honor network  

- your ability to mobilize kin for protection  

This is not unique to Arabs. It’s the same pattern you see in:

- the Pashtun highlands  

- the Caucasus  

- premodern Sicily  

- the Scottish Highlands  

- the Balkans  

- Bedouin and Berber societies  

- tribal Afghanistan and Yemen  

Where the state is weak, predatory, or frequently replaced, kinship becomes the only durable institution.

That’s not pathology. That’s adaptation.

2. The Arab experience was shaped by impermanence of rule.  From the Achaemenids to the Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Umayyads, Abbasids, Seljuks, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, and Europeans, the Arab-speaking world experienced:

- constant elite turnover  

- shifting tax regimes  

- rulers who were often foreign or distant  

- little incentive to invest trust in the state  

So yes — in that environment, clinging to kinship wasn’t backwardness. It was the only rational hedge.

3. But here’s the nuance Patai misses. Kinship dominance is not a permanent civilizational trait. It’s a political equilibrium that emerges when:

- the state cannot enforce contracts  

- courts are unreliable  

- taxation is arbitrary  

- rulers change frequently  

- external powers intervene  

When those conditions change, kinship patterns change too.  

You can see this in:

- Tunisia’s post‑2011 civic activism  

- the Gulf states’ bureaucratic modernization  

- Jordan’s hybrid tribal–bureaucratic state  

- Oman’s slow institutional consolidation  

The Arab world is not frozen in a kinship mode. It’s responding to structural incentives.

4. And this brings us back to your earlier point about the Arab Spring. I see the Arab Spring as a take-off attempt — a push toward:

- impersonal rule of law  

- accountable institutions  

- civic rather than kin-based legitimacy  

External interference (Gulf counterrevolution, Western ambivalence, NATO’s Libya intervention, Syrian proxy war) helped abort that take-off. (Like we'uns did in Russia.)

When a take-off fails, societies often revert to the last reliable structure. In much of the Arab world, that structure is kinship. Not because it’s “Arab”. Because it’s durable.

5. I can fit this onto my Spengler–Toynbee–Khaldun triad:

- Weak or predatory states → low ʿasabiyya at the civic level  

- Strong kinship → high ʿasabiyya at the tribal level  

- Failed take-off → reversion to the older solidarity form  

- External domination → prevents the emergence of a creative minority  

Patai is gesturing at something real — but the real engine is political ecology, not cultural essence. The hands of his intellect were cut off at the wrists.

"Gimme Shelter (of the Last Resort)" = the structure a people fall back on when the civic husk collapses.

Other factors: Judaism with a chip on its shoulder; U.K. using Persian Empire's "divide and rule".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Blueprint v. the Altar Call

Obama didn’t use the word deindustrialization as often as economists or critics did, but his administration’s stance is very clear in the record: he saw the long decline of U.S. manufacturing as a structural problem that needed active correction, not something to accept as inevitable.  In Obama’s view, deindustrialization was a threat to middle‑class stability. Obama consistently treated the erosion of manufacturing capacity as a danger to economic resilience and to the social fabric. His policy documents describe the loss of industrial jobs as something the federal government should reverse, not merely cushion. His “Blueprint to Support U.S. Manufacturing Jobs” explicitly framed offshoring as a harmful trend and proposed tax changes to discourage it. He regarded offshoring as a policy failure, not a natural market outcome.  Full marks, Mr. President!   His administration argued that the tax code rewarded firms for moving production overseas and needed to be rewritte...
Read more

The Throughput World Order

Image
Isn't Immanuel Wallerstein's "world system" just the latest variant of a Universal Empire? Not quite — and the distinction is pre'-damn-near illuminating once you tease apart what Wallerstein is describing and what Toynbee means by a Universal Empire. There's a rhyme, but they’re not the same creature. In fact, the gap between them is where the modern world hides its deepest structural weirdness. 1. A Universal Empire is a political unification. Toynbee’s Universal Empire is a single sovereign authority that forcibly knits together a civilization after its creative energies have died out. Its traits are unmistakable: - one imperial center   - one administrative shell   - one military monopoly   - coercive unity   - cultural mummification   Rome, Qin-Han, the Caliphate, the Mauryas — these are Universal Empires. They are states. A Universal Empire is a political solution to civilizational breakdown. 2. Wallerstein’s world-system is not a ...
Read more

The Century of Recovery

Image
Monbiot's reading list is pre=approved by moi. I have been following Raworth and Klein for years. They're hip to the evolutionary, historical, time-based entropy in human institutions which many take to last forever, taken for granted as products of natural law. My culture-hero character defined capitalism as profit-seeking in a price structure. He went on to say that fascism is the concluding form of capitalism. The seller will hold a gun to your head and compel you to buy only his product. This is when profit‑seeking detached from real human needs and from the social purpose that once justified it. And he's right to say that he saw a deep psychological deformation in the elites who came to dominate late‑stage financial capitalism when profit became an end in itself. Profit is never about human benefit, only incidentally. Human benefit is not its primary concern. The Quartet that financed Hitler were pseudo-psychotic psychopaths about profit. Any other system that did not ...
Read more