Islam and Democracy: Demos & Eros

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Jun 11 13:19:52 PDT 2002


At 01:39 PM 6/11/2002 -0400, Yoshieu wrote:
>Islam and Democracy
>
>By Richard Morin
>Sunday, April 28, 2002; Page B05
>
>The researchers examined data from more than 100,000 interviews conducted
>between 1995 and 2001 in 72 countries on six continents as part of the
>World Values Study. This ongoing project, which began in the early 1980s,
>is directed by Inglehart in collaboration with a network of social
>scientists in this country and abroad.

There are many problems with WVS - the main among them is cross-national comparability. Thus comparing aggregated scores for different countries can be very misleading. But even if Islamic countries did score higher on the "democracy" measures, and lower on "sex" measures - the interpretation of these results that it is about Eros rather than Demos is wrong. Every nation has its favourite "sub-human species" - Southerners had Negros, Nazis had Jews, and Arabs have women. And it is not about sex, but also - or perhaps above all, about economic opportunity, education, abuse, etc. see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/ww2000/index.htm

Thus its wrong to say that Arabs are democracy-loving people, it is just their different sexual morality - because the oppressed groups are identified in their society by gender. It would be wrong to say that Nazi Germany or was a democracy, only their religious views were peculiar.

BTW, Huntington is a mouthpiece of the US establishment, and his views on social change border on mythology, but that does not mean that everything he says is groundless.

wojtek



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list