> What, exactly are "authentically iranian" values.
A problematic phrase. But if one wants to talk in those terms, here's a first approximation -- "the values most Iranians espouse"?
Of course this might change over time.
General acceptance of the idea of women's equality (for example) in the US has been a thing of yesterday. It certainly wasn't an "authentic American value" when I was a lad, and now it is.
A good thing, of course, we all agree. But it took us a while to get there. Pressure from high-minded foreign lands played very little role, as I recall. It's something we got to on the basis of our own experience as a culture and of changes in the material relations underlying that culture.
If it were a universal value, might not intelligent people like Aristotle and John Milton have been expected to twig to it?
It seems quite likely that the burqua and the other gross indicia of gender inequality will vanish from Iran in a historical eyeblink -- a generation or so, probably. Full equality will no doubt take longer. That's not a completed project even in this enlightened modern land of ours.
It'll take some conflict, sure. The analogous changes took some conflict here -- though it didn't take a social revolution, and happened without any barricades being built in the streets, once the basis for the change was in place in the culture. (Unlike the fight against Jim Crow, which really took on some important institutions intimately connected with the way American elites practiced social control.)
Modernization is not a set of ideas, or a cause, or a value: it's an event, or a cluster of connected events, connected mostly with the way people make their living and the kinds of places where they live. These events happen, and as a result people are taken out of certain patterns of life and placed in other patterns of life. Consequently, their outlook changes.
It doesn't have anything to do with social revolution. The elites are fine with it. Gender equality -- to the extent that we've achieved it here in the US -- hasn't threatened their rule in the slightest, and it won't threaten their rule even if we get all the way there. Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright as no worse servants than Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger.
Neither has sexual freedom posed a problem for our rulers, or the newfound okayness of same-sexery. These are great things but they're epiphenomena -- though they certainly matter very much to the lives of countless individuals.
But social revolution does poses a problem for our rulers. When a lucrative client state gets off the reservation -- even if its new political and cultural order is not something Leon Trotsky might have signed off on -- that's serious.
"Values" can actually change pretty easily in response to changed circumstances. But for the powerful to lose power -- to find their ability to rule the world impaired -- that's not so easily done, and once it is done, I for one like to see it stay done.
No doubt there are plenty of people in Iran who would like to live like us (and many who wouldn't, of course). All very understandable. We live pretty well in many ways.
But suppose the only way to do that -- at this particular moment in history -- is to live under the rule of the same people who rule us?
That's what worries me.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org