Do Nations have Life Expectancies?
Nations get older, but do they age, and must they?
Want to know your own country? Leave it for awhile. I’ve lived over half of my adult life in other countries than my own, a dozen or so other countries, and while my decades abroad have taught me most of what I know about the rest of the world, they’ve also taught me a significant amount of what I know about my own country, the United States.
Apart from a few short detours into despair, (The American Civil War was a tough time, as were the Great Depression years,) we have, as a nation, brimmed with optimism and hope.
I sense that’s changing — which change has little or nothing to do with failed foreign entanglements or anything foreign. The fact that most Americans don’t even know we’re entangled in five foreign conflicts makes my point.
Since almost ninety percent of Americans never leave their home country, the cause for our failing national confidence mustn’t lie overseas, it’s got to lie within our own borders.
I’ve noticed the change on my many visits, much as we notice the changes in family members whom we see infrequently, we notice them passing through the stages of life. Our own slow aging, observed daily impresses us less than the apparently accelerated aging we observe in others over long periods of time. One day they’re young and vital, and the next time we see them they’ve aged a decade, seemingly instantaneously.
We appear to have passed what might be called our national prime of life, to have passed on to a national emotional age that, in human terms might be comparable to our still alive, but not as vital golden years.
National fortunes rise and fall. One might expect national attitudes to do the same, but for our first few hundred years, our national attitude seems to have ignored our hardships and mostly brimmed with hope, until now.
Are we doomed, as a nation to never feel young and vital again? Looking at history and the rest of the world — it might appear we are — so…what? What might this mean for us and the world?
For all our economic and military power that started at almost nil, rising almost constantly for our first century, perhaps peaking in our second century, I’m not sure how much we’ve changed the world.
In particular, our impact on Afghanistan and the Islamic world in general isn’t anything that particular world hasn’t been through before and won’t go through again, until it finally wears itself out of its Islamism, which is the reason there has never been a real Afghan Nation and the reason the Muslim world, which holds huge reserves of an essential commodity in near constant shortage for a century, has remained so backward.
Afghanistan is so rugged, so geographically fractured that it always has been, and remains to this day socially fractured. It is tribal, and the tribes are notionally Islamic, and Islam is almost synonymous with tribal conquest.
The Holy Quran is, more than anything else, a manual for tribal conquest.
The Quran holds some history, some parables, but much of what the Holy Quran concerns itself with is the individual’s obligation to the tribe in times of war, specifically wars of conquest, cloaked as wars of conversion.
In Muhammad’s time the road to prosperity was through conquest. Want something? Steal it. Might made right, not just on the Arabian Peninsula, might carried the argument throughout the world. Men haven’t changed much, but much of the world has. Except in rare occasions now, men have agreed to let national and international laws carry the argument. We live, for the most part, in a world of laws.
Not the Afghans, nor most Muslims — rather, they live in a world of Islamic laws, which means perpetual tribal war in the name of Islam.
The Quran institutionalized what had been cultural. Conquering and killing and stealing from infidels, conquering and killing and stealing from apostates, conquering and killing and stealing from everyone not as Muslim or of exactly the same brand of Islam as one’s own tribe isn’t just OK, not just permitted by the Quran, it’s ordered by the Quran.
So, as long as Afghanistan is geographically fractured it will be socially fractured, and as long as it’s socially fractured and Muslim, it will be in perpetual tribal war, in the name of Allah. This isn’t our doing, and we won’t undo it. Someday, when the Afghans are less Muslim than today, they’ll undo it themselves, and find a way to exist as a nation inside the borders we’ve given them.
Until then, all we are doing in the Middle East and Africa is lopping off the head of the Islamic Hydra, only to face many more heads in its place.
Hmmm…I think that deserves an article of its own — “Killing the Hydra — Why Killing Strongmen Doesn’t Eradicate Strongmen” — I think I’ve already written that one…have I forgotten to post it? Maybe. Maybe I got fed up with Medium and forgot it.
But, back to the original point, had we built a cohesive nation of Afghanistan, had we solved the problems of the Islamic world, had the Palestinian lion laid down with the Israeli lamb, we’d still be an aging, tired nation. Afghanistan and the Middle East didn’t wear us out, that’s just where we happened to be when we got tired, and disengaging from them won’t make us young again.
The elixir of youth doesn’t lie without. If it exists, it lies within.
