I don't like how the original author failed to distinguish between Arabian culture and Muslim religion. Though they are intertwined, there are non-Arabian Muslim cultures as well. To add to DanielBMarkham's comment, though, Arabic culture centers around the language, not the ethnicity. Some of the original author's arguments are evidence of Muslim rather than Arabian origin. Lastly, just to throw more confusion into the issue, some of the Sufi sages were tortured to death by their Muslim bretherens as heretics, and they died with the same kind of aplomb the way the Buddhist monks were tortured to death. (Not all Arabs sacrifice themselves in hopes of attaining 72 virgins).
The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture.
The original author also vaguely discusses the rise of 'thar' culture sprouting on the internet without giving any specifics. I've been to forums where where people flame each other for sport. I remember the occasional tiffs here, and people trashing Reddit. I know Digg and YouTube comments are full of inanities. Not to mention the flames on blog posts and regular news articles when someone gets upset but clearly did not thoroughly read the article in question. It often seem to closely track the maturity level of the people involved: immature human beings don't know how to set good personal boundaries, whatever culture that might be.
"The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture."
I don't have first-hand experience, so obviously I could be wrong, and if I've mischaracterized the culture, correct me. But here're a few points I've noticed:
1.) The obsession with "bling" and personal status through high-priced consumer goods. I've read that it's poor urban kids buying those $200 Nikes, and then marketers hope that their tastes will filter down into middle-class American kids. The street kids on the subway often have more stylish clothes and accessories than rich white kids. Remember Ludacris's song "Glamorous"?
2.) Anti-intellectualism. I have a couple friends who teach in inner-city school system. When black kids do well in school, they're taunted and teased by their classmates for "acting white". There's a strong cultural pressure not to stick out or excel.
3.) Gang warfare and revenge killings. There was a shooting a block away from my workplace a couple of years ago. A few gang members had apparently been slighted, so they got in a car, hunted down the rival gang member responsible, and shot him in a drive-by.
I think there's a bit of bias as an outsider looking in, so here are my comments, having been a bit closer involved in "black culture," as it were.
1) Obsession with personal status isn't one of the points of Thar, at least not as expressed by the collecting of property. And black kids aren't alone in buying clothes that outwardly indicate their high price, although they might be alone in buying rainbow colored AF1's.
2) Anti-intellectualism is an interesting point which I'll grant does show itself in middle and high school aged kids. I think if you ask those kids (or their parents) if education is important, however, I think they'll all say yes. I haven't actually tried it, but I've never met a high school dropout (of any race) who didn't regret it. Inner city schools are filled with kids who, by high school, have often given up on themselves, and the "acting white" expressions are sort of a outward expression of that frustration. Rather than muddle this too much with socioeconomic rhetoric, I'll just say that one look at MySpace and another at Facebook demonstrates there are plenty of kids steeped deep in hiphop culture who are getting their four year degrees.
3) Gang warfare among blacks is probably comparable in degree to that seen with the Mafia and various Hispanic gangs. I don't think your standard Italians, Hispanics, or black people are gang banging, no matter how hiphop or "urban" they are.
>The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture.
As you point out, the term Arabian is more about language than ethnicity. I'm probably wrong, but don't tribal, violence-based political-religious movements possess these same cultural traits wherever they are found, such as Polynesian countries? One could argue that in the case of extreme Islamism this is Arabic culture seeping into other areas, but Polynesians are certainly not Arabic -- or any ethnicity that could be considered Arabic. So race or geography has little to do with it.
But I agree -- the article meandered a bit and one could draw various conclusions. I couldn't see anything racist, though. Seems like any more, people stick the racism label onto anything that might be critical of any sort of generic category of people. I guess if we say fat people are happy we would be accused of racism. It's just a poor choice of words, that's all my comment meant to point out.
Hmm, "tribal, violence-based political-religious movements." Going that way though, we could start pulling in examples from the Crusades, witchhunts ... I don't remember if they matched all of the factors:
- Restrictions on the free flow of information.
- The subjugation of women.
- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
- Domination by a restrictive religion.
- A low valuation of education.
- Low prestige assigned to work.
Given that, Dark-Ages European cultures matches most if not all of those traits.
As a tangential note, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink wrote about these guys who were able to figure things out from people because they have studied the way people make faces. They categorized facial expressions. They were able to distinguish between two South American tribe based photographs of the individuals within each of the tribes. One tribe is very friendly. The other is not -- includes a lot of the attributes listed in 'Spotting the Losers'.
The caveat is that face reading like this is a specialty that requires a lot of training. Would be interesting to write software that can suggest cultural influences though, then run it through say, all the American news footage and see what kind of subcultures we have here.
I'm not about to defend the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition! However there are certain differences between say, Europe in the year 1200 and any random warrior nomadic tribe of the same time. I keep getting back to private property rights, which I believe is the foundation of all western civilization. Also the religious insistence on personal responsibility (as opposed to blind submission) was nascent even at that point. And the Magna Carta showed that the idea of governance being a two way street. These themes bloomed into the Reformation, which kicked off the 100 years war, which got us modern secularism, which enhanced the renaissance and set the stage for all those miracles that happened in the last 400 years or so. I would tell you to wait for the movie, but it would be something like a 200-hour serial or something just for the highlights.
You hit on an interesting startup topic, though. Is it possible to algorithmically determine cultures and sub-cultures by biometrics, writing analysis, web sites visited, or some other factor? Aside from the big brother implications, there's actually a real market need -- people who belong to the same "clans" usually like spending time together on the web. Any way to make that easier should have value. In the information age, it's very possible that people belong to some sub-culture that they are not even aware of.
The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture.
The original author also vaguely discusses the rise of 'thar' culture sprouting on the internet without giving any specifics. I've been to forums where where people flame each other for sport. I remember the occasional tiffs here, and people trashing Reddit. I know Digg and YouTube comments are full of inanities. Not to mention the flames on blog posts and regular news articles when someone gets upset but clearly did not thoroughly read the article in question. It often seem to closely track the maturity level of the people involved: immature human beings don't know how to set good personal boundaries, whatever culture that might be.