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This reminds me of the narrative I bought into about 20 years ago, when the left was pushing the idea that everyone, including those in the Middle East, just wanted liberal democracy (even if they weren't aware of it). So once freed from the religious oppressive forces keeping them down, they'd gravitate towards such a system like in America. Same for immigrants from such cultures, whose kids would see how awesome liberal democracy is and thus adopt its values. I particularly recall a (more recent, but still like a decade old, I think?) 5-hour long conversation between Cenk Uygher and Sam Harris about this kind of stuff, where Cenk was smugly telling Sam about how suicide bombers and other similar Muslim terrorists could just be won over with the benefits of Western liberal values.
I think the amount of epicycles that have been required to explain the various failures and speedbumps that such a narrative has encountered in the past 2 decades shows that, no, it was rather that the people who pushed such a narrative largely just lacked the ability or willingness to appreciate the true diversity of thought there exists in humans. I don't put much weight to any sort of sociological study anymore, but I suspect that the findings that liberals in America have a hard time modeling how conservatives think in a way that doesn't exist in reverse might be pointing at something that's true. Likewise for the cliche that "liberals think conservatives are evil; conservatives think liberals are stupid."
I honestly think most people simply are not good at understanding the Zeitgeist of cultures outside of their own and perhaps nearby cultures that are fairly similar. We don’t really get the MENA region because most of us are generations removed from a culture that took religion seriously. To most WEIRD people, religion is just a personal preference, probably not much more important than other lifestyle choices. We don’t think of God in universal terms and not really as a thing to order society by. We would never ever suggest a state religion except in a nominalistic way— yes we’re Anglican, but it’s not like we take it seriously enough to seriously teach it or publicly acknowledge it or encourage its practice.
Comparing that to MENA, they’d be convinced that most of the West are atheists. They don’t allow the public display of religion outside of the state sect of Islam. They not only live by those rules themselves, and publicly so, but enforce those rules on everyone whether Muslims or not. The Quran bans homosexual behavior and they will teach gays to fly off skyscrapers. The mindset is that Allah is watching and allah is going to not only keep score but intervene in history and in personal life to enforce his will.
Now on the liberal conservative version, I think it’s the same thing. Liberals are farther along the path to practical atheism. Most have at best found churches that are liberal first and Christian second, if they bother to go. They’re much more down the path of chewing almost everything through the Post-Modern Neo-Marxist lens of oppression and global culture norms of not judging anything except traditional Western values. As such they simply cannot fathom that someone might take such things seriously.
MENA was a seriously different place from the west even when the west took religion seriously; endemic cousin marriage and segmentary lineage will do that
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