Who would have thought that a Tunisian scholar who perished 600 years ago developed a theory of the US Democratic netroots in the early 21st century? Right. And I will grant, off the cuff, that he didn't. Yet his model of political history lends itself strikingly to what is being duly celebrated in Las Vegas.
The
New York Times remarks on Yearly Kos:
They may think of themselves as rebels, separate from mainstream politics and media. But by the end of a day on which the convention halls were shoulder to shoulder with bloggers, Democratic operatives, candidates and Washington reporters, it seemed that bloggers were well on the way to becoming — dare we say it? — part of the American political establishment. Indeed, the convention, the first of what organizers said would become an annual event, seems on the way to becoming as much a part of the Democratic political circuit as the Iowa State Fair.
"It's 2006, and I think we have arrived," Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos and the man for whom the conference was named, announced....
For me, that passage brought to mind 'Abd-ar-Rahmân Abû Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn al-Hadramî, or as he is also known, Abû Zayd 'Abd-ar-Rahmân ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn al-Hadrami al-Ishbilî; or with merciful simplicity: Ibn Khaldun (1332—1406).
Please let me explain this strange association.
The background for Khaldun's work was the intellectual stagnation and political disintegration of the Islamic civilization since about 1000 A.D., when the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad began to unravel. The Mongol hordes had dismantled the Caliphate and the Ottomans not yet established a new one. Across North Africa and the Middle East, Berber, Bedouin, and Tartar tribes washed over the urban settlements in successive waves of invasion. Khaldun, whose biography is extremely colorful, had first-hand experience with this: in 1401, he was lowered down the walls of besieged Damascus to negotiate with Tamerlane, Chinggiz Khan's odious successor, who liked to build pyramids of his enemies' skulls.
These turbulent times inspired his Muqaddimah (Prolegomena), which the great British historian Arnold J. Toynbee called "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place." Others have compared it to the work of Hegel, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx, and Durkheim. Founding a discipline that five centuries later would be called 'Sociology', the Muqaddimah highlights how environmental, social, and economic factors produce the ebb and flow of civilization (al-'Umraan).
Khaldun memorably defined the state as an institution that prevents injustice other than such as it inflicts itself. Yet "a thousand years of tyranny," he affirmed in a classic aphorism, "is preferable to one day of anarchy." Then again, the political order cannot be based upon brute subjugation. After all, who is to do the subjugation if not some armed group acting of free will? Essential, therefore, is cohesion or group-feeling (al-'Asabiyya); a social glue only prone to arise in the absence of subjugation that can be found in the hinterland of mountain, steppe, or desert.
Here self-governing clans and tribes roam free, protected by their mobility and environment from the emir's or sultan's control. Typically egalitarian communities where every man is a warrior, they hone their fighting skills by internal feuds, disdaining the unfree yet lax and decadent life of the city. At the same time they may, however, come to desire the resources and power of the urban rulers. Occasionally — rallied around a feisty leader — they may put their differences aside and ride on the alluring city in the distance.
The philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner summarized Khaldun's general account as follows:
[P]olitical order can be based only on cohesion, and cohesion can only be engendered in the rude conditions of tribal life, where no central power keeps the peace, so that a man's security can depend only on mutual trust between himself and fellow members of his camp.... So government had to be the gift of the tribe to the city, renewed every three or four generations or so, when the previous set of tribal conqueror-rulers had become exhausted and had lost its erstwhile unity, its cohesion eroded by urban or civilized life.
Ernest Gellner: Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and its Rivals, p. 27
Within such a cycle of a few generations, a successful urban ruling dynasty goes through five stages of power, theorized Ibn Khaldun:
1) the stage of success (tawr az-zafar).
2) that of establishing a monopoly on organized violence, or complete authority (tawr al-istibdaad).
3) that of leisure and tranquility (tawr al-faraj wa-d-dicah).
4) that of contentment and peacefulness (tawr al-qunuuc wa-l-musaalamah), and
5) that of waste and squandering (tawr al-israaf wa-l-tabdhiir).
It is at the fifth stage that the state is most in need of an infusion of fresh blood if it is not to be overrun by an enemy state. Fortunately, that is also the stage where it is most vulnerable to invasion by the free-roaming, fierce, egalitarian, and honor-craving hordes that, with any luck, will be crashing the gates.
I trust, fellow barbarians, that the analogy does not need to be spelled out further.