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History See other History Articles Title: Hillbillies and Arabs One of the few ethnic groups people still feel free to make fun of without being instantly banished to outer un-p.c. darkness is hillbillies - i.e., the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants who still hang their (worn out, floppy) hats in rural Appalachia. Wikipedia's "Hillbilly" article even includes an amusing (and rather affectionate) section on "the hillbilly stereotype." Consider, if you will, a couple of the entries under that heading: (1) Inbred and incestuous. (2) Often fight each other along family lines. This is known as a "feud." [thanks for explaining that, Wikipedia!] Now, obviously, (1) and (2) are related. When everybody's marrying his cousin, you get very, very closely knit families. And that means that anybody's personal quarrel with an outsider rapidly becomes his whole family's quarrel with the outsider's whole family. Worse still, this level of consanguinity can make honest and effective democratic government next to impossible. With all due respect to "family values," when familes get too strong and too extended, the danger arises that people's loyalty to clan might trump their loyalty to the good of the polity as a whole, and even to the rule of law itself. Is it any wonder that Appalachia is as notorious for nepotistic corruption as it is for internecine feuding? Unfortunately, hillbilly inbreeding is not just a stereotype. There's a lot of truth to it. But, fortunately, it's gotten better. The redoubtable Cecil Adams reports: "...as late as 1950 inbreeding [in Appalachia] was well above what could be accounted for by chance--married couples on average were approximately third cousins. However, the rate had dropped sharply since the peak after the Civil War, when the average couple were somewhere between second cousins and second cousins once removed. What's more, the rate fell quickly after 1950--no doubt due to postwar prosperity, urbanization, and so on--and by 1970 was no higher than you'd likely find in the general population." So the sort of hillbilly inbreeding that led to generations of family feuding and political corruption that people still joke about peaked more than a century ago "when the average couple were somewhere between second cousins and second cousins once removed." So much for the hillbillies. But what about the Arabs? Well. If tears you have, prepare to shed them now. The link is to a global map of the incidence of consanguinity. Long story short: our hillbillies, even at their inbred peak of corruption and feuding, were as nothing compared to the Arabs. Cousin-marriage is even more prevalent in the Arab world today than it ever was in Appalachia. And Iraq is among the worst of the worst: about half of Iraquis marry their first or second cousins. Moreover (as if that weren't bad enough) not only do Arabs prefer to marry their cousins - they prefer to marry their parallel cousins, rather than their cross cousins - as Stanley Kurtz has pointed out in two fascinating recent articles. Let me (try to) explain. A man's parallel cousins are the children of his father's brothers. His cross cousins are the children of his father's sisters. And that distinction matters. A lot. Because in patrilineal cultures (which is to say, cultures where men trace their descent, and determine their clan membership, through their male ancestors), when a man marries his father's sister's daughter, he practices an elementary form of "exogamy," or "marrying out." This is because his father's sister, when she marries, leaves his own clan and joins her husband's. So his father's sister's children belong to a different clan. But if he marries his father's brother's daughter, he practices a form of "endogamy," or "marrying in," since his father's brother, and that brother's children, are members of his own clan. As Kurtz observes, lots of primitive cultures practice cousin-marriage. But most of them prefer cross cousin-marriage - i.e., marrying out into new clans. The Arabs are unusual in pursuing the alternative strategy of marrying in to their own clans by marrying their parallel cousins. The advantage of this strategy (as Kurtz puts it) is "intense social solidarity and unbreakable cultural continuity." The disadvantage (as Kurtz does not put it) is that Arabs are like hillbillies on steroids, when it comes to anything remotely resembling effective democratic government: they simply can't do it. They have never been able to do it, and there's no particular reason to believe that they ever will be able to do it - certainly not within the lifetime of anyone here. Their whole way of life is founded in a system of kinship and social structure that is deeply inimical to Western conceptions of good government. For the Arabs, as a group, it's very likely that loyalty to clan will always, as I put it above, trump loyalty to the good of the polity as a whole, and even to the rule of law itself. How else to explain, for example, the utterly pathetic performance of the current Iraqi armed forces, even though they receive training and support from the greatest military machine on earth, in comparison to the rag-tag clan-based militias which seem to have the run of the country, and which apparently intimidate Iraqi government officials far more than we do? These are people whose concern for the common good lacks all conviction, but whose dedication to family, to tribe, and to sect is full of passionate intensity. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that Saddam Hussein was the best the Iraqis could hope for, or that it wasn't worth getting rid of him. But it does mean that our ongoing effort to install a functioning democracy in Iraq is probably about as likely to succeed as trying to explain Maxwell's equations to the cat. And it's not just because of any unusual or surprising incompetence on the part of the Bush administration, as some erstwhile supporters of the war now gone sour would have us believe. It's because the whole project of democratizing the Arab world was unrealistic from the beginning.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 12.
#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
We need a hill billy eradication program.
You better start runnin', Gramps, cuz I got my .410 all loaded with rocksalt and it's itchin' to shoot anyone in the butt.
I can outrun any puny .410. they are for flatlander wussies. You need to get a mans weapon.
I just like to make people howl and jump. Makes me laugh like a hillbilly!
Bet you are not a real hill billy. More like a flat lander becoming a hill billy by osmosis. Admit it, you are a fraud. We uns hill billies have ethics you know. If you dont have fried squirrel for breakfast, you aint no hill billy.
I et a rabbit once.
Roadkill?
Roadkill? Grandpa shot him with a shotgun. He had BBs in him.
#13. To: YertleTurtle (#12)
Prolly neighbors pet wabbit.
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