Fundamental Misunderstandings
I can remember back in the late ’80s being told that westerners do not understand the Middle East. Westerners, the theory went could not understand the forces that shaped Middle Eastern culture because those forces have little or no influence on events in the west.
Perhaps they were right. It’s been a decade and a half since then though and the west has, for one reason or another, had it’s eyes firmly on the Middle East for the entire period. Today, the problems between the west and the Middle East stem not from western failure to understand the Middle East, but from the fact that nations and people in the Middle East only think that they understand the west.
The wealthiest sons of Middle Eastern nations have been sent to western institutions of higher education and during their time there, they have behaved in the manner of wealthy tourists since time immemorial: badly. Believing that because the rules of conduct in the west are different from those that they are used to, that therefore there are in fact, no rules, these young men return to their own nations and speak of the decadent and immoral nature of the west to their countrymen. What they fail, or refuse, to understand that it is not the west that is decadent and immoral, but their own behaviour.
The western media is also a source of confusion to persons raised in the Middle East: they see powerful men and women brought down by accusations of corruption and immorality and conclude that corruption and immorality are normal in western society. In this they are like a man who watches his neighbor removing garbage from his home every few days and placing it in the trash for removal thinking that his neighbor must be terribly dirty to have so much trash to take out while wading through the detritus in his own home which comes from weeks of neglect.
The attitude of Middle Eastern cultures to western culture is profoundly shaped by the power relationships in their own nations. Middle Eastern nations tend to form monocultures with powerful and fixed hierarchies which exert firm control over public discourse. Their perceptions of western nations are therefore skewed by their own experiences. This is why they do not so much ignore the differences between various media outlets and the differing perspectives that these outlets offer as they simply cannot perceive those differences. They look for a powerful person or group which forces its own perspective on western societies and failing to find it, invent fantasies usually derived from western conspiracy theorists.
In trying to squeeze western nations into a mold shaped by their own experiences, Middle Eastern cultures fail spectacularly to recognize exactly what it is that they are dealing with. Although they have proven adept at manipulating various aspects of western culture, their failure not only to grasp the whole but also to recognize that failure creates a disconnect from which only conflict can derive.
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