The Arab Spring, Justice, and Moral Disaster

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Part I: Defining Moral Disaster

    The causes, dynamics, and results of the Arab Spring and of a possible Arab Winter are almost universally addressed within the paradigm of freedom.  Nowhere does one find any discussion of another still higher paradigm, namely, justice.

    Why?  Perhaps because justice is a thoroughly subjective concept unless it is based on truth.  Truth, however, cannot exist in a culture with an educational system that denies the possibility of its very existence.  Without truth and justice, there is no such thing as a moral disaster.  The root cause of most of the injustices in the world, however, is the moral disaster of secular utilitarianism.  The wielders of financial and political influence in America have imposed this utilitarian philosophy as a paradigmatic monopoly in the American educational system and with it infected the entire world.

    In a compartmentalized system of education, where there is no coherence in anything, the products of this system necessarily are too narrow to value knowledge exogenous to their field of expertise or even to sense that a system of morality can even exist. 

    The spread of this moral disaster has been going on within the American educational establishment for more than a century, especially since John Dewey.  Dewey was born before the American Civil War and set the standard for modern education in America and throughout the world a hundred years ago in his many books, perhaps especially in his Depression-Era book, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process.  Dewey invented the school of “philosophical pragmatism” which is associated originally with John Stuart Mill, but was further developed at Harvard by others who defined all meaning in life and all morality as the maximization of net utility based on pain versus pleasure.  Avoid whatever gives one pain, and embrace whatever gives pleasure, which, in turn, is associated with the philosophy of hedonism.  One can argue with this approach pro and con, but the major distinction is that in modern secular education there is no truth and no justice, because even the concepts of truth and justice are thought to restrict rather maximize human freedom.

    This is the exact opposite of education in classical Islam, which is based on the wisdom of the Qur’anic verse, wa tamaat kalimatu rabbika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “And the Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and in justice.”

    Both Muslims abroad and Americans here have lost much of their common heritage, because they do not even know they have a heritage.  The Jefferson library at Montecello has hundreds of books about Jefferson, and all of them are hostile to religion.  The University of Virginia runs the library, so it is shocking that the books focusing on Jefferson’s deep and strong faith are not represented. 

    Two of the best commentaries on the moral disaster of America today are Joseph Stiglitz’s article in Vanity Fair, May 1911, entitled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%”, and the position paper, “A Moral Disaster Coming Near You, Produced by Wall Street and Washington”, penned by Lydia Fisher, former Bear Stearns Senior Managing Director and author of the book, Cinderella of Wall Street.

    Whoever controls the past is said to control the future, but, fortunately, no-one can overcome the best in human nature, nor can a collapsing civilization forever block the solutions as developed by such centers of creative thought as the Center for Economic and Social Justice, http://www.cesj.org, which directed President Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on Economic Justice in 1985-86, for which I was chairman of the Financial Markets Committee.  He was never able to get his ideas implemented, but perhaps only because the crisis of the modern world had not yet reached the crescendo of moral disaster that can no longer be credibly denied today.

Part II:  Economic Injustice:  A Cause of Terrorism

    One question in evaluating the future of the Arab Spring is what influence it might have on the future of terrorism.  This was explored a decade ago in my article, “Economic Justice: A Cure for Terrorism”, posted in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org on September 29, 2002.

    The biggest question is whether globalization, as presently configured, plays a role in creating a climate conducive to the alienation and desperation that leads to terrorism. Regardless of the “future of freedom”, the future of justice will remain as an equally big question mark.  Globalization can be a cure for desperation, but only if it can reverse the rapidly and vastly growing disparity of wealth in the world. Awareness of this disparity, which amounts to economic injustice, impels some intellectuals to generate the terrorist paradigm of thought and action as the only solution.

    The problem finally is now being addressed a decade after 9/11, but only because the question is now politically relevant in American domestic politics.  The statistics have changed during the past decade but only by getting worse both at home and around the world.  This state of the world was brought out shortly after 9/11, unfortunately without mention of any solutions, by Jeff Gates in the January/February, 2002, issue of Tikkun: A Bi-Monthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture, and Society (see

2) Funds in the hands of U.S. money managers grew from $1.9 trillion in 1980 to $17 trillion in 2,000.  While those funds were under the control of fiduciaries (half the funds are due to tax incentives), the pay gap between top executives and production workers in the 362 largest U.S. companies soared from 42:1 in 1980 to 475:1 in 1999. See “Executive Pay Report,” Business Week, April 7, 2000, p. 100.

3) Prior to the dot.com collapse, Wired magazine projected that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would become a trillionaire by March 2005 and, by March 2020, a quadrillionaire (a million billions). See Evan L. Marcus, Wired, September 1999, p. 163.  Baby boomers could look forward to a future where a single person might have more financial wealth than an entire generation, all 76 million strong.  Far-fetched?  From l983-1997, only the top five percent of U.S. households saw an increase in net worth, while wealth declined for everyone else. See Federal Reserve Bulletin, January 2000, p. 10.

4) The financial wealth of the top one percent of U.S. households by the time of 9/11 exceeded the combined household financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent.  See Edward N. Wolff, “Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership,” a paper for the conference on “Benefits and Mechanisms for Spreading Asset Ownership in the United States,” New York University, December 10-12, 1998.

5) The share of the nation’s after-tax income received by the top one percent doubled from 1979-1997.  By 1998, the top-earning one percent had as much combined income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.  See Congressional Budget Office Memorandum, “Estimates of Federal Tax Liabilities for Individuals and Families by Income Category and Family Type for 1995 and 1999,” May 1998.

6) The top fifth of U.S. households claims 49.2 percent of national income while the bottom fifth gets by on 3.6 percent. See [url=http://www.census.gov]http://www.census.gov.  (Table H-2). Between 1979 and 1997, the average income of the richest fifth jumped from nine times the income of the poorest fifth to fifteen times. See The Economist, June 16-22, 2001.”

    The statistical rundown on the global impact of the mal-structure maintained by all the international financial institutions is similar:

1) “Eighty countries had per capita incomes lower than a decade earlier. Sixty countries had grown steadily poorer since 1980.

2) In 1960, the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest countries was 30 to 1.  By 1990, the gap had widened to 60 to 1. By 1998, it had surged to 74 to one.

3) From 1995 to 1999 the world’s 200 wealthiest people doubled their net worth to $1,000 billion.

4) Three billion people presently live on $2 or less per day, while 1.3 billion of those get by on $1 or less per day. With global population expanding 80 million each year, World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn cautioned that, unless we address the “challenge of inclusion,” thirty years hence we may have 5 billion people living on $2 or less per day.

5) Two billion people suffered and still suffer from malnutrition, including 55 million in industrial countries.

6) UNDP’s assessment: “Development that perpetuates today’s inequalities is neither sustainable nor worth sustaining”.

7) A decade ago at the time of 9/11, 61.7 percent of the Indonesian stock market’s value was held by that nation’s fifteen richest families. The comparable figure for the Phillipines was 55.1 percent and 55.3 percent for Thailand.  This has not changed.  See Stijn Claessens, Simeon Djankov and Larry H. P. Lang, “Who Controls East Asian Corporations?” Washington D.C.: The World Bank, 1999.  The Bin Laden family, of course, is a prime example.  According to Jeff Gates, “with help from their global regulatory agent, the WTO [World Trade Organization], neo-liberalism is evoking a future where a handful of the world’s most well-to-do families may pocket more than 50 percent of [the expected additional] $90 trillion in financial wealth.”

III.  Economic Justice: A Cure?

    Revolutionary theoreticians in the 19th century invented the paradigm of governmentally owned and managed socialism. This was popular for almost two centuries because the “man in the street” equated and confused it with compassion.  Other theoreticians at the same time invented the paradigm of the free market based on private ownership of the means of production, with management through the “invisible hand” of “economic efficiency.”

    These advocates of what the socialists derogatorily called “capitalism” were just as morally sensitive as was Karl Marx, and just as committed to justice, but also equally naïve. Today even the barons of economic globalization, such as those who gather at Davos and congregate at such fora as the Aspen Institute, the Bohemian Grove, and the Renaissance Weekends, are beginning to recognize that there has to be a third way to avoid the evils of doctrinaire economics in order to reduce the headlong rush toward enormous concentration of enormous wealth without destroying the system that has produced it.

    The only solution is not to fly planes into tall buildings but fundamentally to restructure the entire system of money and banking in order to broaden capital ownership and thereby avoid the need to steal from capital owners by governmentally mandated re-distribution of wealth.  We need a revolution in access to credit so that wealth is distributed during the production process not afterwards in derogation of property ownership.

    Some people call this Islamic finance, but this merely adds baggage to common sense.  Certainly, investing is better than lending, because lending at interest is a powerful concentrator of wealth, especially when the legal system promotes monopolization of credit by exclusionary methods of finance based on past wealth as collateral rather than on pure credit from future profits.  And no loans should ever have been given to so-called Third World governments.  For those who believe that “small is beautiful,” return on investment in locally-based, private enterprise, with substantial employee ownership and provision for automatic divestment of foreign ownership out of profits, is the best way to promote business integrity and economic independence.  For those who believe that “big is better,” the “statism” inherent in reliance on governments to manage the use of money from abroad undermines the opportunities that multinationals can offer to democratize capital credit by facilitating the entry of local ownership into global corporations, with the consequent benefits of spreading know-how and superior access by locals to global markets.

    No loans or investment should ever go to crony capitalists, like the mafia in Russia, who used “privatization” to steal the country at fire-sale prices and then embezzled funds from all the international lending institutions in a frenzy of corruption that nearly destroyed a country and set it back a decade.  The hopes of millions throughout Eastern Europe were dashed as privatization of individual companies to their employees was discouraged.  In Poland, more than fifteen percent ownership by workers in the factories where they worked was decreed to be illegal.  The rationale, given by former World Bank president and Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was that reliable international investment, and effective international policy, requires concentration of power at the top.

    This third way, broadening capital ownership through the democratization of capital credit as a fundamental human right, can be called Islamic for those so inclined.  The mechanisms for reform have been spelled out and promoted by the inter-faith think-tank/global-network, The Center for Economic and Social Justice, which I co-founded with its President, Norman Kurland, in 1985 as a platform to establish the Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice.  President Ronald Reagan backed this initiative more enthusiastically than anything other than the space-based anti-missile defense, known as Star Wars, because he clearly saw that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy, and that evil empires of whatever sort can be countered with missiles but can be defeated only through economic justice.

    We could not get this project past the White House bureaucracy, so we ran an end run around it by rejecting all government funding and tacking it onto the Foreign Aid Authorization bill as the only presidential task force ever created by Congress.  I was the Chairman of its Financial Markets Committee, based on my experience as the Principal Economic and Budget Advisor to the Finance Minister of the Emirate of Bahrain.

    For details on this third way see http://www.cesj.org or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (Norman Kurland), as well as some of my books dealing with the clash of paradigms as the core of global conflict within civilizations.  These include Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response, published in Santa Fe, New Mexico by The Center for Civilizational Renewal in 1997, and The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice: An Islamic Perspective, 2d edition, published by The Center for Understanding Islam in 2011, as well as several monographs published by The Islamic Institute for Strategic Studies, including “Projecting Islamic Vision for America”.

IV.  Shaping the Future after the Arab Spring

    Reagan’s evil empire is still out there. Nowadays it is an amorphous but still targetible Al Qa’ida, but tomorrow it may be a hundred al qa’idas with no leadership because none will be necessary to accomplish the common goal of indiscriminate destruction.

    As a life-long professional in long-range global forecasting, as well as in the study of revolution, I see a link between the increasing concentration of capital ownership and the radicalization of the dispossessed and of their rich but alienated would-be leaders.  Al Qa’ida and Osama bin Laden may be recognized in the future as merely the first phase of violence in the new era of asymmetrical warfare.  We must try to understand the perspective of the evilly misled, who thrive in Muslim countries not merely because injustice there is extreme but because Islam, more than any other religion, emphasizes the responsibility to seek both knowledge and justice.

    The choice is between working “within the system” or destroying it in a frenzy of the French Revolution’s apres moi le deluge.  The Arab Spring in most cases has been a model of the former, but continued success will require exploration and application of the criteria carefully developed by Islamic scholars for both just war and just revolution.  They include probability of success in producing something better than the present and probability that the damage of war and revolution can be contained.

Terrorism, which is termed hirabah (not jihad) in Arabic, was uniformly condemned by all the classical Islamic scholars, even by those who were imprisoned by the authorities (which included all the greatest scholars in Islamic history), because it was the classic example of the fasad (or societal corruption) that destroys civilization (al hadara al islamiya).  Osama bin Laden’s terrorism against America was hirabah al shaitaniyyah, a satanic war that can only plunge all of humanity into centuries or millennia of barbarism.

    We must understand both where this hiraba came from and where it might be going.  Our task is not to stop evil, which can’t be done, but to promote good, which can overcome it, in sha’a Allah.