Stardate 20020429.1300

(Captain's log): Just as other memes compete in a growing environment which eventually saturates, the particular memes of religion and political philosophy do the same. I group them because they are closely linked historically, and because unlike many other kinds of memes they are exclusive.

While you can be a fan of both rock and jazz, or speak more than one language, or like to eat more than one kind of food, you can pretty much only have one kind of government and only one religion. There have been exceptions. Buddhism is particularly good at coexisting with other religions (it coexisted quite nicely with Shinto in Japan for centuries), but the vast majority of the world's religions are exclusive. If you believe in Christianity, you don't believe in Islam. If you're an atheist, you don't believe in either.

By the same token, nations pretty much have to choose a single form of government. What they choose may be a mix of existing systems, but whatever they create is a unified whole.

Religions and political philosophy can spread by growth, but they mostly spread by conversion, and that means that they are locked in what is mostly a zero-sum game. For one to win, another will lose. And those on the losing side won't like it.

There will be shakeout. Just as there was biological shakeout in the Cambrian, and commercial shakeout in the automobile industry, there will be shakeout politically. Old forms will decline and vanish, and new forms will appear, spread, and take over their places.

There are always those who watch shakeout and yearn nostalgically for the good old days when things were more varied. That early variation is seen as the ideal state rather than as a transient side effect of growth before the switch to competition.

This doesn't just happen with politics; it happens with entire cultures. Sometimes this spread is deliberate and centrally planned, sometimes it is the result of millions of individuals acting independently, and sometimes it just happens on its own.

The name for this is globalization and those who oppose globalization are the cultural equivalents of those who yearn for the good old days of OS/2 and the Amiga, and bitch about the nasty big giant who replaced them.

Yes, American culture is flowing out to the world. Yes, in many ways it is mediocre. The food at McDonalds is not haute cuisine, but it's predictable, reliable, hot, cheap and readily available and can be prepared in huge quantities by unskilled labor with little training. So it's moved into France and become a success there. And such is also the case with many of the other aspects of American culture and society that the anti-globalization protesters object to.

It's not so much that American culture is universally superior to that which it replaces; it isn't. In fact, in most ways it is not superior and may even be inferior. But in the shakeout phase, what's critical is that it doesn't have any fatal weaknesses, and the things it is vanquishing, although perhaps extremely impressive in some ways, are fatally flawed in other ways. In the inevitable shakeout phase, lack-of-weaknesses is more important than presence-of-virtues.

Arab Muslim culture is one of those being crushed. Those who attacked us are trying to prevent their traditional culture from being rolled over by the Western juggernaut. Were this a biological selection process, everyone would just go their way and eventually the losers would become extinct.

But another critical difference between Lamarckian cultural evolution and Darwinian biological evolution is that memes can fight back. They can reform themselves to improve their chances, for instance, or they can actively marshal their resources to try to destroy competing memes (i.e. they can fight wars). Examples of both exist all over the place in history.

The great strength of Western (especially American) culture is that it is particularly good at adopting the best it sees from competing systems and improving itself in that way. Because of that it has gotten progressively stronger and more widespread.

The great weakness of extremist Arab Muslim culture is that it does not do so. It is the nature of its meme that it rejects any change. But because of that, it is becoming progressively less competitive. It's now backed into a corner: it can fight or die.

So it is fighting back, and the opening round of the resulting war was the September 11 attack on the US. Our culture, on the other hand, didn't feel the need to actively seek out a physical conflict with theirs, but that's because our cultural meme wasn't threatened by theirs.

But theirs was threatened by ours. The creep of Western ideas into the Arab nations had become a flood. Western clothes, western music, and in particular western ideas had begun to threaten the foundation of the Islamic ideal. The goal of the extremists is to expunge all traces of western culture and western politics from the Islamic nations. (That's why they have committees "for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice". Their job is keeping everyone pure by eliminating all outside cultural influences.)

But as long as a pool of foreign ideas exists elsewhere, there will always be more chance of infection. In the long run they'll lose, because their cultural meme is not really competitive. Purifying their own cultures is a defense measure and is doomed to failure.

The only solution is to destroy the infection at its source. That means kill; that means us. You and I. Americans and Europeans and everyone else in the world who believes in the principles of individual freedom and secular government and diversity. (And blue-jeans and rock-and-roll.)

And that's why we're in a war.

And that's why we're going to win it. One way or another, in the short term or long term, radical Islam is doomed. In the early expansion phase, Islam prospered because of its virtues. Now it's stagnating because of its faults.