What is going on in Iran?

Iranians are not Puritan Pilgrims.  They do not see the world the same way as people in the West do, they do not value the same things.

Iran is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited lands.  It lives with the baggage of it’s history: countless kingdoms and wars, different religions overlapping each other, generations of accumulated cultural traditions all ensuring that there will always be a reason for one Iranian to disagree with the other. It is said that Iranians live in many centuries at once, as much at ease with their cell phones as with the mystical beliefs and passions of yesteryear.  They take these passions seriously and are not afraid to act on them.  There is nothing worse you can do to an Iranian than suggest he is not the head honcho who knows everything. In this culture face is everything.

The opposition candidate Mousavi who is disputing his election defeat is most certainly not a Jeffersonian liberal democrat. Please take a close look at his history. He was Iran’s prime minister during its most hardline time - right after the revolution and that should say enough.

Only the very naive fool would see the Iranian election as an Iranian version of West v/s The Barbarians UFC round.  It is not and seeing it that way is a mistake that costs the West.   We overestimate the ability of the place to change, we misunderstand what people’s grievances and problems are about and so cannot respond appropriately to events.

So what is the current Iranian conflict about? It appears to be a combination of a few things: firstly an old fashioned internal power struggle to get at the political office trough. Mousavi and Ahmedinajad are both old time hard liners.  That Mousavi says he wants to change this or that is not that important, politicians will say what they want to say to get the votes they think they can get.  The Iranian political order is not some monolithic entity speaking with one voice, it is full of all the intrigue, backbiting and games that are the nature of politics, especially in a place with all that cultural history and baggage.

All elections are typically about economics.  People vote with their wallets and in this respect Iran is no different.  Before the revolution there was a big class divide in Iran.  A small elite owned much of the wealth making enterprise, in this case the oil industry, and the rest lived by some amalgam of old traditional values while facing the the arduous struggle of life without much in the third world. 

With the Shah’s modernization policies came displacement and the movement of a lot of people into the cities looking for work.  In the cities they found marginal work but not much else, no community,no family no training to cope with life without the old social structures and securities. These displaced angry people formed some of  base of the revolution.

After the revolution much of the old elite went into exile and new equally corrupt elite took over the wealth centers.  Ahmedinajad came to power promising economic change, more disbursement of the oil money  and the end of corruption all of which appealed to his core constituency, people from this ‘rest’.

The old elite mostly living in the cities look at the ‘rest’ as backward people.  They did want to be Western though not in a Benjamin Franklin idealist way but  in a  Western yuppie way with the Cartier showrooms, Louis Vitton bags and libertine lifestyle.  The send their children overseas to get educated and vacationed in Paris and Switzerland.  

The new elite are an enigma.  The old revolutionaries are past their time. Corruption is still endemic, in spite of Ahmedinijad’s promises.  The young want better economic prospects and the freedom to be young, to have some fun.  

But there is simply no Lockean pilgrim political space of the Massachusetts kind in  Iran, nor is there going to be anytime soon.   When Iranians vote they actually do vote for people like Ahmedinajad. They do not value the things the pilgrims did and it is silly to think that they are bad people only because they don’t.  They like their passions and don’t mind a little disorder that goes with them. 

So what of the street protests? It is possible that some of the election results were fudged. There are no credible reports suggesting that they were nor weren’t we can’t really know.  Since Mousavi was Prime Minister at one time, he must have some support base that he can call on.  Many of the protesters are of the young elite university student variety and very understandably looking to do what young people like to do: get high and get laid. In America we call this a rock concert.  Since the rock concert is not allowed the riot is the substitute and in that respect the American way is certainly more honest and generally more pleasant.  Otherwise you will find the anger on the street to be of the rather bargain basement variety: a frustration with corruption, economic  hardship and general no-reason-for-it angst, a boredom and ennui.

This boredom and ennui are the hallmarks of people who have left their old secure spaces in the old world and have not yet found a stable way to live in the new.   The old space of traditional life while not wealthy or glamorous was ‘whole’ and stable.  It provided for the basic necessities of life and had enough cultural traditions to enable people to get through the phases of life: easy ways to find a partner, a support network for raising a family, willing community spaces and more.

Iran like many other newly industrializing countries is full of people who have left their old space to come to the new, either voluntarily or by economic necessity, typically by migrating to the city for work or getting college degrees. These people often end up losing what was there in the traditional life and find little to replace it.   They no longer have any stable way of finding a partner and building a family, they must work in temporary jobs without any community spaces.  This is the metamorphosis of modern life that Kafka wrote about:  getting into an ‘insect’ psychic state where what we knew, what we were trained to do no longer works and there is nothing to replace it.  Much of the world is struggling in this state and being in this intermediate state can create much anger.

What’s to be done? Nothing and it appears that the current administration is smart about that.  Treating Mousavi as Iran’s westernizing saviour would be a bad mistake because it is, well, simply not true.  Throwing in our lot with Mousavi would be foolish in the extreme.   From a purely geopolitical selfish view internal conflict weakens Iran and is a benefit to America and we should be grateful for that. 

Dropping the obsessive belief that Iranians really want to become like Ohioans would be a great help in formulating good policy. Let Iranians be Iranians, they can’t really be anything else and deal with them that way.  But in so much as Iranian activities conflict with our interests they have to be dealt with.  After all you can’t ‘live and let live’ people who wont ‘live and let live’ you.  If we do want to get them to drop some of their less likable cultural habits, this is a process of smart, judicious engagement.  To do this in a smart way that uses America’s resources most efficiently we have to understand more carefully what it takes to make the transition from traditional life to this modern life.