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Permalink The Progress Of ScienceBy mohammadfadel Why does it take so long for discredited ideas to disappear? One colleague suggested that it is because "science progresses one retirement at a time." If that is the case, why do Muslim religious leaders seem stuck arguing the same issues, again and again, without any resolution? On Wednesday, I attended a very interesting session of the combined Law & Economics/Tax Workshop where we were regaled by a colleague as to the inefficiencies that result from the United States' taxation of foreign source income. In the course of the question and answer period following the presentation, I asked the presenter a couple of questions in order to discover his theory for the persistence of what is -- at least if the presenter's theory is correct -- a significant irrationality in the U.S. Tax Code. His response was interesting: science progresses one retirement at a time. I have often thought that this insight explains a lot. Ideas or theories often are not refuted so much as they lose their ability to attract new defenders.
This essentially explains the revolution in American law that occurred at the time of the New Deal. As is well known, the Supreme Court struck down a series of laws introduced by the Roosevelt administration which were designed to address the profound crises caused by the Great Depression. A narrow majority of the Supreme Court, however, struck down all, or nearly all of these pieces of legislation as unconstitutional, usually on the grounds that the legislation exceeded Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. President Roosevelt, growing impatient with the Court, threatened to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court from nine to eleven so that he could appoint an additional two justices who would be more sympathetic to his legislative program. In what is now known as the , one of the conservative justices joined the liberal minority in approving a minimum wage statute, thereby staving off Roosevelt's attempt at court packing, and also starting off a revolution in the Supreme Court's understanding of the Commerce Clause. Whereas prior to the New Deal, the Supreme Court had attempted to to limit the legislative powers of the United States by taking a relatively restrictive view of the Commerce Clause, the jurisprudence of the New Deal court ushered in a new understanding of the Commerce Clause that contemplated virtually unlimited Congressional power, the odd case such as notwithstanding. What does this excurcus on United States constitutional history have to do with Islamic thought? Well, let's go back to the statemenet "science progresses one retirement at a time." That may be the best explanation for the revolution in the Commerce Clause jurisprudence. It was most definitely not the case that the adherents of the expansive view of federal power suddenly became smarter than the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, or that the conserative wing of the Supreme Court suddenly realized that their reasoning was weaker than that of the liberals. No, what happened was simply that the New Deal worked (or it was perceived to have worked), World War II broke out, and the United States successfully led the Allies in the defeat of fascism. The lesson here is that nothing succeeds like success. The converse is almost certainly true as well: nothing fails like failure, and that may be the best explanation for the failure of Islamic reform movements. Despite their promising beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Islamic modernists movements placed their bets on modernizing the Ottoman Empire as the only effective strategy in warding off aggressive European powers. It may have been the rational strategy at the time, but it failed when the Ottoman state collapsed. As a result of the political failures of Muslim modernist movements, their intellectual underpinnings have been subject to savage attack, much of it unfair. We need not speculate on what the world would like today if the Ottoman Empire had not been dismembered following World War I, but we almost certainly would not have seen radical Islamism. Instead, the liberal salafism of would have likely carried the day and he would have been thought of today in the same manner as American lawyers think of Justice Cardozo, a brilliant and creative jurist. Because of the political defeat, however, his ideas were tarnished and discredited, and as a result, we are stuck living what seems to be the myth of the eternal return: the same issues come up, go away, and then come up again. The clergy of the Arab world are too cowed and too insular to be able to make a decisive break with the past. This does not mean that they are stupid, only that decisive breaks with traditions akin to what occurred in the United States in the 1930s are only partially a result of new ideas: while new ideas are important, a friendly "political economy" for change is the critical factor for whether the new ideas will be able to replace the old orthodoxy, or whether the "new idea" will die a premature death. When friendly political and social conditions predominate, progress really can be as simple as time marching on, as is implied by the statement that "science progresses one retirement at a time." In unfriendly circumstances (as is currently the case in the Arab world), the best one can hope for is a status quo that inflicts no further harm. Without a successful political transition to democracy in a prominent Arab country, e.g. Egypt or perhaps Morocco or Algeria, there is little hope that organized Islamic movements will be able to take the baton of reform from the generation of Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida. The best hope may in fact be Turkey (although if the European Community does decide to exclude Turkey from membership, the risk of Turkey backsliding on its democratic commitments will increase dramatically). Muslims in North America seem happy enough to practice Islam, often times in a fashion more rigorous than Muslims in Muslim countries, without much concern for whether the government is "Islamic." That ought certainly be a lesson for policymakers. Concentrate on fixing the profound failures in secular governance of Muslim (and especially Arab) countries, and it is likely you will be rewarded with a profound reduction in political violence and instability. If we could imagine a productive and stable Muslim world, it is hard to imagine that anyone would be getting worked up about silly issues like hijab in government offices or whether one should be excused from work to attend prayer. Instead, you would have a live and let live community with a shared public space, much like what we see in North America. If that state of affairs were to come about, then we could imagine that the statement "science progresses one retirement at a time," would hold true for Muslims as well.
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