Anomie and authoritarianism

Anomie is a term meaning "without Law" to describe a lack of social norms; "normlessness". It describes the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community ties, with fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values.

I sometimes wonder if authoritarianism is a response to the historical normlessness of such anomie societies, which might address the question of why did Islam develop here in Saudi Arabia, and not in Africa, or elsewhere in the Middle East? The unwillingness of individuals to regulate themselves from the inside-out is compensated for by an authoritarian and institutionalized system working from the outside-in.

Huntington has talked about the clash of the west and the Islamic world as being concerned with religious differences vis a vis democratic values, and this creates much tension worldwide. Inglehart's modernization theory asserts, in contrast, that as societies develop, there is less need for the security that religiosity tends to bring, and that conflicts arise instead from social issue differences like gender equality and attitudes toward sexuality.

The purpose of any theory is to generalize a position, so that it finds wider application; it's replicable. Human societies being as complex as they are render such wide-ranging theories difficult to defend, but when constrained more locally may be informative (ie interactional differences cancel each other out, eliminating main effects). In the graph below, for example, data for 3 different years is given. The data has been entered into the binomial equation associated with each year. But, what if all the data had been entered, regardless of year? The distribution would have been much flatter; the variations would cancel out the differences between these three years.

Fig. 1 Multiple distributions

In KSA, for example, a saying here is "the rule-breaker becomes famous," which is un-Islamic, but very Saudi. You almost wonder whether the imposition of strict socio-religious rules here, as opposed to say another Muslim society such as Lebanon, is a direct counter-reaction to regional cultural normlessness, exemplified by the drifting of cars and other reckless driving habits, the use of "inshallah" to justify the breaking of promises or the refusal to make them, and what seems to be a lack of willingness and sense of entitlement of younger people to take on personal responsibilities when others can do it for them?

Thus, the growing liberalization that Inglehart's theory suggests as inevitable might spur a stronger clash within this society to contain it and thus prevent it. From an individual level, could you see this in someone who has lived life on the edge, finds religion, and then tends toward a very strict and judgmental interpretation of what makes a "good life"? And that this person swings back and forth, as the dissonance within his mind takes him in one direction and then another as time goes on?

Thus, I still see merit in a conflict theory to explain the cultural phenomena, but less so as a consensual response to particular kinds of religious or social values as Huntington would have it, and more in terms of reactions which happen to be juxtaposed. That is, the conflict exists in part because oil happens to be largely under Islamic soil; if it were under Hindu soil, would we now be talking about an Indo-Western conflict instead?

I will have to give the culture-shock-inducing aspects of Saudi culture more thought as time goes on.