Author: Paul Johnson
Publication: Forbes.com
Date: June 21, 2004
URL: http://www.forbes.com/columnists/free_forbes/2004/0621/041.html
In economic activities the greatest
of virtues is tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance
is the norm, and our age furnishes many examples of this. China began its
astounding commercial and industrial takeoff only when Mao Zedong's odiously
intolerant form of communism was scrapped in favor of what might be called
totalitarian laissez-faire.
India is another example. It is
the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious
way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his
family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely
bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains),
and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist
rigidity.
In the last fiscal year India's
GDP grew an estimated 8%, and in the third quarter, 10%. India's economy
for the first time is expanding faster than China's. For years India was
the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on, and my money's on India,
because freedom--of movement, speech, the media--is always an economic
asset.
When left to themselves, Indians
(like the Chinese) always prosper as a community. Take the case of Uganda's
Indian population, which was expelled by the horrific dictator Idi Amin
and received into the tolerant society of Britain. There are now more millionaires
in this group than in any other recent immigrant community in Britain.
They are a striking example of how far hard work, strong family bonds and
a devotion to education can carry a people who have been stripped of all
their worldly assets.
Common Denominator
The contrast between China and India--both
moving steadily to join the
advanced countries of the world--and
those countries where Islam is dominant is marked. Whatever its merits
may be, Islam is not famed for tolerance. Indeed, of the major world religions
it is the least broad- minded and open to argument. With the rise of a
new form of fundamentalism in recent decades, its intolerance has been
growing--as has the concomitant poverty.
In the past when an Islamic society
has been modified by a strong secular influence, economic progress has
been possible. Take Iraq. Until 1958 the British-influenced Nuri as-Said
regime, which was comparatively tolerant in its outlook, made good use
of the country's oil revenues. The Iraq Development Board was doing an
excellent job. Had it been allowed to continue, this enlightened form of
capitalist state planning would by now have made Iraq one of the richest
countries in the world. Alas, the regime was too tolerant of extremists.
In 1958 Nuri as-Said and all his colleagues were murdered by an alliance
of Baathist officers and religious fanatics. Since then Iraq's oil revenues
have been wasted on war and armaments, and its people brutalized almost
beyond belief.
The tale in Iran is similar. Under
the secular regime of the last Shah the economy was going great guns, but
then the Shah wasdriven out by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his zealots.
Some Iranians believed the modernizing and industrialization were happening
too fast. But at least Iran had been moving forward--incomes had risen
and poverty was on the wane. Since the Iranian revolution this great and
once highly civilized country has stagnated or gone backward, and all the
money generated by its oil has been wasted.
There are many other examples. Algeria
once had a flourishing agricultural sector, a significant industrial sector
and highly productive oil and gas fields, but it has little to show for
all that now. Libya's Muammar Qaddafi may have come to his senses, but
a generation of rich oil production has been wasted. Nigeria, where Islam
is on the ascent, has also dissipated its oil wealth. Conditions there
are less promising today than when Britain was in charge a half-century
ago.
Saudi Arabia is another country
where intolerance has held back economic advance. No nation has received
more cash from its natural resources than has this Sunni Muslim state,
with its ferocious tradition of Wahhabi fundamentalism. What's happened
to the wealth? Gone with the wind of bigotry. Some of the other oil-rich
Gulf states have done a little better, but in none of them do enterprise
and free-market capitalism flourish.
As for the less well endowed Islamic
states like Pakistan and Bangladesh, it's better to draw a veil over their
misery. On the evidence of the second half of the 20th century it would
appear that Islamic state control is a formula for continuing poverty,
and Islamic fundamentalism a formula for extreme poverty.
The more I study history, the more
I deplore the existence of those--be they clerics, bureaucrats or politicians--who
think they know what's best for ordinary people and impose it on them.
We have a pungent example of this know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats
of Brussels have created yet another brand of intolerance that determines
by law everything from the shape of bananas to the number of seats in a
bus, from apple growing to house plumbing. As a result the German economy
is contracting and the French economy is stagnant. There are now more unemployed
people in single-currency EU Europe than there have been at any other time
since the worst of the 1930s, and many of them will never work again.
Let those of us fortunate enough
to live in the U.S. or Britain hang on to our traditions of tolerance at
all costs, resisting like fury all those who seek to undermine them with
political correctness or any other kind of dogma.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian
and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo,
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico,
in addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing
this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at
www.forbes.com/ currentevents.
