Poor Oscar Wilde. While he believed that people who know nothing make far better company than those who know everything, surely he lived at the time when the telephone was making its first baby steps, the telegraph still the only stumbling method for trans-continental communication, and, in other parts of the world, energetic ponies and sensible pigeons were still the only means of telling someone that you do not care enough to come see them in person.
Poor Oscar, how he would have had to change his mind today!
People who knew nothing used to freely admit it, and, under proper social constraints, always contributed precisely to that extent of their knowledge. But today, people who know nothing have far too many tools of conveying the emptiness within to a limitless audience of their peers.
Trouble with emptiness, It leads to resonance, and, if stupidity scales as frequencies and amplitudes do, then - just as an ill-judged high F from a Wagnerian soprano could rupture your eardrum - these resonances should easily pierce the lowest bounds of common sense assumed in post-agriculture homo sapiens.
So, how is that related to gulf monarchs and royal families? Well, it seems many people, under the banner of sense and reason, have decided to present the utmost challenge to the very sense and the very reason by defending the necessity of maintaining that dull surplus to the history of humanity in a capacity that actually affects the way far more intelligent living, breathing beings conduct their lives.
One common theme seems to be in the vein of lowering the necessary qualifications required to call a member of those wretched families – families of the royal variety naturally - a reformer. Suddenly, under the auspices of new standards concocted by many an educated and civilized person and freely distributed over new and old media by fellow sensible souls, apparently, King Abdullah of the Saudi Arabia ™, the Crown Prince of Bahrain © , and Sultan Qaboos of Oman ® , are all reformers who should be given a chance to lead their people to a better and brighter future.
Very well, that may be, and far from it for me to claim any knowledge beyond anyone else’s – so I won’t. But as logic dictates, I shall have to write down on a piece of paper the new rules defining a reform-minded leader:
a- The combined age of his four wives should be superior to his own age.
b- One of those four wives has to be foreign-born, preferably with blue eyes
c- He should speak at least one language. Reading is a plus.
d-He should be able to count till nine, and have others handy to help him count beyond that
e-Should be blissfully ignorant of something called inflation, hence should be capable of bribing his people when he needs to, with their own money.
f-Should possess an Italian supercar
Armed with these new definitions, I could certainly see why some people of the highly civilized, liberal and reasonable type would believe in the Crown Prince of Bahrain © as a leader of the reform movement, or the very youthful King Abdullah ™ as an agent of modernization. Then again, apart from the fact that King Abdullah can’t speak a single language properly nor read it, and that the Crown Prince probably only has three wives up till now, they do rather satisfy the new list of demands for a reformer. Who am I to argue?
But perhaps the issue goes deeper, and there exist far more interesting reasons for supporting the royal families. After all, apparently the case for democracy in gulf countries is just non-existent. In the case of Bahrain, those calling for democracy are apparently extremists and their incarceration could be tacitly approved (but not overtly since one has to keep the civilized and liberal guise). Even worse, apparently there are even more dangerous extremists who call for a republic, with an elected president and an elected government! Shock and horror, people choosing for themselves when there exist those bright and brilliant minds already in the form of, say, Al-Khalifa?
It could possibly be all about the talents that were sent from an unseen censer to that unparalleled family, that it may rule till the end of days over a happy and content populace. However, if Fate had decided to concentrate all the superior qualities of the human race into one bloodline, then either fate is incredibly cruel, or alternatively, all descendents of that line are born with the fortunes of a daily lottery-winner. Setting aside a cruel divine intervention, even Bernard Shaw professed that his offspring together with Isadora Duncan might be neither intelligent nor beautiful, all the while the two of them were considered, respectively, to be the most intelligent and the most beautiful of their time (or so the story goes, still the point is valid nonetheless).
Sadly, the pure fact is that those archaic families tend to descend from a line that at the base of it was skilled at killing and conquering rather than at chess and mathematics, while inbreeding over the years hasn’t helped much either. At the end of the day, we have ended up with unintelligent polygamous megalomaniacs who - unlike say Napoleon or Lenin - are only barely literate, cheat through school, but then still believe they have a divine right to rule over much more intelligent and far more interesting people.
Another argument those from the self avowed liberal and civilized race project is that those reformist monarchs ™ are far better than the alternative, which so happens to be a theocracy. Beyond this seemingly unerring capacity to detect what is in other people’s hearts and minds, which, as someone who is unpossessing of it I can not possibly comprehend, might I suggest that these monarchs are already the very embodiment of a rule-by-divine-decree?
Emperors of yore figured that one out; they knew that people did not see in them the shining light of philosophy, arts, and human thought. In fact, any Roman dynasty that spilled over three generations risked becoming a running joke and was quickly replaced by the army or by the masses. Constantine knew that, and he introduced the concept of the emperor as Isapostolos, an equal to the apostles, and used the church effectively to cement his rule. Modern gulf monarchs ™ use the same techniques: they claim a religious pedigree, and rely on a class of utterly corrupt and well-fed preachers and religious scholars, who do their bidding just as effectively as ambitious bishops did during the times of Constantine (and isn’t that precisely the difference between a priest and a prophet? Priests justify the handiwork of their benefactor to the oppressed masses.) At the very least, true dictators are deprived of that very formidable armor which is the hallmark of a theocracy.
The only trouble is, Constantine died some seventeen hundred years ago, while gulf monarchial families live as an anachronism, a persistent pebble in the hourglass of time. Aren’t people allowed to look beyond them? I wonder…
People who claim education, common sense, civic maturity, impartiality, and yet refuse to support others who call for an unwavering democracy, either know nothing, in which case they should accept that fact, and stop resonating with their peers, or they know everything, but are dissimulating their true beliefs and desires. If they do know everything, then Oscar Wilde is right after all and they are indeed horrible company, since what lies below the surface of their souls cannot possibly be worth exploring.
Thoughts are rather curious creatures. You might try to hide what you really believe within the deepest abysses of your heart, but, if enough people share your opinion, hiding it is not much easier than trying to hide the sun behind the moon. It may happen, but it will take a giant leap of stupidity not to know that it is there and that it will show up within a few minutes. With that, the question has to be posed to the civilized and educated supporters of princes© and kings™ and sultans® :
“Do you know everything, or do you know nothing?”
By Comte Almaviva
