More clever than responsible

Authority as a system for exercising and distributing power is well suited for the delegation of decision-making necessary for the factory system and the industrialization that comes with modernization and the introduction of technologies that enable large-scale societies to take shape. 

Where the fundamental mode of exercising and distributing power is honor and not authority, decision-making gets delegated not to the most meritorious but to the most loyal. As a result large-scale economic systems that entail the development of bureaucratic systems of management cannot operate properly in such societies. And where decision-making is not delegated – where the superior decision-maker takes the decision into his own hands – the situation is just as bad. The decisions that are made tend to be whimsical, centered around the reputation of the honor ruler rather than on whether the innovation or the new technology is being well deployed. Such systems of power distribution tend to come off as capricious and dysfunctional. They are victims of an ill-considered reformist impulse. 

The social planners had come in from the West to introduce Western style technology and organization, only to destroy the indigeneous customs and practices without at the same time installing alternative modes of conduct that would be more compatible with the demands of the Western style institutions they were bringing to the area. Before honor societies can embrace technological innovation and the miracles of high-rise buildings and massive transportation systems and systems of finance and social organization, etc., the societies must transform the basis of power throughout the under-structure of custom in the community and alter it from honor to authority; and that, they have resolutely refused to do. 

Instead, the wielders of power in these societies are using the instruments of (and the symbols of) technological modernity to defeat in the West the under-structure of custom that is sympathetic and welcoming of Western systems of authority. It is easier to acquire a new technology and to relate to a new social system when the objective is destructive rather than constructive. 

The Middle Eastern prestige wielders have divined an insidious way to appear powerful and knowledgable without having to acquire the niceties of the modernist knowledge systems. They learned how to fly the plane but not how to take off and land. They pride themselves in being clever rather than in being responsible.