Excellent piece. And your comment about Rousseauian Third Worldism is right on target. Stevens was a less militaristic version of T.E. Lawrence or any of the other civilized, genteelly brought up, well educated young men of the West who fell in love with the exotic and for some reason couldn’t understand that the very things they liked and projected on these hostile cultures actually came from their own Western cultural heritage. Islamic and all Third World cultures possess only tribal values; the west, thanks to the cumulative influences of Greco-Roman thought, Judaism and Christianity, focus on human values and the values of individuals in a community, rather than the savage anonymous “values” of a tribe.
That said, however, I still feel rather badly for all thse foolish people when they meet up with the brutal Third World or Muslim reality. The biggest failure here is not that of the sad, foolish Stevens, but of our US government, which is supposed to protect and promote US interests (including our legal and governmental system) abroad and instead has devoted itself to turning into one large-scale, institutional Stevens.
Dinesh D’Souza was absolutely correct about Obama, the ultimate Third Worldist.
Bump!
Until not so long ago, the Western world was pretty tribalistic as well.
The pre-modern West wasn't terribly different from the non-Western world today in that regard.
And today? Is the contrast between, say, Japan or Korea on the one hand and Holland or Sweden on the other really a contrast between savage tribalism and humane and healthy universalism?