Dubai: the new Melbourne

I recently spent three nights with my wife in Dubai - two nights out and one night back on a trip to visit my daughter in Melbourne. We stayed on both occasions in the XVA Art Hotel - a wonderful small guesthouse built around an art gallery and a vegetarian café. This is in Al Bastakiya, the oldest part of Dubai, located between to the Creek, the Linen Souk, the al Fahidi Fort, and the Royal Palace. Al Bastakiya is a network of narrow alleys between courtyard houses, each of which has a wind tower - a sort of air conditioning system in reverse, designed to channel cooler winds from the sea down into the rooms of the house. The Creek is lined with dhows and crossed by small open ferries called ‘abras’, which take you across to Deira, which has the gold and spice souks.

This is of course very different from the other Dubai, of gleaming towers and shopping centres, all marble, gold, glass and flash. The most common reaction of visitors to this Dubai is that it is ‘artificial’. This is a strange comment because all cities are the result of human decisions, either by planners, property developers, or the inhabitants themselves. Dubai has been set out in the desert, but many of the world’s great cities were laid out in this way. Melbourne was laid out as a grid in the Australian bush by a surveyor one morning. This must have seemed an unpromising location for a great city, but, as in Dubai, its governors built imposing town halls, government buildings, museums and art galleries, and post offices that befitted the great city they intended Melbourne to become. Over the 150 years since it was planned, the central grid has been adapted. Narrow passages between buildings have become ‘laneways’ - pedestrian streets packed with restaurants and small shops. Trees line each of the broad main streets of the grid, which are wide enough to allow tramlines (and tram stations) down their centre.

Dubai too will change over the next century: people will become familiar with and fond of its iconic buildings; different areas of the City will develop distinct characters; its inhabitants will adapt and humanise its houses and streets; people will become proud of their city and pity those unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. Perhaps they will remember with gratitude the vision and drive of those who founded the city.

No sympathy for the devils

Future generations will look back on the 20th Century as the time of genocide and rock and roll. The extent of this genocide is almost beyond belief: not just the 20 or so million killed systematically by Nazi Germany and a similar number by the Japanese Empire, but also the 45 million killed in China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, the 10 million in the contrived famines associated with the ‘collectivisation’ of agriculture in the Soviet Union, and millions in Cambodia, Armenia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and many other places. Industrial scale warfare resulted in tens of millions more deaths, with new ‘weapons of mass destruction’, starting with poison gas devised by the German Empire in the First World War, and nuclear and biological weapons introduced to the world by the USA. Agent Orange, which was used by the USA in Vietnam, resulted in half a million deaths and millions of disabilities, increased risk of diseases such as cancer, and birth defects among the civilian population.

How can we explain this utter horror, this evil? The source of evil has been attributed through the ages to the devil or to devils. In Hollywood, the devil is portrayed as a deformed and deranged monster. This is a comforting depiction because it suggests that the source of evil lies outside ourselves, and that normal people are incapable of evil unless seduced into it by an alien being. This depiction of the devil as alien easily slides into xenophobia, leading people to believe that their society can be cured of evil if only they are able to eliminate foreigners, blacks, jews, communists, or some other defined minority.

But there is another quite different vision of the devil - the devil as a gentleman, suave, charismatic and persuasive, and very much one of us. This is  the version that appears in one of the 20th Century’s greatest rock and roll songs ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1968 and recorded by the Rolling Stones. In this song, Lucifer proclaims his wealth and taste. Like sophists everywhere, he argues for moral relativity: “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints”, and for universal self-blame: “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, when after all it was you and me.” Yet at the root is a love of death and despair: “I watched with glee as your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made”.

This is a lot of work for one devil, and it is not surprising that many sources (such as Milton’s Paradise Lost) identify a pandemonium of devils, each of which characterises a particular kind of evil. These include Mammon, who exalts wealth, persuading us to feast while others starve. Beelzebub represents the arrogance of power, tempting those in high office to crush their rivals to maintain personal supremacy. Astaroth is the devil of accusers and inquisitors - those who enforce conformity with torture and death, while  Moloch is the demon of religious cruelty, persuading those with religious faith to stone miscreants to death, burn unbelievers at the stake and crash aeroplanes into skyscrapers. Finally, there is Belial, who works to stir up lies and hatred, and “loves vice for itself”.

Belial, like all the other devils, walk among us, or rather pass by us in their chauffer-driven cars and their private jets. They run giant chains of ‘news media’ which promote pornography and inculcate hatred of their political rivals, they manage wealthy corporations which employ workers in the Third World on starvation wages and pollute the landscape, they go to war in the name of security and ensure those they capture are tortured and murdered. They glory in personal power and crush and destroy others as an act of pleasure. They succeed because we are weak and easily impressed by ‘wealth and taste’.