One of the more interesting projects I learned about in the last few years is the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia. I was immediately intrigued by it and have been following it for several years. The concept is to create a district in Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea and build from the ground up a city of the future, with modern values, modern technology, and modern methods. The marketing is spectacular, the videos are beautiful and the imagination is nothing short of incredible. One pundit I followed believed it was the beginning of modernization of Saudi Arabia and Islam, because it would bring a multicultural hub to the country and familiarize the country with things like authoritative working women and western criminal justice.
The only thing is that this whole project appears aspirational. There appears to be no ground broken in the actual NEOM region, but there is a LOT of money flowing and a lot of really great marketing. With that much money flowing I would be surprised if they do nothing but a part of me thinks reality will be somewhat underwhelming compared to the marketing material.
How can it be anything but? NEOM is a product of modernity. Yes it aims to modernize Saudi Arabia, but that is as much in the philosophical sense as it is in any given practical sense. Their marketing material literally headlines “progressive laws!” as a selling point.
This is not a critique of Saudi Arabia or Islam but is instead a critique of modernity. A point I made in a previous article was that profit motive does not automatically create the public good. People are rational economic beings but it is not a given that they are moral economic beings. Rational economic beings will make decisions that make them money. I heard an anecdote from someone about their nephew who quit their job driving for doordash to collect unemployment benefits when they realized the unemployment benefit was greater than the doordash income. That is a rational economic calculus–given certain constraints, that decision made sense. People like to jump on Trump for his numerous bankruptcies when he was leveraging the system as it was designed to pursue profit motive: he was behaving as a rational economic being. Saudi Arabia, with the mere idea of NEOM, is behaving as a rational economic being. I can’t judge whether they are operating in good faith or not–it would be the finest fraud in human history if not–but they are selling a modernist utopia and raking in cash just by the suggestion.
What it is, is a land without excuses: Oh, if only we didn’t have this or that historical baggage! If only previous generations hadn’t ruined us with this or that decision! If only we could have designed this city around such and such technology! How about an inhospitable desert? How about a region with no pre-existing population or economic activity? How about a region literally designed from the dirt up?
The idea of the city really appeals to my imagination. But once I think about the reality of it…
Well, let me just say the last city that I know of that was built from the ground up out of a desert was Las Vegas, and that’s definitely not the paragon of virtue but it is certainly modern and progressive.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 