Almost 65 years have elapsed, yet, it does not seem so long ago when my pastime amusement as a small child during bright summer nights was counting the stars in the clear skies as I lay down on my straw mat on the roof of our small mud house. My meditative amusement was occasionally interrupted by the crying of a cock or by the barking of dogs running down the street, which was not too far away since houses then were built no more than four meters high. The chirp of crickets was so familiar and constant you get used to it as if it were not there. It was the buzzing and bites of mosquito, which was most annoying. But the most revolutionary change came when transistor radios were introduced into my village and we were able to buy them and, as we lay down at night on the roof we used to put them next to our heads to listen to our favorite songs and programs. It was at this juncture that technology began to drive a wedge between us and nature. We forgot all about the stars and we turned our gaze from up to down. All of a sudden we found ourselves wanting to wash our hands with soup and dry them with towels, and we started telling times by watches instead of by the length and direction of the shade. Another revolutionary change came about when wood was replaced by kerosene burners for cooking and bare light bulbs fixed on the mud walls replaced kerosene lamps as a source of light. I am sure most of the canned foods we craved then out of novelty were expired and not fit for human consumption.

Such awful gadgets did not only cut us off from watching the stars and listening to the sounds of chirping crickets and crying cock. I remember when it was past midnight, the most pleasant, soothing sounds of natural human voices came from various directions as criers mounted minarets to call for the morning prayer. Every time I hear the bills of a cathedral ringing I remember those enchanting voices. It is amazing how the human voice can carry and modulate in the stillness of the night. It used to sink in and seep through gently into my whole being. All of a sudden this most pleasant sound turned into a jarring screech when the criers started using microphones and turning them all the way up, as if to force it on you. It began to sound like muster or summon, rather than call to prayers.

When I travel back in memory to those days and recall our astonishment and amazement then at our first encounters with things, which we now take for granted, like cars and bicycles and paved roads, when I compare where we were then and where we are now and the accelerating changes which we have been experiencing within the last few decades, it seems like I have lived several lives. Take, for example, our move from a mud house to a brick house. It was a total transformation. Yet, I chuckle when I look back today at the way that house was designed and constructed and the way it was wired and piped for electricity and water and plumbing and the way it was fitted with furniture. None of the appliances in that house worked but we took it for a king’s palace. The main thing for us was that it was not a mud house. We felt we were well on our way to become modern and aristocrats. It did not bother us at all that multitudes of flies shared with us the dining room or that crickets shared the toilets. DDT was too valuable then to be wasted on murdering flies and roaches. We used it to rinse our hair to kill lice that was driving us crazy with itching. This is health awareness for you.

These memories flooded my mind as I was driving one of the main roads in Riyadh with five lanes on one direction and another five lanes on the opposite direction. To my right and left are ultramodern glistening skyscrapers all covered with reflecting glass and shiny aluminum. What is even more amazing than these physical structures is what is inside each and everyone of them; transcontinental corporations, banks, insurance companies, specialized hospitals, showrooms for automobiles, latest fashions for ladies, and what have you. And here I am, driving my Lexus on my way to give a lecture on the history of social thought to my female graduate students at King Saudi University. I caught myself scratching my head, not because there was a lice this time, but because the mud house flashed and buzzed inside my brain. There is so much one’s brain could take.

I gazed at those imposing structures in front of me and I tried to measure the civilizational distance covered from the mud house to these glass buildings. Then, I looked inward and tried to see if I myself covered the same distance in terms of my way of thinking and outlook on life. Obviously, there is a big gap. This is a leap, which no human being in one lifetime could jump. All this and seventeen years in the USA, spent mostly on the Campus of UC, Berkeley could not change my skin deep enough to turn me into a twenty first century man, although I am trying hard.

The lecture I prepared to give to my female students on that day was about the transformation of Europe from a feudal to an industrial society and how all this brought about so many social problems and dislocations which eventually gave rise to social thinking as a means to find a way out of that miss. But wait a minute! Why travel five thousand miles and go back two hundred years to the age of the European enlightenment and industrial revolution? Isn’t almost the same thing happening right now, right in front of my eyes? What can we do to bridge the cultural and social gap between this tremendous material progress that we have achieved and the way we run our lives and affairs? What lessons can we draw from the European experience to apply to our situation? I decided to lecture my students on these points instead of my prepared topic.

But once you put it this way, other things start coming out like of a Pandora jar. Reason is struggling to find a place for itself amidst us like it did three hundred years ago in Europe. The struggle between semi-secular states and the clerical class is gripping the whole region. Religious wars between sunna and shi’a are the staple of our TV news. The thesis and the antithesis are caught up in a fierce struggle to produce a new rational and coherent synthesis that could make sense and give meaning to all this. The rope of the old order is being pulled at so hard by the new that its strands are snapping one after the other. The contradictions are multiplying and they have come close to the point of social disfunctionallty. A safety net or cushion must be worked out quickly before the fall turn into a crash.

With all fairness, a great deal has been achieved in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, but a lot more still need to be done, and urgently. It is time for cool heads to sit down together and rearrange our priorities. More importantly, our countries need to open up for fresh ideas and give more room for their own intellectuals to contribute freely their own thoughts and analysis of the situation we are at now and what should be done. strong bridges must be built and free lines of communication must be established between intellectuals and decision makers. Our countries need to utilize every human resource available to give it strength and resilience. Now that we have covered so much ground in the area of material development and infrastructure, time has come to turn to human development.