Our faith in western liberal democracy ...
... and our belief that it possesses a superior moral truth, have blinded us to countries with other traditions.
If you say that different cultures are entitled to their own views on right and wrong you will be howled down as a "relativist". But since when did the west have a monopoly on wisdom?
by Sholto Byrnes
New Statesman Essay (October 03 2005)
There is no thought-crime greater today, it seems, than sympathy for relativism. To label an argument "relativist" is to dismiss it instantly, to imply that the argument's proposer has fallen into such moral jeopardy that no further rebuttal is required. This is curious. One might have thought that the relativist position - to judge a society by its own cultural and ethical customs - was not only sensible, as our understanding of other societies will be severely limited if we do not take these customs into account, but also the genuinely liberal position. Do not liberals pride themselves on their willingness to accept that others may have different ideas about how the world should be ordered?
But we are all worshippers at the altar of western liberal democracy now, and the paradox at the heart of this supposedly tolerant creed is that it is intolerant of any society which orders its affairs according to different principles.
Our faith in western liberal democracy, and our unshakeable belief that it is the unique possessor of a superior moral truth, have blinded us time and again to the realities in countries with other traditions. Furthermore, it endangers our own security. Seeing the world through this prism, we are unable to concede the force of other bonds, such as religion, tribe or a non-democratic form of hierarchy. We may admit that these factors carry some weight in parts of the world where the United States and its deputy sheriffs, Britain and Australia, so arrogantly assume the right to interfere, but we consider them to be no more than veils of ignorance to be swept aside. Then, we say, the peoples of these countries will gladly embrace our values as surely as medieval man would have accepted that the earth was round, not flat, had he been privy to the wonders of modern science.
Only it doesn't quite work like that. The mystery is that we persist in our belief in the universality of western liberal democracy in the face of consistent evidence that other parts of the world have deep attachments to different value systems. Some may say that we ought to look to our own house given that, under varied forms of our treasured faith, the wrong US president was elected in 2000 and the Labour Party gained a large majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share of the vote in British electoral history earlier this year. But the more salient point is that there is no tradition of anything approaching western liberal democracy in many countries. Why should they be so desperate to adopt it? Especially when our attempts to persuade others of its merits are often accompanied by threats, to withhold aid, trading rights or the like, thus leading legitimate reasoned argument to degenerate into bullying.
Convinced of the universal appeal and application of our creed, we ignore local historical and cultural factors. So we remove Saddam Hussein (whom no one disputes was an evil dictator) and are then surprised when liberal democracy does not instantly flourish in the soil of ancient Mesopotamia. Instead, as Iraq falls apart, its population demonstrates an appetite for using the democratic process to vote for parties whose express purpose is to set up an Islamic, not a liberal democratic, state. Already the cause of women's rights has been seriously set back. (One of the positive aspects of Ba'athism, from a western point of view, is that it is a secular and, at least in terms of equality between the sexes, a modern political philosophy. Yet we are not interested in finding areas of common ground; liberal democracy does not negotiate.)
Whatever colours are flown by an eventual Iraqi government - assuming there is an Iraq left to be governed - we are deluded if we expect them to bear any similarity to the tricolour of liberte, egalite and fraternite. Throughout most of the Middle East, the popular alternative to dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes is not our system of government but Wahhabist or Shia theocracy. This is headbangingly obvious to anyone who has spent time in the region. But, of course, the leaders of the west are not Arabists. Why should they know anything of the Middle East's history?
Why should they be expected to remember that Iraq is a country cobbled together from three provinces of the old Ottoman empire (the same three areas that had so much trouble agreeing a constitution)? Or that a Hashemite prince from the Hijaz, who was being compensated by the British for their failure to ensure that his father became ruler of the Arabian peninsula, was plonked on its throne after the First World War? We wave aside such complications in our certainty of the cure-all properties of our faith, frequently damaging our own interests in the process.
Yet if we cannot expect our leaders to bother to take into account a little local history, or to reflect that the Arab nationalism which the west did so much to undermine might have been preferable to the militant Islam we helped to unleash, we certainly can't expect the vast majority of the western populace to have any genuine understanding of these societies.
Western liberal commentators are at particular fault here for their unwillingness to recognise shades of grey. If they find anything disagreeable about a regime, it is instantly condemned. Little do they realise - or if they do realise, they fail to acknowledge - that the alternative may be still less palatable according to their tastes. So President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for instance, is damned for banning certain parties from last month's presidential election. He is less than perfect according to our criteria. But would western critics really prefer a candidate from one of the banned parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, to determine Egyptian policy towards Israel instead? And who do they think is standing in the wings waiting to take over if the House of Saud falls? That Osama Bin Laden is one of those most eager for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family should give liberal critics pause for thought.
This determination to see the world as entirely black and white, as either meeting or failing by the standards of western liberal democracy, blinds us from seeing what we would otherwise recognise as good in our terms. It leads us to act with enmity towards those who should be our friends. The British media collude in this polarisation, at times through ignorance, at times through ideology. Positive aspects are brushed aside in order that our prosecution should not be hindered by inconvenient mitigating factors.
Thus, one newspaper attacked Cherie Blair over her recent lecture in Kuala Lumpur on the grounds that Malaysia was a "repressive regime". This is an absurd oversimplification of a cosmopolitan society in which three main ethnic groups manage to exist mostly in harmony; of an Islamic state where non-Muslims are free from the restrictions of sharia law; and in which the Islam that is practised is far removed from the more conservative form familiar to us through television reports from the Middle East.
It ignores the fact that Malaysia is a democracy in which - not that you'd know it from western reports - the governmental coalition loses elections; and that it is a country where criticism of the previous prime minister, Mahathir Mohamed (it's usually him people have in mind when they attack the Malaysian political system), is to be found in books, in newspapers and even on the walls of the museum dedicated to the father of Malaysian independence, Tunku Abdul Rahman.
No, it is not perfect. The charges of sodomy and corruption for which the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was jailed in 1999 were openly acknowledged as politically motivated and dubious. Anwar was released last year after the sodomy conviction was quashed, but he is not quite the liberal reformist the west likes to portray him as. Keadilan, the party of which he is de facto head (he is still banned from political office until 2008), is allied with Pas, an Islamic fundamentalist party which favours the imposition of a very strict form of sharia law. For all its faults, anyone familiar with Malaysia would describe it as a modern, vibrant place. Western critics, however, judge it wanting by their standards, and so condemn it as a "repressive regime". The disparity would be laughable, if it did not constitute so grave a failure to understand the local historical factors that have led Malaysia to develop as it has.
If the west doesn't try to understand the forces that swirl through societies which have not drawn deeply from the wells of Athenian democracy and the European Enlightenment, it will never be able to engage with them. Instead, it will continue to barge in, stirring up all sorts of post-imperial resentments and fuelling religious conflicts on the way, and it will continue to be baffled by the lack of gratitude that greets its interventions.
Why should it be any different, however, given that the west considers itself to have a monopoly on the truth? Now that the proselytisers are to the fore more than ever, they consider it their right and duty to lecture others on how to behave. When the leaders of countries with different values express irritation at being patronised by countries that were once their colonial masters, they are often dismissed as either corrupt or dictatorial.
We may not agree with the way affairs are ordered in other countries, and we might take to the streets if there were any suggestion that such systems should be implemented here. Can we not concede, though, that the populations of other countries may find them not only tolerable but even desirable? The western liberal-democratic consensus says not. But why has this consensus become so rigid? Just where does this unquestioning faith in the universal applicability of our values come from?
One theory traces our moral certainty in this political faith to the Christian roots of the west. In Christian theology, God is the source of all morality. In societies which for centuries were almost wholly Christian and whose laws were informed by religion, Christian morality became conflated with objective universal morality - that which is somehow built into the fabric of the universe. We have, by and large, removed God from the equation, but our conviction remains. Christians can fudge the question of whether their morality is objective or not; the buck stops, ultimately, with God. The rest of us need a better justification of our moral beliefs than the unsupported and unprovable statement that they are objective. That is no more than an assertion.
If, then, we cannot prove the universality and objectivity of our moral creed - for that is exactly what our belief in western liberal democracy is - why should we expect others to accept it? To downgrade western liberal democracy to a social contractual morality is, of course, to deny it the quasi-religious force that we are accustomed to ascribe to it. Yet it is much more justifiable, and it also allows us to make sense of other countries' obstinate refusal to take the medicine we keep trying to force upon them.
Seeing different countries' value systems and cultural customs in the context of their own implicit social contracts enables us to relate to them more easily. Then you can accept, for instance, that in many countries there is sufficient attachment to tribal solidarity and hereditary rule as to make a different form of government appropriate. The western liberal sees no merit in such considerations because he has long ceased to give them any weight, but others do.
To give a more down-to-earth example: recognising different social contractual arrangements would also help if you were buying land in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Because many local tribes consider the land to contain the spirits of their ancestors, they can never deem it sold in the way that we would. Consequently, westerners who have bought plots of land have often been asked, quite volubly, to pay for them again a few years later. You could rail and reason and explain the western concept of property ownership until the mosquitoes swarm at dusk, and it would make no difference. They have a different value system. It is, after all, their country.
If to understand and accept that is a form of relativism, then where is the sin? We in the west continue to maintain that we know better, and that we have the right to impose our values on the rest of the world. While we continue to enjoy superiority in wealth and weaponry we can get away with it. But what if one day the objects of our lecturing turn round and demand, "Says who?" If, in their fury, their response goes beyond words, we should not be surprised.
Sholto Byrnes is a staff writer on the Independent
Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2005
http://www.newstatesman.com/200510030023
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
If you say that different cultures are entitled to their own views on right and wrong you will be howled down as a "relativist". But since when did the west have a monopoly on wisdom?
by Sholto Byrnes
New Statesman Essay (October 03 2005)
There is no thought-crime greater today, it seems, than sympathy for relativism. To label an argument "relativist" is to dismiss it instantly, to imply that the argument's proposer has fallen into such moral jeopardy that no further rebuttal is required. This is curious. One might have thought that the relativist position - to judge a society by its own cultural and ethical customs - was not only sensible, as our understanding of other societies will be severely limited if we do not take these customs into account, but also the genuinely liberal position. Do not liberals pride themselves on their willingness to accept that others may have different ideas about how the world should be ordered?
But we are all worshippers at the altar of western liberal democracy now, and the paradox at the heart of this supposedly tolerant creed is that it is intolerant of any society which orders its affairs according to different principles.
Our faith in western liberal democracy, and our unshakeable belief that it is the unique possessor of a superior moral truth, have blinded us time and again to the realities in countries with other traditions. Furthermore, it endangers our own security. Seeing the world through this prism, we are unable to concede the force of other bonds, such as religion, tribe or a non-democratic form of hierarchy. We may admit that these factors carry some weight in parts of the world where the United States and its deputy sheriffs, Britain and Australia, so arrogantly assume the right to interfere, but we consider them to be no more than veils of ignorance to be swept aside. Then, we say, the peoples of these countries will gladly embrace our values as surely as medieval man would have accepted that the earth was round, not flat, had he been privy to the wonders of modern science.
Only it doesn't quite work like that. The mystery is that we persist in our belief in the universality of western liberal democracy in the face of consistent evidence that other parts of the world have deep attachments to different value systems. Some may say that we ought to look to our own house given that, under varied forms of our treasured faith, the wrong US president was elected in 2000 and the Labour Party gained a large majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share of the vote in British electoral history earlier this year. But the more salient point is that there is no tradition of anything approaching western liberal democracy in many countries. Why should they be so desperate to adopt it? Especially when our attempts to persuade others of its merits are often accompanied by threats, to withhold aid, trading rights or the like, thus leading legitimate reasoned argument to degenerate into bullying.
Convinced of the universal appeal and application of our creed, we ignore local historical and cultural factors. So we remove Saddam Hussein (whom no one disputes was an evil dictator) and are then surprised when liberal democracy does not instantly flourish in the soil of ancient Mesopotamia. Instead, as Iraq falls apart, its population demonstrates an appetite for using the democratic process to vote for parties whose express purpose is to set up an Islamic, not a liberal democratic, state. Already the cause of women's rights has been seriously set back. (One of the positive aspects of Ba'athism, from a western point of view, is that it is a secular and, at least in terms of equality between the sexes, a modern political philosophy. Yet we are not interested in finding areas of common ground; liberal democracy does not negotiate.)
Whatever colours are flown by an eventual Iraqi government - assuming there is an Iraq left to be governed - we are deluded if we expect them to bear any similarity to the tricolour of liberte, egalite and fraternite. Throughout most of the Middle East, the popular alternative to dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes is not our system of government but Wahhabist or Shia theocracy. This is headbangingly obvious to anyone who has spent time in the region. But, of course, the leaders of the west are not Arabists. Why should they know anything of the Middle East's history?
Why should they be expected to remember that Iraq is a country cobbled together from three provinces of the old Ottoman empire (the same three areas that had so much trouble agreeing a constitution)? Or that a Hashemite prince from the Hijaz, who was being compensated by the British for their failure to ensure that his father became ruler of the Arabian peninsula, was plonked on its throne after the First World War? We wave aside such complications in our certainty of the cure-all properties of our faith, frequently damaging our own interests in the process.
Yet if we cannot expect our leaders to bother to take into account a little local history, or to reflect that the Arab nationalism which the west did so much to undermine might have been preferable to the militant Islam we helped to unleash, we certainly can't expect the vast majority of the western populace to have any genuine understanding of these societies.
Western liberal commentators are at particular fault here for their unwillingness to recognise shades of grey. If they find anything disagreeable about a regime, it is instantly condemned. Little do they realise - or if they do realise, they fail to acknowledge - that the alternative may be still less palatable according to their tastes. So President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for instance, is damned for banning certain parties from last month's presidential election. He is less than perfect according to our criteria. But would western critics really prefer a candidate from one of the banned parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, to determine Egyptian policy towards Israel instead? And who do they think is standing in the wings waiting to take over if the House of Saud falls? That Osama Bin Laden is one of those most eager for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family should give liberal critics pause for thought.
This determination to see the world as entirely black and white, as either meeting or failing by the standards of western liberal democracy, blinds us from seeing what we would otherwise recognise as good in our terms. It leads us to act with enmity towards those who should be our friends. The British media collude in this polarisation, at times through ignorance, at times through ideology. Positive aspects are brushed aside in order that our prosecution should not be hindered by inconvenient mitigating factors.
Thus, one newspaper attacked Cherie Blair over her recent lecture in Kuala Lumpur on the grounds that Malaysia was a "repressive regime". This is an absurd oversimplification of a cosmopolitan society in which three main ethnic groups manage to exist mostly in harmony; of an Islamic state where non-Muslims are free from the restrictions of sharia law; and in which the Islam that is practised is far removed from the more conservative form familiar to us through television reports from the Middle East.
It ignores the fact that Malaysia is a democracy in which - not that you'd know it from western reports - the governmental coalition loses elections; and that it is a country where criticism of the previous prime minister, Mahathir Mohamed (it's usually him people have in mind when they attack the Malaysian political system), is to be found in books, in newspapers and even on the walls of the museum dedicated to the father of Malaysian independence, Tunku Abdul Rahman.
No, it is not perfect. The charges of sodomy and corruption for which the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was jailed in 1999 were openly acknowledged as politically motivated and dubious. Anwar was released last year after the sodomy conviction was quashed, but he is not quite the liberal reformist the west likes to portray him as. Keadilan, the party of which he is de facto head (he is still banned from political office until 2008), is allied with Pas, an Islamic fundamentalist party which favours the imposition of a very strict form of sharia law. For all its faults, anyone familiar with Malaysia would describe it as a modern, vibrant place. Western critics, however, judge it wanting by their standards, and so condemn it as a "repressive regime". The disparity would be laughable, if it did not constitute so grave a failure to understand the local historical factors that have led Malaysia to develop as it has.
If the west doesn't try to understand the forces that swirl through societies which have not drawn deeply from the wells of Athenian democracy and the European Enlightenment, it will never be able to engage with them. Instead, it will continue to barge in, stirring up all sorts of post-imperial resentments and fuelling religious conflicts on the way, and it will continue to be baffled by the lack of gratitude that greets its interventions.
Why should it be any different, however, given that the west considers itself to have a monopoly on the truth? Now that the proselytisers are to the fore more than ever, they consider it their right and duty to lecture others on how to behave. When the leaders of countries with different values express irritation at being patronised by countries that were once their colonial masters, they are often dismissed as either corrupt or dictatorial.
We may not agree with the way affairs are ordered in other countries, and we might take to the streets if there were any suggestion that such systems should be implemented here. Can we not concede, though, that the populations of other countries may find them not only tolerable but even desirable? The western liberal-democratic consensus says not. But why has this consensus become so rigid? Just where does this unquestioning faith in the universal applicability of our values come from?
One theory traces our moral certainty in this political faith to the Christian roots of the west. In Christian theology, God is the source of all morality. In societies which for centuries were almost wholly Christian and whose laws were informed by religion, Christian morality became conflated with objective universal morality - that which is somehow built into the fabric of the universe. We have, by and large, removed God from the equation, but our conviction remains. Christians can fudge the question of whether their morality is objective or not; the buck stops, ultimately, with God. The rest of us need a better justification of our moral beliefs than the unsupported and unprovable statement that they are objective. That is no more than an assertion.
If, then, we cannot prove the universality and objectivity of our moral creed - for that is exactly what our belief in western liberal democracy is - why should we expect others to accept it? To downgrade western liberal democracy to a social contractual morality is, of course, to deny it the quasi-religious force that we are accustomed to ascribe to it. Yet it is much more justifiable, and it also allows us to make sense of other countries' obstinate refusal to take the medicine we keep trying to force upon them.
Seeing different countries' value systems and cultural customs in the context of their own implicit social contracts enables us to relate to them more easily. Then you can accept, for instance, that in many countries there is sufficient attachment to tribal solidarity and hereditary rule as to make a different form of government appropriate. The western liberal sees no merit in such considerations because he has long ceased to give them any weight, but others do.
To give a more down-to-earth example: recognising different social contractual arrangements would also help if you were buying land in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Because many local tribes consider the land to contain the spirits of their ancestors, they can never deem it sold in the way that we would. Consequently, westerners who have bought plots of land have often been asked, quite volubly, to pay for them again a few years later. You could rail and reason and explain the western concept of property ownership until the mosquitoes swarm at dusk, and it would make no difference. They have a different value system. It is, after all, their country.
If to understand and accept that is a form of relativism, then where is the sin? We in the west continue to maintain that we know better, and that we have the right to impose our values on the rest of the world. While we continue to enjoy superiority in wealth and weaponry we can get away with it. But what if one day the objects of our lecturing turn round and demand, "Says who?" If, in their fury, their response goes beyond words, we should not be surprised.
Sholto Byrnes is a staff writer on the Independent
Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2005
http://www.newstatesman.com/200510030023
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
posted by Bill Totten at
10:19 AM
2 Comments:
Yes, Japan should go back to military dictatorship. That's more in keeping with their history and culture. And it served them so well in the 1930s.
Seriously now, can you really judge non-democratic forms of government as being no worse when you haven't lived under one? The people I know who've emigrated from former non-democracies (e.g. Yugoslavia) are very happy to live under western democracy. That's because they know the difference first hand.
It's morally reprehensible of you to sit on your wealth in a nice town like Kyoto, be the beneficiary of western democracy, and condemn the Iraqis to plastic shredders, mass graves and rape rooms.
By
Anonymous, at 6:17 AM, October 02, 2005
Thanks Steven for commenting on this post. But where did you get the idea that I recommended that "Japan should go back to military dictatorship" ... that "served them so well in the 1930s"? The article I posted mentioned nothing of the sort and I've never said or written anything of the sort. (However, I do think the military dictatorship of the Edo period served most Japanese citizens far better than most other governments anywhere, anytime, have served most of their own citizens.)
The point of the article was just the opposite of your comments. The author was not (and I am not) judging non-democratic forms of government. Rather we oppose the conceit of many westerners that their system is the only one worth having and their egregious attempts to impose it (often by force of arms) on others.
I have never condemned "the Iraqis to plastic shredders, mass graves and rape rooms" but the United States of America and its lackeys (Great Britain and Japan) have killed about a million Iraqis since the first Gulf War. I think that is morally reprehensible and I don't think those million dead Iraqis are better off now than they were alive under their own government.
By
Bill Totten, at 10:58 AM, October 02, 2005
Post a Comment
<< Home