Liberal Arrogance

One of the key criticisms of the American Left and of the Europeans has long been that America and the West in general, is our ethnocentric views and specifically, our forcing of American and Western values on other cultures. This has long been one of the various arguments against the war in Iraq. However, in this case, the Left is guilty not only of misunderstanding but of profound arrogance. Are democracy and freedom really “western values?” This blogger as well as his co-bloggers does not believe so, nor, I imagine, do most people in the world. Self-determination and basic political freedoms are hardly values known only to white christians.

If we follow the liberal train of thought that believes forcing our foreign western values on other countries will be disasterous not to mention morally wrong, is to condem the majority of the world to tyranny. While I’d like to note that not all liberals or left of center thinkers believe this, it is nevertheless a leading criticism of American foreign policy at home and abroad. Such statements are be racist in nature and assume that non anglosaxons aren’t capable of running a modern country based on some form of capitalism and democracy. The left, as with most others, is guilty of grossly misjudging the situation and failing to read back through history to understand why certain regions and countries are plagued by totalitarianism. Bernard Lewis, in an article, I’ll refer to in a minute, discusses just this:

Some critics may point out that regardless of theory, in reality a pattern of arbitrary, tyrannical, despotic government marks the entire Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world. Some go further, saying, “That is how Muslims are, that is how Muslims have always been, and there is nothing the West can do about it.” That is a misreading of history. One has to look back a little way to see how Middle Eastern government arrived at its current state.

The change took place in two phases. Phase one began with Bonaparte’s incursion and continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Middle Eastern rulers, painfully aware of the need to catch up with the modern world, tried to modernize their societies, beginning with their governments. These transformations were mostly carried out not by imperialist rulers, who tended to be cautiously conservative, but by local rulers—the sultans of Turkey, the pashas and khedives of Egypt, the shahs of Persia—with the best of intentions but with disastrous results.

Modernizing meant introducing Western systems of communication, warfare, and rule, inevitably including the tools of domination and repression. The authority of the state vastly increased with the adoption of instruments of control, surveillance, and enforcement far beyond the capabilities of earlier leaders, so that by the end of the twentieth century any tin-pot ruler of a petty state or even of a quasi state had vastly greater powers than were ever enjoyed by the mighty caliphs and sultans of the past.

Well said. I wonder if the left would have condemned eastern Europe to the same fate before the USSR fell.

But to speak of dictatorship as being the immemorial way of doing things in that part of the world is simply untrue. It shows ignorance of the Arab past, contempt for the Arab present, and unconcern for the Arab future.

Younghusband recently posted a fabulous piece concerning the linguistics of debate and how language can (and can’t) be used to shape public discussions. On this note, one interesting cultural miscommunication however, regards justice. According to an article in Foreign Affairs by Bernard Lewis, the concept of justice is far more important to your average Muslim than is freedom. However, he notes that these terms carry vastly different meanings.

…the traditional Islamic ideal of good government is expressed in the term “justice.” This is represented by several different words in Arabic and other Islamic languages. The most usual, adl, means “justice according to the law” (with “law” defined as God’s law, the sharia, as revealed to the Prophet and to the Muslim community).

Westerners have tended to view the world in terms of free and unfree or democratic and undemocratic wheres Muslims seem to rather view the world in terms of just and unjust. What does this mean for the promotion of democracy in the region?