The Crusade
It was a slip of the tongue, perhaps a poor choice in wording, but early in the Iraq war President Bush referred to it as a “crusade,” unintentionally invoking the name of a series of wars fought in the middle ages wherein the Christians from Europe attacked the Islamic world and committed atrocities and massacres. In some ways, though, the word choice was accurate. While the crusade is no longer for the Christian God, it is for the current religion of the West – the ideology of liberal democracy. Back in the middle ages, the legitimacy of the crusades was clear. It was obvious to Europeans that the Christian God was the one true God, and it was honorable to free the holy land and given the Muslims a chance at salvation. The idea that Islam was simply a different religion that deserved respect didn’t occur to them, there is only one true God, after all!
In 2003 the American public met the idea of spreading democracy with the same uncritical response. Of course we want to spread democracy, equal rights for women, free speech, and markets! These things have created prosperity in the West, and seem to be self-evidently good. We are liberating people from a dictator, we aren’t imposing anything, we want to give them the freedom to define their own destiny. Yet that view is a bit of a delusion.
Democracy as a process does not guarantee anything. In the US the cost of competing in an election effectively limits the capacity of people to participate, and requires they adhere to certain “politically viable” views and histories to have a chance to win. Even if your pastor has said something embarrassing, it can haunt you. Thus there are strict limits on what actually becomes viable for democratic choice, limits shaped by both the culture and the elite. In third world countries the existence of democracy has usually not led to a true expansion of political rights and freedoms; corruption and cronyism remain.
More importantly, democracy as we understand it rests on a variety of assumptions about the nature of politics and indeed human nature. It assumes people are rational, self-interested, and can accept a democratic method of choosing between different perspectives and opinions. This requires a toleration of diverse perspectives and opinions, and an ability to compromise. Democracy, especially when combined with capitalism, is a western enlightenment invention, a rational way to try to implement enlightenment ideals without the negative effects caused by the French revolution or Marxism.
Simply, our notion of democracy is fundamentally western. Yet it is put forth as being universal, outside of a cultural context, something that all should have and want, and which one might even kill and die in order to bring it to another state or people. That belief is dangerous. Democracy is part of our culture, its ideology and assumptions are western. Fighting to spread democracy and markets is fighting to replace another culture’s approach to politics and life with ours. And, even if another culture is suffering under a dictatorship, removing the dictator and then working to try to build our kind of system is more a crusade than liberation. We see it as liberation because to us it would be, just like the Christians of the crusades saw conversion to Christianity as salvation.
This is hard to accept; most people say ‘of course it’s wrong to subjugate women or deny basic rights, or to have rule by a monarch.’ But, of course, we would say that, those are our deep culturally held beliefs. Does this mean, though, that we should all become moral relativists, whatever a culture does is OK? Since we can’t prove our beliefs right, at one level we have no choice but to be relativists — and the argument against moral relativism usually rests on emotional grounds. However, relativism does not imply equivalence. There are differences, and those differences can be traced, discussed and analyzed. Maybe treating women as equal to men isn’t something I can prove to be right, but I can show that the more equality of the sexes, the more prosperity, the less war, and the higher the standard of living.
However, even if we have no choice but to be relativist, we also have no choice but to make moral calls. We have to act on our ethical/moral understandings, even if we can’t prove we are right. This means we act politically, try to persuade others, and engage in debate and discussion. In other words, there is nothing wrong with defending our beliefs, even as we tolerate others. Finally, most atrocities we see come not from the way other cultures understand the world, but the way in which the state and modern life have made it difficult for cultures to deal with complex issues, allowing power to centralize or colonialism to destroy old cultures. Stalin, Pol Pot, and many others cannot be protected by claims to doing what their culture accepted; they clearly stepped beyond that.
Perhaps the best thing is to simply avoid crusades. Live by our values, let them guide us, and perhaps work to persuade others that our approach makes sense (but learn from others in areas where we may be weak — we are a very materialist culture, that could be a weakness). Engage and consider the ethics of each situation, even if we lack certainty about what ethical principles should guide our action. The war in Iraq, however, shows the folly of making it a crusade. We can’t impose our cultural creations wherever we want, the problems in Iraq stem not from bad execution of policy to not truly understanding the political culture and history of the region. They need to make their own choices, and we need to accept that, and realize that a crusade for democracy simply won’t work.
June 5, 2008 at 10:47 pm
With at least as much evidence you could have promoted the christian view that islamist expansionism and the destruction of churches had to be stopped. You have a crusade of your own, or should I say a jihad?!..
You are right that democracy limits the possibilities of people with less spending power. Your Barack would not have come so far without the millions drawn in by the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Limits shaped by the culture and the elite are also the exact opportunities of that culture and elite, to express in an acceptable way their favoritism and nepotism, making sure they will stay in power and have a marionette at their fingertips.
Our notion of democracy doesn’t seem especially western to me. It is more like statistics or quantum mechanics applied to humans: acquire experience, create overview, make a choice and hold on to that implicit criterion you just used. All people function like that and democracy just makes it explicit.
Of course collectivism is what tries to do away with all that, make people believe that some have the brains while almost all others don’t have to think for themselves but just leave it to the leaders. This gives rise to a whole different kind of social dynamics, where people are expected or forced to make their individual choice known that can only be the same as the leader’s.
Saying this choice was independent, is how collectivism beats democracy, home-grown leftism or immigrated islamism alike. Also, it will claim that democracy is an invention of the west and has nothing to do with universal human decision making, so that the west should really feel ashamed of itself for attempting to free those who are under leftist or islamist dictatorship.
The cultural pessimism and religious relativism thus introduced, to do away with those hated sovereign values of the populus that cannot be reigned from the outside by the self acclaimed elites, must now be mellowed and then swallowed. Therefore their debatability and equality must be pointed out and sold to those suffering from it, in the quarters where 170 nationalities are forces to live together in the same block.
Politically correct leftist elites can of course be surer to have been nurtured in a tradition of eloquent rationalization for the good cause of self service. So there is no harm in this little scheme of them, especially not when power play peeks around the corner and things cannot be turned back any more. That is how on the left, Stalin and Pol Pot empowered themselves too.
Polarization or crusades will remain necessary for working class people to keep their values and norms that they acquired in their homeland over centuries. That is not just true for the scapegoat of current western elite, the working class, but for any people respecting themselves and not having any of their Uebermensch fellow countrymen.
June 5, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Obviously Islamic extremist jihadism is wrong; looking at the faults of uncritically thinking spreading our way is right is something not so many people consider, and I’m trying to point out the less obvious. Democracy of our kind is very rare historically, and steeped in western history and tradition. I don’t think one can say ‘that’s the way people are.’ We think it’s natural because it seems natural in our culture, we’ve been culturally programmed, so to speak. Also, don’t forget the importance I put in my post about moral choices; however, I don’t see any way one can prove one religion “right” or “best,” or one ideology “true.” Indeed, that was the error of Stalin and Pol Pot, to think they had the “right” solution, and thus could do whatever necessary to enforce it. I always liked the quote by Jewel on her debut album, “What we consider human nature is really human habit.”
June 6, 2008 at 12:15 am
Sometimes and hopefully oftentimes, we think something is natural because it is natural, so that we sensibly know what we are talking about and do not drift away in derealization or depersonalization.
June 6, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Of course it could be that very little is natural in complex modern cultures, and it’s instead human choice and human creation. We naturally need to eat, procreate, survive and take care of basic bodily functions. But our cultural worlds may be less a natural state of affairs than a creative endeavor.
June 8, 2008 at 12:46 am
Our worlds are comprised of material reality, social reality and cultural reality, and these intellectual expressions must always be coordinated with instinctive impressions. Nature is always basic to them, even when organisms ad infinitum live on lower organisms to keep themselves alive. That is how I understand the great Bergson and how I try to extend it in my philosophy (on my site).
June 9, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Interesting…I don’t disagree, but I wonder how much we are driven by a kind of set nature, and how much it is our nature to be creative and to build different worlds and cultures.
June 12, 2008 at 3:29 pm
“I wonder how much we are driven by a kind of set nature, and how much it is our nature to be creative and to build different worlds and cultures”
It is very subtle but I do sense the political bias again. Aren’t you trying to say that liberal democrats are creative and driven to build different worlds and cultures, while republicans are driven by a kind of set nature? Those poor republicans then, they cannot be creative, are set and stuck. While the whole world, and even multiple worlds, are open for their opponents.
So if that is what you meta-communicated, then let me try to put it in a more neutral way. The context of discovery and the context of justification alternate and indeed are favored by the different parties, mainly to compensate for what is perceived as each others flaws, in a continuous creative evolution (CE, Bergson, 1907) with Kuhnian ‘normal’ (set nature) and ‘revolutionary’ stratified stability. Culture and civilization are differentiated and integrated as any growing organism does. It reaches, supposedly, ever higher levels of functional structure for nature to spare its energy and not have it wasted to the 2nd law of thermodynamics (chaos). I see a definite role for religion here (re-legare = re-connect).
June 12, 2008 at 4:02 pm
My comment was meant for all humans, for good or bad. Fascists were extremely creative in building an alternative culture, communists tried it, and religions are an example of creative culture-building. I think that’s one thing we humans do, we build worlds of meaning. I don’t think we can see this as analogous to an organism or physical systems. Worlds of meaning can be very stable — we were hunter gatherers for a long, long time. Most of what we consider ‘civilization’ is very recent. I think people tend to learn meaning from their family and culture, and then reproduce it, with change coming either as conditions demand it, or there is some challenge to the status quo. Modernism is defined conditions where change and transformation are considered a part of that world of meaning, so reproducing it means being change-acceptant. It also puts the individual above the society, which again is very recent. That means modern cultures change quickly, and individual choice tends to trump societal concerns and tradition/custom. As modernism spreads globally, that challenges every civilization or culture it encounters. These are, I think, interesting times!