Dealing With Backward Societies
I'm consistently impressed with Melek Kaylan. His piece in World Affairs Journal this month, The No-Show: Why Values Should Have Mattered in Iraq, articulates many points that have been floating unorganized in my mind for some time. I wish I'd written it, actually.
There was a time when, in dealing with backward societies—and we were not afraid to call them backward—we advocated an entire worldview whose numerous specific tenets we advanced as being clearly superior to theirs or anyone else’s. Well into the years of the Cold War, before our sense of mission got clouded by notions of cultural relativity and cultural imperialism, we could export technology, medicine, engineering, empiricism, individualism, scholarship, education of women, hygiene, children’s rights, consumerism, adequate nutrition, good manners, and perhaps most importantly, Western literature and arts with the conviction that we were strengthening these societies’ prospects for freedom.
Although we didn’t force them on people Soviet-style, we believed that our intellectual and cultural customs were all of a piece with our political system. Together they made up a coherent Western way of life, one that it was our duty to evangelize to the less favored nations. From former British boarding schools in India and Pakistan, to American universities in Beirut and Cairo, to French academies in Constantinople, the West built centers of learning in which locals were taught unequivocally to embrace its universalism. Such institutions propounded a clear and explicit message to the locals: If you want to improve your lot, you should not only master the art of the vote but master as well the intellectual “habits,” in Tocqueville’s term, that help support a society’s democratic foundations.
It seems like a politically incorrect way to think these days, but consider the kind of societies with which we now find ourselves embroiled—from Yemen and Somalia to Afghanistan. They are now allowed to export their values in the form of jihad to us, and all we are allowed to export is a system of “freedom” in which they are enabled to do so.
I might quibble with the hierarchy--I am not sure Western literature and arts are "perhaps most important," but in stressing that yes, they are important, he makes an overall point worth making.
Parents here in Turkey with high aspirations for their children have traditionally tried to place them in the German, French, and American schools. They pull strings and use their contacts to secure places for them; they anguish about how to do it and afford it. It has long been obvious that kids who graduate from those schools are better-equipped to succeed. No one forces them to send their kids to these schools. They want to do it.
Islamist ideologues might rail against these values, but the ordinary locals know that their own culture has failed them. They want a transformation, with a lucid set of arguments with which to defend their aspirations, to pass on to their kids, to present to relatives. In short, they wanted clearer propaganda from us about what we offer as Westerners, some sort of argumentation about how to resist the pressure to re-embrace their roots, which comes not from within but from without, from jihadis pouring discipline over chaos. Be yourselves: This was the contemporary message from America to Muslims, from the very force that was supposed to deliver them from themselves. Ultimately they knew what it meant: the US was going to “liberate” them and then leave them with no way forward. America was their last chance and it, too, had failed them.
The idea that offering an argument for Western culture is somehow an arrogant act is a terrible betrayal. If you would not, yourself, wish to live in a backward country, as backward people do, without a Western passport, with no possibility of escape--if you are not really willing to do it--it suggests that deep down, you do in fact believe something about the Western way of life has more to offer. To believe that but pretend otherwise is not respectful. It is the opposite.
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Jul '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Unfortunately, Claire, what the West now exports to backward countries is a message of self-abnegation and a toxic popular-culture stew of half-naked strumpets, nihilistic hip-hop and exploding-helicopter movies.
Hard to see how that sends an uplifting message to the benighted.
Oct '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
This is what I hate most. There is an attitude that working hard and getting ahead is immoral and exploitative, so people people should never be taught to do so. Yet the people who believe this are perfectly happy to go on earning their decent (or wealthy) livings.
You would think that with the modern ethnic diversity of Western culture we'd get over this "white evilness! white evilness!!!!!" knee-jerk reaction.
Edited on Feb 9, 2011 at 9:30pmOct '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
The West may have its self-loathing elites, but those elites still don't move to the backward world. A accurate term in the current era and one that is need after the collpase of the Berlin Wall. People around the world see beyond the pop cultue images. We should not focus only on what we do not like, but realize that we have choices. The elites who are self-loathing, can only be so in the West. Football, Pop Music, Gossip, Symphony, Opera, Boxing, Plays, Books, Smartphones, Computers, Movies, Art, Telivision and hatred of any of it or all of it - are all choices we have in the West. The only sins we have permitted are lazy thinking and the associated cringing idiocy of climate change, religious environmentalism and the continued tolerance of statist ideas.
Nov '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
I’ve encountered those who seem to think that the United States should not meddle in the conditions that people in backward countries live under because those people have somehow chosen to live that way and it’s none of our business. Even if they live under a brutal dictatorship, as in Cuba, liberals seem to think the people have made a choice.
Aside from how nuts that is, I wish those same liberals would give half as much respect for the real choices their own countrymen make for themselves.
May '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Once upon a time, I was passing by a lecture hall at the East-West Center at the U of Hawaii at the precise moment when they were welcoming a group of Fulbright Exchange Scholars to America. The speaker said, "I know you have all heard about all the good things about America. Today I want to talk about what's wrong with America."
Imagine the disappointment those eager young people must have felt. Imagine the idiocy of a government that pays people money to talk like that.
May '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Good grief, Claire. "Backward" cultures, "superior" values? This is 2011. We don't talk like that anymore. How ethnocentric. Sigh. If only you had found the time to venture outside your tiny white American suburban bubble to see the rich diversity of the real world. Only someone so sheltered could make such ignorant remarks. Right?
But seriously, I often detect that sentiment around me (I'm a Midwesterner in the San Francisco Bay Area). The implication is that once you go out and see the world, you'll cease to judge other cultures "hierarchically" as Mark Steyn put it, becoming more tolerant and egalitarian. I think it might actually work in reverse: The more you see, the more informed judgments you can make when determining what cultures and political systems are best.
Edited on Feb 10, 2011 at 12:07amSep '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Great article! My whole world-view changed in 1979 living for a year in downtown Cairo. Before that I bought into all the cultural relativism tropes. Still, it took me a while to be able to declare - at least to myself, that *our* culture is, um, superior.
Traveling in a short trip to Europe I met some Canadians who were planning to go through Cairo. I gave them my address and told them to look me up when they got there.
Sure enough they did. We would go out to cafes and talk. I had been complaining about things in Egypt generally and they said " you're too harsh, we kinda like it". By the end of their month-long stay, they said in effect, "we see what you mean"
I recently was talking to an Egyptian who has been living here in the US for many years and we were talking about Egypt and I was being careful not to offend. He stopped me and said "It's called civilization!"
May '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Not sure who said it: "If all cultures are of equal value, then cannibalism is simply a matter of taste."
Or British General Napier (via Steyn) when confronted with "suttee"--the Indian practice of throwing widows onto the funeral pyres of their husbands: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
Oct '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
The left travels across the globe also. You can go to Islamabad, stay in the Intercontinental Hotel, eat at fine Pakistani and American or Chinese restaurants, or, in private quarters drink really good French and American wines with those meals. You can take day trips around the country, seeing tourist attractions or visiting an occasional village to "see the natives in their native habitat", have you ever really been to Pakistan?
The difference isn't your frequent flier miles, it is your frequent contact with the actual citizens in the third world that matters. Working with a small NGO in these countries we would watch the UN crowd come into the country, stay in the Intercontinental, do the fine meals and $400 wines, and then have their conference about how to help the native poor.
Sep '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Good article -great post. I would have to add moral values to Tocqueville’s intellectual “habits” as the foundation stones of American democracy. While our democracy may to a degree reinforce these values and habits they are not the source of them. The idea that the US can go into a country and establish a democracy absent these values and habits and that that democracy will endure and flourish is foolish and reveals a hubris that indicates the values and habits that served us so will in the past are waning in this country. The latter is perhaps the greatest danger of modern liberalism. I suggest this not as an argument for isolationism but as an argument for humility.
May '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Great piece. Oddly missing from the list, though, is religion. Western military conquest used to be preceded or followed or accompanied (or all three) by Christian missionaries who preached the gospel and set up churches.
Feb '11
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
If all cultures are equal, then there should be a pattern of immigration that supports that claim, people should be coming and going between cultures at an equal rate.
Dec '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Kenneth: Unfortunately, Claire, what the West now exports to backward countries is a message of self-abnegation and a toxic popular-culture stew of half-naked strumpets, nihilistic hip-hop and exploding-helicopter movies.
Hard to see how that sends an uplifting message to the benighted. · Feb 9 at 8:39pm
As always, Kenneth, I agree with you. It can't be a good sign when the main exports of the West are, as you say; MTV, blue jeans, Hollywood and gangster culture.
The West has lost confidence in our civilization. When was the last time anyone heard of a main stream politician--or anyone outside the conservative sphere--proudly proclaiming the glory of Western civilization? Why should any non-westerner try to join a civilization who is too spineless to believe in itself?
Say what you will about the Islamists, but at least they have unwavering faith in their civilization, backwards and decayed though it may be.
Jul '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
I believe Mark Steyn said that here.
Feb '11
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
"Multiculturalism" on the part of the upper-middle-class and above, is largely a matter of *consumption patterns* as in buying handcrafted products from African villages and eating in ethnic restaurants. It allows them to cast a "spiritual" patina on consumerism.
Who has more genuine multicultural experience: the tenured professor who blathers on about the "other" and does his shopping along the lines described above...or the company commander in Afghanistan who interacts with locals frequently as part of his mission? The answer is pretty clear.
Jan '11
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
raycon
The difference isn't your frequent flier miles, it is your frequent contact with the actual citizens in the third world that matters. Working with a small NGO in these countries we would watch the UN crowd come into the country, stay in the Intercontinental, do the fine meals and $400 wines, and then have their conference about how to help the native poor. · Feb 10 at 5:23am
I wish I had a nickel for every person who's told me, "I love India! I go there every year! They're so pure and unselfish and unmaterialistic!"
It inevitably transpires that they fly to India for some kind of spiritual/yoga retreat where they sit around with a lot of other Westerners and never have contact with any actual Indians other than the guy who's relieving them of their cash for running the retreat.
I love India too. But "unmaterialistic?" Come on!
May '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
Margaret Ball
I wish I had a nickel for every person who's told me, "I love India! I go there every year! They're so pure and unselfish and unmaterialistic!"
It is true that unmaterialistic Indians are unmaterialistic. Of course, one finds what one seeks to find.
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
The test: Take away the American passport, put the tourist in a village somewhere in the remotest corner of Sikkim, take away his wallet and his credit cards, and tell him to learn to love it or figure out some way to get home. He is allowed no help from the US Embassy beyond what would be extended a citizen of India from that village.
If after a year he still maintains that Indians are terrifically unmaterialistic, I'll listen.
May '10
Re: Dealing With Backward Societies
[double post deleted]
Edited on Feb 11, 2011 at 10:36am