In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century.
The answer is obvious. ICBMs delivering Hydrogen bombes. Never before in History could all life on earth be wiped out over the space of a couple of hours.
I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years.
But the H-bomb delivered by rockets was a unique twentieth century development.
The European empires, especially the British and French ones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end.
They hadn't dominated shit. Nothing very much changed by their coming into existence or fading away. The Spanish and Portuguese Empires did change the world. Holland and England were just better at turning a profit on the thing.
...among the great variety of developments that have occurred in the twentieth century, I did not, ultimately, have any difficulty in choosing one as the preeminent development of the period: the rise of democracy.
It rose in the Nineteenth century and fell in the Twentieth. Some countries could only be ruled democratically, others could only be ruled despotically. Democracy as a 'universal value' was as dead as the dodo. You can't export or impose that shit on countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc.
The idea of democracy originated, of course, in ancient Greece,
No. The word is Greek but the Greeks knew that there were plenty of less advanced polities, formed out of the union of tribes, which, speaking generally, had some sort of elective process or representative council. Interestingly, Herodotus depicted the ancient Iranians, after the slaughter of the Magi, debating what type of Government to chose. One of their number, Otanes advocates 'isonomia' of a political sort- i.e. something like Democracy. Darius is more persuasive and by some trick gets to be King and thus found a great Empire.
more than two millennia ago. Piecemeal efforts at democratization were attempted elsewhere as well, including in India.
This cretin doesn't get that first there are forms of government and only much later do a couple of shithead Professors get to give them names and talk stupid shit about them. On the other hand, it is true that the Macedonians and the Mauryas tried to copy the Persian Empire. Nobody wanted to copy shitty tribal republics where wealth was counted in sheep or chickens.
But it is really in ancient Greece that the idea of democracy took shape and was seriously put into practice (albeit on a limited scale),
No. Athens for various reasons went through a Democratic phase. But this was predicated on imperial expansion enabling the wealthy to gain the extra money needed to discharge more and more onerous liturgical duties. In other words, there was a brief historical window when a degree of Democracy was 'incentive compatible'. It coincided with a great literary flowering. But if you read Aristophanes and Plato, you become sceptical of Democracy.
before it collapsed and was replaced by more authoritarian
Athens was so fucking authoritarian that the Ecclesia put Socrates to death just for talking bollocks.
and asymmetric forms of government.
The Ecclesia could kill you. You couldn't kill the Ecclesia. There was asymmetry between Sen's parents and the Muslim mobs which wanted to slit their throats in their ancestral Dacca. That's why they ran the fuck away. The transition to Democracy in Bengal produced not one but two big famines and episodes of ethnic cleansing. True, the one which occurred in the early Seventies was confined to Sen's ancestral East Bengal.
There were no other kinds anywhere else.
The Icelandic Althing- or national parliament- dates back to 930 AD. The oldest continuous parliament is that of the Isle of Mann. But this thousand year old institution was based on much earlier 'Things' in Scandinavia. It is probable that they predate the establishment of City States like Athens or Sparta. As I said, 'democratic' or other representative institutions are a survival of much older tribal forms of administration.
Thereafter, democracy as we know it took a long time to emerge.
Nope. For English people, it emerged at the same time as the Common Law which, as Lord Coke said, was, for all we know, the work of the Druids. However, a strong Crown and strong 'marcher lords' were needed to protect the populace. England became less democratic as it rose economically. What reversed this process was the Industrial revolution which made, first the entrepreneurs and then 'the proletariat' more and more productive. As they paid more in tax, their demand for increased representation had to be accepted. The slogan of the American Revolution was 'no taxation without representation'.
Its gradual--and ultimately triumphant-
save where it was ultimately defeated or would have been but for American military bases on their soil.
-emergence as a working system of governance was bolstered by many developments, from the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215,
which had zero effect. Tudor England was more absolutist than the regime presided over by Bad King John.
to the French and the American Revolutions in the eighteenth century,
based on military victories. A country which can win a war can probably administer itself well enough.
to the widening of the franchise in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century.
and twentieth century. England only got universal adult suffrage after the Great War. Ceylon got it a dozen years later. French women had to wait till after the Second World War.
It was in the twentieth century, however, that the idea of democracy became established as the "normal" form of government to which any nation is entitled--whether in Europe, America, Asia, or Africa.
Nonsense! Professor Wilson was soon shown to be as stupid as shit. Much of Europe went down the path of One Party States which, admittedly, probably would have won 'free and fair' elections. After the Second World War, the US didn't even pretend to care about Democracy. Dictators and Emperors were fine so long as they were allies or had oil.
The idea of democracy as a universal commitment is quite new, and it is quintessentially a product of the twentieth century.
Nope. Chartists were banging on about it in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It was only in the 1880s that idealists understood that universal suffrage might help the Conservatives and Imperialists, not the crazy Communists or nigger loving Lesbian kikes with Collidge degrees.
The rebels who forced restraint on the king of England through the Magna Carta saw the need as an entirely local one.
Because they weren't mad. Sen does not understand that all political demands are either 'local' or they are crazy.
In contrast, the American fighters for independence and the revolutionaries in France contributed greatly to an understanding of the need for democracy as a general system.
No. They contributed greatly to an understanding that winning wars matters. 'General systems' don't. France was cool with an Emperor, provided he kept winning wars. On the other hand, it is true that Democracy, limited to men of a particular colour, can give those men the incentive to fight to preserve 'peculiar institutions'- e.g. slavery or apartheid.
Yet the focus of their practical demands remained quite local--confined, in effect, to the two sides of the North Atlantic, and founded on the special economic, social, and political history of the region.
Why did medieval English Barons not demand that the Chinese Emperor undergo gender re-assignment surgery?
Throughout the nineteenth century, theorists of democracy found it quite natural to discuss whether one country or another was "fit for democracy."
i.e. could they expel foreign rulers and rule themselves. For Kossuth's Hungary, the answer was that the military defeat suffered by the Emperor did indeed permit something that came close.
This thinking changed only in the twentieth century, with the recognition that the question itself was wrong: A country does not have to be deemed fit for democracy; rather, it has to become fit through democracy.
Gibberish! Hungary or Czechoslovakia may have been fit for democracy but the Soviet Army had other ideas. Just the other day, the elected President of Korea tried to stage a military coup. It looks as though the army isn't backing him just as the Bangladesh army refused to back Sheikh Hasina. Hasina is in exile. Yoon may go to jail. Still, a nation's army may decide to get rid of democracy.
This is indeed a momentous change, extending the potential reach of democracy to cover billions of people, with their varying histories and cultures and disparate levels of affluence.
It would have been a momentous change if it had actually changed things. In India it probably delayed needful change. But that's because its leaders and 'thinkers' (like Sen himself) were as stupid as shit.
It was also in this century that people finally accepted that "franchise for all adults" must mean all--not just men but also women.
Women in New Zealand got the vote in 1893.
When in January of this year I had the opportunity to meet Ruth Dreyfuss, the president of Switzerland and a woman of remarkable distinction, it gave me occasion to recollect that only a quarter century ago Swiss women could not even vote.
Which is why so many Swiss women kept trying to emigrate to India. The fact is whether you can or can't vote doesn't matter greatly. Whether you can be productively employed and thus have a good material standard of living is the only thing of significance.
We have at last reached the point of recognizing that the coverage of universality, like the quality of mercy, is not strained.
It is meaningless. Kashmiri Pundits had the vote. They still had to run away from the Valley a few years before Sen wrote this.
I do not deny that there are challenges to democracy's claim to universality.
Democracy does not claim to be universal. It isn't the case that foreigners get to vote in national elections.
These challenges come in many shapes and forms--and from different directions.
What are those directions? The answer is invasion or a military coup. Other challenges- economic, diplomatic, sociological, etc. are independent of form of government.
Indeed, that is part of the subject of this essay. I have to examine the claim of democracy as a universal value and the disputes that surround that claim.
In other words, Sen has to babble stupid, ignorant, shite in order to defend a false claim.
... in the general climate of world opinion, democratic governance has now achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.
I suppose there was a period when even the Chinese were pretending- to Jimmy Carter- that they were moving towards Democracy. But, that period was brief.
The ball is very much in the court of those who want to rubbish democracy to provide justification for that rejection.
Yeltsin. That's it. If Democracy means a drunken buffoon can become President, then, it is obvious, there are places which shouldn't have Democracy- which is why they haven't had Democracy.
This is a historic change from not very long ago, when the advocates of democracy for Asia or Africa had to argue for democracy with their backs to the wall.
Nonsense! They had to get somebody to pay them to talk bollocks- preferably on some nice Ivy league campus.
While we still have reason enough to dispute those who, implicitly or explicitly, reject the need for democracy, we must also note clearly how the general climate of opinion has shifted from what it was in previous centuries.
Opinions don't matter. What matters are whether smart peeps think a particular form of government in a particular place is viable. Their expectations can create the reality they fear.
We do not have to establish afresh, each time, whether such and such a country (South Africa,
smart peeps should get the fuck out before it turns into Zimbabwe
or Cambodia,
which will remain Communist and may do well emulating China
or Chile)
probably can't be ruled by the Army whereas Venezuela can. But, like Venezuela, its fate will always be tied to commodity prices.
is "fit for democracy" (a question that was prominent in the discourse of the nineteenth century); we now take that for granted.
Stupid shitheads like Sen- maybe. But, the truth is, Sen and his ilk were sensible enough. If they were paid to tell stupid lies, that is what they did. But they didn't emigrate to places which were bound to turn into shitholes.
This recognition of democracy as a universally relevant system, which moves in the direction of its acceptance as a universal value, is a major revolution in thinking, and one of the main contributions of the twentieth century.
No. This type of stupidity had a brief run. But only senile Biden thought 'Summits for Democracy' weren't a fucking joke. Incidentally, both Imran Khan and Sheikh Hasina blame Biden for destabilizing Democracy in their countries. On the other hand, South Korea's President Yoon serenaded Biden with 'American Pie'. That hasn't ended well.
It is in this context that we have to examine the question of democracy as a universal value
Maybe we should examine why we did stupid shit under the rubric of 'promoting Democracy'. I think it was about money. Maybe Iraqi oil would 'trickle down' to the tax-paying voter.
The Indian Experience How well has democracy worked?
Institutions set up by the Brits worked well enough provided they were backed up with extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale.
While no one really questions the role of democracy in, say, the United States
not the US under Trump
or Britain
because Brexit has worked out so well- right?
or France,
where Bernier has had to resign. Will Macron go too? Will Le Pen take over? A similar cloud hangs over the head of Germany's Scholz.
Still, it is a fact that Ukraine is sitting pretty because Democracy made it perfectly secure.
it is still a matter of dispute for many of the poorer countries in the world.
Don't stick around disputing stuff in 'poorer countries'. Get the fuck out.
This is not the occasion for a detailed examination of the historical record, but I would argue that democracy has worked well enough. India, of course, was one of the major battlegrounds of this debate. In denying Indians independence,
because the country could not defend or feed itself or agree a constitution for itself. Still, the Brits set the ball of 'representative government' rolling towards the end of the nineteenth century. It's not their fault that Mahatma Gandhi was a fucking nutcase.
the British expressed anxiety over the Indians' ability to govern themselves.
They expressed dismay at Indian stupidity. What was Lord Irwin's big headache when he became Viceroy in 1926? It was to figure out a way to stop Hindus and Muslims killing each other in Calcutta. But the same thing happened on a much bigger scale in 1946 when Suhrawardy was Premier. Only Partition and massive ethnic cleansing solved that problem. Contra Sen, both Nationalism and Democracy are about 'majoritarianism'.
India was indeed in some disarray in 1947, the year it became independent.
Churchill had saved it from the Japanese. Once it got rid of the Muslim problem it could have risen rapidly. Sadly Nehru and his economic advisers were as stupid as shit.
It had an untried government,
Congress had formed Ministries in several States in 1937 at which time Provincial autonomy came into operation. Had the Indians been able to agree on forming a Federal Government, India would have been a de facto Dominion.
an undigested partition,
Hindus would have to continue to flee Sen's ancestral East Bengal
and unclear political alignments, combined with widespread communal violence and social disorder. It was hard to have faith in the future of a united and democratic India.
The Muslim and Commie threat meant that Hindus had to hang together. Democracy suited the leaders who had won the 1946 elections. It took them some time to write a Constitution and hold elections under universal adult suffrage- but India is a big and very poor country, so this wasn't a big surprise. What was a bit unexpected, to those who didn't know the Indian Princes, was how utterly shit the Indian Princes were. But then the Commies too turned out to be utterly shit. British institutions worked well enough- though one institution, created by a Britisher, became wholly dynastic. Rahul still rules the INC. He could, as he says, have become PM at the age of 25. But autocracy is tempered by assassination- or, in Rahul's case, the fear of fucking up as badly as Daddy or Granny and thus getting killed by crazy Sikhs or Sri Lankan Tamils or whatever.
And yet, half a century later, we find a democracy that has, taking the rough with the smooth, worked remarkably well.
Coz a nice Italian lady running India is a truly democratic outcome- right?
Political differences have been largely tackled within the constitutional guidelines, and governments have risen and fallen according to electoral and parliamentary rules. An ungainly, unlikely, inelegant combination of differences, India nonetheless survives and functions remarkably well as a political unit with a democratic system.
Why? The Army is apolitical. I suppose this has to do with post-Mutiny British recruitment policies.
Indeed, it is held together by its working democracy. India has also survived the tremendous challenge of dealing with a variety of major languages and a spectrum of religions.
India did ethnic cleansing so as to get rid of the Muslim problem and the demand for Urdu script etc.
Religious and communal differences are, of course, vulnerable to exploitation by sectarian politicians,
Nehru and Jinnah presided over massive ethnic cleansing.
and have indeed been so used on several occasions (including in recent months), causing massive consternation in the country.
A Hindu majority nation experiences no great 'consternation' if Muslims are killed. Nehru was very popular precisely because he dealt harshly with 'Rezakars' and Commies. Rajiv Gandhi understood this. Had he lived, he'd have knocked down a disused mosque and built a Ram Temple there. Sadly, he was killed and so the BJP was able to monopolize the issue.
Yet the fact that consternation greets sectarian violence and that condemnation of such violence comes from all sections of the country ultimately
makes no fucking difference even if were the case.
provides the main democratic guarantee against the narrowly factional exploitation of sectarianism.
Democracy directly led to sectarian ethnic cleansing in India. Imperialism protects minorities- if it pays to do so.
This is, of course, essential for the survival and prosperity of a country as remarkably varied as India, which is home not only to a Hindu majority, but to the world's third largest Muslim population, to millions of Christians and Buddhists, and to most of the world's Sikhs, Parsees, and Jains.
Nonsense! India thrived under Emperors. Democracy meant famine and ethnic cleansing and a corrupt, casteist, type of dynasticism.
Democracy and Economic Development It is often claimed that nondemocratic systems are better at bringing about economic development.
It is obvious that Democracy is undesirable if a nations wants to become rich and strong. But there may be no alternative to Democracy.
This belief sometimes goes by the name of "the Lee hypothesis,"which is that democratic systems are not good at implementing economic reforms that improve efficiency. In India, that turned out to be true, though this may not have been obvious 25 years ago.
due to its advocacy by Lee Kuan Yew, the leader and former president of Singapore.
He was right. Sen was wrong.
He is certainly right that some disciplinarian states (such as South Korea, his own Singapore, and postreform China) have had faster rates of economic growth than many less authoritarian ones (including India, Jamaica, and Costa Rica).
Singapore has higher per capita income than the UK. They have had 4 leaders since they became independent almost 60 years ago. The UK has had 5 Prime Ministers since 2016.
The "Lee hypothesis," however, is based on sporadic empiricism,
No. Lee had a 'Structural Causal Model'. As a lawyer by profession he understood why Democracies find it difficult to do efficiency enhancing reform. True, there can be elite 'workarounds'. But, in that case, the quality of the elite matters. The countries which most need reform are likely to have the worst elites.
drawing on very selective and limited information, rather than on any general statistical testing over the wide-ranging data that are available.
Such 'statistical testing' are junk social science. Why not compare apples and apple computers instead?
A general relation of this kind cannot be established on the basis of very selective evidence. For example, we cannot really take the high economic growth of Singapore or China as "definitive proof" that authoritarianism does better in promoting economic growth,
We can take it as definitive proof that an authoritarianism focussed on economic growth does better than a democracy which isn't. Why? Because Singaporeans and Chinese peeps are as smart as fuck. If you see smart people going in one direction and getting much richer as a result, that is proof that they were right to go in that direction.
any more than we can draw the opposite conclusion from the fact that Botswana,
whose political institutions built upon their own ancient culture and practices. This is because Bantu people studied Political Science in Athens 2300 years ago and thus understood the concept of democracy as a universal value.
the country with the best record of economic growth in Africa, indeed with one of the finest records of economic growth in the whole world, has been an oasis of democracy on that continent over the decades.
Because the Tswana people have always been smart, decent, hard working, thrifty and concerned with solving collective action problems in a smart, not a brutal, manner. Still, there is an element of 'hysteresis'. There has been a dominant party though, as in India, factionalism is a problem.
We need more systematic empirical studies to sort out the claims and counterclaims.
No. We need common sense. 'Empirical studies' are carried out by stupid cunts.
There is, in fact, no convincing general evidence that authoritarian governance and the suppression of political and civil rights are really beneficial to economic development.
But there is convincing evidence that if authoritarianism is focussed on economic development and has a sound understanding of economics
Indeed, the general statistical picture does not permit any such induction.
For the same reason that farting gives no insight into quantum theory.
Systematic empirical studies (for example, by Robert Barro
who found growth and democracy had a weak but negative correlation. This supports the Lee hypothesis
or by Adam Przeworski)
His thought democracy had the edge because populations grow faster under dictatorships. But China could enforce 'one child'. India could not. That's why India has overtaken China in terms of population while falling much further behind in terms of per capita Income
give no real support to the claim that there is a general conflict between political rights and economic performance.
There is no necessary conflict. But if there are no fucking political rights, there can't be any fucking conflict. Sen does not understand that the two fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ, not to mention the folk theorem of repeated games, merely say non-coercive mechanisms can do as well, not better, than coercive mechanisms. The problem is that an authoritarian leader may continue to do stupid shit long after a stupid democratic leader has been forced out of office. The problem is that his successors may do equally stupid shit.
The directional linkage seems to depend on many other circumstances, and while some statistical investigations note a weakly negative relation, others find a strongly positive one.
More particularly, if affluence has been achieved and thus demographic transition has occurred. But this is like saying 'the reason some countries are rich is because they are rich.'
If all the comparative studies are viewed together, the hypothesis that there is no clear relation between economic growth and democracy in either direction remains extremely plausible.
It is irrelevant. The fact is economic growth occurs if smart decisions are made. Sometimes the dictator is smart but there can be smart democratic leaders.
Since democracy and political liberty have importance in themselves, the case for them therefore remains untarnished.
But that case is on the same footing as the case for Theocracy or the case for compulsory gender re-assignment surgery for all heterosexual males.
The question also involves a fundamental issue of methods of economic research.
useless research.
We must not only look at statistical connections,
There are none. The question is, ceteris paribus, would the current leader- assuming he has a good plan- be better able to implement it if he was a dictator? The answer is- yes. That is why Constitutions have a provision for Emergency situations where the Government assumes dictatorial powers and the Rule of Law may be suspended.
but also examine and scrutinize the causal processes that are involved in economic growth and development. The economic policies and circumstances that led to the economic success of countries in East Asia are by now reasonably well understood.
Not by Sen. Countries which faced an existential threat- South Korea, Taiwan but also Malaysia and Singapore- had to have conscription and thus had an incentive to raise literacy. But this was also the reason they had to go for growth.
While different empirical studies have varied in emphasis, there is by now broad consensus on a list of "helpful policies" that includes openness to competition, the use of international markets,public provision of incentives for investment and export,a high level of literacy and schooling, successful land reforms, and other social opportunities that widen participation in the process of economic expansion.
Fuck that. What is helpful is having lots of smart peeps and relatively few dumb shitheads to do the dirty jobs.
There is no reason at all to assume that any of these policies is inconsistent with greater democracy and had to be forcibly sustained by the elements of authoritarianism that happened to be present in South Korea or Singapore or China.
Yet South Korea was a shithole when it was a democracy and started to rise when it became a dictatorship. Singapore could be an open air brothel featuring gang-wars between Triads and gangs of various ethnicities.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence to show that what is needed for generating faster economic growth is a friendlier economic climate rather than a harsher political system.
But that political system needs to be harsh to those who don't want a 'friendly' economic climate.
To complete this examination, we must go beyond the narrow confines of economic growth and scrutinize the broader demands of economic development, including the need for economic and social security.
That is not a 'demand of economic development'. Economic and Social security can raise productivity. But there can be a disincentive effect on work. High taxes on the productive sector might drive away enterprise.
In that context, we have to look at the connection between political and civil rights,
There are none. Rights are only as good as the remedies provided for them. Sadly, incentive incompatibility might mean that those remedies are rationed or that they disappear.
on the one hand, and the prevention of major economic disasters, on the other.
Sadly, they can't be prevented only mitigated.
Political and civil rights give people the opportunity to draw attention forcefully to general needs and to demand appropriate public action.
The people want Death to be abolished. Political and civil rights give people the opportunity to draw attention to stupid shit. But other people have the equal and opposite right to ignore the fuck out of them or to come up with even more ridiculous demands.
The response of a government to the acute suffering of its people often depends on the pressure that is put on it.
If the Government can be put under more pressure than it can itself inflict, it isn't much of a government. Moreover, those putting the pressure need to consider whether the devil you know mightn't be better than the government you don't. Anyway, any sort of regime might be weak and devolve into a game of musical chairs involving increasingly senile and useless apparatchiks.
The exercise of political rights (such as voting, criticizing, protesting, and the like) can make a real difference to the political incentives that operate on a government.
But 'criticizing' and 'protesting'- even voting for nutters- can be counterproductive. Bengali buddhijivis have been criticizing the BJP for three decades. What has been the result? The BJP is now the largest opposition party in West Bengal. Thankfully, Mamta's goons are very good at killing and raping those who protest against her misrule.
I have discussed elsewhere the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.
Except Bangladesh 1974- which is where Sen's people are from.
We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look:
Why not look at the place you yourself come from, you shithead?
the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China's 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland
which was like the Finnish famine, under Finnish rule
or India under alien rule.
Bengal had an elected Bengali Government in 1943. That is why there was so much excess mortality.
China,
had big famines under Chinese rule in every century
although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India,
Because it was killing, or 're-educating', more people.
still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years.
Both Stalin and Mao put an end to the threat of agrarian insurrection. The peasants were put, very firmly, in their place.
The policies went uncriticized because
critics were killed as were potential critics or those who looked like they might potentially become potential critics. But, Democracies can fuck over 'critics' just as well. It's just that such 'critics' tend to be as shitty as Sen or Chomsky and so the 'silent majority' votes in the direction diametrically opposed to the one they uphold as a shining path.
there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections.
So what? The guy in power has to worry about one of his colleagues knifing him. South Korea's dictator was killed by his Intelligence chief. Mao and Stalin were very good at being beforehand in killing colleagues.
Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year.
In India millions would have starved if LBJ hadn't sent 10 million tons of food. The plain fact is, letting a portion of the population starve can be economically beneficial.
The same can be said about the world's two contemporary famines, occurring right now in North Korea and Sudan.
It turned out, neither mattered in the slightest.
Famines are often associated with what look like natural disasters, and commentators often settle for the simplicity of explaining famines by pointing to these events: the floods in China during the failed Great Leap Forward, the droughts in Ethiopia, or crop failures in North Korea. Nevertheless, many countries with similar natural problems, or even worse ones, manage perfectly well, because
Uncle Sam sends food. This is because American farmers have good lobbyists.
a responsive government intervenes to help alleviate hunger. Since the primary victims of a famine are the indigent, deaths can be prevented by
giving people food
recreating incomes (for example, through employment programs), which makes food accessible to potential famine victims.
by giving them food. It is cheaper to give people food then to spend money 'recreating income'- e.g. by retraining the very hungry as dieting consultants.
Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts or floods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973,
thanks to the Green Revolution, rice and wheat weren't that badly affected by the drought. The shortfall was in coarse grain. Nationalizing the wholesale market was a bad idea, opposed by Minhas who resigned from the Planning Commission, which Indira later regretted.
or Zimbabwe and Botswana in the early 1980s)
both were lightly populated.
have been able to feed their people without experiencing a famine.
Because there wasn't a big food availability deficit. Still, it is noteworthy that both India and Bangladesh chose to go down a Dictatorial path in the immediate aftermath of the food crisis.
Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so,
They are even easier to prevent if there is a highly frivolous effort to do so which consists of getting guys in clown costumes to hand out hot dogs. What matters is food availability.
and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort.
No. It can blame profiteers, hoarders, the CIA, etc. Just make sure the guys who starve are ones who wouldn't have voted for you.
Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence (the last famine, which I witnessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before independence),
No. The Brits ended famine. Sadly, once they handed over power to the elected government in Bengal both famine and ethnic cleansing reappeared.
they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.
Not in Bangladesh in 1974. Still, if the country hadn't wanted to export jute to Cuba, Uncle Sam would have stepped in.
I have discussed these issues elsewhere, particularly in my joint work with Jean Dr'eze,
which is shit.
so I will not dwell further on them here.
The guy comes from Dacca but won't talk about the Bangladesh famine under democratically elected Mujib.
Indeed, the issue of famine is only one example of the reach of democracy,
Sen's ancestral Bengal had two big famines when elected politicians took power from civil servants or army officers.
though it is, in many ways, the easiest case to analyze. The positive role of political and civil rights applies to the prevention of economic and social disasters in general. When things go fine and everything is routinely good, this instrumental role of democracy may not be particularly missed. It is when things get fouled up, for one reason or another, that the political incentives provided by democratic governance acquire great practical value.
Not in Sen's ancestral homeland. Two big famines and episodes of genocidal violence accompanied the transition to government by popular elected leaders. The plain fact is, voters don't mind other people dying. They just don't want to die themselves.
There is, I believe, an important lesson here.
That important lesson was to run the fuck away from India to somewhere still ruled by White peeps.
Many economic technocrats recommend the use of economic incentives (which the market system provides) while ignoring political incentives (which democratic systems could guarantee).
The democratic system guaranteed that Hindus would get short shrift in East Bengal. Also, there would be famine. That's why Sen's people ran away from there.
This is to opt for a deeply unbalanced set of ground rules.
Sen's people didn't opt for ground rules. They opted to run away from ground where Muslims were the majority.
The protective power of democracy may not be missed much when a country is lucky enough to be facing no serious calamity, when everything is going quite smoothly.
This is equally true of the protective power of Monarchy and the magical efficacy of melodious farts.
Yet the danger of insecurity, arising from changed economic or other circumstances, or from uncorrected mistakes of policy, can lurk behind what looks like a healthy state. The recent problems of East and Southeast Asia bring out, among other things, the penalties of undemocratic governance.
Nonsense! There was a bubble. Then there was a shakeout. True, Malaysia's Mahathir could tell Soros & Co to fuck off. But then he could also frame a rival for homosexual rape.
This is so in two striking respects. First, the development of the financial crisis in some of these economies (including South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia) has been closely linked to the lack of transparency in business, in particular the lack of public participation in reviewing financial arrangements.
The US is a democracy. That's why it will never have a sub-prime crisis- right?
The absence of an effective democratic forum has been central to this failing.
No! It was lack of sufficiently melodious farts being produced in an equitable manner which causes financial crashes.
Second, once the financial crisis led to a general economic recession,
which command economies may never experience. But they tend not to be democracies.
the protective power of democracy--not unlike that which prevents famines in democratic countries--was badly missed in a country like Indonesia.
IMF tough love helped Indonesia to get rid of Suharto and his corrupt cronies. This was a win for democracy. Sen, like Stiglitz, was too stupid to understand this.
The newly dispossessed did not have the hearing they needed.
Some Chinese origin Indonesians were attacked. But the violence was nothing compared to what had happened in the mid Sixties. I suppose, with the Communist threat gone from the region, Suharto could be abandoned to his fate. Sen is weeping for a brutal and corrupt military dictator.
A fall in total gross national product of, say, 10 percent may not look like much if it follows in the wake of a growth rate of 5 or 10 percent every year over the past few decades, and yet that decline can decimate lives and create misery for millions if the burden of contraction is not widely shared but allowed to be heaped on those--the unemployed or the economically redundant--who can least bear it. The vulnerable in Indonesia may not have missed democracy when things went up and up, but that lacuna kept their voice low and muffled as the unequally shared crisis developed.
The crisis is what enabled them to get Democracy.
The protective role of democracy is strongly missed when it is most needed.
Just as the protective role of Batman is most strongly missed when people realize Batman is a fictional character.
The Functions of Democracy
1) in a democracy there will be plenty of food. Thus if you are hungry, you should declare yourself a democracy with a free press and, by magic, food will appear on your plate.
2) in a true democracy there will be no financial crises. Also, death will be abolished because people have the civil and political right to put pressure on the Government to make it so
3) In a true Democracy everybody will have multiple identities. This means, even if Muslims kill you in your Hindu identity, you will continue to exist in your Lesbian identity. Also you can have sex with your Marie Antoinette identity.
I have so far allowed the agenda of this essay to be determined by the critics of democracy, especially the economic critics. I shall return to criticisms again, taking up the arguments of the cultural critics in particular, but the time has come for me to pursue further the positive analysis of what democracy does and what may lie at the base of its claim to be a universal value. What exactly is democracy?
A system of government where periodic elections determine who gets to rule. Some Democracies have an independent Judiciary and rule of law. Others don't.
We must not identify democracy with majority rule.
A plurality of votes may be enough to rule. However, no country is a democracy if a substantial majority of voters chose a different candidate than the one who takes office.
Failure to identify democracy with majority rule may be the result of eating dog turds because, imaginary empirical studies have shown, Sen eats nothing else.
Democracy has complex demands,
No. It requires the implementation of a very simple process.
which certainly include voting and respect for election results,
not respect, but enforcement
but it also requires the protection of liberties and freedoms,
No. Monarchies or Oligarchies may do that better.
respect for legal entitlements,
see above.
and the guaranteeing of free discussion and uncensored distribution of news and fair comment.
This may obtain under any sort of regime. Equally, if 'free expression' endangers the commonweal, it will be severely restricted.
Even elections can be deeply defective if they occur without the different sides getting an adequate opportunity to present their respective cases, or without the electorate enjoying the freedom to obtain news and to consider the views of the competing protagonists.
The losers will always find something 'deeply defective' about an election they lost. But if there is nothing they can do about it- this does not matter in the slightest.
Democracy is a demanding system, and not just a mechanical condition (like majority rule) taken in isolation.
Robust systems don't make demands. Moreover, they can get by even if there is a resource crunch. That's what makes them robust.
Viewed in this light, the merits of democracy and its claim as a universal value can be related to certain distinct virtues that go with its unfettered practice.
No. Something which makes a lot of demands isn't a 'universal value'. It is a high maintenance item which some can afford but others can't.
Indeed, we can distinguish three different ways in which democracy enriches the lives of the citizens.
They are the same way that melodious farts enrich lives.
First, political freedom is a part of human freedom in general, and exercising civil and political rights is a crucial part of good lives of individuals as social beings
Only in the sense that melodious farting is part of human freedom in general. But so is shitting oneself.
Political and social participation has intrinsic value for human life and well-being.
As does farting.
To be prevented from
farting or
participation in the political life of the community is a major deprivation. Second, as I have just discussed (in disputing the claim that democracy is in tension with economic development), democracy has an important instrumental value in enhancing the hearing that people get in expressing and supporting their claims to political attention (including claims of economic needs).
People will listen to you if the alternative is your farting in their face. One way of overcoming 'agent principal hazard' is by ensuring that the principal can fart in the face of an agent who is not listening to him.
Third--and this is a point to be explored further--the practice of democracy gives citizens an opportunity to learn from one another, and helps society to form its values and priorities.
The ability to use language- not the practice of democracy- assures this. I may point out that farts can be used as a method of communication. However the demands this makes on sphincter control are even greater than those made by Sen's stupid idea of democracy.
Even the idea of "needs," including the understanding of "economic needs," requires public discussion and exchange of information, views, and analyses.
No it doesn't. That is why wolves are able to understand and act collectively to fulfil their economic needs by hunting in a pack. On the other hand, hiring a lot of Bengali economists to discuss 'economic needs' will do no good whatsoever. They literally have shit for brains.
In this sense, democracy has constructive importance, in addition to its intrinsic value for the lives of the citizens and its instrumental importance in political decisions. The claims of democracy as a universal value have to take note of this diversity of considerations.
Farting, as a universal value, has to take note of all sorts of shit.
The conceptualization--even comprehension--of what are to count as "needs," including "economic needs," may itself require the exercise of political and civil rights.
Sadly, 'needs' conceptualized by Sen are stupid. They don't exist.
A proper understanding of what economic needs are--their content and their force--may require discussion and exchange.
No. Discussion and exchange will cause artificial 'needs' to be created to counterbalance genuine ones.
Political and civil rights, especially those related to the guaranteeing of open discussion, debate, criticism, and dissent, are central to the process of generating informed and considered choices.
But discussion, debate, criticism and dissent are central to the process of generating shitty ideas, wedge issues, fake news and ordinary people voting for Trump.
These processes are crucial to the formation of values and priorities,
Bad values and stupid priorities.
and we cannot, in general, take preferences as given independently of public discussion,
Nor can we take 'public discussion' as sincere rather than strategic. It is likely to feature 'preference falisification' and virtue signalling and paranoid 'wolf whistles'.
that is, irrespective of whether open interchange and debate are permitted or not.
Open interchange is not permitted if you are a politician, an academic, a journalist or represent a particular interest group. You are obliged to talk a lot of bollocks. This doesn't mean you can't do a deal in a smoke filled room or just profit from an unstated or implicit understanding between the powers that be.
In fact, the reach and effectiveness of open dialogue are often underestimated in assessing social and political problems.
No one can underestimate the stupidity and ignorance displayed in 'open dialogue'.
For example, public discussion has an important role to play in reducing the high rates of fertility that characterize many developing countries.
It has none at all. You have to spend money on distributing contraceptives and send female family planning workers into the villages. Sen comes from India. He knew there was a big advertising campaign and a Family Planning Ministry and various NGOs training thousands of workers for field work. What was lacking was 'public discussion' even when Indira Gandhi introduced forcible sterilization. It was the reaction of the voters which put the kybosh on that experiment.
There is substantial evidence that the sharp decline in fertility rates in India's more literate states has been much influenced by
access to cheap and reliable contraceptives. Public discussion played no part. The plain fact is, nobody may be mentioning family planning- more particularly in religious countries (e.g. Catholic Ireland or Italy) but the fertility rate plummets if contraceptives are easily accessible..
public discussion of the bad effects of high fertility rates on the community at large, and especially on the lives of young women. If the view has emerged in, say, the Indian state of Kerala or of Tamil Nadu that a happy family in the modern age is a small family, much discussion and debate have gone into the formation of these perspectives.
None did. There was Government advertising and plenty of field workers from the Family Planning Ministry but the only thing which mattered was availability of contraception. It was true that from time to time the Pope or Mother Theresa or the local Bishop or Maulana might condemn contraception but everybody understood this was just for show.
Kerala now has a fertility rate of 1.7 (similar to that of Britain and France, and well below China's 1.9),
Nonsense! At the time, China, because of the one child policy, was at 1.22 though some suggested the true rate was 1.5.
and this has been achieved with no coercion, but mainly through
availability of contraception. Reduced infant mortality because of better nutrition and health care also played a role. Still, sociologically speaking, the Dravidian areas tended to be 'matrilocal' rather than patriarchal. If daughters can inherit land, son preference is reduced. This means people with daughters don't keep trying for a son.
the emergence of new values--a process in which political and social dialogue has played a major part. Kerala's high literacy rate (it ranks higher in literacy than any province in China), especially among women, has greatly contributed to making such social and political dialogue possible.
There was no such dialogue. Female literacy is associated with greater knowledge of contraceptive practices. But it was Government sponsored provision of cheap and reliable contraception which was the gamechanger.
Public discussion and debate has zero relevance. Guess which country had the fastest fall in fertility? Iran under the fucking Ayatollahs.
Miseries and deprivations can be of various kinds, some more amenable to social remedies than others. The totality of the human predicament would be a gross basis for identifying our "needs."
And yet, that is what Humanity has done. There have been and there are theocratic states precisely because humans can believe that this world is shit. What we should work towards is a better after-life. This may involve killing 'infidels'- like Sen's parents who ran away from their ancestral Dacca.
For example, there are many things that we might have good reason to value and thus could be taken as "needs" if they were feasible. We could even want immortality, as Maitreyee, that remarkable inquiring mind in the Upanishads, famously did in her 3000-year old conversation with Yajnvalkya. But we do not see immortality as a "need" because it is clearly unfeasible.
Tell the Pope or the Ayatollah that. The whole world would soon see that a bunch of hijackers who believed they would get 72 virgins in Heaven if they blew themselves up could profoundly affect the course of world history.
Our conception of needs relates to our ideas of the preventable nature of some deprivations
Throughout human history people have had the need for God and Heaven. Indeed, many have voluntarily embraced deprivation for the sake of a Kingdom not of this world.
and to our understanding of what can be done about them. In the formation of understandings and beliefs about feasibility (particularly, social feasibility), public discussions play a crucial role.
No. There is no public discussion about vital matters affecting national security. Moreover, even where there is going to be a referendum, the public discussion of the issue is utterly shit. Everybody starts telling stupider and more paranoid lies. It is a different matter that, while everybody is saying one thing, there is an unstated consensus that the country must go in the opposite direction.
Political rights, including freedom of expression and discussion, are not only pivotal in inducing social responses to economic needs, they are also central to the conceptualization of economic needs themselves.
Endlessly repeating a stupid lie doesn't make it true. This nutter comes from India- a very poor country where political rights were once far superior to South Korea- which had about the same per capita income and literacy level as Kerala in 1960- but where the people's 'economic needs' were not met because that need was to become more productive. Since this raises profits and incomes for the skilled, it is very evil. India had very loud and long public discussions about how what people needed were jobs which paid a living wage without, obviously, their having to do anything useful.
Universality of Values If the above analysis is correct,
It is mad
then democracy's claim to be valuable does not rest on just one particular merit.
A system of government is valuable iff it is the only way a particular country is run. Either it obtains or there is anarchy.
There is a plurality of virtues here, including, first, the intrinsic importance of political participation and freedom in human life;
There is no such 'intrinsic importance'. On the other hand, because I was born in February, it is definitely true that it is intrinsically important to be born in February. I used to feel envy of Terence Tao. Then I discovered he wasn't born in February. No wonder he hasn't proved the Reimann hypothesis!
second, the instrumental importance of political incentives in keeping governments responsible and accountable;
or, if voters are stupid or want ethnic cleansing, the incentive to do stupid or genocidal shite. The fact is, Monarchs or Dictators may have more of an incentive to provide good governance. In a Democracy, you just have to be slightly less shitty than your rival. If people feel they can kick out the administration a year or two down the line, they may not feel it worthwhile to storm the proverbial Bastille.
and third, the constructive role of democracy in the formation of values and in the understanding of needs, rights, and duties.
Democracy does mean flattering particular voting groups and pretending that various needs or rights exist. Yet more hilariously, those picking your pocket may claim to have all sorts of sacred duty.
In the light of this diagnosis, we may now address the motivating question of this essay, namely the case for seeing democracy as a universal value.
If you are a little brown monkey- from a place where the transition to democracy directly led to famine and genocide on two separate occasions in your life-time- then 'seeing democracy as a universal value' may get you paid a little money.
In disputing this claim, it is sometimes argued that not everyone agrees on the decisive importance of democracy,
Holding elections may be helpful after the violent overthrow of an occupying or dictatorial regime. But, people might decide a strong-man delivers better governance.
particularly when it competes with other desirable things for our attention and loyalty.
Saying Democracy is nice doesn't compete with saying anything else is nice.
This is indeed so, and there is no unanimity here. This lack of unanimity is seen by some as sufficient evidence that democracy is not a universal value.
Because it isn't something which all people at all times have considered a universal value. The same is true of Capitalism or Guild Socialism.
Clearly, we must begin by dealing with a methodological question: What is a universal value?
That is a semantic, not a methodological, question. Since values are wholly imperative, not alethic, no 'methodology' can be applied in detecting or classifying them.
For a value to be considered universal, must it have the consent of everyone?
No. Gold is valuable everywhere though some may not value it at all.
If that were indeed necessary, then the category of universal values might well be empty.
No. The category would not be empty because it does not depend on empirical existence. Moreover, it would never be provable that no universal value exists because there may be some value everybody would assent to- although it may be trivial.
I know of no value-not even motherhood (I think of Mommie Dearest)--to which no one has ever objected.
What about the value of not being killed and eaten by rabid animals?
I would argue that universal consent is not required for something to be a universal value. Rather, the claim of a universal value is that people anywhere may have reason to see it as valuable.
Thus farting is a universal value. If we didn't fart our health would suffer.
When Mahatma Gandhi argued for the universal value of non-violence, he was not arguing that people everywhere already acted according to this value, but rather that they had good reason to see it as valuable.
Gandhi didn't argue for it. He claimed it had magical powers just as Sen claims Democracy has magic powers. In Gandhi's case, it was valuable for people who might be accused of 'waging war on the King Emperor' to say 'I spin cotton because I believe in the Ahimsa Fairy. Fuck would I wage war for? Ahimsa Fairy would get angry with me if I did.'
Similarly, when Rabindranath Tagore argued for "the freedom of the mind" as a universal value,
He did not argue for 'freedom of the mind'. He said, in his Hibbert lecture, 'true enjoyment can never be had through the satisfaction of greed, but only through the surrender of our individual self to the Universal Self'. He was the head of a religious sect.
he was not saying that this claim is accepted by all, but that all do have reason enough to accept it--a reason that he did much to explore, present, and propagate.
If you don't accept a thing you don't have 'reason enough' to do so. The opposite is the case.
Understood in this way, any claim that something is a universal value involves
bullshitting
some counterfactual analysiswhich 'compares outcomes of an intervention with what would have happened if the intervention had not taken place.' A claim is not an intervention. It is merely a claim. Supporting a claim may involve 'counterfactual analysis'- e.g. saying 'if Gandhi had not claimed magical properties for Non-Violence, Indians would have descended into cannibalism. Did you know the number one cause of mortality amongst Gujarati banias was being killed and eaten by a sibling?
--in particular, whether people might see some value in a claim that they have not yet considered adequately.
That isn't counterfactual. It is a claim that those who dissent have shit for brains.
All claims to universal value--not just that of democracy--have this implicit presumption.
Nonsense. Jesus Christ, delivering the Sermon on the Mount, wasn't making some absurd 'presumption'.
I would argue that it is with regard to this often implicit presumption that the biggest attitudinal shift toward democracy has occurred in the twentieth century. In considering democracy for a country that does not have it and where many people may not yet have had the opportunity to consider it for actual practice, it is now presumed
by shitheads
that the people involved would approve of it once it becomes a reality in their lives.
Interestingly, students just overthrew the democratically elected Premier of Sen's ancestral Bangladesh. True, the Government promises fresh elections but it looks as though it won't let the former ruling party compete.
In the nineteenth century this assumption typically would have not been made, but the presumption that is taken to be natural (what I earlier called the "default" position) has changed radically during the twentieth century.
It kept changing. By the Thirties, people thought Democracy was shitty and in the Fifties and Sixties many believed the Soviets would overtake the Americans in material living standards. After Thatcher, Reagan et al. revitalized Capitalism, Democracy (which was now associated with Neo-Liberal policies) seemed cool. But China's rise and rise has altered the picture. Currently we can only agree with Alexander Pope that 'for forms of Government, let fools contest/ What ever is best administered is best.'
It must also be noted that this change is, to a great extent, based on observing the history of the twentieth century.
No. Observing that history would show that Democracy's stock rose and fell as did the stock of Fascism, Communism etc.
As democracy has spread, its adherents have grown, not shrunk.
Because that's what happens when a thing spreads.
Starting off from Europe and America, democracy as a system
failed in some places and succeeded in others
has reached very many distant shores,
where it failed in some places and succeeded in others.
where it has been met with willing participation and acceptance.
in some places not others.
Moreover, when an existing democracy has been overthrown, there have been widespread protests,
or none at all
even though these protests have often been brutally suppressed.
because it is difficult to suppress stuff by making cooing noises.
Many people have been willing to risk their lives in the fight to bring back democracy.
Or overthrow it.
Some who dispute the status of democracy as a universal value base their argument not on the absence of unanimity, but on the presence of regional contrasts.
Which suggest that people care less about the type of government than the quality of administration. One may say good governance is a universal value whereas different places prefer different forms of government.
These alleged contrasts are sometimes related to the poverty of some nations.
No. They are related to 'hysteresis'- i.e. the persistence of what went before. The Brits introduced representative government and General Elections to some of their colonies. After independence, some countries retained this. Others did not.
According to this argument, poor people are interested, and have reason to be interested, in bread, not in democracy.
Rich people in Dubai are concerned with staying rich. They may run away if the UAE becomes a multi-party Democracy more particularly because one party is bound to favour granting citizenship on more liberal terms to people of foreign origin.
This oft-repeated argument is fallacious at two different levels.
No fallacy is involved in saying poor countries won't be able to remain Democracies. It is merely a factually incorrect claim.
First, as discussed above, the protective role of democracy may be particularly important for the poor.
It has no such magic power. Also, what is important to the poor does not matter if they have no power.
This obviously applies to potential famine victims who face starvation.
And who starved in democratic Bangladesh.
It also applies to the destitute thrown off the economic ladder in a financial crisis.
How did American Democracy help the unemployed during the Great Depression. The fact is Hitler's Germany did better.
People in economic need also need a political voice.
No. They need money. Having 'political voice' may not get them any if there is no fucking money to be had. Sen lived in a fantasy world where if newspapers say 'people are starving' and poor voters said 'we're very very hungry', then food would magically appear. Yet Sen came from a place where people died of hunger though newspapers reported the famine and the poor had 'voice'. Why did this happen? The answer is 'there was a food availability deficit'. Unlike India, Bangladesh didn't have the money to get food even on 'easy terms'. Also, the Indian Green Revolution had started to kick in.
Democracy is not a luxury that can await the arrival of general prosperity.
It must await the building of sufficient State Capacity to hold elections. In India, the Brits had taken care of that side of things. The mistake made by Civilian Heads of Government in Pakistan and Burma was to invite in the Army. But, the Army is like a vampire, once invited into the house, it turns it into its own nest.
Second, there is very little evidence that poor people, given the choice, prefer to reject democracy.
There is no evidence that they wouldn't trade Democracy for Prosperity.
It is thus of some interest to note that when an erstwhile Indian government in the mid-1970s tried out a similar argument to justify the alleged "emergency" (and the suppression of various political and civil rights) that it had declared, an election was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue.
Indira called the election. Why? My guess is that she feared her son's cronies would bump her off and then blame the RSS or the Communists or (her own favourite bogeyman) the CIA.
In that fateful election, fought largely on this one overriding theme, the suppression of basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indian electorate--one of the poorest in the world--showed itself to be no less keen on protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than on complaining about economic deprivation.
The North Indians didn't like forcible sterilization. The South hadn't had much of it and so Indira was able to get back into Parliament from the South. But the fact that she returned to power within 3 years showed that Indians preferred a shitty administration to a totally shitty administration hopelessly divided against itself.
To the extent that there has been any testing of the proposition that the poor do not care about civil and political rights,
There hasn't, just as there has been no testing of the proposition that the poor do care about Uranus.
the evidence is entirely against that claim.
There is no evidence whatsoever.
Similar points can be made by observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Asia.
Viz. that Democracy does not matter. People may want to get rid of a particular regime and install another. But they don't care how this is done.
Similarly, while political freedom is widely denied in Africa, there have been movements and protests against such repression whenever circumstances have permitted them.
There have been movements and protests about lots of things. Sometimes this involves killing people from a different tribe or religion.
The Argument from Cultural Differences There is also another argument in defense of an allegedly fundamental regional contrast, one related not to economic circumstances but to cultural differences. Perhaps the most famous of these claims relates to what have been called "Asian values." It has been claimed that Asians traditionally value discipline, not political freedom, and thus the attitude to democracy must inevitably be much more skeptical in these countries.
East Asians. They tend to have a low opinion of South Asians.
I have discussed this thesis in some detail in my Morganthau Memorial Lecture at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
But it was Lee Kuan Yew whom Sonia wanted as a mentor for her son. India agreed that Lee spoke sooth. Sen spoke shit.
It is very hard to find any real basis for this intellectual claim in the history of Asian cultures, especially if we look at the classical traditions of India,
a time when 'anushan' (discipline) not Democracy was the core value.
the Middle East, Iran, and other parts of Asia.
or America or Africa
For example, one of the earliest and most emphatic statements advocating the tolerance of pluralism and the duty of the state to protect minorities can be found in the inscriptions of the Indian emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C.
The Mauryas imitated Persian 'isonomia' as did Alexander. But the Arthashastra shows that the State was highly authoritarian and kept the entire population under strict surveillance.
Asia is, of course, a very large area, containing 60 percent of the world's population, and generalizations about such a vast set of peoples is not easy. Sometimes the advocates of "Asian values" have tended to look primarily at East Asia as the region of particular applicability. The general thesis of a contrast between the West and Asia often concentrates on the lands to the east of Thailand, even though there is also a more ambitious claim that the rest of Asia is rather "similar." Lee Kuan Yew, to whom we must be grateful for being such a clear expositor (and for articulating fully what is often stated vaguely in this tangled literature), outlines "the fundamental difference between Western concepts of society and government and East Asian concepts" by explaining, "when I say East Asians, I mean Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, as distinct from Southeast Asia, which is a mix between the Sinic and the Indian, though Indian culture itself emphasizes similar values."
What Lee meant is that countries with a lot of Chinese origin people or which, like Japan, Korea and North Vietnam, imported Chinese culture and political ideology, have done better than Indian or Indian influenced territories. Don't forget Lee is ethnically Chinese.
Even East Asia itself, however, is remarkably diverse, with many variations to be found not only among Japan, China, Korea, and other countries of the region, but also within each country.
The reverse is the case. There is less diversity because a civilizational synthesis spread more widely a thousand years ago.
Confucius is the standard author quoted in interpreting Asian values, but he is not the only intellectual influence in these countries (in Japan, China, and Korea for example, there are very old and very widespread Buddhist traditions, powerful for over a millennium and a half, and there are also other influences, including a considerable Christian presence).
But Buddhism had been fully incorporated into Chinese literary culture by the T'ang dynasty.
There is no homogeneous worship of order over freedom in any of these cultures.
Yes there is. True, the Indians (or at least Sen's ancestors) went to the extreme of preferring British Rule- because of the superior order they could provide but this was because they had become very undisciplined indeed. Lee knew this well enough. When he first stayed in the Indian Presidential palace, he was appalled at the dirt and dinginess of the place. The fork he was eating with snapped in two and hit him in the face. Still, at least he was provided with a fork. When he dined with the Nehrus he had to eat with his hands.
Furthermore, Confucius himself did not recommend blind allegiance to the state. When Zilu asks him "how to serve a prince," Confucius replies (in a statement that the censors of authoritarian regimes may want to ponder), "Tell him the truth even if it offends him."
i.e. display your allegiance by doing your duty. Sen is too stupid to understand that the job of a State Counsellor is to tell his master the truth.
Confucius is not averse to practical caution and tact, but does not forgo the recommendation to oppose a bad government (tactfully, if necessary): "When the [good] way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly. When the state has lost the way, act boldly and speak softly."
You are not 'opposing' a government you work for when you, in a tactful manner, seek to improve its functioning.
Indeed, Confucius provides a clear pointer to the fact that the two pillars of the imagined edifice of Asian values, loyalty to family and obedience to the state, can be in severe conflict with each other.
If so, gather your family and run the fuck away. The practice then was to decimate an entire clan if a senior official belonging to it rebelled or was deemed a traitor.
Many advocates of the power of "Asian values" see the role of the state as an extension of the role of the family, but as Confucius noted, there can be tension between the two.
He didn't note any such thing. Later Chinese philosophers- more particularly when addressing an Indian audience- cautioned against nepotistic practices amongst senior officials. In particular, there was a danger in the maternal uncles of an Emperor gaining too much power. But this was also true of Tudor England.
The Governor of She told Confucius, "Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his father stole a sheep, he denounced him." To this Confucius replied, "Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father--and there is integrity in what they do."
Moh Tzu took a different tack. Still, Confucius prevailed because of the practice of collective punishment. Filial piety was useful to the Emperor because seniors would keep juniors in line lest the whole clan suffer for their sins.
The monolithic interpretation of Asian values as hostile to democracy and political rights does not bear critical scrutiny.
Sen is incapable of 'critical scrutiny'. The fact of the matter is, Lee was right. Sen was wrong. We now have the spectacle of Sen denouncing a democratic leader when the only alternative is a dynastic moon calf.
I should not, I suppose, be too critical of the lack of scholarship supporting these beliefs,
because Sen, unlike Lee, doesn't even know how to read Chinese
since those who have made these claims are not scholars but political leaders, often official or unofficial spokesmen for authoritarian governments.
Whereas Sen is a brown monkey paid by the West to pretend that their form of government has magic properties.
It is, however, interesting to see that while we academics can be impractical about practical politics, practical politicians can, in turn, be rather impractical about scholarship.
Not Lee & his dynasty. Scholarship, especially in STEM subjects, is flourishing in Singapore, not India.
It is not hard, of course, to find authoritarian writings within the Asian traditions.
It is impossible to find advocacy of democracy there
But neither is it hard to find them in Western classics: One has only to reflect on the writings of Plato or Aquinas to see that devotion to discipline is not a special Asian taste.
Devotion to democracy never existed in the Western tradition. The fact that the College of Cardinals elects the Pope does not mean the Catholic Church is a democracy.
To dismiss the plausibility of democracy as a universal value because of the presence of some Asian writings on discipline and order would be similar to rejecting the plausibility of democracy as a natural form of government in Europe or America today on the basis of the writings of Plato or Aquinas (not to mention the substantial medieval literature in support of the Inquisitions).
Why speak of what is or isn't plausible? It is simply a fact that Democracy wasn't a universal value at any time for the same reason that Capitalism or Communism wasn't.
Due to the experience of contemporary political battles, especially in the Middle East, Islam is often portrayed as fundamentally intolerant of and hostile to individual freedom.
It wasn't their 'freedom' that Sen's family feared for when they fled Dacca. It was their lives. Why? Islam is cool with killing kaffirs.
But the presence of diversity and variety within a tradition applies very much to Islam as well. In India, Akbar and most of the other Moghul emperors (with the notable exception of Aurangzeb) provide good examples of both the theory and practice of political and religious tolerance.
They provide good examples of why a Muslim ruler fearful of Muslim usurpers might maintain alliances with warrior Princes from the non-Muslim majority.
The Turkish emperors were often more tolerant than their European contemporaries. Abundant examples can also be found among rulers in Cairo and Baghdad. Indeed, in the twelfth century, the great Jewish scholar Maimonides had to run away from an intolerant Europe (where he was born), and from its persecution of Jews,
his family had to run away from Muslim ruled Andalusia because they didn't want to convert to Islam. How fucking ignorant is Sen?
to the security of a tolerant and urbane Cairo and the patronage of Sultan Saladin. Diversity is a feature of most cultures in the world.
Only if there is immigration for an economic reason.
Western civilization is no exception. The practice of democracy that has won out in the modern West is largely a result of
the Allies defeating Hitler and American troops and money being available to contain the Communist threat
a consensus that has emerged since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last century or so.
There was no such consensus while the Soviet Union posed a military threat and could hold down Eastern Europe.
To read in this a historical commitment of the West-- over the millennia--to democracy, and then to contrast it with non-Western traditions (treating each as monolithic) would be a great mistake.
The mistake is to say there is anything 'universal' or intrinsically valuable about a particular type of political regime. But few have ever made it. Pretending otherwise is all very well when it comes to ignorant pedants or opportunistic politicians. We expect nothing from either save stupid lies.
This tendency toward oversimplification can be seen not only in the writings of some governmental spokesmen in Asia, but also in the theories of some of the finest Western scholars themselves.
Sadly, simple theories which are correct are better than complicated theories which are wrong. Lee Kuan Yew and Samuel Huntingdon were true prophets with honour not only in their own countries but also in Sen's India.
As an example from the writings of a major scholar whose works, in many other ways, have been totally impressive, let me cite Samuel Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilizations, where the heterogeneities within each culture get quite inadequate recognition.
India would move to embracing rather than rejecting Israel because there was a clash between Islamic and infidel Civilization. This was not obvious to all when Sen wrote this.
His study comes to the clear conclusion that "a sense of individualism and a tradition of rights and liberties" can be found in the West that are "unique among civilized societies."
He was right that the West would do very foolish things in the name of 'ordoliberal' values.
Huntington also argues that "the central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West." In his view, "The West was West long before it was modern."
Again, there is a lot of evidence for this view.
It is this thesis that--I have argued--does not survive historical scrutiny.
Sen was wrong. The great divergence dates back to the thirteenth and fourteenth century.
For every attempt by an Asian government spokesman to contrast alleged "Asian values" with alleged Western ones, there is, it seems, an attempt by a Western intellectual to make a similar contrast from the other side.
No. Few Asian government spokesmen bother to do any such thing. Lee enjoyed much prestige because Thatcher kept gassing on about how wonderful Singapore was.
But even though every Asian pull may be matched by a Western push, the two together do not really manage to dent democracy's claim to be a universal value
Asians who don't want democracy dent that claim. China gave up the pretence of moving towards Democracy.
. Where the Debate Belongs I have tried to cover a number of issues related to the claim that democracy is a universal value. The value of democracy includes its intrinsic importance in human life,
Governance of any sort has intrinsic importance. But the type of Governance does not. What works for you is good. What can't work for you is bad.
its instrumental role in generating political incentives,
They exist regardless of type of regime
and its constructive function in the formation of values (and in understanding the force and feasibility of claims of needs, rights, and duties).
Having values doesn't mean having anything valuable. I value being rich. I'm as poor as shit.
These merits are not regional in character.
If Western values are confined to the West, they are regional in character.
Nor is the advocacy of discipline or order.
Advocacy does not matter. Provision does.
Heterogeneity of values seems to characterize most, perhaps all, major cultures.
Heterogenous values aren't universal.
The cultural argument does not foreclose, nor indeed deeply constrain, the choices we can make today.
Which is why Iranian women are welcome to parade around in mini-skirts in Teheran.
Those choices have to be made here and now, taking note of the functional roles of democracy, on which the case for democracy in the contemporary world depends.
The West used weapons to impose 'democracy' on Iraq and Afghanistan. In the latter case, this didn't work at all. But Iraq too may dispense with elections.
I have argued that this case is indeed strong and not regionally contingent. The force of the claim that democracy is a universal value lies, ultimately, in that strength.
Force depends on strength. That's true enough but not exactly a contribution to knowledge.
That is where the debate belongs.
i.e. with the pronouncement of tautologies. Force depends on strength. Strength depends on Power. Power depends on force.
It cannot be disposed of by imagined cultural taboos
e.g. the notion that Iranians and Saudis are orthodox Muslims and encourage a modest type of clothing for women.
or assumed civilizational predispositions imposed by our various pasts.
Which is why there is no part of India where beef is banned. Sen lives in a fantasy world.
2 comments:
Excellent Mr Iyer, I would like to invite you for a podcast of mine about the recent political scenario in India and its relation to the west, do you have an email I can reach out to
Sure. My email is polypubs@gmail.com.
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