The future has arrived. But, which future?

In this blog, and with my students (I have only one more term to engage with them!) I have often discussed my concerns about the China model for development and its superficial attractiveness not only to developing countries but even to "thinkers" right here in the US.  In 2013, for instance, I wrote in this post against the backdrop of a federal government shutdown:

It is tempting, in such situations, to look across at Russia and China and note that their governments are more “efficient.”  A few months ago, well before this partial shut down, even the New York Times columnists, Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, had written about how the Chinese get things done while we squabble here.  When Valdimir Putin effortlessly pushes ahead with his agenda, there are appreciative comments as well.

The Chinese model looks "efficient."  The American model of democracy, on the other hand, has always seemed messy, and the past five years of tRumpian politics has only worsened the standing of American politics and governance.

No wonder then that I was attracted to this essay in The Atlantic, in which the author argues that when Joe Biden worries about China it is not merely about the economic competition.  Nope.  His worry is something much bigger.  "In Biden’s view, the United States and other democracies are in a competition with China and other autocracies."

The old rules-based international order has come apart, and two broad constellations of countries are emerging in its place—one consisting of democracies, the other autocracies. Each side is motivated more by insecurity than by an ambition to transform the world in its image. Xi and his fellow autocrats worry that the free flow of information, the attractiveness of democracy, and economic interdependence would destabilize their regimes. Biden and America’s allies are concerned that Xi’s attempt to make the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party will undermine freedom and democracy, pushing international rules in an illiberal direction and empowering autocrats worldwide.

Sure, there are other interpretations of China in the global stage.  Biden gets my vote on this with his concern that the China model is a serious threat to liberal democracy.

And, yet again consistent with my world view, another essay argues that the fate of democracy in the world depends on the fate of democracy in one country--India, where liberal democracy has been rapidly losing ground to authoritarianism that is favored by mOdi and his toadies.

And the rest of the world doesn't even need a microscope to examine what the tRumpian Republicans have been doing in the states that are governed by them: Democracy is already dying in those states!

As Biden says, we are at an inflection point.  What we do and say have immense implications for the global future of liberal democracy.

And then there were six :(

The unraveling of the liberal democratic world order is tragically surreal.   

Pause and think about this for a while. The US President treating the six closest economic and military allies as enemies, while talking up North Korea?

I am shocked, not at trump though.  Because, this is exactly what trump spoke about over and over and over in his obnoxious campaign.  Like in this speech about trade, back in June 2016--well before the November elections:

America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997 - even as the country has increased its population by 50 million people.
At the center of this catastrophe are two trade deals pushed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. First, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.  Second, China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
NAFTA was the worst trade deal in history, and China's entrance into the World Trade Organization has enabled the greatest jobs theft in history.
It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA in 1993, and Hillary Clinton who supported it.
It was also Bill Clinton who lobbied for China's disastrous entry into the World Trade Organization, and Hillary Clinton who backed that terrible agreement.

If you didn't take his words seriously and literally, then you were in some parallel universe!  He is now fulfilling his campaign promise to tear all the trade deals to pieces.

I am shocked that the "principled" Republicans, including many whom I used to know, voted for trump.  They used to talk principles of free market and world trade and more.  trump became quite a test of the character of the 63 million voters, and boy have they revealed to us who they really are!

The President of France tweets:

At the G-7, the six have pretty much booted the US out!  

The US President has turned six of America's closest allies against him.  Are you happy now, you 63 million voters?

And, would you have ever imagined such a headline? Ever?

Or this headline:

63 million voters for this guy, who is doing exactly all the crazy things that he said he would do.  Are you happy now?

Well, I bet they are absolutely excited.  So much so that even the guy who once correctly described trump as a con man only to later eat crow with him, is now confident and happy that trump will easily win a second term.

Maybe in his second term, trump will formally withdraw from G7 and form a competing G3 with Russia and China, and complete the annihilation of the liberal democratic framework.  All thanks to 63 million voters!  Gob bless America, indeed!

Stability is not a static phenomenon

Over the years, and many times in this blog, I have expressed my deepest commitment to free thinking and my distaste for politics--whether at my campus or in China--that does not allow free expression.

It is one thing for me to write about those ideals.  But, I am not that much a fool into believing that my ideal world is already here.  As even the neighborhood and campus politics suggest, the world is a far too messy place to allow for free thinking, unfortunately.

As I look across the global geopolitics, it seems like there is a growing attraction for a Singapore/China model of politics and governance in which individuals operate within well-defined limits to expression.  India's society and politics don't seem to want more freedom.  Russia and the Central Asian "Stans" resemble the old Soviet Union more than the relatively freer Eastern European countries.

What happened?

With the collapse of Communism, “what we may be witnessing,” Mr. Fukuyama wrote hopefully in 1989, “is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
But couple the tightening of Chinese authoritarianism with Russia’s turn toward revanchism and dictatorship, and then add the rise of radical Islam, and the grand victory of Western liberalism can seem hollow, its values under threat even within its own societies.

In September 2000, I would never have imagined the world that it is today.  I would have described a world of freer people, and would have been emphatic about the coming future with less interference from government and religion.  Yet, here we are in September 2015 and the world is anything but that.

China fascinates me for the very reason that is articulated in that NY Times essay:

China is often cited as a counterexample to the universality of democracy and human rights. But what distinguishes China is its disinterest in spreading its model to the rest of the world.
Western universalism was real, if rivalrous. The Soviet Union tried to spread revolution and Communism, France had its “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and the United States its self-image as “the city upon a hill.” But China engages with the world in its own interest, divorced from moral aims, with little desire to proselytize.
The Chinese vision is not universalist but mercantilist, and Beijing is interested less in remaking the world than in protecting itself from vulnerabilities of globalization, including the chaotic freedoms of the Internet. China, like Russia now, pushes back against Western aspirations and efforts to reshape the world in its own image.

The China described here is the "new" China, in contrast to the old China of Mao that was certainly interested in influencing similar peasant revolutions in its neighboring countries, including India.  

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker featured a marvelous essay by Peter Hessler, who also described China and its entrepreneurs as dispassionate producers and sellers of goods.  The context for Hessler's essay was the strange juxtaposition of Chinese merchants selling lingerie to uber-conservative and traditional Muslim women in the smaller cities of Upper Egypt.  

Upper Egypt is the most conservative part of the country. Virtually all Muslim women there wear the head scarf, and it’s not uncommon for them to dress in the niqab, the black garment that covers everything but the eyes. In most towns, there’s no tourism to speak of, and very little industry; Asyut is the poorest governorate in Egypt. Apart from small groups of Syrians who occasionally pass through in travelling market fairs, it’s all but unimaginable for a foreigner to do business there. And yet I found Chinese lingerie dealers scattered throughout the region.

Hessler's essay is a beauty; I won't be surprised if it ends up a serious contender for awards that recognize nonfiction.  He writes there:

All told, along a three-hundred-mile stretch, I found twenty-six Chinese lingerie dealers: four in Sohag, twelve in Asyut, two in Mallawi, six in Minya, and two in Beni Suef. It was like mapping the territory of large predator cats: in the Nile Valley, clusters of Chinese lingerie dealers tend to appear at intervals of thirty to fifty miles, and the size of each cluster varies according to the local population. Cairo is big enough to support dozens. Dong Weiping, a businessman who owns a lingerie factory in the capital, told me that he has more than forty relatives in Egypt, all of them selling his products. Other Chinese people supply the countless underwear shops that are run by Egyptians. For the Chinese dealers, this is their window into Egypt, and they live on lingerie time. Days start late, and nights run long; they ignore the Spring Festival and sell briskly after sundown during Ramadan. Winter is better than summer. Mother’s Day is made for lingerie. But nothing compares with Valentine’s Day,

Hessler, too, notices how it is all about business:

I've never met Chinese people in Egypt who express an interest in changing the country. They often talk about what they perceive to be weaknesses—a lack of work ethic among the people, a lack of system in the government—but the tone is different from that of many Westerners. There’s little frustration; the Chinese seem to accept that this is simply the way things are. There’s also no guilt, because China has no colonial history in the region, and its government engages with both Israel and Palestine. Chinese entrepreneurs often speak fondly of the friendliness of Egyptians and their willingness to help strangers, two qualities that the Chinese believe to be rare in their own country. They almost never seem disappointed by the Egyptian revolution. This is not because they believe that the Arab Spring has turned out well but because they had no faith in it in the first place.

So, whither democracy and the rights of the individual?  Is America not the beacon on the hill?  Back to that NY Times piece:

“Our own preachiness and lecturing tendencies sometimes get in the way, but there is a core to more open democratic systems that has an enduring appeal,” he said. That core is “the broad notion of human rights, that people have the right to participate in political and economic decisions that matter to them, and the rule of law to institutionalize those rights.”
The result “doesn’t have to look like Washington, which may be for the good,” Mr. Burns said. “But a respect for law and pluralism creates more flexible societies, because otherwise it’s hard to hold together multiethnic, multireligious societies.”

But, China seems to hold together, right?

[Democracies] in whatever form seem more capable of coping with shifting pressures than authoritarian governments. History does not move laterally but in many different directions at once, Mr. Burns said. “Stability is not a static phenomenon.”

I am not sure if I can handle any more instability than what I see out there.

Hey, we are better humans than those in the past. Seriously, we are!

It's hard to accept the notion that people in the early 20th century were moral idiots, two standard deviations dumber than us. Their attitudes about race and gender sure seem morally moronic to us today, but does that mean in another half century our descendants will look at us with equal moral dumbfoundedness?

Perhaps you are feeling defensive after having read that.
Don't.
It is not about you or me.
It is about all of us.
Feeling better?

I think about the old country.  Even my own folks in the past.  Brahmins they were, which means they, for all purposes, were bigots with their Brahmin-supremacy and the awful caste system.  It is strong language, yes, to refer to the past, which includes people like my grandmothers, when we say "moral idiots."  But, compared to them and their practices, aren't we at a much better place now with people treated far less unequally than ever before?

Michael Shermer writes that we are becoming morally smarter, from where I had excerpted those couple of sentences.  He observes, and I agree with him, that:

Since the Enlightenment, humans have demonstrated dramatic moral progress. Almost everyone in the Western world today enjoys rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberal democracies are now the dominant form of governance, systematically replacing the autocracies and theocracies of centuries past. Slavery and torture are outlawed everywhere in the world (even if occasionally still practiced). The death penalty is on death row and will likely go extinct sometime in the 2020s. Violence and crime are at historic lows, and we have expanded the moral sphere to include more people as members of the human community deserving of rights and respect. Even some animals are now being considered as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration.

It is remarkable that we have reached this stage.  Not merely in the US or India but throughout the world.

Evolution endowed us with a natural tendency to be kind to our genetic relations but to be xenophobic, suspicious, and aggressive toward people in other tribes. As our brains become better equipped to reason abstractly in such tasks as lumping dogs and rabbits together into the category "mammal," so too have we improved in our capacity to lump blacks and whites, men and women, straights and gays into the category "human."

Isn't that a phenomenal development that we should celebrate?

Shermer also makes this claim that will make the two argumentative readers of this blog very happy, if they ever get to reading it!  With literacy and education, people become fans of democracy and freer markets:

Intelligence predicts economic attitudes, most notably abstract concepts such as the way that free trade is a positive-sum game. This runs counter to our folk-economic intuitions that most economic exchanges are zero-sum in a fixed pie of wealth. The economists Bryan Caplan and Stephen Miller culled data from the General Social Survey and published an article in a 2010 issue of the journal Intelligence tellingly titled "Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists." They found a correlation between intelligence and openness to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and a reluctance to endorse government make- work projects, protectionist policies, and business interventionism.

I better wrap this up before I comment anything about the "comrades" ;)

Shermer notes that when it comes to such abstract problem solving,
"Our improved ability to reason abstractly may also be the result of
the spread of scientific thinking-reason, rationality, empiricism, skepticism"

I like to live in America!

A few years ago, when I was asked for advice, I told the young person that to me living in America is not really about the material affluence, which I do enjoy, yes.  And, if affluence were all that was of interest, then there are plenty of other places on the planet now where one can earn planeloads of money--perhaps even more than what can be earned in America.  One can even stay put in the country of birth and earn in plenty.

Therefore, my advice was that coming to America should be about wanting a certain way of living and not really about the money.  "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that embraces liberal democracy and values the individual's rights.

The fact that these values are precious to me, and are why I love living here in America, does not mean that I believe these are universal values either.  In my atheist framework, we are born, we live, we die and, therefore, it is up to each one of us to figure out how to live.  If others choose a completely different framework, and live happily or unhappily as a result of that, well, it matters not to me as long as they don't compel me to live according to their rules.  Nor do I find it necessary for me to try to convert others into my way of thinking--it simply ain't my business.

Thus, I often note that it is up to people to draw up their own social contracts with their fellow citizens.  All I know is that I do not care to live in countries where their social contracts are practically incompatible with my approach to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  Even after all these years, I shudder recalling the experience of the computer returning a "site banned" message on the screen when all I did was try to access my work emails during a visit to a country whose name begins with a U and ends with an S, and when staying in a city with a name that begins with a D and ends with an I.  (You solved the puzzle? hehehe!)

It also pisses me off when Americans think it is their responsibility to spread the idea of individual rights and the pursuit of happiness to the rest of the world, overtly and covertly.  This missionary zeal to export the American, and Western, model is also what the talented wordsmith and ideas man, Pankaj Mishra tackles in a lengthy essay, in which he notes:

In the 21st century that old spell of universal progress through western ideologies – socialism and capitalism – has been decisively broken. If we are appalled and dumbfounded by a world in flames it is because we have been living – in the east and south as well as west and north – with vanities and illusions: that Asian and African societies would become, like Europe, more secular and instrumentally rational as economic growth accelerated; that with socialism dead and buried, free markets would guarantee rapid economic growth and worldwide prosperity. What these fantasies of inverted Hegelianism always disguised was a sobering fact: that the dynamics and specific features of western “progress” were not and could not be replicated or correctly sequenced in the non-west. ...
China has more recently achieved a form of capitalist modernity without embracing liberal democracy. Turkey now enjoys economic growth as well as regular elections; but these have not made the country break with long decades of authoritarian rule. The arrival of Anatolian masses in politics has actually enabled a demagogue like Erdoğan to imagine himself as a second Atatürk.

I would not want to live in China or Turkey, but would love to spend a few days as a traveler in those countries.  Living there for an extended period of time will call for thinking about the issues that surround me.  For instance, at the high school reunion a couple of years ago, a classmate asked another classmate--who is now an American expat working and living in China--a few questions about his life there.  And asked for some examples.  The Indian-American expat in China talked about how in a matter of months the Chinese government got rid of an antiquated road system that did not have the capacity for modern needs and built a multi-lane freeway.  "What happened to the homes there?" the classmate asked.  The expat said he assumed that the government paid the people a fair compensation.  "If they protested?" was the follow-up.  The expat shrugged his shoulder.  "Not my problem" he said.  It was another reminder that I cannot live in a society and simply shrug my shoulder and say "not my problem."  A mercenary existence that does not appeal to me.

But, neither do I want my government to tell people in other countries how they ought to live and govern themselves.  As Mishra notes:

Recklessly exported worldwide even today, the west’s successful formulas have continued to cause much invisible suffering.

Exactly!

Whether it is via the economics of the market or the politics of democracy, a reckless export causes, and has caused, a lot of suffering.

The result is endless insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, wars and massacres, the rise of such bizarre anachronisms and novelties as Maoist guerrillas in India and self-immolating monks in Tibet, the increased attraction of unemployed and unemployable youth to extremist organisations, and the endless misery that provokes thousands of desperate Asians and Africans to make the risky journey to what they see as the centre of successful modernity.
It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. The political and economic institutions and ideologies of western Europe and the United States had been forged by specific events – revolts against clerical authority, industrial innovations, capitalist consolidation through colonial conquest – that did not occur elsewhere. So formal religion – not only Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and the Russian Orthodox Church, but also such quietist religions as Buddhism – is actually now increasingly allied with rather than detached from state power. The middle classes, whether in India, Thailand, Turkey or Egypt, betray a greater liking for authoritarian leaders and even uniformed despots than for the rule of law and social justice.

Yep. Why meddle around?  I am not happy that Indians have elected to power a maniac whose rise to power was fueled by Hindu nationalism, nor am I happy with the Party in China, or with Russia's Putin, or ... the list is endless.  I blog about them.  I critique them, yes, as much as I critique America too--after all, America is no Eden.  But, at the end of it all, I recognize that those are their problems not mine or America's.

The crisis in the West because liberal democracy is under attack?

I was an eager-beaver graduate student when Francis Fukuyama's the "end of history" article was one of the biggest ideas that we wannabe intellectuals were all excited about.  And for a decade, it seemed like his thesis was a clear articulation of the future liberal democratic world that would blossom.  The collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the shaky Chinese system that was recovering from the Tianmen incidents gave us plenty to rejoice.

But then, with 9/11 and its aftershocks, with China's Communist Party tightening its grip on politics, and Putin becoming a tsar, everything changed and even the most ardent fans of Fukuyama's thesis have to wonder whether liberal democracy is indeed winning.  And now we have more to worry about with new agents like ISIS.

So, where are we today, twenty-five years into Fukuyama's thesis?

Today, it’s hard to imagine Fukuyama being more wrong. History isn’t over and neither liberalism nor democracy is ascendant. The comfy Western consensus he inspired is under threat in ways he never predicted. A new Cold War has broken out. China’s “Marxist capitalism” suggests you can have wealth without freedom. And the advance of ISIS may herald a new, state-oriented Islamic fundamentalism.

Were we a tad over-confident in celebrating the coming global liberal democracy?

The problem is that hubris has blinded its defenders to the crisis consuming liberalism’s identity, leaving them unable or unwilling, to respond to pressing challenges around the world.

So, what should we do?

If liberalism is to survive and flourish, it has to be rescued from Fukuyama’s grasp and from the perils of historical determinism. It has to be defined and defended all over again. This of course raises the question of what liberalism actually is—and it’s notable that so many liberals skip this step in debate as though it was unimportant.

It does sound crazy that we have to get into this all over again.  We have to start explaining what liberty is and debate and defend it?  Have we not been doing this for, well, forever it seems like?

Liberalism will not work if too much emphasis is placed on total human autonomy at the expense of all others, nor if it is obsessed with materialism and consumerism. In contrast to the Fukuyama model of yoking liberal values to economic self-interest—a combination that, when given free rein, has often damaged society at large in recent years—a model that emphasizes human dignity allows for a more positive, relevant kind of politics that constantly struggles to assert itself. Instead of encouraging us to rest easy in the assurance that liberalism will certainly triumph, a conception of liberty based on human dignity recognizes that there is nothing inevitable about its success. While each of us may wish to be free as an individual, it shows that individual freedom is dependent on us all being free; and that means that we all have to cling to our shared humanity, our shared dignity.

I agree with the point there that one of the big problems was with how American politics began to equate liberal democracy to unfettered market interactions, which was not a free market anyway with all the ugliness of crony capitalism.

Does it mean that the Western liberal democracy project is under threat of being overrun by Putinism or the Chinese "communist capitalism" or the theocratic ISIS?

Liberal democracy is not under any threat by any means in the West.  However, the advance of liberal democracy has been halted, and is also being pushed back.  All the crisis in the West is, in the grand scheme of things, something like what President Truman's mother supposedly told him, which I paraphrase to "if that is your biggest problem, then consider yourself to be very lucky."

Pessimism has its advantages: to predict the worst—and, in the event of catastrophe, to boast of having seen it coming—pays off. Optimism is more perilous, since it requires looking at the horizon and discerning positive developments, while risking being called Pangloss, whom Voltaire ridiculed for believing that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The optimist is also shadowed by the temptation to set aside unexpected events that don’t corroborate his original theory. At every moment, he must ask if it is reasonable to stay optimistic; he must also be a skeptic. This is no contradiction

Ah, yes, to be a skeptic. This blogger is always proud to display his skepticism, even while being optimistic.  It is the cautionary stance, that skeptic view, that makes sure we don't fall victim to the prevailing sentiments of any mob.

Crisis and freedom are surely bound together, since the West is essentially driven toward self-criticism and what economists call “creative destruction,” an expression that really should apply to all aspects of our society. To a Chinese person oppressed by tyranny, creative destruction is eminently desirable. Perhaps, then, it’s time to love the West, and our times, more, as others envy us so much. 

It is not jingoistic flag-waving, and prostrating before our governments, that we need to do in order to demonstrate our love of liberty and liberal democracy.  In fact, those acts of obedience are exactly how we have internally weakened the glorious liberal democracy.  We need optimistic skeptics instead.  Easier said than done when people can get so easily distracted by videos of cats playing the piano or by the news of nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence.  Oh well, no wonder we have a crisis in the West!