Are freedom and liberty the natural conditions mankind aspires toward, or are they learned constructs, erected over long years of struggle and reflection but not necessarily accepted by all?
The Bush administration has taken the divine approach, as Orlando Patterson, a Harvard academic, writes in a New York Times op-ed piece today — which has had a disastrous impact on our relationships with the rest of the world. The president, he writes, offered a “disastrously simple-minded argument,” saying that “all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.”
It is this argument that has been central to the administration’s go-it-alone approach to foreign policy, the delusional assumption that the United States government is the keeper of the democratic flame and is therefore empowered to impose democracy around the globe.
Delusional, as I said, and dangerous for everyone — especially American troops and the people they have been asked to liberate, as the Iraq debacle shows.
The issue, as Patterson points out, is the Bush folks’ incredible hubris (my word, not Patterson’s), a hubris that has led to a “failure to distinguish Western beliefs about freedom from those critical features of it that non-Western peoples were likely to embrace.”
Those of us who cherish liberty hold as part of the rhetoric that it is “written in our heart,” an essential part of our humanity. It is among the first civic lessons that we teach our children. But such legitimizing rhetoric should not blind us to the fact that freedom is neither instinctive nor universally desired, and that most of the world’s peoples have found so little need to express it that their indigenous languages did not even have a word for it before Western contact. It is, instead, a distinctive product of Western civilization, crafted through the centuries from its contingent social and political struggles and secular reflections, as well as its religious doctrines and conflicts.
Does this mean that average Iraqis — or Sri Lankans or Liberians or Cubans — should be left to live their lives under the desperate circumstances that repressive regimes create? Of course not.
“Acknowledging the Western social origins of freedom in no way implies that we abandon the effort to make it universal,” Patterson writes.
We do so, however, not at the point of a gun but by persuasion — through diplomacy, intercultural conversation and public reason, encouraged, where necessary, with material incentives. From this can emerge a global regime wherein freedom is embraced as the best norm and practice for private life and government.
The recent history of repressive regimes has been, as Jonathan Schell has written often in The Nation and in his book, “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.” Consider Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe.
More from Patterson:
The good news is that freedom has been steadily carrying the day: nearly all nations now at least proclaim universal human rights as an ideal, though many are yet to put their constitutional commitments to practice. Freedom House’s data show the share of the world’s genuinely free countries increasing from 25 to 46 percent between 1975 and 2005.
The bad news is Iraq. Apart from the horrible toll in American and Iraqi lives, two disastrous consequences seem likely to follow from this debacle. One is the possibility that, by the time America extricates itself, most Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will have come to identify freedom with chaos, deprivation and national humiliation. The other is that most Americans will become so disgusted with foreign engagements that a new insularism will be forced on their leaders in which the last thing that voters would wish to hear is any talk about the global promotion of freedom, whatever “God’s gift” and the “longing of the soul.”
Buried in this final quotation is something troubling — a defense of military solutions in advance of future military adventures — but the point is pretty clear: George W. Bush has burned too many bridges, making it impossible for the United States to function in the world. That, along with thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis and Americans, will be the ultimate legacy of this war.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Hank Kalet 