vulgar morality : Blogging for the relationship between morality and freedom
Updated: 4/3/2005; 11:36:32 AM.

 

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Friday, March 11, 2005

THE HABITS OF COMMANDAbdel-Moneim Said provides the flip side of the coin:  the Arab perspective on the question whether freedom can spread to places that have long been unfree.  Said contemplates Arab "exceptionalism":  "For two decades now the Arabs have been spoken of as a special case, as a people unlike other peoples. Apparently, what is good for others is not good for us."  His conclusions don't differ materially from those of Robert Conquest:

What we see now is the tip of the iceberg. We don't know whether the Sudanese agreement will hold. We don't know whether the election of Mahmoud Abbas is the beginning or the end of the struggle for Palestinian salvation. We don't know whether the Iraqi elections will bring national unity or civil war. We don't know whether thae changes in Saudi Arabia are the start of real reform, or a ripple across a stagnant pond. We don't know whether the constitutional amendment is the beginning of a comprehensive political makeover in Egypt or a measure designed to stall reform.

We don't know whether the Lebanese protests will nudge the country towards independence or chaos. All these questions lack answers.

All we know is that the bureaucracy, conservatism and fundamentalism that surround us remain strong. They are forces that thrived on our exceptionalism, and they will stop at nothing as they try to drag us back.


11:41:46 PM    comment []

THE HABITS OF FREEDOMA few days back I wrote on the difficulty of imposing democracy on elite-ridden cultures.  My point was that freedom depends on a specific kind of person, the citizen, who must hold his ground in many other domains than politics.  A certain amount of economic and intellectual independence is required, for example.

Debating democracy is in the air.  Shortly after my post, the Becker-Posner blog carried two long posts and a heated discussion on the question:  is economic independence more important than political freedom?  Now Robert Conquest, writing in the National Interest, has a rambling but provocative article on the impossibility of "Downloading Democracy."  Conquest's main point is absolutely correct, and lies at the heart of this blog:  freedom is a matter of right habits, of morality embedded in behavior, more than institutions or procedures, such as elections.  Free peoples will impose democratic structures on government; democratic structures absent a free people are a body without a soul.  Here is Conquest's take on the subject:

"Democracy" is often given as the essential definition of Western political culture. At the same time, it is applied to other areas of the world in a formal and misleading way. So we are told to regard more or less uncritically the legitimacy of any regime in which a majority has thus won an election. But "democracy" did not develop or become viable in the West until quite a time after a law-and-liberty polity had emerged. Habeas corpus, the jury system and the rule of law were not products of "democracy", but of a long effort, from medieval times, to curb the power of the English executive. And democracy can only be seen in any positive or laudable sense if it emerges from and is an aspect of the law-and-liberty tradition.

Institutions that differ in the United States and the United Kingdom have worked (though forms created in other countries that were theoretically much the same have often collapsed). That is to say, at least two formally different sets of institutions have generally flourished. It seems that the main thing they share is not so much the institutions as the habits of mind, which are far more crucial, and, above all, the acceptance of the traditional rules of the political game.

More broadly, in the West it has been tradition that has been generally determinant of public policy. Habituation is more central to a viable constitution than any other factor. Even the Western "democracies" are not exactly models of societies generated by the word, the abstract idea. Still they, or some of them, roughly embody the concept, as we know it, and at least are basically consensual and plural--the product of at best a long evolution.

I concur.


10:26:23 PM    comment []

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