Comments on: Phillippines, Malaysia, South Africa: A Full Disclosure Approach to Historical Analogy

By: The Constructivist

The Constructivist — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:29:02 +0000

But doubledubya, what's you position on analogies in meaningless mayral campaigns?

By: withywindle

withywindle — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 03:59:12 +0000

JPool: Jim Crow was a *necessary* thing bound up in the good of preserving liberal democracy. (I recognize that a Communist might say something structurally similar about, say the Gulag.) You make an interesting point about contingency. I think what I want to say is that to recognize contingency, to say there are not inevitable laws of history, is not to say there aren’t overdetermining patterns, that render very likely results. Tim’s pessimisms about the efficacy of American action in some situtations, for example, have some justification as intuitions or temperaments; I just think he is too consistent in his pessimism. I don’t see American political culture in the 1870s as being able to sustain Reconstruction–though you are right that I should probably add a dollop of contingency to that judgment, and say that things could have been significantly better in terms of racial equality (or significantly worse, I suppose). Let me rephrase then: *to the extent* that various past sufferings were necessary prices for liberty, we should endorse them in terms of necessity. (Although never think of them as good in and of themselves, nor cease to engage in moral judgment.) But you are right that we should always keep contingency in our sense of the past, not least so we don’t succumb to the temptation to say “What was, was good.” Practically, the difference between the 1870s and the 1960s that made the dismantling of Jim Crow derives from intervening transformation in the political cultures, societal attitudes, of all Americans, black and white. As for discriminations between free and unfree–oh, come on, why are you asking me a question that requires a book to answer properly? Let us say that philosophically I am something of a neo-Aristotelian right now (wait until I read another book; I may be something else tomorrow), and that Hannah Arendt’s sense of liberty is close to mine. Say also that I am a Burkean conservative who places high value on the institutionalizations of ideals–that liberty as an unattached ideal matters little, but liberty institutionalized in parliamentary practice, history, and emotional attachment to parliament matters very much. America clearly had a broader and more radical liberty and democracy to offer than the UK in the 1776, rooted in enduring provincial legislatures, so deserves advocacy–although I have great sympathy for the Loyalists who thought they opposed only a revolutionary rabble. My advocacy, as I say, always depends on the relevant protagonists–I suppose if you feed me an endless stream of examples, I can give you an endless stream of answers, though this strikes me as a waste of time. If you like, I think the British case in the Boer War is actually one of the weaker ones, since I understand the Afrikaner Republics to have been pretty (white) liberal and democratic; and the case for British interest is, if not quite as derisory as Tim thinks, not the strongest in the world. You’re not the first to call me racist, and I suppose you won’t be the last. Who am I to deny a man his innocent pleasures?

Tim: I think that we should give some credit to people for unanticipated outcomes–not least because they are not entirely unanticipated. We hold our beliefs knowing they are subject to a variety of outcomes, knowing that by excluding some alternatives we open the door to others. British principles in 1899 closed the door on tyranny, and established liberty as an irreducible ideal; the door was held open to 1993 by that choice–and not entirely unconsciously. 1899 may not have loved 1993, but they had already made the fundamental choice that preferred the possibility of 1993 to the possibility of the revocation of 1688. So, yes, they get credit for that. I think the US should get the credit for a future liberal Iraq, just as it should get the blame for a future Hezbollah Iraq–both implicit in the alternatives we have foreclosed.

By: jpool

jpool — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:02:03 +0000

I haven’t read Ferguson, though between you and Fred Cooper I feel like I’m going to have to sometime to understand this contemporary mythology and the resurrected defence of empire that, sooner or later, is going to show up in my prospective classroom.

Part of the deconstruction of colonialism I do is around the idea of colonial citizenship circulation in 1940s and early 1950s British West Africa (but also Uganda and Tanzania) where the British tried unsucessfully to catch up with and redirect some of these ideas of liberal democracy and national sovereignty already in circulation. As you note, these debates, in those lucky cases where I’ve encountered them, contain a lively mix of ideas from pre-colonial political values, missionary and colonial schooling, and wartime propaganda. It’s worth noting in this light that pre-colonial Akan political systems, while containing many elements of radical inequality and a large excluded class, was certainly a liberal democracy by Withywindle’s standards.

On Iraq, that’s an interesting point. It shows neocon millenarianism dove-tailing with Christian fundamentalist millenarianism, even though they have differing views of the great change coming.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:21:29 +0000

I can certainly say that aspects of British liberalism reproduced themselves in the political imagination in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, with at least sometimes good long-term results. But this was an accident of history, not the result of a policy or purpose; if liberalism reproduced itself in the minds and hearts of Africans, it was because they grabbed at its implications against the declared will of colonial policy-makers, much as slaves and abolitionists in the United States wrote the humanity of slaves into the Constitution despite considerable attempts to write them out of it. You can give liberalism itself, or the Constitution itself, some credit as a philosophical doctrine for containing the possibility of its accidental universality. You can’t give colonial policy-makers credit, or many of the initial drafters of the Constitution, credit, because that universalizing was expressly counter to their intent, and often counter to very considerable efforts to prevent it from happening.

This compares to Iraq in a crucial way. Suddenly Withywindle wants the war in Iraq to get credit for its deliberate policy objectives, to write an imaginary future history of Iraq some decades hence in which it is a fully liberal society and to collapse anything that might have come between the deliberate, programmatic decisions being made now and that hypothetical future.

But 1993 was not what the British were trying to do in creating the Union of South Africa. In fact, the bargain they struck with the defeated Afrikaner leadership more or less made 1993 less likely to happen in any future rather than more likely. Even in the most Hegelian and teleological scheme you could imagine, the settlement of the Boer War deferred the freedom of all South Africans rather than secured it. The only credit that Britain can get for anything good about the post-1993 era is indirect and accidental, for the underlying vigor and potential of its political culture. Joe Chamberlain, Alfred Milner, Lord Salisbury, Cecil Rhodes and others get credit only for spending lives and money like a sailor chasing whores and then more or less capitulating to the repressive whims of their defeated enemies in order to get out with their political asses intact.

This is what’s nuts about Niall Ferguson’s claim that liberalism and good governance were spread programmatically and on purpose by colonial officers, as an altruistic gift to the non-Western world. Liberalism was spread the way that ticks are spread by a dog, by riding invisibly along with people whose job it was to administer an empire or to convert its subjects into Christians. They couldn’t help themselves, though lord knows they tried from time to time.

This is the point about Iraq. At this juncture, anything that American policy-makers choose to do is likely to have little relationship to the achievement of some distantly future political order, frankly. In that case, given that withdrawal at the least saves American lives and resources, might as well. The war itself is likely to have a pretty catastrophic effect on the possibility of progressive change in Iraq for some time to come regardless of how it formally concludes.

By: jpool

jpool — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:27:34 +0000

Huh.
OK, I can sort of see the not further complicating the argument thing, but given that your view of the situation runs precisely counter to what Tim was arguing, as well as to what I would say is the current historical consensus on South Africa, I don’t see how this would be a “free gift to him.”
But then that doesn’t matter, because you go on to the very odd teleology through which you view the last couple centuries. So all of this enslavement and disenfranchisement and suffering is not just a tragic historical reality, but a necessary element for the creation of British/American democracy? From someone who often insists, “But if you take away this variable, then who’s to say others wouldn’t arise in its place?” this seems a particularly odd theory of history. So would you say that Jim Crow was a good thing because it somehow preserved liberal democracy for White US Southerners (and I suppose white US unity) rather than a cowardly betrayal because it specifically denied liberal democracy to non-White Americans? And would you then see its dismantling some 80 years later not as the result of sucessful resistance by those disenfranchised, but as the flowering of that same political culture that sought to disenfranchise them? Your 93-year cicada theory of British democratic culture in South Africa starts to seem at least more consistent in this light.
I could try asking you how you make this discrimination between free people (or just men?) and the unfree, or what it means to have stable politcal institutions and a deep political culture (so, at the time, the creation of the US was a horrible mistake, yes?), or what other nations you see as having these qualities (France, the Netherlands?) and thus as being worthy of historical advocacy over the Others, but I don’t know if that would illuminate the underlying issues. So, yes, I’ll stick with my earlier assessment of your beliefs here.

By: withywindle

withywindle — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:43:05 +0000

Tim: thank you for return of compliments and civility! I don’t actually know that I have an exact sense of the proportion of academics I fear are beyond my persuasion. In the younger generation, I would say a minimum of a quarter–perhaps a majority, although I hope not. I would not be surprised to discover that I was in the most conservative 1% of humanities academics in my age cohort.

JPool: Re South Africa, I deliberately excluded the Africans from the moral calculus because I understood that that is usually held to aid the case for British annexation–that (contra the tenor of Tim’s argument that the Boer War bears culpability for apartheid) the Afrikaners would have been more harsh toward the Afrikaners absent British annexation–imposed apartheid or some other system of racial oppression sooner and/or more harshly. I thought it would be unfair of me to add that complicating argument in my favor–playing with the given terms of the debate. So that was intended as a free gift to Tim.

More broadly, 1) I weigh the interests and survival of nations whose liberal democracy is rooted in stable institutions and a deep political culture far above the interests of nations lacking these attributes; 2) in each given historical period, my judgments favor the nation whose liberal democracy is broadest and most stable among its contemporary peers; 3) I take the growth of liberal democracy in history to be inextricably bound up with oppressions, expulsions, and conquests, and that (tragically) these were the necessary prices of the growth of liberty. (I.e., English liberty depnded on giving the anti-democratic upper classes room to play in Ireland and the larger Empire; sucks to be Irish or colonial, but better they suffer than no English liberty. American freedom is built on American slavery and mass murder of Indians; ditto on suckage and the preferability of American liberty.) If you like, I accept much of the left-critique on how great was the cost of the growth of modern liberal democracies, but preserve a right-judgment on the value and worth of the said liberal democracies–which is not dependent on said liberal democracies being particularly nice. I am perfectly willing to acknowledge the sufferings of the colonized; I don’t take their suffering to be the only measure of historical judgment. I fancy that most Irishmen and Africans are unlikely to share my scale of values anytime soon, but that isn’t by itself a sufficient judgement on their rightness or wrongness. You are welcome to call this racist or nationalist if you like, some thin screen or justification; it is to my mind a discrimination between free men and the unfree.

By: jpool

jpool — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:15:35 +0000

Sorry, that last line should read “because they were poor examples of it themselves.”

By: jpool

jpool — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:12:43 +0000

Withywindle,
You politely commanded that I should explain my use of the term “racist.” My temptation is to say, you’re a smart guy, figure it out, but, as it is indeed a serious charge, I’ll make an effort to explain.
The short version is that you discus the decisions of the US and Britain as colonial powers without any reference to their effects on the rights, welfare or lives of the colonized. You write about necessary trade offs in South Africa in terms of Afrikaner suffering, not in terms of the much greater long-term suffering of non-White South Africans. This is not just looking at the big picture, it is considering a historical dynamic with one set of sympathies turned up to 11 and another turned down to zero.
This is why the question of whether you were seriously arguing that these efforts to maintain colonial control in the face of insurgency were good for liberal democracy seemed important. Perhaps you simply equate the U.S. and Britain with liberal democracy, in which case you could argue that you are not a racist, but simply a colonialist and an ultra-nationalist.
We can deconstruct the old image of colonialism as the “crusher of rocks” and take seriously itself image as a civilizing mission and late efforts at democratic tutelage all day long (and, indeed, I do some of this in my work), but it doesn’t change the fact that it was, in essence, a system of national and racial domination. This is why I think Achille Mbembe’s point about commandement is important, and it’s why colonial regimes tended to be very poor teachers of liberal democracy — because they were examples of it themselves.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:58:27 +0000

Well, right back atcha on that. It’s definitely worth continuing the conversation. I think one thing I’d like to convince you of is that there are more academics, left and otherwise, who are “within your reach”, that the core of academia are people who care primarily about ideas and intellectualism despite a lot of the institutional and careerist pressures that try to push them elsewhere. But as you know, I’d also agree that there’s an awful lot wrong with academia.

By: withywindle

withywindle — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:35:16 +0000

I don’t actually think we disagree on most of the bundles of principles at stake, but rather (to keep flogging a dead horse) on the prudential judgments of means and circumstance. Now these are significant–I rate the acuity of Kirkpatrick’s prudential judgment and analysis far more highly than you do, and it does of course have significant policy differences–but I recognize you as inhabiting the same moral universe as I do. (The universe is a large place, but still.) I do keep hoping that this statement of basic moral recognition will elicit a countervailing response. However, if not you, I hope to receive it from some unknown reader, now or in the future. The point of all this gabbling, after all.

(And, fundamentally, why I keep bugging you by commenting on your website. Aside from the fact that I find you interesting and decent, and I do take intrinsic pleasure in reading and commenting here, you seem to me to be right at the edge of the mental horizon where you can either fall off the edge of engaging someone of my views in discourse, or of turning back to continue the effort. I think it’s worth the effort to try to rope you into continued discourse. What I’m doing here is in effect the encapsulation of one of my larger projects–persuasion by varying rhetorical modes aimed at academics to make them acknowledge my political and philosophical stance as part of their moral universe. A great number I’m afraid are beyond my reach. It is your dubious fortune that I judge that you are not quite.)