Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn't 'Western'

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics discusses the deception of using cultural differences between countries as an explanation of economic and political differences, in particular as an explanation for the emergence of democracy in some countries, but not in others:

Democracy Isn't 'Western', by Amartya Sem, Commentary, WSJ:  "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Culture too, like our stars, is often blamed for our failures. Attempts to build a better world capsize, it is alleged, in the high sea of cultural resistance. The determinism of culture is increasingly used in contemporary global discussions to generate pessimism about the feasibility of a democratic state, or of a flourishing economy, or of a tolerant society, wherever these conditions do not already obtain.

Indeed, cultural stereotyping can have great effectiveness in fixing our way of thinking. When there is an accidental correlation between cultural prejudice and social observation (no matter how casual), a theory is born, and it may refuse to die even after the chance correlation has vanished without trace. For example, labored jokes against the Irish, which have had such currency in England, had the superficial appearance of fitting well with the depressing predicament of the Irish economy when it was doing quite badly. But when the Irish economy started growing astonishingly rapidly, for many years faster than any other European economy, the cultural stereotyping and its allegedly profound economic and social relevance were not junked as sheer rubbish. Theories have lives of their own, quite defiantly of the phenomenal world that can be actually observed.

Many have observed that in the '60s South Korea and Ghana had similar income per head, whereas within 30 years the former grew to be 15 times richer than the latter. This comparative history is immensely important to study and causally analyze, but the temptation to put much of the blame on Ghanaian or African culture (as is done by as astute an observer as Samuel Huntington) calls for some resistance. Mr. Huntington closes his contrast with a spectacular formula: "South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count." Ghanaians, and perhaps many other Africans, seem doomed to stagnate, according to this analysis.

In fact, that cultural story is extremely deceptive. There were many important differences, other than any differences in cultural predispositions, between Ghana and Korea in the 1960s. First, the class structures in the two countries were quite different, with a very much bigger -- and proactive -- role of business classes in Korea. Second, the politics were very different, too, with the government in South Korea eager to play a prime-moving role in initiating societal reform and economic development in a way that was not true in Ghana. Third, the close relationship between the Korean economy and Japan, on the one hand, and the U.S., on the other, made a big difference, at least in the early stages of Korean economic expansion.

Fourth -- and perhaps most important -- by the 1960s South Korea had acquired a much higher literacy rate and a much more expanded school system than Ghana had. Korean massive progress in school education had been largely brought about in the post-World War II period, mainly through resolute public policy, and it could not be seen just as a reflection of cultural difference. This is not to suggest that cultural factors are irrelevant to the process of development, but they do not work in isolation from social, political and economic influences. Nor are they immutable.

The temptation of founding economic pessimism on cultural resistance is matched by the evident enchantment, even more common today, of basing political pessimism, particularly about democracy, on alleged cultural impossibilities. While it is easy enough to understand the widespread -- and increasing -- doubts about armed intervention allegedly aimed at jump-starting democracy in Iraq through largely foreign and military planning, it would be quite a leap from there to become skeptical of the general possibility of the emergence of democracy in any country that is currently nondemocratic. It is worth remembering that democracy has developed well enough in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the case of some, such as South Africa, even foreign assistance to local democratic movements (for example through economic boycott) has positively helped.

When it is asked whether Western countries can "impose" democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of "imposition," since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy "belongs" to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially "Western" idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.

Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is "government by discussion," and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society). There can be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and of public reasoning have been very deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as Marquis de Condorcet, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be deeply misleading. There is a long history of public reasoning across the world, and while it has gone through ups and downs everywhere, the sharp priority of liberal tolerance that has emerged in the West over the past three centuries reflects how social evolution can strengthen and consolidate one tendency to the exclusion -- or near exclusion -- of other tendencies.

The belief in the allegedly "Western" nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition ("they are all Europeans," we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).

Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer." Mr. Mandela could combine his modern ideas about democracy with emphasizing the supportive part of the native tradition, in a way that Gandhi had done in India, and that is the way cultures adapt and develop to respond to modernity. Mr. Mandela's quest for democracy and freedom did not emerge from any Western "imposition."

Similarly, the history of Muslims includes a variety of traditions, not all of which are just religious or "Islamic" in any obvious sense. The work of Arab and Iranian mathematicians, from the eighth century onward reflects a largely nonreligious tradition. Depending on politics, which varied between one Muslim ruler and another, there is also quite a history of tolerance and of public discussion, on which the pursuit of a modern democracy can draw. For example, the emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides, as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).

Cultural dynamics does not have to build something from absolutely nothing, nor need the future be rigidly tied to majoritarian beliefs today or the power of the contemporary orthodoxy. To see Iranian dissidents who want a fully democratic Iran not as Iranian advocates but as "ambassadors of Western values" would be to add insult to injury, aside from neglecting parts of Iranian history (including the practice of democracy in Susa or Shushan in southwest Iran 2,000 years ago). The diversity of the human past and the freedoms of the contemporary world give us much more choice than cultural determinists acknowledge. This is particularly important to emphasize since the illusion of cultural destiny can extract a heavy price in the continued impoverishment of human lives and liberties.

Comments

[anne]

Wonderful Mark Thoma offers essays of remarkable importance :) Amartya Sen is a gem and I do wish we might turn to appreciating values that are more than an imitation of what we assume to be ours. We might even, oh dear, ask after our own values in these turmoil filled times.

[slink]

nice piece mark

sen never lets us down

[anne]

Smartya Sen

Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer." Mr. Mandela could combine his modern ideas about democracy with emphasizing the supportive part of the native tradition, in a way that Gandhi had done in India, and that is the way cultures adapt and develop to respond to modernity. Mr. Mandela's quest for democracy and freedom did not emerge from any Western "imposition."

Imagine the delicacy with which Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and a mix from revolutionary to communist to capitalist led South Africa to a remarkably democratic constitution and political and social hopefulness for all the legacy of fierce separation.

[Emmanuel]

I'm looking forward to his next book, "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny." It should be another sooper read.

[anne]

Another lovely related thinker:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/books/review/12FREEDMA.html?ex=1276315200&en=b3e3c0b7da1d201c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

June 12, 2005

'The Ethics of Identity': A Rooted Cosmopolitan
By JONATHAN FREEDMAN

These may be conservative times, but liberal political theory is poised to make a comeback. And not just the chilly sort that flickers in the hearts of libertarians, but a variety that seeks to revive the traditions of tolerance, pluralism and respect for both individual and group rights that animated liberal thought for the greater part of the last two centuries. Such, at least, is the promise offered by the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's suave and discerning ''Ethics of Identity.'' Appiah seeks to reorient political philosophy by returning to the example set by John Stuart Mill in ''On Liberty.''

Having in his youth rebelled against his father's dry utilitarian philosophy and solaced himself with Romantic poetry; and having loved, married and lost a brilliant woman, Harriet Taylor, Mill constructed a passionately precise argument for the rights of both individuals and minority groups in the face of ''the tyranny of the majority.'' Appiah wants to graft the branch of Millian individualism back onto the tree of political philosophy at a moment when possibilities of personhood unknown to Mill have entered public discussion -- the openly gay man or lesbian and the postcolonial subject, to name a few. Affirmative action, gay marriage, the human rights movement, even the teaching of evolution in the public schools: just about all the hot-button controversies of our moment turn on the scope and limits of individual and group rights Mill attempted to sort out more than a century ago.

No wonder, then, that Mill has been claimed by both the left and the right: the N.A.A.C.P. and the Young Americans for Freedom can each trace their lineage back to ''On Liberty.'' But Mill remains a shrewd choice: pursuing his example enables Appiah to jettison a good deal of the baggage that has been piled onto the liberal project in the last hundred years, to return to first principles. Appiah uses Mill -- who, over the course of the book, becomes more its touchstone, less its subject -- to focus ethical attention on the notion of identity.

This notion, he suggests, posits both a self with the freedom to create itself and a self shaped in relation to collective identities. Indeed, for Appiah these two ways of viewing the self are inseparable. I am who I am not only because I am engaged in the lifelong task of becoming the person I want to be but also because I can identify myself with groups of people engaged in similar ''life-projects'': secular Jews, people with kids, people raised in Iowa City, to mention three personal instances. Appiah stresses that the life-project I am carrying out, the story of my self that I'm struggling to tell, can't be separated from the affiliations in which that project was formed and to which it refers. The very pursuit of individualism demands the cultivation of collective identities, and the often conflicting ethical demands of each represent the poles between which Appiah's arguments swing....

[anne]

Of a mother:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/international/africa/16appiah.html?ex=1297746000&en=363d1c2d0df3d2ef&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

February 16, 2006

Peggy Appiah, 84, Author Who Bridged Two Cultures
By NADINE BROZAN

Peggy Appiah, who as a daughter of a British chancellor of the exchequer defied the conventions of her time by marrying an Ashanti political leader and who went on to become an author and a revered figure in her adopted homeland, Ghana, died Saturday in Kumasi, Ghana. She was 84.

The cause was a heart attack at Akomfo Anokye Hospital, according to her son, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Reared in upper-crust Britain, the youngest of four children of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labor party leader and cabinet officer in the Clement Attlee government (1945-51), Peggy Cripps caused an international sensation when she announced plans to marry in July 1953. Her fiancé was Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, who was in London as a law student and representative of Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of the Gold Coast, the British colony that became Ghana in 1957.

Nkrumah was Ghana's first president, and Mr. Appiah was a close associate and his choice for vice president, until political differences led Nkrumah to imprison him several times.

The Appiahs are said to have been the inspiration, along with another African-British couple, Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, for the 1967 film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which dealt with a California couple's reaction to their daughter's engagement to a black doctor.

That view was lent support by Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard, and a friend of Mr. Appiah's since their student days, who noted that it was a marriage of equals at the highest levels of their societies.

"She was to the manner born and he was an aristocrat related to the king of the Ashanti," Mr. Gates said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "He was the John Adams of his country; its founding father with Kwame Nkrumah."

The couple met at a gathering of the West African Students Union, of which Mr. Appiah was president. From the start, Miss Cripps made it clear that she would not be intimidated by the firestorm of criticism the couple endured.

"If we experience any difficulties in mixing with Europeans, I shall throw in my lot with the colored people," she told The Sunday Express of London.

The marriage came to symbolize far more than the union of two individuals. Richard Weight, a British historian who is making a documentary about interracial marriage, said: "For a lot of people, it drew the line between those who thought Britain had an integrated postcolonial future and those who didn't. And it became an international story with particular resonance because it involved the daughter of a former chancellor." ...

[anne]

Who we might be:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/arts/09conn.html?ex=1294462800&en=dd33e180560e7665&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

January 9, 2006

A Philosopher's Vision of Fundamentalism
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

"They believe in human dignity across the nations, and they live their creed," Kwame Anthony Appiah writes in his elegantly provocative new book, "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers" (W. W. Norton). "They share these ideals with people in many countries," he continues. Moreover, they are "thoroughgoing globalists" who resist both "the crass consumerism of modern Western society" and the "narrow nationalisms of the countries where they were born."

Who are they, these transnational idealists with their utopian visions? Before identifying them, Mr. Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton University, almost teases us into admiration of their goals. In fact, with his meditative, conversational prose, he has already mounted a defense of similar universalist ambitions.

But these particular idealists, he says, are actually "young, global Muslim fundamentalists; they are the recruiting grounds for Al Qaeda."

At first, we are shocked, brought up short. The description was so seductive, the virtue so plain. But that is one of Mr. Appiah's points. The fundamentalists' ambition is also a form of universalism, and it is profoundly believed. They too have their vision of human dignity, their grand plans, their notion of utopian possibilities. And like other utopians, they "resist the call of all local allegiances, all traditional loyalties, even to family."

How then are these universalists any different from those in the West who might use political rather than religious concepts, substitute notions of reason for sharia, and affirm individual liberties rather than a communal ummah? Who is to say which universalist ideal is superior, and why?

Those questions reflect a great relativist temptation that has been much indulged in recent years, but Mr. Appiah will have none of it. In fact, one of the goals of this short but pungent book is to try to describe a more ethical form of universalism that would not resemble any imagined by a fundamentalist. He calls it "cosmopolitanism."

The word cosmopolitan, he points out, dates back to the Greek Cynics of the fourth century B.C. and means a "citizen of the cosmos" - someone who transcends the restrictive loyalties of a citizen to a particular polis, or city-state. The concept was also heralded by the philosophers of the European Enlightenment who attempted to define the "universal rights of man"; in 1788, Christoph Martin Wieland wrote that cosmopolitans "regard all the peoples of the earth as so many branches of a single family."

The concept fell on hard times during the 20th century - cosmopolitanism was a code word used by both Hitler and Stalin as a slur against the Jews, who were seen as rootless aliens. But Mr. Appiah believes it is due for a revival, particularly at a time when cultures confront one another in battles over matters ranging from ownership of historical artifacts to acts of terror....