If You Build It, They Will Come

Where on earth did this week go to? I know that Thursday night I went to a friend's birthday party, and Wednesday night was busy for some other reason. And the world just seems overwhelming lately.

I haven't written about the protests in Egypt, because while I support them I'm not knowledgeable enough to say anything useful about them. (Yeah, like that's ever stopped me before...) I'd hope that the people who read this blog know where to look for information, but if not, try Democracy Now!'s coverage, or the liveblogging by the blogger at Moon of Alabama (CORRECTION: not Billmon, as I mistakenly wrote before -- sorry for the mistake), or articles by an old friend of mine, an Egyptian-American journalist who's been in the thick of things in Tahrir Square. (I've seen the weird phrase "pro-Mubarak supporters" in more than one US news article; aside from being redundant, it covers up the fact that the "supporters" are mostly thugs and plainclothes police in Mubarak's pay -- which doesn't exclude their being "supporters", but suggests a false equivalence between them and the anti-Mubarak protesters.) Ash, who's the source for the photo above, has apparently been heard on NPR and the BBC, along with other people who actually know what they're talking about, a big improvement on the usual malignly ignorant talking heads.

And that's not including such purely malign figures as President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, who'd be hard to keep out of the media in any case. It appears that the "reform" we're supposedly seeing now is a typical change-without-change: Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's new vice president, has a long history as torturer-for-hire.

The FAIR blog, as usual, has been critiquing the corporate media coverage, such as the noteworthy but unsurprising agreement between "conservative" pundits like Charles Krauthammer and "liberal" ones like Joe Klein that democracy isn't for Mooslims. (At least not until they've been invaded and occupied by the US, I suppose.)

Which reminds me that my right-wing Facebook friends have been surprisingly quiet about the Egyptian uprising. RWA2 posted a quotation from Admiral Dama of Battleship Galactica (I had to ask for the source): "There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." I pointed out that in Egypt, it's the military that had been siding with the people, however uncharacteristically, and the police that sent in thugs and agents provocateurs to attack the demonstrators. Plus, of course, the US has traditionally preferred to blur the distinction between the police and the army in our client countries, arming and training both. No further exchange ensued, or I'd have asked why a self-styled libertarian likes a statist like General Dama: the army "fights the enemies of the state"? Doesn't the army supposedly defend the people against those who would attack and enslave them? Someone's got his propaganda all garbled.

RWA1 has also been relatively taciturn on the Egyptian protests. At first he stuck with links to relatively noncommittal stuff like this reassuring piece by Robert Kaplan (The protests "are not about the existential plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation; nor are they at least overtly anti-Western or even anti-American. The demonstrators have directed their ire against unemployment, tyranny, and the general lack of dignity and justice in their own societies.") and this fatuous piece from National Review Online which claimed that it's all about Demographics: Then he recommended an op-ed from the Philly Inquirer which called on the Obama administration to "get on the right side in Egypt", but that couldn't last; next he recommended this article by a stupid and vicious Tory from the Telegraph which blames TV and "Muslim extremists" in England for the protests in Tunisia and Egypt: "The Iranian Revolution of 1979 began with the overthrow of an unpopular autocrat and ended with the triumph of a murderous theocrat." That "unpopular autocrat" was also murderous, but that can conveniently be forgotten. RWA1's thrashing about on the issues is all too typical of right-thinking educated Americans, of course, which is why I'm talking about it here.

Myself, I approve of the demonstrations in Egypt and elsewhere, because I think that people should have as much control as possible over their governments -- that governments should be accountable to their people. The whole point of US and Israeli support for Mubarak has been to have an Egyptian government that is not accountable to its people. It's tempting to say that the US should simply butt out of Egyptian politics, but I'm not sure that's possible: there will be plenty of other outside forces butting in, so the question is whether we can butt in intelligently (as hilarious as the idea is, given our track record). Another Facebook friend linked to this very sensible blog post from a couple of days ago.

If the people go home now, there will be a few days of relief and peace. Those who only want stability at any cost will be appeased. The U.S. government and the American media will report it as a victory for Egyptian democracy, because Mubarak has agreed to step down in the fall and the protesters have "agreed" (by virtue of going home). There will be a respite of a week or two, and the story will fade from the international news.

Then it will begin. Mubarak's security team will start combing the videos that have been uploaded over the past week, making notes of names and faces. They will obtain phone and internet records. They will start tapping phones and monitoring Facebook. (In the U.S. the word "Facebook" means "ha ha I spend too much time here omg I should be studying"; in Egypt it means that too, but is also a way to organize politically in a country where there is no right to assemble.)

And so on; the whole post is worth reading. Constructing a democratic Egypt will not be easy because of the repressive state apparatus that has been in place for more than thirty years, with US and other outside support. You don't dismantle all those institutions simply by getting rid of the guy at the top, if only because not even the most brutal tyrant or absolute monarch rules alone. It's a popular mainstream US trope to excuse our support of repressive regimes by saying that there are no local institutions of self-government there; to the extent that it's true, it's because such local institutions have been stamped out before they could become effective. Which is not accidental, despite the equally popular imperial lament of Joe Klein (via), "How on earth do we get saddled with such creepy clients as Karzai and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, over and over again?" We don't "get saddled with" them, we choose them, over and over again, because only corrupt tyrants will let themselves be bought by outsiders. And it isn't "we" (viz., Americans) who are saddled with them, it's them -- you know, the faceless huddled masses of Afghanistan and Egypt.

This is not to say, as the blogger I just quoted wrote in another post, that "the U.S. hates democracy for its own sake." The blogger attributes this idea to a "forty-year-old analysis" of unnamed "progressives"; I think it's a straw man, because 1) I can't remember ever having seen any progressive or left analyst say such a thing and 2) this is a common accusation made against left critics of the US imperium -- that we think the US is responsible for all the bad things that happen in the world, and so on. If we can get democracies that will go along with us, we will let them survive. "The United States government would support a stuffed rabbit or Paris Hilton if it meant making the Arab world safe for economic investment and keeping the Suez Canal open," the blogger says. Exactly what people like Noam Chomsky have been saying for decades. But unfortunately, cheap docile labor and other perks of a welcoming investment climate are hard to square with local governments that are accountable to their people. That, and not some metaphysical hatred of democracy, is the reason for the ongoing US discomfort with democracy, abroad and at home. It's because capitalism (whether nominally private or public -- it doesn't make much difference in practice) is incompatible with democracy.

Gleaning My Teeming Brain Again

I don't know if I'm exactly over what I've had the past week -- I'm still coughing a lot, and haven't decided whether to go to the doctor about it -- but at least I'm able to read again, and I feel a certain compulsion to write. Which is a very nice feeling.

So I'm dipping into a book called A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain (Believer Books, 2009), a collection of nine conversations between the philosopher Tamler Sommers and "ten acclaimed researchers in the burgeoning field of moral psychology" as the back-cover blurb describes them. I have a feeling I'll be referring to it here with some frequency in the days to come.

In the conversation with Joseph Henrich, a researcher with a background in anthropology at the University of British Columbia, there's this (page 127):

TS: What do you think the social and practical implications of your research are?

JH: One practical implication of all this is that things like formal institutions, legal systems, laws, formal government, they have to be well-fitted to the informal local norms. And so what you can't do is take a formal system from one place and just plop it on top of another place, and expect it to work. Because there's no fit. That seems to have all kinds of implications for economic development, for all kinds of things.

TS: Maybe a certain war we're engaged in? Trying to bring our values, democracy, to a region where it might not fit -- is that something you'd think is unwise?

JH: Sure, that definitely comes to mind. Of course, the Iraq situation is just the latest installment of this same notion that happened a lot throughout Africa. Instituting a British parliamentary system or something like that. And it's really hard to get those things to work because it doesn't fit with the local system of values. The idea of doing democracy in a Fijian village, for example, is actually insulting to its people there because they have a hierarchy that's based on the chief. And we've been studying why they think the chief has the right to make these decisions. They have an existing system which isn't a democracy, although it does give equal voice to everybody. But it is a decision-making system. If you tried to just stick a democracy in there, I can't imagine what would -- things just wouldn't go well.

TS: The norms are too entrenched for that to work.

Whew. That took my breath away all over again as I typed it in -- the sheer arrogance and stupidity that exude from every sentence, uttered by two very intelligent, highly educated and thoughtful men. One reason I want to pass it along is to see if anyone else has the same reaction I did.

Where to begin? Well, first, of course, there was never any intention on the US' part of bringing "democracy" to Iraq in the first place. Nor did the British have any such intention in India or the rest of their Asian and African empire. The US and its collaborators invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in order to gain control of its oil reserves and establish US military bases there. Elections were not on Bush's agenda until they were forced on him by mostly Shi'a nonviolent resistance, and then they were a mere public-relations formality, which he overrode at his pleasure. The election results in Iraq have signaled Iraqis' demand that the US withdraw its occupying army, a demand affirmed without compliance by the Status of Forces Agreement concluded at the end of Bush's second term. The situation has not changed under Obama, despite or because of all the handwringing over Iraqis' alleged refusal to take responsibility for their government. One might as honestly speak of Saddam's trying to "stick a democracy" on Kuwait in 1990. Yet neither Sommers nor Henrich seems to be experiencing any cognitive dissonance at their application of the term.

Second, then, I have to wonder what Sommers and Henrich mean by "democracy" in their exchange. The meaning of the word isn't clear under the best of circumstances, and it appears to me that they are using it here in its normal, North American propaganda sense: the American way, just like we have in the States: elections, a legislature, courts, an executive, lobbyists, mass media, corporate donations, with plenty of structural and practical barriers to keep the majority of Americans away from the levers of power. (Henrich was teaching in Canada at the time of the interview, but he had lived and worked in the US until 2006.) Of course you couldn't easily transplant such a complex, expensive, and corrupt system just anywhere overnight, but who in their right mind would want to?

Third, the Fijian setup Henrich describes doesn't sound all that un-democratic. (Without the quotes.) There's an executive, the chief, who "makes the decisions," but the Fijians do "give equal voice to everybody." If the Fijians have a "hierarchy," so does the US, even in theory, from local to state to federal, and ladders of influence and power within each branch.

Seriously, I can't imagine what Sommers and Henrich think they're talking about here. On the face of it they're simply indulging in a very familiar self-congratulatory white-guy view of the dusky races, and Henrich in particular seems to be gesturing toward the idea of anthropologists functioning as consultants to imperial power in the metropole on dealing with subject peoples in the far-flung protectorates. I'm just surprised, given the amount of self-criticism among anthropologists in the past half-century for having played that role in the past, to see him so complacent and open about it now. His criticism of past efforts seems not to consider that other people in other "regions" might have a right to direct themselves (that would be "insulting"), nor even that "informal local norms" should be respected for their own sake -- only that "you can't ... take a formal system from one place and just plop it on top of another place, and expect it to work." If the systems of control are tailored to "informal local norms", they might work very well -- for the outside controllers, anyway.

As I say, this is nothing new. I was just mildly surprised to find it rearing its head in such a nice liberal-minded discussion. Knowing what I know, I shouldn't have been; indeed, it's exactly where I should have expected to find it.