{"id":2950,"date":"2002-10-16T14:20:50","date_gmt":"2002-10-16T14:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=348"},"modified":"2002-10-16T14:20:50","modified_gmt":"2002-10-16T14:20:50","slug":"brittle-governments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2950","title":{"rendered":"BRITTLE GOVERNMENTS"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the difficulties of dealing with matters in much of the Middle East and Third World in general is the \u0091brittleness\u0092 of the governments there.
\nThis is raised in the questions raised by Chris Bertram<\/a> a few days ago, in his commentary on the Thomas Pogge article<\/a> (pdf file)<\/i> on the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in resource-dependent countries. Bertram and Pogge start by pointing out that political power in a place like Nigeria is the path to wealth \u0096 by Western standards \u0096 for the individuals in power. They take this further, to suggest that the West is immiserating the populations of these countries by accepting the legitimacy of, and trading with, the kleptocrats.
\nAnd it is certainly the case that many of our problems in the Arab world are the result of our desire to have compliant trading partners \u0096 as we have in Saudi Arabia \u0096 whose interests may not intersect well with their population. The anger of the population, logically directed at their rulers, then is redirected by the rulers and cultural institutions that they explicitly support first at Israel and the United States, and then secondarily at modernity in general.
\nHaving mounted this tiger, there is no safe way for these governments to dismount.
\nI don\u0092t know how to respond to Bertram on the issue of \u0091legitimate ownership\u0092 and who should get to determine it; the sad reality is that for most of human history, the definition of property was \u0091what I could keep others from taking\u0092. They aren\u0092t wrong about presenting the problem, but we\u0092re short of the kind of enlightenment \u0096 as well as the kind of Enlightenment \u0096 that would enable justice to be done.
\nThere are a whole slug of problems to be addressed here; I\u0092ll start with the straightforward one.
\nWe somehow continue to expect that cultures which have been in place for hundreds or thousands of years will suddenly, on contact with us, dissolve and allow their members to simply join ours.
\nNow the reality is that Western, market-based culture is corrosive of traditional cultures. But it itself has a cultural base; I\u0092ll make the Weberian argument that can be seen in \u0091The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism\u0092, and suggests that capitalism, and the self-restraint necessary for a culture to succeed in capitalism, is different than the unselfrestrained accumulativeness in more \u0091backward\u0092 societies. Weber said:<\/p>\n

The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has re-mained backward.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I\u0092ll skip over the (very big) issue of whether or not we should attempt to make other countries and other cultures look like us. But I will suggest that we keep operating with the expectation that they will, and that maybe, just maybe, that is going to be much harder than we think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the difficulties of dealing with matters in much of the Middle East and Third World in general is the \u0091brittleness\u0092 of the governments there. This is raised in the questions raised by Chris Bertram a few days ago, in his commentary on the Thomas Pogge article (pdf file) on the legitimacy of authoritarian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2950"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}