Philosophical Apprentice comments.

The Reader needn’t resort to the doom saying political hysterics of Niall Ferguson, to find that ‘we’ are in trouble, of the most dire kind! That Reader just needs to consult this ‘essay’ for a package of bad news.

Leaders | Value judgments

Authoritarians are on the march

They argue that universal values are the new imperialism. They are wrong

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/03/authoritarians-are-on-the-march?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

The Economist bases it’s essay on ‘The World Values Survey’ this link is to an evaluation:

The Public Face of Science Across the World

Analyzing the World Values Survey

https://www.amacad.org/publication/science-across-the-world/section/3

Some quotations from this evaluation are instructive:

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Yet even controlling for human, economic, and democratic development, people living in countries with greater scientific and technological development as measured by per capita scientific publications, patents, and citations tended to be more optimistic about science and technology. Whether such optimism creates a culture that drives scientific ambition and productivity or whether such outputs boost optimism is not a question we can answer with our data. The most likely explanation, however, is a reinforcing, virtuous circle of optimism driving output and output reinvigorating optimism, irrespective of the stage of economic and democratic development a country may be in. In all, controlling for individual-level factors within countries, our model predicts 53 percent of the between-country differences in terms of scientific optimism.

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There is, however, one important caveat to these relationships. When we examined the relationship between individual-level beliefs about state authority and country-level context, we observed that the influence of state authority skepticism on scientific optimism is significantly more pronounced among those living in highly developed countries (see Figure 1). In wealthy countries, for individuals who distrust the police, military, or courts, they may be more prone to view the close association between scientific research, technological innovation, militarization, and surveillance as operating in the service of social control, rather than economic growth, as their counterparts in developing countries might primarily view science. Overall, our final model including country-level and individual-level factors accounted for 15 percent of within-country, individual variation in scientific optimism.

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Apart from the religious, those who are more distrustful of various forms of societal authority and conventional norms also expressed greater reservations about science. Somewhat paradoxically, moral relativism across countries is significantly related to reservations about the impact of science and technology on faith, morality, and the perceived importance to life. Notably, the relationship between defiance of traditional authority and scientific reservations varies strongly by the level of democratic development in a country. In countries with fewer civil liberties and press freedoms, science may still be closely associated with forms of government and societal control; thus, those who are distrusting of traditional authority expressed higher levels of scientific reservations. In contrast, their counterparts living in strongly democratic countries expressed far fewer reservations about science and technology (see Figure 5).

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https://www.amacad.org/publication/science-across-the-world/section/3

The Reader might inquire what ‘universal values’ means? But short of that, look to these paragraphs, as steeped in Oxbridger self-serving Political Mendacity- wedded to an apologetic for the murderous political adventurism, of the Neo-Conservative clique, still in charge of American Foreign policy: Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. That morphs into: ‘This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy’ , as if political misadventure applies?

This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.

The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.

A selection of topic sentences is instructive, as to the propaganda strategy of this intervention: the imperative of enlarging the canvas, denies to a possible critic, a way to capture the possible political essence of this essay, composed of stitched together tangents. The vexing question of the Sociological Method that ‘reduces’ via mathematical formulas, amount to a reductionist standpoint. The question becomes can Sociology, in its various iterations, come to terms with the actuality of Cultures, not with a mere mathematical homogenization?

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Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s.

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Something similar has happened in Russia.

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Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear.

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Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support.

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Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down.

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China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights.

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A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law.

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However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change.

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Where does The Reader eventually find herself? This defence of ‘Universal Values’ is a defence of Classical liberalism.

And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.

Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.

In The Real World ‘we’ live in the political crater of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism: The Economist was one of the political champions of the Neo-Liberal Trinity: Hayek/Mises/ Friedman. Advocating/Apologizing/Rationalizing for The American Proxy War in Ukraine, and fomenting a War with China is the business of The Economist, under the rubric of ‘Universal values’.

Philosophical Apprentice