234. How About "Compassionate Cruelty" as a Foreign Policy?

      There comes a time in every parent's education when he or she hears a voice that says, "Pain is a better teacher than you are."  You lecture and demonstrate and harangue and then whacko, zero winds hit the child on the way home from school and the next time he puts on his jacket.

And apparently there comes a time in every advanced nation's education when it hears the same thing.  According to Schmuel Rosner (NYT, 12-27-13) Israel is discovering that its children, the Ultra-Orthodox men who choose not to work or join the army (they stay home and study the Torah while their wives work), might learn to make a better choice if they suffered more.  If, says the government reducing benefits, they prefer "their traditions over participating in the modern Israeli economy," let them freeze.  Rosner calls this policy "compassionate cruelty."  Like Daniel Moynihan's "benign neglect," a 1969 policy to get blacks to rely less on the government and more on themselves, it trusts pain to do the teaching.

The hitch in this approach, as every parent knows, is that you have to watch the pain.  It's not easy seeing a child come in blue, or, if he's of the Haredim, walk around in rags.

Nevertheless, I find myself wondering if the papa of the advanced nations, the United States, might not try this approach with the backward nations of the world.  "Do you prefer loyalty to family, or clan, or tribe over loyalty to nation?  Ancient custom to codified law?  Ruler's wishes to rational organization?  Education in Scripture to education in science?  Patriarchal security over education of women?  Assurance of wives' fidelity over their health and pleasure?  Land-holding over commerce?  Faith over reason?  Very well, continue.  We'll watch you freeze."

What lets you call this compassionate or benign is that you trust the ability of the backward people to watch also, and learn. (Only the extremely soft-hearted, the "soft bigots of low expectations," don't trust them.)  "Over there are nations prospering through commerce, and commitment to law, and education in science, and the freedom of women.  Over there are nations losing less to corruption because their office-holders put loyalty to nation over loyalty to family.  Over there are people who are strong militarily because they organize themselves rationally."  They'll get the point.  Pretty soon you will see them going out the door with their jackets on.  Pain was a good teacher.

You'd have a devil of a time pushing through such a policy but maybe some cunning and imaginative president of some commercial and military super power (that's what it would take) could do it.  Or could at least get it started.