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.

77. "My culture's better than yours."

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A lot of people, citing cultural anthropologists, tell me that I can't say that my culture is better than somebody else's. I am expressing an ethnocentric prejudice.

Yet cultural anthropologists, if the summary of their position in my History of the Modern World is correct, actually do let me say such a thing.  To them, according to Palmer, Colton, and Kramer, "no culture or society was 'better' than any other, all being adaptations to an environment." The permission taken away in the first part of the sentence is restored in the second. I can say, "This culture has adapted better than that one." Better.

For support I point to Chinese culture. Its emphasis on education has filled the awards lists of American high schools with the names of its young. Note the number of graduates high in Silicon Valley. The Chinese have adapted better than anybody to the California environment.

So, we have another reminder (after Post #56) that as soon as we contemplate a particular end, as soon as we abandon categorical assertion, we are entitled to, we are obliged to, discriminate among means. (See Post # 8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.) Here cultures provide the means. And with all the other ends people may have in a mixed society we may do the same.

All right, I move through a mixed society — the U.S., and more and more the world — with a permit to use the words "better" and "worse" with respect to cultures. Holding the permit is not enough, though. You've got to get somebody to honor it. And in today's universities you'll have a devil of a time. "Value judgment" is still a put-down word in science lounges. Look as if you're going to make such a judgment and a sociologist will snort like a spooked horse. You've violated an axiom: "There are or can be no value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures."

So with many of my colleagues listening I still can't say what I want to say to people who force women to have clitorectomies. What do I want to say? This: "You stink. Your culture stinks. Any culture that encourages doing this to little girls stinks."

There was once a way of placing that statement (tempered, of course) under an acceptable category: possible truth. If mankind were one, if sympathies were universal, and if some sympathies were so beneficial that, if shared, they improved the life of all mankind, then there was the chance that any individual, at any time, might express one. If history showed that life was indeed improved when the displayed sympathy was shared then the statement had all the verification needed to be called a "truth."

That way of placing value statements was developed in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, a period now in bad repute. Its universalism has not stood up under the poundings of relativism. And verification of its "truths"? That comes so far in the future. You have to believe in "progress."

Oh that we Enlightenment types could live for that verification. Oh to be there to see relativists put down. Oh that the Enlightenment had a God who could bring us all together after time has run its course.

I see a representative of the offending culture, surveying the full sweep, seeing where it ended, reflecting for a while and saying, "Clitorectomy, you know. That really did stink."

But God has arranged it so that we're still human. The enlightened offender reproaches me: "Why didn't you tell me?"

And I, savoring my revenge, say, "Because the cultural relativists wouldn't let me."