Sultan Knish
One-hundred and thirteen years ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about
the American enterprise in the Philippines. The title of that poem has
since become a byword for racist colonialism and yet its text is a
sardonic recitation of the dim virtues of the "Savage wars of peace".
"Go bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need;" Kipling
wrote. "To seek another's profit, And work another's gain. Fill full the
mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease."
This moral imperialism has never gone away, though it is no longer
thought of in racial terms. For over a hundred years, the United States
has gone on trying to feed and cure the world, sacrificing for others
and seeing nothing in return.
The burden has been internalized, its concept not racial, but moral. The
lack of empire has not lessened it. That absence of a physical empire,
of conquered provinces and colonies administered with the whip has only
strengthened the might of the moral empire. And the savage wars of peace
go on in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where we fight desperately to
save the natives from themselves.
The liberal man's burden is the United Nations. It is the obligation to
universalize national greatness by extending it around the world through
a moral empire. An empire of the progressive spirit that sweeps aside
the old for the new, that makes the world over in a liberal image and a
liberal template. The moral empire with the world as its consensual
subjects whose conquests are achieved through the transcendent
superiority of its modernity and humanity.
The Pax Americana is grounded in this notion of a moral empire. Russia
or China may rule territories by force, but America expands its
influence by exporting the virtues of its culture. Democracy and human
rights are shipped overseas, wrapped in ribbons of international law,
and soon enough the world is full of Pakistani Americans, Libyan
Americans, Sudanese Americans and a horde of others who are happy to
rule themselves under the systems of our moral colonialism. And once
this is done then we will all be living in a truly Post-American world
in which there will be no need for America because we will all be
Americans.
American policymakers ask themselves why the people of another nation
are still not Americans and then they set out to remove those obstacles,
sending food, curing disease and gifting money to take care of physical
needs, and removing dictators, enabling elections and instituting free
market reforms to set aside any political repression. And if their
theory were correct, then once that was done the people would be
Americans. Instead they remain what they are and the policymakers remain
baffled.
Introducing democracy to the Muslim world has not made it American, has
not made it respectful of human rights or tolerant of dissent. It is
possible to be a democracy and own slaves. It is certainly possible to
be a democracy and treat non-Muslims as subhuman creatures to be beaten
whenever the economy turns bad. Democracy is no defense against that
sort of behavior. Character is and that cannot be exported along with
election monitors and purple fingers.
Systems can be exported, but not assumptions and that is where the
liberal man's burden always goes wrong, because he believes that he is
exporting his virtues, when he is only exporting his systems. And his
systems are only expressions of his virtues, they are not his virtues.
It is possible to export a CD full of Mozart symphonies, but not the
ability to compose those symphonies. Similarly we can send out copies of
the Constitution, but not the minds that created and maintained such a
document.
The moral empire proves even more fragile than the physical empire, for
it depends on the export of virtues. And for those virtues which cannot
be exported, American soldiers go to the cities and deserts of other
lands and mark them with their living and dead. And for those virtues,
teachers, aid workers, diplomats and a thousand others go to export the
unexportable, they try to bring Mozart to Pakistan and rather than
learning to compose symphonies, the natives kill Mozart and leave his
body in a ditch.
The Pax Americana has not cured world hunger or disease, it has not
brought peace and freedom to the world. What it has done is applied band
aids, thrown off a dictator here or there, fed a few children and
brought the occasional glimpse of light. But the light has never
endured. Sooner or later it breaks down again, if not in the same ways,
then in new and more troubling ways.
A people cannot be uplifted, they can only uplift themselves. That is
the fallacy of the burden with all its weary futility. Americans cannot
teach Pakistanis to be Americans. They cannot even teach them to be
better Pakistanis. Only the Pakistanis stand any chance of teaching
themselves that. America cannot fix Africa. Only Africa can fix Africa.
And only America can fix America.
Every nation has its own journey to make and its own path to walk and no
other nation can make the journey for it. Some will not make it and
others will. But no nation can make another nation moral and no nation
can make another civilized.
America has a duty to behave morally, but it does not have a duty to
make other nations moral. The virtue of helping others only extends
insofar as they can be helped. Only when that help is extended beyond
the point where they can be helped or where they wish to be helped, does
it become a burden. And a burden is carrying that which ought to be
able to carry itself.
The difference between aid and empire, is that when aid is unending then
it becomes empire, when there is no foreseeable point at which it ends
and when extending it ensures dependency rather than the alleviation of a
temporary condition, then it is not aid but empire. And that which can
carry itself but chooses not to becomes a permanent burden and a corrupt
power relationship is born built on revulsion and dependency, the
familiar one of the welfare state where the master is the slave and the
slave is the master, becomes a stain on two pairs of souls.
Exceptionalism is the core of nationalism. There are no shortage of
nations that believe that they are fated to save the world. And to its
credit the United States has saved the world, but saving the world is
not the same thing as changing it. Resources and determination extended
and expended in the right place and at the right time can save the
world. But changing the world requires more than that, it requires even
more than the big ideas that people imagine change the world, it
requires that people take responsibility for their own actions and their
own consequences.
The liberal man's burden acts in direct opposition to this, lifting away
actions and consequences, and retarding the development of entire
nations. Instead of making the world a better place, it makes it worse
and instead of bringing progress, it turns the clock back, because moral
colonialism is in its own way no different from any other kind of
colonialism.
The most devastating aspect of colonialism is that it destroys a
people's faith in itself, in its own power, its own judgement and its
own industry. And it is doubly devastating when it had little of these
things to begin with. The moral empire undermines the character of a
people almost as well as its more brawny cousin does. It takes away any
reason for progress and then wonders why that progress never seems to
materialize.
The liberal man's burden is based on an unspoken superiority, the
superiority which attends all liberal humanitarian impulses, the
superiority of the sensitive man or woman who is ethically aware over
the ethically unaware. But this superiority is a fleeting thing when the
savage wars of peace begin and the price to be paid for trying to teach
ethics to the unethical itself comes to seem highly unethical.
War is not made for either the preservation of the moral high ground or
for its export to foreign parts. It is not fought to bring about a
global state of peace, but so that those who fight it shall have peace,
anything else is foolishly futile and a self-nullifying act that ends up
shedding more blood than it saves.
The press of events in the 20th Century forced America to take on great
power, but it reacted to that power by adopting the model of FDR, who
ran for as many terms as he lived, instead of the model of Washington
who stepped down as soon as it was feasible. The difference between
these two kinds of power is the difference between Caesar and
Cincinnatus , it is the difference between empire and expedition and
between virtue and burden.
It is now long since past time to put down that burden. It is not
America's mission to teach democracy to the Muslim world or to export
any of its virtues by gentle means or harsh. The first duty of every
society is not the export of its virtues, but their safeguarding. Only
then can that society serve as an example to the world that inspires,
rather sacrificing its virtues to teach virtue to the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment