Abraham Lincoln is credited with the saying that any lawyer who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. Put another way, none of us can be truly objective when dealing with our own perspectives and vested interests. That is why doctors don’t operate on family members.
Applying this sensible reality to the situation in the Middle East, it should come as no surprise that numbers of Middle-Eastern country leaders are saying both publicly and privately, “We don’t want your western democracy forced upon us.” We may want it for them, but we’re fools to project our values on them while at the same time contending that democracy gives people the right to control their own futures, regardless of the alleged goodness of intention.
Beyond this, the hypocrisy of our selective targets for democracy is not missed by the critics of our current U.S. policies. We want democracy for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, but are seemingly content to leave our oil-supplying allies like Saudi Arabia exempt from this demand.
While there are undoubtedly strategic priorities involved here, it only reinforces the inconsistencies of our policy and further undercuts the moral authority of the West’s controversies with the Islamic worldview. In short, we lose ground with Islam globally and our own internal critics domestically.
Military wars and culture wars are won by ideas, not just bullets or banners. What truths may be “self-evident” to us in the West are certainly not so to the rest of the world. We think we offer the world both freedom and prosperity. Here is what many of them say we offer them: pollution, economic exploitation coupled with pragmatic subservience, mega-cities with wide gaps between the minority rich and majority poor, anti-family abortion, adultery, homosexuality, etc. These are magnified through our global media and Hollywood values, unpayable bank loans from the World Bank, and “women’s rights” that undercut their historic male authority structures. This list is not complete, which only makes it all the more problematic.
We have seen a massive middle-class lifestyle with historic levels of prosperity never before experienced by such a percentage of any culture. We have seen the rights of the freedoms of religion, press, personal expression, etc. We have seen unprecedented levels of public education, health care, and social services. We have seen, “do your own thing.” We have seen innumerable stories of Cinderella: poor and average people becoming either very successful, or amazingly successful. They see crime, divorce, drugs, addictions, depression, racism, both real and imagined. They see the “underside” while we promise the blessings of the upside.
So what does all this mean? For starters it means that Western democracy really does have a great upside and a very dark downside. It also means that forcing democracy on people is an oxymoron. It is self-contradictory. For me all this means what I have said for years: We need a much wider prime-time debate than currently exists. The center of that debate should be, “What values will both preserve our culture domestically and in an increasingly shrinking world, make themselves increasingly sought after globally?” As Christians, the question becomes, “What must we do to become real enough to play a critical part in that discussion?” That is the bottom line.
Principle Based Evaluation: Real transformation comes from the inside out and the bottom up. It cannot be forced on anyone just because it is deemed “good for them.”
For more information on the author, Dennis Peacocke, go to: http://www.gostrategic.org/
Jaelle Hamann
said:
 |
True Democracy? I've wondered this same thing myself. What does America have to offer different cultures? There are benefits to our democracy. We have freedom but that dark underside is entitlement. An old American maxim would be, "Every man is equal." We all have equal rights, equal opportunities for success, no man is lifted above the other. This can be a fantastic positive but also a lingering negative. James Bryce mentions about an American President, " In order to avoid the assumption of being individually wiser or better than his fellow citizens, he has been apt to act and speak as though he were still simply one of them, and so far from magnifying his office and making it honourable, seems anxious to show that he is the mere creature of the popular vote, so filled by the sense that it is the people and not he who governs as to fear that he should be deemed to have forgotten his personal insignificance." And this is our own president! The man who leads our country has to belittle himself to be more "relatable." America is a fantastic example of the tyrrany of the masses. I think the Middle East recognizes the flukes of such a system, which is exactly why if they want democracy then they are going to have to define it. We cannot press standards that they are not willing to embrace. The result is situations like the recent, fraud-marred "election" of Karzai in Afghanistan. There are too many cultural precepts that make the ground for growing democracy a hard place to plant seeds. Patrick Basham, a senior fellow in The Center For Representative Government said, "Churchill urged the Free World to lead by principled example, not to impose such principles by force; adopting the latter course risks subverting these principles from within, and thus eroding the foundations of our own democracy as we propose to build new democratic foundations abroad. The reality is that the ingredients for successful democracy are found in domestic political kitchens. Democracy is a dish that Iraqis and others throughout the Middle East must prepare for themselves." There is a level of responsibility that calls us to action in places such as the Middle East. But if we can't get our own politics together how can we expect to lead other nations into a "true" democracy? http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php?title=697&chapter=188412&layout=html&Itemid=27 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3325 |
Joel Petersen
said:
 |
Gods " Bottom Line " One of the very few absolutes [ that doesn't have some mystery in it that opens it up to different interpretations ] in the Word of God is " Go And Make Disciples of the Nations " Untill America gets to that place, we don't have any business exporting any system on anybody. Period. Gods Law says the only legal cause for war is if another nation attacks us or an attack is imminent or if we have a treaty with another nation to protect them in case of attack. Biblically, we don't have a right to invade another nation because we want to spread " Democracy ". Sovereign nations problems are basically between them and God. Regards, Lumberjack |
