Multiculturalism and the right

And now for some Canadian content. A little while back there were two surprising elections here, even though both were predicted by polls -- in Toronto, perhaps Canada's most liberal (small-l) city, a fat, white, presumably heterosexual, male conservative (small-c) soundly defeated a liberal Liberal (also white and male, but not so fat, and openly gay); and in Calgary, perhaps Canada's most conservative major city, a Muslim was elected as the first Islamic mayor in Canada. Now, in themselves, these results might be a bit unusual, but hardly that interesting -- it's what they suggest about that familiar theme of multiculturalism that's significant. For reasons both naive and opportunistic, liberals have made this theme a pet project, viewing it in the former sense as perhaps just "more pavilions at Folkfest" (thanks to Kate at SDA for the expression), and in the latter, more cynical, sense, as the source of an easy supply of immigrant votes in any given election. But the naivete is rapidly falling away, as the previous post indicated, and now even the electoral opportunism seems threatened -- Rob Ford, the Toronto conservative, apparently outpolled his liberal rival by about 52% to 30% of respondents born outside of the country.

Granted, these are just a couple of Canadian municipal elections, but sometimes small events can portend larger things. Here, for example, are some possible take aways:

• Liberal attempts, both in Canada and the US, to pander to new immigrants, including bribing them with tax-intensive programs, may finally be reaching the point not just of diminishing returns but of negative returns -- more than most, immigrants as a group tend to be hard-working family people who dislike seeing their earnings taken from them to fund easy election-time promises as much as anyone.
• Conservatives recognize cultural diversity, once no longer a fetish, as indeed a rich source of vitality and energy within any society, as are a continual influx of new immigrants -- but add two general provisos: first, that the rate of cultural change be contained within supportable limits; and second, that the most general principles of a free society be recognized by all, including the supreme value of the individual.
• And immigrants, so many, as I say, from family-oriented, hard-working backgrounds, are increasingly finding contemporary conservatism a more natural political expression than contemporary liberalism -- indeed, the small government emphasis on freedom, tolerance, and opportunity is frequently a primary reason so many left their homes to seek this society out in the first place.

The crumbling facade of "human rights"

Kenneth Anderson has a very long but excellent post on The Volokh Conspiracy, "Samuel Moyn on the history of the human rights movement", that does a remarkable job of cutting through the haze of ambiguity and flighty rhetoric that so often obscures liberal foreign policy -- particularly in this case the foreign policy of the Obama Administration -- and outlining both its real background and its current underlying assumptions.

First Anderson provides a long quote from a Moyn article in The Nation, pointing out the somewhat questionable origins of international human rights in the 40's:

From a global perspective, the brief career of human rights in the 1940s is the story of how the Allied nations elevated language about human rights as they reneged on the earlier wartime promise—made in the 1941 Atlantic Charter—of the self-determination of peoples. Global self-determination would have spelled the end of empire, but by war’s end the Allies had come around to Winston Churchill’s clarification that this promise applied only to Hitler’s empire, not empire in general (and certainly not Churchill’s). ... Human rights turned out to be a substitute for what many around the world wanted: a collective entitlement to self-determination. To the extent they noticed the rhetoric of human rights at all, the subjects of empire were not wrong to view it as a consolation prize.

Anderson, with some extensive personal experience in the international human rights field finds that this "accurately captures in my own experience as an NGO person who first volunteered to do work for Human Rights Watch in 1983". But from this he goes on to talk about a convergence of views between Moyn's more liberal-left position and Anderson's more conservative-right:

My own speculative view is that the human rights movement is in decline as the “apex values” of the international system — at least insofar as it means core individual human rights in the sense that both I and Moyn, on the basis of the Nation article, would mean. For one thing, in my view those human rights, and the universal conception of them, shelters not in the UN system but under US hegemony. The Obama administration has both diagnosed and embraced decline of the form of loose American hegemony that permits those values to be treated as “universal” by organizations like HRW, or funders like George Soros; if and as American hegemony declines (or to put it in Moyn’s historical terms, as the Allies of WWII and their enabling rhetoric fades as a tool of legitimacy) then so too human rights in that substantive meaning.

That does not mean that the rhetoric of human rights fades; rather, its content is redefined to other ends, and as a tool, it is defanged so as to ensure that — contra the vision of Moynihan — it is no longer a tool to go after bad regimes, excepting, of course, the United States and Israel. The Obama administration largely embraces that — human rights as a way of confessing that we are all sinners, and so it is not necessary to single anyone out.

So then Anderson sees two strands of foreign policy emerging in the current US administration:

In my take on the Obama administration and human rights, it has two wings, the liberal internationalist wing and the New Liberal Realist wing. The latter are those of Hillary Clinton’s general outlook — time to put aside childish things and get on with managing American decline, and with handing out the rhetoric necessary to fend off the problems of the world so that the intellectual firepower of the administration can focus on re-making the US domestically as a European social-democracy. Plus there’s that China-creditor problem.

The former wing, the liberal internationalists, however, who might otherwise have been thought to incline to more stern idealism, are comfortable with that for three reasons, I’d suggest. One is that they have a further belief that a weaker America — given its tendency to elect non-liberal-internationalist presidents and Congresses, and the general atavism of the American people — is better for liberal internationalism....

Outside the US, and perhaps outside the West generally, the future for "human rights", even with the scare quotes, looks increasingly dim:

My guess is that the future transcendental value, the apex values language of the UN system particularly, will morph very gradually from human rights to some version of global welfare, development, human security, income transfer, and all sorts of terms that do not carry baggage for the developing world, or the rising new great powers, in terms of obligations.

...

But “human rights,” in the hands of the NGOs like HRW and at the UN, seems to me likely to gradually convert over to a version of global religious communalism claims; a language of individual human rights gradually shifted over into a language for the protection of religious communalism, and Muslim global sensibilities in particular. The leading human rights organizations, Amnesty and HRW, already seem to see themselves in something like that role (global New Class managers of group identity relations, to put it in Telos-ian shorthand), positioning themselves as guardians of communalist sensibility as against Western publics.

But these excerpts can't do justice to a detailed and complex analysis -- in this case especially, you really need to read the whole thing.

At any rate, at some point the present managers of American, and by extension Western, decline and their cynically idealist counterparts will be gone. We can only hope that those who take their place will once again bring with them some awareness of America's exceptional origins, and some self-confidence in the cultural value of the individual and the rights thereof that America once stood for, and may still.

Liberty, the knowledge problem, and social evolution

We've seen that Jim Manzi's distinction between liberty-as-goal and liberty-as-means libertarianisms runs into some immediate problems and false paradoxes. Better to contrast dogmatic libertarianism with a pragmatic version, that aims simply to increase liberty in an incremental, experimental manner. But there are deeper issues involved in the notion of liberty, both as goal and means, that Manzi also raises, though again in a somewhat tangled fashion.

The first of these is the famous "knowledge problem" (see, e.g., Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society"), which can take various forms, but can be expressed as the idea that the dispersion of decision-making power amongst the individuals affected by decisions takes maximum advantage of their knowledge of their own circumstances. In this sense, we might say that liberty -- that is, the dispersion of decision-making power -- is a means to the end of maximizing individual well-being, in whatever way individuals define it. But this, by its emphasis on the individual's definition of her own well-being, and by its very generality, comes quite close at least to being equivalent to simply making liberty a goal -- we might say that it helps explain why liberty is a goal.

Manzi may be alluding to something like this in his assertion that "We need liberty ... because we are so ignorant of what works in practical, material terms". But, in bypassing the individual emphasis, it misses a critical aspect of the issue, and leads him into the false paradox noted earlier, where liberty, and the ignorance it addresses, is apparently satisfied simply by dividing society into smaller units, each of which is "free" to be relatively repressive or anarchic.

But perhaps Manzi has in mind another kind of ignorance than the Hayekian notion of the dispersion of knowledge -- perhaps he's simply referring to the limits of human knowledge in general. Here, for example, are the sentences that preceded the quote above:

Liberty-as-means libertarianism sees the world in an evolutionary framework: societies evolve rules, norms, laws and so forth in order to adapt and survive in a complex and changing external environment. At a high level of abstraction, internal freedoms are necessary so that the society can learn (which requires trial-and-error learning because the external reality is believed to be too complex to be fully comprehended by any existing theory) and adapt (which is important because the external reality is changing).

 And here (finally) is a clear and important realization. Let's try to make its components even more explicit:

• First, social/cultural evolution is not something brought about by design -- by social engineers, policy-makers, or bureaucrats -- but rather by the same sort of random, trial-and-error processes that we see in the natural world; it's Darwinian, in other words, as opposed to Lamarckian. This isn't because human knowledge is futile but simply because it has limits, outside of which nature always waits and exerts her influence -- it's just that influence that appears as evolution, as distinct from, say, "improvement", "reform", "institutional design", "revolution", etc.
• But, second, such evolution isn't something distinct or apart from human agency, but rather consists of human decisions and actions, and of course of the consequences thereof. Manzi is right to point out, therefore, that the dispersal of decision-making power in the face of this sort of unavoidable ignorance confers a distinct evolutionary advantage on a society, in terms of the greater flexibility and adaptability it allows. There are, as he also points out, limits to this dispersal, or issues on which coercion is still an evolutionary advantage (e.g., obviously, laws against murder or theft, or, arguably, laws against prostitution), but everywhere the evolutionary logic is to disperse this power as far as possible, thereby extending the freedom of the individual agent. 

Development: systems as distinct from aid

From Cafe Hayek comes a link to an interesting post on an even more interesting blog, called Aid Watch, with the tag line, "Just asking that aid benefit the poor". The post makes a distinction between "direct solutions to problems" and "problem-solving systems", and goes on to say why that's important:

Here’s why direct solutions to problems cannot foster development. Each direct solution depends on lots of other complementary factors, so the solutions can seldom be generalized across different settings; Solutions must fit each local context....

Development happens thanks to problem-solving systems. To vastly oversimplify for illustrative purposes, the market is a decentralized (private) problem solving system with rich feedback and accountability. Democracy, civil liberties, free speech, protection of rights of dissidents and activists is a decentralized (public) problem solving system with (imperfect) feedback and accountability. Individual liberty in general fosters systems that allow many different individuals to use their particular local knowledge and expertise to attempt many different independent trials at solutions. When you have a large number of independent trials, the probability of solutions goes way up.

Easterley, the author, provides a kind of qualification of his post near its end:

Direct solutions to problems (say, using aid programs) still may be worthwhile as benefiting a lot of people. But a long list of many such solutions is not development; development is the gradual emergence of a problem-solving system.

But that first sentence needs at least some elaboration or it undercuts his thesis -- e.g., direct solutions may be worthwhile only in the case where they don't depend of lots of other complementary factors.

Using aid, however, in an indirect manner, in order to foster problem-solving systems seems a much more promising strategy than we've generally been following to this point. Does that just get us back into a version of the "nation building" quagmire? Or could it mean that "nation building", when looked at in other than military terms, isn't so hopeless after all? Were/are the neocons right regarding long-term foreign policy objectives?