Comment by whatgoodisaroad
4 years ago
Thank you for this thoughtful response! I think I see what you mean how values are not necessarily universal and that imposing them across cultures can go very very wrong. You’re totally right that we don’t have to look past the last several weeks’ world news for examples.
As a “value” democracy gets tricky. What does it mean exactly? Even within the US it takes on many contradictory forms. And why does democracy matter? Is it a worthy value simply because it’s the least bad political system? That’s not very universal as a reason, and surely not a good reason to make war.
Where I suppose I diverge is that I think freedom of expression (and, inextricably, guarantees of privacy) actually are universal values that cross whatever kind of boundary. What has nationality to do with it? Call me a myopic American but its hard for me to accept the idea that freedom of speech could be a culturally specific value.
Now should we enforce values with coercion? Generally I think you and I agree that we shouldn’t. But information technology (and, to a great extent, strong cryptography) provides an enormous (peaceful) opportunity to durably promote those values at an anthropocene scale.
Maybe nobody externally taught these values in the formation of the US, but it’s maybe also worth remarking that the formation greatly benefited from an unusually free press for that time period.
I agree with you that freedom of speech is a fairly important individual right. If you look at the reasoning behind its status it's probably because it's one of the early forms of power an individual could wield, much like how treasured gun rights are in America as well. It goes hand in hand with a free press.
That's certainly something the Chinese people deserve to have, but it's also not our fight, especially if the people of China are less interested in it than foreign spectators seem to be. Since their economy and standard of living is rising and more or less doing fairly well, it raises questions of motivations when we really want them to do something for them under the guise of for us. If we value our democracy or freedom of speech and press more than the average Chinese citizen does, then something is probably up... and something is in fact up, because wars are usually fought under the pretense of righteousness. But in reality almost all wars are fought in the interest of self-preservation and self-interest. US foreign policy is pretty much bound to be purely in the interest of its citizens much like how a corporation is bound to make a profit. If we actually promote free speech and democracy, it'll be due to self-interest, because for the simple reason that a politician can't really justify that they did something for the good of other non-constituents and hope to be re-elected.
Free speech is a great ideal, but it's also a tool used by the enemy for disinformation, destabilization, and defamation. This is similar to how encryption is great, but also empowers criminals just as it empowers resistance to tyranny. Some peoples will choose to have less free speech for more stability, and that is their choice. If the EU started fervently advocating for more consumer privacy protections in the US when we actual Americans don't care about it too much, we'd probably raise an eyebrow too on their actual motivations on matters of domestic concern.
Personally, from a righteousness point of view, if we really wanted to help people we'd take them into our borders and integrate them into productive members of our own society. Anything else is illegitimate. If we truly believe China is going the wrong way then we should take in their citizens who agree with us, and give them the opportunity to shine here. Humans are a resource, not a liability. If we can't take them in, then it's also not our place to tell them how to go about their lives. If we really want people to adopt our values, we should integrate them. And for the most part the US does a pretty good job of this as we're probably one of the most multi-cultural societies on this planet.