Are western values beyond criticism?
And why is liberalism the arbiter of truth? — Swanty

Precisely, western values and liberalism are highly criticised and discussed on TPF. It is obvious that you are a new member. Wait, and you will see.

@javi2541997

I have followed TPF as a non member for years, so yours is pretty patronising, and shows lack of comprehension/insight.

People pay lip service to critiqueing western values but the conclusion is always they are superior and the arbiter of other values.

There is no denying this, look at the title,
responses and OP of this thread for god's sake!

The US has military bases all round the world. — Swanty

And now pays more in servicing it's debt than in puts into it's military spending.

That means it's on the beaten path to lose it's position. And it can always retreat back to isolationism and create the huge vortex of a power struggle when it leaves. We have heard this over and over again, how the US is pivoting to Asia.

And do notice it made the attempt to have military bases in Central Asia after 9/11. Not only Afghanistan, but several other -stans had US bases, Tajikistan even having both US and Russian bases. Now there are none. The US has totally withdrawn from Central Asia and the Russia enjoys dominance over there. This just shows that likely the US "empire" has seen it's pinnacle of it's power perhaps and is on the way out. Just how many decades this withdrawal takes is the real question. And the likely outcome is that nothing will replace it.

Western values include war,economic oppression,imperialism and broken families. — Swanty

I think war and imperialism have been quite universal in human society, actually. Not something that the West enjoys a monopoly.

But there is one thing hypocritical in our thinking of "the West". And that is that we have this habit of announcing other non-European cultures to be "Western" if they are successful. Hence many people see Japan as "Western" because Japan has been a successful industrialized country. Yet this change cannot seemingly be seen as a result of Japan losing WW2 and the US democratizing the state as the transformation goes back to the Meiji restauration. Similarly for South Korea it took roughly 30 years from the Korean war to become a democracy and again the development is something that South Koreans did themselves. "Westernization" has usually been something of a response to European colonialism and imperialism, as in the case of the transformation of the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey with Kemalism (which now has ended with the current leader of Türkiye).

(Kemal Atatürk in Gallipoli in 1915. The modernization of Kemalism was a response to Western power and the defeat of the "Sick man of Europe" in WW1, just like in the case of the arrival of US warships were for Japan in 1853.)


And naturally the huge transformation of China that has happened in our lifetime is the obvious example where we simply cannot talk of modernization as "Westernization". I remember the time when China was referred to being similar in economic size to the Netherlands. Technology and consumerism simply aren't some Western, but something simply universal and we should understand it in such a way.

(How Shanghai has changed in 30 years)

The problem is militant capitalism,led by Europe and it's British colony,the US. — Swanty

Europe and the US don't control either China or India, which have been in this Century the economic drivers of the global economy. Americans mainly consume and even if Trump wants the industry to come back, it won't. The UK is the perfect example of European deindustrialization as the country isn't even producing steel anymore. US economic power reached it's zenith at the end of WW2 when every other global competitor was either destroyed, bankrupt or attempting the ruinous experiment of Marxism-Leninism. From there it's been a steady decline, something irreversible as the decline of the UK after it's Empire collapsed.

@ssu
I feel we are just restating our views on this, and we do agree on some matters.

To pivot a little, I would say you are underestimating the power of European/American banking and it's allies.
America's debt is just a way of fleecing the American labour and business sectors to finance it's bankers and elites.
The banking system includes non western allies,but it's all capitalist hegemony,enforced by violence.
Not a western only thing,but lead by the west,the worlds biggest arms dealers and bankers. Without doubt.

Importing a revolution only works if people want it internally.

Historically, as far as I can tell, it usually was either internally induced or an external government exerted brutality on them to get them in line—the latter being, obviously, immoral.

If I grant your point, then that just means that it is really hard to use sheer force to subjugate a population to fundamentally different values—does that mean we should just leave them be? I don’t think so.

Most of the cases, of which I can think of, the vast majority of the people would actually want the revolution, but they do not have the means (like North Korea, Afghanistan, etc.); and in some cases most of them wouldn’t because that would not be in their own interests (like in India). Sometimes you just have to force people to do the right thing, which is what the entire prison system is based off of—no?

Candidates don't run on aggressive foreign policy.

There’s nothing about a representative republic that prevents this; nor why would it? What do you mean by “aggressive”—that’s a very vague term here.

The American people have just elected an isolationist president who doesn't give a sweet ff about other countries.

It’s not that he doesn’t care: it’s that he cares more about America—as it should be. Why would, e.g., Spain care more about the US than itself?!?

conquest is far more expensive than aid, and many representatives oppose even the barely adequate level of aid that might prevent those bad effects you want to march in to remedy.

This can be true, but isn’t always the case. I think you are denying my OP on the grounds of practicality, when it was meant in principle.

I absolutely do. By prevention - like, not propping up and arming bad leaders; like not bombing civilians or supplying bombs to those who will; like empowering the common people; like supplying medicine and technology. Not by conquest.

Do you think there’s a certain point where the Nation would have to use conquest, as a last resort? It seems to me that it is possible that all these alternative measures you spoke of, which certainly should be deployed first could fail and conquest ends up being the final resort.

I view national conquest—i.e., imperialism—as it relates to inferior societies like violence as it relates to evil perpetrators: violence is a just last resort, just like conquest is a just last resort. Do you agree with that? Otherwise, you are saying, analogously, that violence is not a resort at all.

I'm opining that your subset is a pipedream.

I can see it being impractical most of the time, if that is what you mean.

A nation does not impose its values on other nations. The individuals in government impose their own values on individuals in another nation, whether the rest of the nation approves or not.

It sounds like you don’t believe in personifying the State; and I would just briefly note that in a representative republic you have to—the government represents, to some sufficient extent, the people. You can’t separate any member of the government, or the government in totality, from the people in proper republics.

Human flourishing is not the goal of the state. Its goal is to secure its power and advance its own interests

That’s incredibly immoral. That’s like saying that an individual should only secure their own power and advance their own interests as much as they can—what about caring about other people? What about moral law?

Imposing values on another group of people is wrong for the same reason it would be wrong for them to do it to a western nation: it isn’t up to them. They have not been afforded any right to do so.

This is so obviously wrong, though. You are saying, e.g., that an nation shouldn’t interfere with mass genocide in another nation. It’s nonsense.

:lol:

I'm not a moral realist, and I don't think this is how we should do ethics at all.

Ehhh, then I submit to you that you should be amoral: don’t meddle into matters of right or wrong behavior—because you don’t think there is such a thing. I don’t know why you would even care if North Korea is committing mass genocide because you don’t believe they are doing anything wrong.

:up:

I don't think it frequently works historically. I am not denying that most of the historical examples are catastrophic failures; but the OP is pointing out, in principle, that imperialism is not the issue itself. What you are noting is not that imperialism is wrong, but that it is often impractical to try to conquer another nation for the sake of Imperialism (if done in a morally permissible way). I am not saying we go in and conquer each other for dumb reasons or when it is highly impractical to do so; but we should have the disposition that it is our duty to try to subject our better values on worse nations in every practical way possible.