There be jackals afoot
Russia, China and the universality of human values
What a quote. And it touches on something I've been thinking about since this war began regarding Russia, China and the universality of human values.
One argument says we all share the same values. We all want our kids to be safe, our societies free, our leaders just. This seem straightforward enough. To say otherwise would be bigoted. Chinese parents don’t want their kids to be safe? Russians don’t want their leaders to be just?
And yet it was this very idea that led to the bigotry of social evolution theory, which says that if we all share the same values then German and Kenyan societies only differ because they sit at distinct points on the same evolutionary path from savage to civilized, rather than because each society or culture is proceeding on its own path.
The anthropologists Franz Boas and Stanislaw Malinowski rejected this universalist approach, along with scientific racism, and replaced them with cultural relativism. The idea that each culture is on its own path so each must be judged on its own terms.
This makes sense. You can’t rightly judge an Indian as rude for eating with their fingers if eating with one’s fingers isn’t considered rude in India. But if you acquaint yourself with Indian norms and standards of etiquette, then by those guidelines you’re in a better place from which to judge. Or as the Russian proverb goes:
В чужо́й монасты́рь со свои́м уста́вом не хо́дят (Don’t go to someone else’s monastery with your own rulebook).
Here’s the thing though. In China, Xi Jinping supposedly enjoys over 80% approval. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has similar numbers. Now of course, state media is powerful, people are afraid to speak their minds and I haven’t done the due diligence on the statistical rigor of these surveys.
But anecdotally, for whatever that’s worth, I can tell you that I lived in China for three years, spent a lot of time discussing Chinese politics with locals and often found it challenging to get on the same page with people because I had assumed that we shared the same values. That they want their society to look like our society.
But in fact, in my experience, more often than not people find such assumptions naive if not insultingly condescending. To many, it smacks of American exceptionalism. Another kind of civilizing mission, wrapped in the flag of democratic norms rather than Christian virtues.
“Freedom is a Western value,” a Chinese friend once told me after I appealed to that basic principle while debating oppression in Xinjiang. Checkmate. I had nowhere to take the argument if we couldn’t agree on the value of freedom as a first principle.
For many in China the basic thinking goes something like this. ‘Our lives were hell before but now we spend our Sundays in luxury malls perusing Maison Margiela x Tommy Cash bread loafers and Bottega ankle boots. You think it’s materialistic, but we think that sounds like privilege talking.’
‘Frankly, our economy is doing very well and we don’t identify as oppressed because the things we’re oppressed from doing, like mouthing off about politicians, never mattered to most of us in the first place. Oppressed? That song doesn't play here.’
I’ve heard a variation on this theme more than I can count. Maybe it’s the Judeo-Christian missionary substrate of US culture but Americans do seem more ideological and moralistic than most, if not preachy and parochial. And it seems there are certain differences that run deeper than Boas or Malinowski would want to admit.
“It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways,” Boas wrote in the foreword to Margaret Mead’s controversial classic “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Mead had studied under Boas for her master’s degree, and in that same book, which turned Mead into the world’s most famous anthropologist, she wrote:
Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which believe different things and advocate different practices.
So here’s what I’m thinking. The fundamental lesson of cultural relativism is not that all cultures are relative. Or that they occupy the same moral ground. Or that none is more advanced than another. Rather, the takeaway is merely that judging cultures by external standards necessarily fails. Cultural relativism, therefore, is a call to objectivity rather than relativism.
This is why, when Russian friends tell me, "We want a strong leader, not a just leader," I tend to take them at their word rather than assuming that they don’t really mean it or, worse, that they don’t really know what they’re saying.
“This is Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory,” you may be thinking. But no, that idea, introduced in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article and later expanded in the book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” says cultural/religious differences will be the main source of conflict in the post-Cold War era. What I’m saying, much more simply, is that such differences exist—and run deep.
This week in Warsaw, President Biden said of Putin:
A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase a people's love for liberty. Brutality will never grind down their will to be free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness. We will have a different future, a brighter future, rooted in democracy and principle, hope and light. Of decency and dignity and freedom and possibilities. For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power. God bless you all. And may God defend our freedom, and may God protect our troops.
Many took this as a literal call for regime change. (Last week, when Biden said Putin’s aggression would result in liberal democracies forming a “new world order,” people took that too as a literal proclamation of the world domination conspiracy theory.) But it does raise the question, what would regime change look like?
Would hypothetically removing Vladimir Putin from office change anything at all? Or would the Russian socio-political order merely produce another Putin? Is the problem with Russia its power-hungry leader? Or is the problem with Russia actually Russia?
And if it’s the latter, and if Russians really do support Putin as overwhelmingly as surveys suggest, then some blame does rest on their shoulders. But not in any proximal sense, not in any way that would ever justify being rude to a Russian if you meet one on the street, for example. Rather, what I’m saying is, perhaps it is the case that Russian people value different things and the subsequent society those values create produce a certain political climate rather than the other way around.
Why does any of this matter? Because it could mean that even after Putin, Russia will remain more or less the same. Ditto China, North Korea and the United States, for that matter. As Biden tours Europe and tells world leaders, “America is back,” many are thinking, “yeah but for how long?” Because the same demographics that led to Trump’s rise are still in place. There will be another Trump, and if the current trend continues, he or she will be even worse. George W. Bush made Reagan look good. Trump made Bush look good. Heaven help us when we elect the person who makes Trump look good. The problem, you see, is not the poison flower but the roots that don’t come up. As the passage I linked up top argues, Russian leaders come and go but Russia remains Russia.
We have to deal with Putin at the moment. But moving forward, we should probably learn to accept our neighbors as they are, pocket any hopes that market liberalization will lead to regime change in the Kremlin or Zhongnanhai, and think less about how to turn the grasslands into a garden and more about how to survive in them when there be jackals afoot.