Today Norm quotes an article by Pamela Bone from the Australian that argues that liberal democracies “are better than countries that still operate under rules more appropriate to 7th-century Arabia.” I’m certainly on the side of Norm and Ms. Bone, and am often amazed by the vehemence with which such statements are attacked as “imperialist,” or as making a distinction without a difference because the West has committed more atrocities, allegedly, than any other civilization it holds itself superior to.
I think such attackers take statements like Bone’s as assertions of cultural and personal superiority, which they (usually) are not. Bone perhaps encourages such a reading by slipping into the use of “they” and “we” to refer to religious authoritarians and citizens of liberal democracies, but asserting that liberal democracy is better than theocracy certainly does not entail believing that people in the U.S. or Australia are better than people in Saudi Arabia or North Korea. It simply asserts that democratic institutions are more humane, more just, and more protective of human rights than are nondemocratic ones.
Liberal democracies are the only states that allow all cultures, even minority ones, to flourish. If Saudi Arabia were to become a liberal state overnight, it would certainly see a spike in the population of apostates from Islam, Mormons, libertarians, etc. You could say in response that Saudi culture would experience a rupture from its past and a loss of something it once had if it were to liberalize. But because its supposedly age-old religious and cultural uniqueness relies on the use of state power and violence to prevent individuals from say, reading about Buddhism, questioning the existence of God, or declaring that it might be all right for women to drive, it’s ludicrous to imagine that the culture is a genuine, freely chosen expression of the will of the Saudi people to begin with.
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