But all men are not my brothers

Herotodotus in his work History tells the story of the Persian King Darius and his travels. Darius, in this story, observes the funeral practices of the Greeks who cremate their fallen on a pyre. He also observes that rather than a pyre, the Callatians, an Indian tribe, ate the bodies of their dead fathers. Thus, Darius summons to his court a group of Greeks and asks them for what amount of money they would eat their dead father's bodies. No amount of money, the Greeks reply, could persuade them to do such a ghastly thing. The Callatians, on the other hand, are horrified when Darius suggests that they instead cremate their dead. The cultural differences, Darius noted, were important in having a sophisticated understanding of the world. Neither the Callatians nor the Greeks were any better than the other, culturally speaking, they were simply different.

This is the story that the defenders of relativism constantly use to defend the tolerance of every cultural practice under the sun. But how far can we possibly extend this reasoning in these times? Cultural relativism, at its core, is a moral justification for all cultural practices. It challenged the universality of "Western" moral truths, so say the relativists, and is therefore not palatable for most in the West.

But is that really the case? Is it really true that neither the Callatians nor the Greeks were objectively correct or incorrect? I'd say that, in this particular case, neither was incorrect. The fact that people believe different things to be true does not mean that there is no certain truth. In the case of the Greeks and Callatians, the matter is fairly innocuous -- who can tell which is the correct practice? Perhaps the custom of funeral rites is correct -- perhaps if the Callatians desecrated their dead and the Greeks didn't, then we would see an objective right and wrong?

To put this in a modern context, let's take the case of Mahmod Mahmod and Ari Mahmod. Mahmod was the father of Banaz Mahmod and Ari was her uncle. Banaz fell in love with a man whom the family disapproved of. She decided to marry him anyways.

Now, let us bring Darius into modern times. In New Jersey, let's say, Darius notices that a culturally Western family responds with anger to their daughter's marriage to a man they disapprove of. They have a long and serious talk with both of them. The father storms out. The mother cries. The family becomes estranged from the girl, but they all go on to live their own lives. Darius observes, in London, a similar situation. Banaz Mahmod, a Kurd growing up in a household which promotes a culture in which women are inferior and subservient to men, marries an Iranian Kurd. Her family does not approve. So the father and uncle plot with another family member to kill her. They eventually do so, raping and murdering her in the family home. Her body is stuffed into a suitcase and then buried in a garden.

Can Darius conclude that both cultural practices -- the latter being an honour killing -- are equally valid? Can he conclude that since both families believe they are doing the correct thing, there is no objective truth as to which practice is actually correct? I would say no.

So does the Canadian model of multiculturalism demand cultural relativism? No, of course not. Multiculturalism must not -- cannot -- become synonymous with the relativism that says honour killings, female genital mutilation, and arranged marriages are simply societal quirks. Does this mean that we disrespect other cultures or people? No, not so long as they are respective of certain basic universal truths -- gender equality and respect for life come to mind.

It is my firm belief that this is the question of our times -- is our culture seriously better than any other? Do we seriously believe that? I do -- that is, I imagine, why I find myself troubled by the practice of honour killing; it is why I find myself troubled by female genital mutilation, and so on. What serious, reasonable person can look at these practices and still maintain that there is no difference in validity between a culture that does and does not validate them?

This brings us to the tricky issue of religion. A brief survey of history could be interpreted to illustrate that religious devotion in the conservative sense is the motivation behind this cultural backwardness. Burning witches at the stake and female genital mutilation are products of the conservative forces of religion, even if not directly sanctioned by any religious text, are they not? Perhaps, but perhaps it's really the other way around. The backwards religious conservatism could just as easily be a product of the savagery -- and no, I don't hesitate to use that word -- of the culture.

Depending on where you come down on that question, your view of the world and of foreign policy is probably starkly different. Do you believe in the singularity of religion posited by Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations model or in the dominance of culture and historical progress put forth by Fukuyama and the End of History model?

After 9/11, Ann Coulter (no doubt saying what a good portion of the right-wing was thinking) crowed that we should invade the Muslim world and convert them to Christianity. Plenty of good that would do! The history of Christianity is no less barbaric and bloody than that of Islam. So, to be clear, a difference in religion is not the same as a difference in culture. Advocating against relativism, as I am doing, is not an indictment of Islam or Christianity, but rather of the cultures in this world, whatever religion they may adhere to, that violate certain universal truths. It is also, by the way, an indictment of the relativists who claim that these universal truths don't even exist.

Martin Amis, in a spectacular essay in the Guardian, touched on cultural relativism. During a trip to Pakistan, a local friend of Amis' -- a reporter, no less -- begins to haggle with a local street vendor over the price of a shirt emblazoned with Osama bin Laden's visage. A crowd soon gathers. "Why you want these? You like Osama?' they ask. "Of course. He is my brother," replies the reporter. "He is your brother?" asks the crowd, to which the reporter replies "All men are my brothers." Thus, Amis notes:

"All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother."

Indeed. All men are not my brothers.

Turkish elections: follow up.

Here's some interesting stuff from TNR regarding the Kurds:

Given this environment, it's a less-than-ideal time for Kurds to make their grand return to national politics. Numerous DTP offices have been attacked and vandalized, while party officials and activists have been arrested by the police on trumped-up charges to keep them from campaigning. A new law requires independent candidates to be listed without any emblem on the ballot, a measure that many believe is meant to undermine the Kurdish candidates, who have largely illiterate constituencies. "Rather than campaigning for our candidates," says Calap, the DTP field organizer, "most of our activists are spending this week going door-to-door teaching our voters how to read the ballot."

Despite these impediments, the Kurds look set to win 20-30 seats in Sunday's election. But getting into the parliament is just the beginning: When Kurdish MPs (elected under other parties) tried to form a Kurdish bloc in 1993, their party was quickly banned by the Constitutional Court, the MPs were stripped of their office, and seven of the 13 deputies received up to15-year prison sentences for "crimes against the state" and "separatist propaganda."

The environment in Turkey has calmed significantly since then, to the point where Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in 2005 delivered a taboo-shattering speech in which he acknowledged that Turkey has a "Kurdish problem" and that "mistakes have been made" in the state's attempts to deal with that problem. The ban on Kurdish names has finally been lifted, and the state has decided to allow 45 minutes of Kurdish TV broadcasts a day. And, particularly in light of Turkey's hopeful ascension to the EU, the government would be remiss to take any actions that would be seen as anti-democratic. (In 2002, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey had violated "the very essence of the right to stand for election and to hold parliamentary office" when it imprisoned the Kurdish deputies in the '90s.)

You can read the whole thing here. I believe it may be subscriber-only.

When the Islamists are the liberals

While all eyes are on the American primaries, Turkey will go to the polls tomorrow in what will amount to a far more important decision than which Republican will face which Democrat. Turks will decide, essentially, whether or not the ruling AK parties record merits an extension of their rule. Surprisingly, it does.

The AK party has Islamist roots, true. The wife of Abdullah Gul, nominated to be President, wears a headscarf -- in a country that reveres Ataturk and is probably the most secular state in Europe, this is a big issue. It's little things like this that have made the Army, which is widely respected in Turkey and seen as a check on any religious influence, hint that it may step in if the AK party is given too large a mandate. Should the Turkish electorate decide that AK deserves a 2/3rds super majority, which is quite possible, then it's also quite probable the Army will exercise their veto over the people's choice.

When the Army hinted that it might just intervene a few months back, people in the West were rather pleased. It's hard to blame them. In a time when it seems the whole of the Muslim world is dominated by extreme Islamists, it's refreshing to see such staunch support of secularism. But what is it that the West is actually hoping to promote in the Middle East -- secularism or democracy?

Neither neoconservatives or liberal Wilsonians (I count myself among the latter) are really too concerned with whether or not a country is staunchly secular or staunchly religious because both are an impediment to democracy -- what is the difference between the Army intervening on behalf of secularism and Islamist insurgents intervening on behalf of religious fanaticism? Really, in the end, there is none. Democracy suffers in both cases.

In Turkey, the West is faced with a difficult prospect. The AK Party may not be exactly what we're looking for in a Middle Eastern government, but it's pretty damn close. They've introduced liberalizing reforms to Turkey's economy, kept the Army out of Northern Iraq, toned down persecution of the Kurds, and, most importantly, spent alot of political capital introducing the domestic reforms that will get Turkey into the E.U.

In short, the "Islamist" party, as the secularists call them, are the liberals of Turkey. The Army and the hard-core secularists are defenders of Ataturk's legacy. Now, don't get me wrong, Ataturk's legacy is reasonably positive (for the Middle East, particularly), but is it one that really want to carry on in perpetuity? While Ataturk's Turkey may closely resemble Western states, it is essentially nationalist -- that sort of attitude is why a good half of the population (0r more?) is against joining the E.U.

This election will be very important for both Turkey and the region as a whole. If the West can apply enough pressure to keep the Army from intervening, AK's position will be strengthened and we could see a renewed effort to get Turkey into the E.U, firmly solidifying its place in the West and ending the notion that the E.U. is a Christian's Club.

Why are Liberal Bloggers so liberal?

I don't ask to attack any of the fine Liberal and progressive bloggers whose posts I stumble across via LibBlogs, I'm simply curious as to why blogs under the LibBlogs banner tend to be so much more left-wing than the Liberal Party itself? I see people advocating leaving Afghanistan now. I see people advocating protectionism (from the left-wing viewpoint). I see people advocating all sort of things that are found only on the fringes of the Liberal Party and in the mainstream of the NDP.

So? Any theories?

Conservative paternalism

It's stuff like this that makes me a liberal. Whether they're Republicans or Big-C Conservatives, most small-c conservatives have a socially paternalistic streak a mile long. There are some who don't, but we call them libertarians, and they're few and far between. Going all the way back to Edmund Burke, the whole point of conservatism has been to create a paternalistic state which watches over the "flock" of society.

Canadian conservatives haven't somehow shed this fundamental principle of the conservative movement. They've stopped talking about it for the time being, but it's still there, and probably always will be.

At least Mitt Romney is honest enough to campaign on it:

The humanitarian case for free trade

I don't know how the Liberals will respond to Prime Minister Harper's proposed free trade deal with Colombia, but I hope they support it. If they decide not to, their arguments are already prepared for them: Colombia is violent and violates human rights regularly.

Yes. It does. And so does China, but we trade with them, and the Liberals support trading with them. Why? Because free trade is a force for economic development, global integration, and the spread of human rights. In Colombia's case, the only way to stop the death squads is to open our markets to them, and them to us.

Trade is the mechanism by which globalization occurs. In Colombia's case, most Canadians would probably find that Colombia could do with a little cultural globalization -- it's politics of brutality and coercion are effectively "cultural." Most Colombians would agree with the former, if not the latter assertion. This cultural globalization occurs, in part, because of the fact that in the course of trading and investing abroad, one encounters new ways of thinking about both business and politics. Remember when North American managers were swept in the hype about the superior management style of the Japanese? That was a prime example of how trade brings new ideas to foreign lands.

Not only this, but free trade allows people the opportunity travel and study abroad -- in fact, it necessitates it. It is easy to underestimate the important of this, but one should look at the French Revolution to see the effect that exposure to different political ideals can have on an individual. Many of the French soldiers who failed to quash (or downright assisted) the rebellion against the Monarchy were inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution in which their Monarch had sent them to fight.

The significant link between democracy and free trade is perhaps most clear when one considers the nature of a pluralist society in which power (and, thus, wealth) is controlled by a large and diverse number of groups and people. Free trade, rather than import quotas and tariffs, spread economic decisions and control into the hands of millions of producers and consumers. Protectionism restricts those economic decisions and the numbers of people who can make them. This is the basis for a civil society and a pluralistic, representative political system -- namely, democracy.

This is all fine and well, but without a middle class -- the typical agent of democratization -- political and civil liberties rarely exist. This brings us to the most important argument for free trade -- it creates a middle class.

Most free trade opponents argue the opposite -- it actually exploits workers in the Developing World. This couldn't be further from the truth because free trade is about free choices. People in the developing world may work long hours in unsafe sweatshops, but they're not being forced to. The alternative, usually subsistence farming, is worse for them than these sweatshops. If it wasn't, they would make the choice to stay on the farm. But day after day, they leave the farm, come to the cities, and work for a pittance in dirty factories.

It is at this point that it's worth reminding free trade skeptics that the developed world went through this phase at well. In fact, we were the first to go through it. If you don't believe me, read Dickens' Hard Times. His description of the Coketown factories could be applied accurately to many of those in present-day south-east Asia. This is why I always find the argument that the developed world is "exploiting" the developing world through free trade to be so fallacious -- if that is the case, then who was exploiting Britain during the Industrial Revolution?

I think the answer is not some other developed country, but rather the factory owners. Yes, what happens in sweatshops is exploitation. However, the sad reality is that no other country can change that through protectionism. No country can lift Colombia out of poverty while still refusing to trade with it. The Colombian people, perhaps now working in horrid factories, would simply return to the farms that they know are even more horrid and sink further into poverty.

We need free trade to create a middle class in developing countries. And we need a middle class to improve humans rights and political liberties in developing countries. Simply put, there is no "humanitarian" case against free trade. The notion that by refusing to trade with countries that have poor human rights standards is ludicrous -- the government, since they already have poor human rights standards, is all to ready to keep it that way. The groundswell of support for more human rights has to come from a vibrant middle class which can only exist if the developed world embraces free trade and open markets.

"Around the country we have 30,000 that have been detained or disappeared in last 10 years, three million internally displaced people, thousands have been killed, so how can someone say, 'OK, all this blood is running but business goes first'?" says Lilia Solano, director of Project Justice and Life, on the proposed Canada-Cololmbia free trade deal. Ms Solano says "business goes first," but I would ask her "ahead of what?" This she does not say.

Ahead of stopping the various humanitarian crises in Colombia? The answer is yes -- business does come first, and it has to come first. If Colombia has no business, then it has no growth, and if it has no growth then it has no mechanism by which to modernize and liberalize in terms of human rights. Tearing down factories in and stopping foreign investment to Colombia won't stop the death squads and the disappearances and the arbitrary use of government power. How could it? If the cases of Cuba and North Korea show anything, it's that poverty doesn't breed reform or rebellion -- rising expectations does. Canada should help raise the expectations of Colombia and the Liberal Party should get behind the Prime Minister's agreement.

Bush's legacy?

Is it possible that President Bush's legacy won't be Iraq? Is it possible that instead of reviled for his mishandling of the Iraq war, he'll be remembered for helping to bring about a formal resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? I doubt it, but it's alright to dream.

Mr Bush is asking for Israel and its Arab neighbours (including, presumably, representatives from Fatah) to sit down with the United States and work out a peace agreement. The BBC article characterizes this as risky because of the fact that Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas doesn't have the support necessary to negotiate a settlement. That may be true, but opposition to Abbas doesn't translate into support for Hamas. Amongst the mostly secular, sometimes nationalist, Palestinians, opposition to Abbas often means support for new faces in Fatah -- that could mean a man like Salam Fayyad, a secular reformer, would have a reasonable chance of assuming leadership of Fatah in the near future.

The peace negotiations, furthermore, would come at a time when the radical elements within Palestinian society have been marginalized. Fatah appears to have taken control over the West Bank, and it would be difficult for Hamas based out of the increasingly destitute Gaza to challenge their dominance. A peace settlement could be reached between Fatah and Israel without the need to include Hamas in negotiations -- for now.

The outcome of these negotiations could be more important than the outcome of any round before not only because there is a reasonable chance of success, but because they could determine who holds sway in Palestine for years to come. Will secularists or Islamists control the Arab-side on the key Middle Eastern issue?