Lushington D. Brady: Is Their Savagery Really as Good as Our Civilisation?

Liberal democracy is a hard-learned process

For a while during the international occupation, Afghanistan hosted one of the most dangerous roads in the world. Not because of IEDs, but because American engineers spent billions building spanking new highways across the graveyard of empires. Afghanistan had just 80 kilometres of paved road in 2001; five years later, it had over 16,000 kilometres.

Afghans, whose driving had previously been kept somewhat in check by dilapidated roads, were suddenly liberated from the limits imposed by potholes and rocks. The result was as predictable as it was deadly. An accident on the Kabul-Kandahar highway could claim as many as 14 lives (not counting injured) in a single swoop. Driving in Afghanistan, as one correspondent put it, “is an exercise in a million close calls”.

The natural order of things has since asserted itself: even before the end of the occupation, insecurity, corruption and lack of funding meant that 95% of roads inspected were damaged or destroyed. 85% were either maintained poorly or not at all.

The sorry saga of Afghanistan’s roads is a microcosm of the entire failed effort to build a Western-style pluralistic, liberal democracy in Afghanistan. This is a nation, after all, which has for centuries resisted, with homicidal dedication, outside attempts to impose modern governance. The Russians, the British, the Russians again, and now the United States, have all learned the hard way that the Afghans are violently wedded to their way of life.

It’s also a broader cautionary tale for those who continue to nurse the twin utopian fallacies that, firstly, Western-style pluralistic, liberal democracy, not to say “woke” progressivism, can simply be parachuted into the most primitive backwaters where it will immediately take root and flower; and, secondly, that it can happily “coexist” with even the most oppressive cultural primitivism, in a Multicultural utopia.

(As always, I distinguish between “small-m” multiculturalism, and “capital-M” Multiculturalism. The former simply acknowledges cultural differences, and that willing mutual exchange can enrich cultures. The latter, though, insists, at the same time, that all cultures are equally valuable, and that Western culture is uniquely invidious and oppressive.)

It’s become a popular conceit, in recent years, to dub Aboriginal Australian culture “the world’s oldest living civilisation”. This is nonsense, of course: “civilisation”, from civis, the Latin word for a town-dweller, necessarily requires the existence of cities. The most basic definition of a civilisation is a society made up of cities. Even by the sort of wishy-washy, politically correct nonsense which is all too commonplace these days in soft “sciences” like anthropology, a civilisation must have urban settlements, a division of labour, government and a surplus of food, as well as other cultural achievements.

Modern anthropologists, in thrall to capital-M Multiculturalism, are horrified by any suggestions that civilisation is a more advanced state of being than barbarism, but the fact remains that civilisation is a process as well as a state of being. The “natural” state of human beings, as we evolved, is small bands of more or less closely related individuals. Even in this age of social media, “Dunbar’s Number” – the optimum number of people with whom a human being can hold a stable social relationship – remains unchanged (around 150).

Learning to live beyond Dunbar’s Number, then, might be called the process of civilisation. Certainly, people who have long lived in extremely large, densely-populated cities – in Southeast Asia, most notably – have long adopted cultural and social strategies to cope. A good example might be the Japanese cultural concepts of honne and tatemae: that is, a person’s inner feelings and desires, contrasted with the behaviours and opinions one exhibits in public.

While such a dichotomy has perhaps achieved its paramount importance in such a densely urbanised society as Japan, most of us would be familiar with its basic precepts. For instance, the sort of jokes or opinions we might share with our closest friends and family are often very different to what we might say in “polite society”. The proliferation of “closed memes groups” on social media platforms like Facebook, where the only rules are to be as offensive as possible and for no one to be offended, a sort of memetic “Fight Club”, is another example of this kind of civilisational steam-valve at work.

It follows, therefore, that more highly civilised – that is, urbanised, high-technology – societies have learned cultural strategies that the less civilised have not. This is not an insult, it might be noted: merely an observation. The cultural rules and norms of a tribal Aboriginal band or an indigenous Amazonian village are necessarily very different to those of a global city like Tokyo, Singapore, London, or New York.

Throwing an individual from one into another will inevitably result in violent culture shock. A villager who looks to the local headman to solve a problem will be bewildered by the Byzantine bureaucracy of even a modest city government. A city-slicker used to routine, anonymous services, from garbage collection to ambulances or police, will likewise flounder in a tribal society.

The same sort of dislocation happens in politics.

Modern democracies are the terminus – or at least, the latest stop – on a road centuries or millennia in the building. From tribalism, they have climbed through kingdoms and empires, feudalism and despotism, parliamentary democracies and classical republics. Even in the latter two, the franchise has spent centuries expanding from landowning nobles to tax-paying males, and, ultimately, universal adult suffrage.

Over the last two centuries or so – a blink in human cultural evolution – modern Western democracy (in at least some form, however, limited) has spread (or been imposed) over much of the world, or at least attempted to be. In some instances, some of the least civilised – i.e. most tribal, and least technologically advanced – societies in the world have been suddenly, rudely, forcefully catapulted over millennia of such civilisational evolution into the modern age.

For groups like the Australian Aborigines, or the Maori of New Zealand, it was as if the flying saucers of a million-year-advanced alien civilisation had suddenly landed in Central Park and declared, “This is how you will live now.”

Anyone who thinks we Western moderns would simply toss everything we know out the window and adopt in a blink the civilisation and culture of Ursa Minor Beta is as optimistically deluded as Klaatu, the would-be civilising spaceman of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Why would anyone expect the literal Stone Age cultures thrust rudely into the Industrial Age to be any different?

This was the fundamental error of the likes of Bush and Blair: to imagine that they could simply walk into Afghanistan with Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks, like Klaatu with his fantastically destructive robot bodyguard, Gort, and simply plonk democracy in the middle of Kabul like a civilisational Ikea kit. Build it and they will vote, was the thinking. Fiercely tribal goat herders would, in an eyeblink, welcome democracy, feminism, and gay liberation, with open arms and rainbow flag parades.

Well, we all know how that went.

The equal-and-opposite fundamental error is to assume that all other ways of living – other cultures – are as valuable and fulfilling as Western-style pluralistic, liberal democracy. If that were true, of course, there would have been no French or American revolutions. No Civil Rights movement, or gay liberation movement. Indeed, there would never have been such failed experiments in opposition to democracy as Fascism. Because, if every way of living were as perfectly valuable and fulfilling as any other, no one would ever seek to change them.

Yet Capital-M Multiculturalism would have us believe that both are true at the same time. That a very modern, Western way of living – Multiculturalism – is at once no better than, and perfectly compatible with, even the most violently insular tribal monoculture.

A good example is the veneration within the chattering circles of “woke” inner-city Australia for traditional Aboriginal culture. The café elite of Melbourne, Sydney, or Wellington, who loudly condemn domestic violence and misogyny, passionately praise exactly that, when it’s “traditional indigenous culture”. At least, as Winston Peters so magnificently reminded a woman on the campaign trail, she wouldn’t be allowed to speak on the marae that she was so passionately defending.

Similarly, gentrified inner-city elites who’d rush for a restraining order at the first harsh word, are perfectly happy to see Aboriginal women condemned to degradation and brutality in the name of “traditional law”. As Australian senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price pointed out, the embiggeners of “traditional law” ought to try, say, looking up a handbook on Ngarra Law.

Under the chapter titled Marriage Law of the Ngarra Law written by Yolngu elders, they would find the following:

When a promised bride has reached sexual maturity her promised husband may take her for his wife. A 40 or 50-year-old man has spent his life learning the Ngarra law. His new wife might only be 13 to 16 years old and she will be sexually mature but she will not know much about the law. Yet when she marries him, she has the right to learn from him all the law that he knows that took him a lifetime to learn. But if she breaks the marriage law she must be speared through the leg. If the husband does not want to ­punish her then her mother or brother or sister will punish her, perhaps by hitting her with a heavy nulla nulla.

I personally first learned of such law decades ago, from an old Outback cameleer, who sneered at the praise for traditional law. What shocked me at the time was what seemed to me then to be such unbridled racism. Looking back, though, what I should really have been shocked about was that such a brutal culture as he described should not only persist into the 20th century but actually be celebrated by so many people who’ve never experienced it.

Even worse is the downward spiral of our civilisation into an abyss where liberal, pluralistic democracy is being dethroned in favour of racially siloed separatism. Where Karl Popper’s Open Society is having all its doors slammed shut into the most closed societies imaginable.
And it’s all being called “progress”.

Lushington describes himself as Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. This article was first published HERE