Aldebaran, are you aware that vast regions of the United States are in fact deserts? Half of California, Oregon and Washington, most of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and parts of most other western states are deserts. There is no water around Los Angeles, so why is it that people there don’t have to walk for miles to get water, or drill to the other side of the earth?
Of course, the answer is that our political and economic system allows for the importation of water from other areas. Large scale irrigation is possible, because property rights are secure, people aren’t afraid that their expensive capital investments aren’t going to be ruined by some local warlord, or expropriated by some dictator’s flunky.
Capitalism requires a political context to work within, otherwise it is nothing but feudalism.
It seems to me that human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and an orderly arangment of the economic sphere are not solely western values, although they were originated by westerners. I don’t reject democracy as a foreign doctrine, even though it originated on a far-away continent thousands of years ago. I don’t reject the idea of limited government simply because it wasn’t invented by Americans. These ideas are the heritage of the world, not the property of one ethnic group. Let’s call this political, economic and social order liberal democracy as a short hand, making sure that we understand that it includes much more than simply voting.
If you really believe the rule of law, democracy, human rights, and capitalism are solely western ideas. Nor are dictatorship, arbitrary rule, feudalism, and tyranny non-western ideas, since you can find many examples of such things among western countries as recently as 30 years ago. Remember Francisco Franco? And I’m sure you remember all the dictatorships of the Eastern Bloc, which certainly qualify as “western”, Marxism of course being a western doctrine.
The West didn’t wake up one day and decide that every country should be a liberal democracy, most western countries were not liberal democracies. But a funny thing happened. Western countries that WERE liberal democracies prospered, those that were tyrannies stagnated or regressed. Eventually every western country became a liberal democracy because those that weren’t learned the value of liberal democracy from those that were. And non-western countries that adopted liberal democracy found themselves prospering as well. The more closely they conformed to liberal democracy, the better off they were.
Now, that is not to say that liberal democracy is the ultimate politico-socio-economic system. Just that we fallible humans haven’t come up with a better solution that works as well. Maybe we already have something better in the idea stages that just needs implementing.
But if a better system exists, it would have to demonstrate its superiority by being implemented somewhere. If said system is so fragile that it cannot spread or prosper in the context of a world liberal democratic order, then I would argue that it cannot be superior to liberal democracy, since it is not robust enough to work in the real world.
And of course, the 20th century has seen many theoretical alternatives to liberal democracy…Marxism, fascism, and many other utopian schemes to remake human nature. Given their record of miserable failure, you can forgive me if I ask that any other proposed social arangment be subjected to some sort of review before it is adopted uncritically.
