October 5, 2014

Ben Affleck vs. Bill Maher on Islam: Bill's right.

On HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Ben Affleck (who I have great respect for on most occasions) sparred with Bill Maher (who I also respect) on the topic of the meaning of Islamophobia, and to what extent criticism of Islam as a set of ideas can be distinguished from bigotry against Muslims. Here is the discussion:

Affleck appears to take the position either that criticizing Islam is indistinguishable from bigotry against Muslims, or that it's a much higher priority to combat the latter than to stand up for the former - and thus implying that criticizing Islam is antagonistic to standing up for Muslims. I find this position shockingly illiberal and irrational.

Maher, however, appears to assert that fighting theocracy is an inextricable responsibility of liberalism, and that liberals can and must acknowledge how widespread theocratic opinions are in Islam. He makes the point that doing so is standing up for Muslims, since they are overwhelmingly the victims when the opinions of their communities lead to theocratic laws that punish them for either leaving or attempting to change their religion in some way.

I have to say that Maher is simply correct. There is no ethical option for a liberal to tolerate intolerance under the aegis of "cultural differences," or to pretend that an objective fact isn't true because it makes the job of fighting bigotry more complicated. Simply by the numbers, the political opinions of Muslims worldwide (though this might be different in the US) veer sharply toward legally imposing the core tenets of their religion - e.g., punishing blasphemy, punishing apostasy, etc. Maher noted one poll that found British Muslims overwhelmingly thought that criticism of Islam should be legally punished.

Another poll, reported by the Washington Post, which is far more disturbing, found that 78% of Afghans, 64% of Egyptians and Pakistanis, 59% of Palestinians, 58% of Jordanians, and 53% of Malaysians...supported the death penalty for leaving Islam. In other words, majorities in these countries were found to support killing other Muslims who decide not to be Muslims anymore.

Now, it's not a monolithic picture of worldwide Islam, because "merely" large minorities (38% and 36%) favored killing apostates in Iraq and Bangladesh, and it is actually good news that only 13% were on board with that in Indonesia (the most populous single Muslim country) and only 2% in Turkey. But it still means that in huge swaths of Islam, this is considered a legitimate or even mainstream political position to take, and the numbers are likely far more staggering if you were merely to ask about lighter punishments like imprisonment or fines.

I haven't seen the numbers for other religions, but I'm willing to bet substantial money that they're not comparable in their respective countries. So...this problem has to be acknowledged and dealt with, and the fact that bigots will exploit it doesn't change that. The current cultural state of Islam worldwide is radically conservative and authoritarian, and the only way to change that is to confront it - not be morally relativistic.

Bigots will always exploit the truth to undermine it. They exploited the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army in WW2 to terrify the American people into putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps, but no one would argue that that insanity meant we shouldn't have fought Japan. They exploited the horrors of the Stalin regime to wage authoritarian campaigns against the peaceful American left, but no one would argue that the madness of Joe McCarthy meant the US should not have stood firm in Europe against the Soviet empire. And today they exploit the Dark Age that Islam is currently experiencing to attack Muslims. But it would be ass-backwards to let that dictate how we respond to a very real and destructive social problem.

Liberals should be leading the charge against Islamic theocracy, not because it's Islamic, but because it's theocracy! We should be angrily telling those people who think their religion gives them the right to kill or imprison apostates or "blasphemers" that they do not have that right - that freedom of and from religion is an absolute, fundamental aspect of basic human dignity, and violating it is despicable and evil. When a Muslim somewhere decides not to be a Muslim anymore, and that leads to their being murdered; when a woman somewhere is stoned to death because she was raped; when mobs chant "death to (insert country)" because someone in that country criticized Islam; when a "blasphemer" is imprisoned...this should boil our blood. It does no service to the world, to liberal values, or to persecuted minority groups in any country to offer up these people as sacrifices on the altar of political correctness.

We can morally excuse some individuals involved in this madness because they grew up in an environment that told them this was acceptable, but we cannot excuse the vile ideas themselves, and certainly not people who grew up in Western countries and somehow still cling to gruesomely authoritarian ideological modes. At that point they are not naive people of a country with no liberal history - they are just radical right-wing conservatives exactly like the ones waving the cross in the name of hate, and should be fought with passion and contempt on behalf of all decent people of all backgrounds and religious beliefs.

Moreover, as noted in the discussion clip, it's not just jihadis that are the problem - not just people blowing stuff up and shooting people. The main problem is the sphere of political opinion that breeds such radicalism, even if it rhetorically condemns it. If it is acceptable to impose your religion on others, then the dispute between "mainstream" conservative Muslims and jihadis is merely one of degree - one believes they should immediately seek to impose Islam by just killing as many of its "enemies" as possible through terrorism, and the other that an orderly governmental process should be instituted to imprison and/or execute apostates and blasphemers. The dispute is mainly one of style and tactics - like the difference between white supremacists and white separatists, it's mostly rhetorical.

So...let's be liberals and stand up for human beings, not be the nihilistic PC priesthood the right paints us being. Say it without hesitation and without mealy-mouthed language: The current state of Islam is repugnant to liberal values. Stand up for the Muslims (or former Muslims) who say that and face brutal consequences to make life better for their people, rather than for the vile conservative degenerates in their communities who try to silence them.

October 1, 2014

Why not start direct democracy cities?

I was severely disappointed when Occupy just dissolved in the face of what were, historically, mild police assaults. While it's true they still exist in some rump form, doing things like cancelling relatively small amounts of student and mortgage debt, I thought they had completely missed and abandoned their true potential as a catalyzing force: Experimentation with practical direct democracy. And the most bizarre thing is that no one seems to talk about that aspect of it, as if there's some collective amnesia going on - or at least stunning lack of imagination.

But here's what occurs to me, that a bold, energetic, and lively society would attempt: Buy some land, incorporate some municipalities on various models, and charter them on the basis of various method of practical direct democracy - with the obvious shortcomings of that system counterbalanced with some thoughtful mechanisms. Just as a thought experiment the possibilities immediately extend far beyond what has been tried, so it seems like the only reason they haven't been tried is that our culture is so wretched with conservatism that even the radical progressives are afraid of new things.

Any objection you could make to the functioning of such cities could be planned against, if it's so obvious that it comes up in a conjectural conversation like this. And the problems that are non-obvious, finding those issues would be part of the benefit of the attempt - because they would represent new information, and give rise to new solutions. Moreover, the design of the mechanisms could be made flexible to deal with such unknowns. Finally, there would (hopefully) be several distinct communities operating in parallel and pursuing independent approaches, providing the diversity that is the fuel of evolution.

Now, I would stress one thing though: As experiments, they should be controlled - as in, the only thing that should be radically different in the initial conditions is the form of government. They should not otherwise be radical - i.e., not utopian communes that represent only a societal niche and deter average, non-ideological people from living there. This stipulation is the main difficulty, I think, since self-defeating insularity is the natural tendency of the boldest elements of the left. It truly hates associating with the wider culture and society, and that solipsism was often on display in the later days of the Occupy movement when the broad-based coalition started to unravel.

So that's a tendency that needs to be overcome, and especially the ludicrous ideology that rejects success and popularity as "selling out." Rather, we need a movement that wants to be emulated in society, wants the influence that comes with shallow political imitation. In this specific subject, we would need a set of town founders who would want to create models that other communities not activated by any kind of ideological zeal might want to emulate. In other words, the form of the direct democracy should be carefully maintained at a level of simplicity that remains accessible to novices, and doesn't degenerate (as it eventually did with Occupy) into an opaque set of shibboleths and insular practices that look alien, bizarre, and intimidating to outsiders. The forms of the wider culture should be diligently maintained while being rearranged into more democratic systems.

While respecting individuals, they should not be allowed to devolve into self-limiting counterculture cults that glory in multiplying the contrasts with the rest of society, since that would totally defeat the purpose of insinuating direct democracy. Basically it needs to be strictly a technocratic set of experiments with a maximally representative cross-section of the population, with obnoxious anti-everything ideological types discouraged without violating the democratic principle. The reason for this is that, whatever successes are discovered, would then be far easier to transmit to larger scales - counties, states, nations, regions, even globally over the longest term. But if the experiments devolve into counterculture caricatures, then other people would reflexively reject its lessons simply because of the form they've taken.

Needless to say, only people whose foremost priorities are humanity and democracy should be involved in the planning. Ideologues whose values are a chaotic laundry list of unrationalized niche issues should not, since they would produce exactly what I just mentioned should be avoided. Beyond that, I won't bother to conjecture exact policies and forms. I'll simply note, again, that if you can raise an objection in a theoretical conversation, then someone seriously planning such a community would probably also think of it and be able to plan for it. Basically, there's no reason not to do this.

There are challenges to doing it, certainly - most immediate simply being the money to buy the land, and attracting the non-ideological expertise to manage the completely technical aspects of planning, building, maintaining, and expanding the communities that are created. But it can be done: Many of the cities and states of this country were founded for a political or moral purpose, and only lately have we completely resigned the further colonization of our own country to development corporations. Boston (and Massachusetts in general) retains the highly literate and education-oriented character of its history, to cite one example. And on the other political side, Utah is still gruesomely Mormon. There's no reason why we have to simply abandon the future shaping of this country to the blind forces of real estate capitalism.

In fact, let's take this concept further: It isn't even strictly necessary to form a new town to pursue these experiments. Just get together with people in your neighborhood, call it the _____ Assembly, and vote on stuff. Doesn't matter if any authorities recognize your resolutions, because if you stick to it, eventually they'll have to at least pay respect to them to avoid alienating a chunk of active voters. With that respect, the reputation and influence of that Assembly would grow, as would its numbers, and you could then take whatever measures were needed to keep its functioning practical while maintaining its direct character. Slowly you could grow such a thing into such an influential force that you might eventually be able to have laws changed giving it some kind of de jure authority. Not likely sole authority, but at least some role in the structure of local government. From there, anything is possible.

The fact that Occupy didn't stick with direct democracy as its primary mission, and instead treated it like an afterthought to be abandoned to the impotent counterculture rather than expanded into the wider culture, is one of its most tragic failures and missed opportunities. But every day is a new opportunity, and the value and potential of this idea will never disappear.

In fact, it's the distilled lesson of all of history: That the single most explosively creative, artistically beautiful, philosophically prolific, and influential civilization in history was the handful of generations in a single city (Athens) living under direct democracy. The fact that it could do what it did in those few generations, in a people numbering little more than 20,000 voters, is just mind-boggling. Now, then again, it was not perfect: It self-destructed as the citizens became a greedy mob willing to endanger their entire society for the spoils of imperialistic wars. But the lesson to be drawn from that is how to tweak direct democracy to avoid those problems, not to simply avoid it altogether. The foundation from which you grow and evolve has to be democracy - it should not be an outgrowth of tolerant monarchy or permissive oligarchy.

We in this country have never had such a democratic foundation. We have always been a state constructed on a permissive oligarchy, and over time the oligarchy is reasserting its foundational privileges. That can, should, and must change - however slowly, it must. There's room enough in this country for thousands of different approaches to direct democracy, but all of them should be attempted, across as many diverse situations as possible.

Experiment with different "action thresholds" (the majority needed to produce a given type of resolution); experiment with different relationships between the Assembly and the courts, the Assembly and the bureaucracies, the Assembly and the Executive; experiment with Assembly sizes and thresholds for fissioning into separate bodies; experiment with methods of order, etc. etc. But for fuck's sake, experiment. Stop just doing things because they've been done before.