Dope

"10 � Then Hanani'ah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah's neck, and brake it.

11 And Hanani'ah spake in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.

12 � Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after that Hanani'ah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying,

13 Go and tell Hanani'ah, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.

14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him: and I have given him the beasts of the field also.

15 Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hanani'ah the prophet, Hear now, Hanani'ah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie."

Jeremiah, of course, lived in a primitive time, before mass produced protest signs. Limited Inc, however, enjoys all the fruits of modern technology, including the aforesaid mass produced protest signs, one of which we spotted yesterday, going into Book People. It said American for Peace, white caps on a red background. It was stapled to a stake, and intended for the good b�rger with the lawn and all the trimmings -- which we would be, Lord thou knowest, if only we had a weekly salary, a decent career, a future and a past, sex, kids, a car. Having none of those and two dollars on us, one buck in quarters, one buck in paper, we approached the Peace guy, who said the signs were three bucks. Dilemma! We wanted to spend our paper dollar, and one or two of our quarters, on getting a cup of java from the coffee shop inside Book People. So here it was, at last -- the social comforts or the stirn prompting of the moral law within us. The choice. And then, suddenly, the guy standing next to us bought us the sign, just dished out three bucks as pretty as you please.

Jeremiah's sign would no doubt have been a little more glorious -- something like "peace, peace, but there is no peace," written in letters of blood -- but ours looks pretty spiffy, wedged into our apartment window.

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Prophecy is a dangerous business. You go around breaking yokes, thinking you are speaking God's own truth, and then God makes a yoke out of you. As per Hanani'ah, one of history's also runs. No book in the bible named for him. The visionary poets from Dante to Ginsburg, do they look back, do they instance Hanani'ah? Nope. Jeremiah even got to be a bullfrog in the days of my youth -- there he was, mentioned in a pop song. Hanani'ah however remains in the dustbin of history. And you'll notice why he is in the dustbin of history. He predicts an easy victory over Babylon. That just wasn't smart.

As we can see from this startling article in the City Journal by Stanley Kurtz, After the War. City Journal is put out by the Manhattan Institute, another rightwing think tank. We came upon it in a sour mood, after reading the extremely silly report on the protest in London by Julia Magnet (whose thesis, popular right now on the right, is that anti-semitism can be compressed into anti-Israel-ism, which can be further compressed into anti-Sharon-ism -- so that any objection to Israel's foreign policy is just a matter of Jew-hating). Magnet, while priding herself on being pro-Israel (and thus, by her convoluted logic, philo-semitic), makes no bones about having contempt for all Moslems. Through these blinders, the million people who turned out in London are transformed into some future brown-shirt army. This is a pandering hysteria that will, we prophesy (yoke on back) eventually haunt those who condone it.

The Kurtz thing surprised us. Kurtz is a thinker at another rightwing think tank -- as Jeremiah said, in another context, according to the number of thy cities were they think tanks, oh America, and according to the number of the streets of D.C. have ye set up telegenic wonks to that shameful thing, tax free foundation money -- and so we would have written him off. At the moment, even though, in their heart of hearts, real conservatives know that there is something screwy in the Wilsonian enthusiasm they are all supposed to be experiencing at the thought of America's infinite involvement in imposing democracy around the world, real conservatives are not going to be expressing that thought and getting those looks from their comrades. This is a world of groupthink.

Well, Kurtz's essay treads on my territory -- he actually goes back to the analogy all the rightwingers love, the British empire, and asks Hobson's question: is it really the case that the British government, defying all the rules of governments ever known, extended itself with suffering and tax dollars in order to bring democracy to the heathen? The answer is no. Although we aren't absolutely happy with Kurtz's reasoning, we do think that this is a step in the right direction .... besides which, it is what we've been trying to write an essay about ourselves. Kurtz doesn't quite go all the way -- he doesn't mention the dreaded word, famine -- but he does hint that the golden picture of the British Raj painted by people like Robert Kagan has more to do with PBS costume dramas than reality.

Kurtz is, first, cautious about the idea that democracy can be imposed from above. Well he should be. If there is anything that binds together Anglo conservativism for the past two hundred twenty some years, it is that revolutions from the top impose an arbitrary order, the order of the abstract thinker, on the natural order of society. This is the lesson of Burke, who applied it not less to India than to France. Here's Kurtz's grafs on the subject:

"...If Iraq currently lacks a modernizing, democratizing class, like Japan�s samurai bureaucrats, might it not be possible to create a sector of Iraqi society that embraces liberal principles�a new, modern bureaucratic class that could then spark a liberalization of the larger society and the government, just as the samurai did in Japan?

In fact, there is a good historical precedent for just such a development: that is precisely what happened when the British ruled India. British rule in the subcontinent, let it be said at once, is a highly imperfect model of democratization. The Raj was often cruel and exploitative. And though a few British thinkers and bureaucrats may have understood the Raj�s 150-year imperium as the midwife of Indian self-rule, for the most part the British brought democracy to the Indians more or less by accident, in fits and starts. But by educating and training�and employing�English-speaking Indians to assist them in administering the empire, the British ended up forging a liberal-minded indigenous class that eventually could run a modern nation on its own.

A pivotal figure in this development is Ram Mohan Roy (1772�1833), the so-called father of modern India. Broadly educated in Indian languages, he went on to master English and work for the British East India Company, where he developed ideas that led to the first modernizing movement within Hinduism�a crucial stage on India�s path to modern democracy. Roy shows how it is possible to take an ancient, nonmodern tradition (like Islam, say) and�without seeming to violate it, and indeed while cherishing much that is valuable in it�to transform it substantially and adapt it to the modern condition. Roy used the philosophical ideas found in the earliest Hindu scriptures to criticize the polytheism and some of the practices of popular Hinduism, such as sati�widow burning. Yet he indignantly rejected the disdain for Hinduism that Christian missionaries and British liberals so casually showed. Immersed in Hinduism�s rich philosophical tradition, Roy defended Hindu pride against British prejudice and simultaneously argued for liberalizing change within the Hindu tradition. The surest route to modern life for Muslim societies may be just such an internal reformation of their Islamic tradition rather than a forcible extirpation of it. If democracy is to succeed in the Middle East, an Islamic Roy may have to arise."

Now that Kurtz has broached the subject, he boldly ventures out a little more.

"While Indian cultural values remain strong in India, Macaulay in a sense got his way, as well. Macaulay�s Minute began the process of relative Anglicization and accelerated the cultural transformation that Roy had begun, a transformation that pushed India into the modern world.

Before the new indigenous elite arose, however, at least one early-nineteenth-century British modernizing effort failed disastrously, proving that it is not enough to blow up existing social structures and assume that, when the dust settles, the fragments will re-form into something recognizably modern. Liberal British administrators wanted to shatter the power of traditional village landlord elites and give individual farmers control over their own land. Like famed Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto today, they believed that once the right property relations were in place, an explosion of free enterprise and productivity would follow. It didn�t happen. The British destroyed the traditional Indian system of village rule and created a market in land, but the Indians showed no signs of developing a liberal, capitalist ethos. Private ownership by itself was insufficient to bring deeper cultural change. So British administrators had to step in, at great and ultimately unsupportable expense to the British Treasury."

Of course, the last sentence is nonsense -- Indians paid for the administration of India, as Kurtz surely knows. He doesn't get into the details of exactly how the modernizing effort failed -- but it is the heart of our perhaps never to be completed essay on James Fitzjames Stephen that the 20th century conservative myth -- that central planning is confined to socialism -- ignores its roots, which are just here, in India. The Benthamite/Laissez faire idea was to "modernize" India along approved capitalist lines with centrally planned laws that would re-do the whole village economy, monetize the place, and bring about relationships of exchange among the happy farmers. Kurtz delicately skirts around the fact that this planning is directly implicated in the worst famines of the nineteenth century. But that he even ventures out far enough to cast doubt on the neo-colonialist projects a-bornin' in D.C. cocktail parties is pretty brave, as far as it goes.

So hallelujah, intelligent life on the right! But I'm not going to break my yoke quite yet.