Values
Thomas Barnett noted this map in a recent New York Times story, overlaying it with the boundaries based on his core-gap theory.
A few comments:
- Gay rights are a strong indicator of values progression, as theorized by Ronald Inglehart; “postmodern” societies tend to have strong gay rights.
- Barnett supposes a causal connection between global connectedness and acceptance of gays. I suspect the connections are secondary, with connectedness driving prosperity, which boosts the kind of societal security which breeds acceptance of nonconformity.
- This gay right map illustrates a broader pattern: religiosity generally varies inversely with morality at a societal level, if by morality one means how well people are treated. This is likely not a direct link, but more that poverty drives both intolerance and fervent religiosity (per Inglehart).
Image: New York Times / Thomas PM Barnett
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For the Twitter futrchat on the future of human rights today, here are some resources and links. (Follow the conversation with #futrchat.)
- Freedom House checklist of political and civil rights — This is a good list of what might be called core human rights, though that designation is subject to a variety of debates.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which codifies many political, civil, and social rights, and is accepted by most countries in principle, if not in practice.
- “A History of Violence” — An essay by Steven Pinker arguing that violence and brutality of all kinds have been decreasing for a long time.
- A report on fighting human rights abuses using technology.
- Ronald Inglehart on the relationship of social conditions and wealth to values, including values that shape attitudes toward human rights.
- Pew polling data on the attitudes of middle classes toward democracy; culture and class matter.
- In thinking about future drivers, what happens if the world becomes much more wealthy? This Asian Development Bank report offers a scenario in which both China and India have per capita incomes over $40,000 by 2050 — see pages 124 and 120.
- Some thoughts from Hplus on the relationship of transhumanism and human rights — see especially scenarios 3 to 5.
- Other human rights-related posts on this blog.
In a recent piece in The New Yorker article, writer Rohinton Mistry mentions growing up in India in the 20th century, “raised to believe that this ancient country was futureless, the only solution to settle in the West, to make a better life.”
This raises a basic question: how do people come to believe they are or are not the future? This belief is central to civilizational confidence, and to a society’s momentum, but it is hardly universal.
The present is here, it is just unequally distributed
People do not even necessarily believe that their societies are in the present, a prerequisite for believing one is the future. It is common to hear people in developing countries say, “We want to be a normal country, we want to join the present.” They have an active sense of dyschronicity: that there is a progression toward a future, and they are further from it than others.
And some cultures may feel shut out of the present. This is a political issue in some societies. In Latin America, for instance, over the last few decades indigenous peoples emerging from quasi-colonial treatment explicitly demand to be considered part of the present, not relics of the past.
Battling for the past
To believe one’s way is the future, it is helpful to believe that you are the culmination of the past. This is a strength of many religions, including state Marxism as practiced in the 20th century.
The American right grasps this concept, incidentally, and is working hard to redefine the American past, sometimes straining historical realities in the process.
China seems to be working through this redefinition now too. In its new narrative, China is not the formerly oppressed vanguard of the Third World—its story for a while—but the global leader for millennia, now emerging from a temporary (150-year) bad patch. (You don’t have to pick a real past to go back to. Some groups that see themselves as the future seek to go back to a past that never was: the glorious rule of the Caliphate, or a free America without government.)
Losing faith
A society can lose its belief in its own place in the future. That happened gradually to the Soviet Union, as its faith-based Marxism was gradually proven to be inferior to other systems, until Gorbachev came along and announced that not even the leadership believed any more.
There is a sense that this is happening in the United States now, that the American narrative is faltering. This is implicit in comments that many Americans make about the Chinese: “They just want it more” and the like. And it seems to underlie the seeming inability to contemplate — or fund — any large projects.
It is unclear whether this is a bigger loss of faith than other periodic doubts, but it is a departure from the normal narrative. From de Tocqueville on, Americans and others typically assumed that America was destined for greatness.
The “American exceptionalism” argument is partly about this: if you are the anointed leader, you must be the future. And in the past, the sense of exceptionalism was in no small sense based on reality: America was the future in so many areas: we had levels of democracy, electrification, car ownership, college education, etc. that other countries would not reach for years.
That reality is gone in almost every area, from health care to Internet speed to political dynamics. Perhaps it is time to find some new ways to be exceptional, to be the future?
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Image: The Wandering Angel (Flickr)
The Washington Post reports that Confucianism is enjoying a revival in China, propelled both by state promotion and popular enthusiasm.
The Party, Andrew Higgins suggests, sees the philosophy as a counter to Westernization, but it is not without danger to existing power structures, as it requires rulers to be virtuous and benevolent. Still, Confucianism could fill a philosophical vacuum that the last 40 years has left in China, and provide a map for changing relationships between the government and the people.
It could also be a means that China enhances it now-weak soft power, which currently is based on little more than pragmatic utility: development that can appeal to the masses, and legitimized authoritarianism which many elites might like to emulate.
A successful, Confucian China would have real ideas to offer to much of the developing world. Large portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America would benefit from a Confucian social contract, in which elites have strong obligations to the populace. Even without Western democracy, that would be vastly different approach from the predatory practices of many states today.
Domestically, the relationship of China’s rulers and ruled will have to evolve as well. A Chinese executive in this article suggests why: “For the past 30 years, China has constantly stressed the economy, not culture, philosophy, and reflection,” he said. “But after you reach a certain economic level, you can start to think.”
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Image of Confucius courtesy Ivan Walsh (Flickr)
The response to the removal of Honduras’ president by the country’s military illustrates an important change: democracy is now the norm in Latin America.
This is a stark change from the past, when coups were common and brutal human rights violations were the norm for even ostensibly democratic states. And the clear American response also shows how things have changed; the US was largely indifferent to military rule and human rights violations in the region well into the 1980s (with the exception of the Carter administration), but has since been fairly attentive to these issues (with some backsliding by the Bush administration in the 2000s).
In other words, a serous values change has transformed a large region, as part of a broader global trend.
(Image courtesy YamilGonzales, Flickr: attribution and ShareAlike license)
The Atlantic recently asked its panel of 40 foreign policy experts about prospects for democracy, publishing the results in March.
One question–do you believe the proliferation of democratic government is inevitable in the long run?–yielded these results:
Skeptics’ comments included these:
- “We seem to have forgotten that democracy is an organic phenomenon–that … it is the outcome of specific histories, cultures, ethnicities, and events.
- “New models quite far from Jeffersonian democracy (China’s ‘Market-Leninism’) could begin to catch the imaginations of transitional societies.”
Someone in the “yes” camp offered this remark:
- “Despite the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, people who are free to choose (as Mrs. Thatcher said) do choose to be free. And the information revolution enables more people to see lives in free countries.”
Image: Racoles (Flickr)
The International Herald Tribune details the process of Islamization, using the case of Egypt.
In Egypt and other Arab lands, faced with frustrated hopes and poor economic prospects,
the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them. With 60 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, this youthful religious fervor has enormous implications for the Middle East. More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other, failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.
The article offers these implications:
- “The focus on Islam is also further alienating young people from the West and aggravating political grievances already stoked by Western foreign policies.”
- An Islamized populace has less distance to travel to reach Islamic radicalism.
Curiously, one of the drivers of social frustration in Arab countries is delayed marriage, due to high marriage costs, the article explains. In other words, given that these economies are not producing widespread wealth, the social system has developed a malfunction.
This trend has implications for stability:
- States may find it harder to control populations that have been primed for political Islam.
- Populations used to thinking in terms of Muslim solidarity may be more actively provoked by the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, and hostile to the impotent peace practiced by states such as Egypt and Jordan.
- Political Islam, with its statist inclinations and hostility to aspects of scientific reasoning, could reinforce the economic malaise that many Middle Eastern countries tend to suffer.
Future Atlas has a new map of an aspect of dyschronicity, the distance in time between places measured by culture, technology, or some other characteristic.
In this case, the map shows approximate distance between one place and the rest of the world in the area of values and attitudes.
The reference country in this map is Sweden, as it is notably further along in a number of social trends that many countries are now undergoing. The map is essentially an estimation of how long ago Sweden was like that place in its values and attitudes.
This kind of dyschronicity can illuminate some culturally-rooted issues. For instance:
- There is some logic in finding Denmark at the heart of the cartoon controversy of last year: it is centuries out of sync with most of the Muslim world at the cultural level.
- Turkey and Western Europe are at best decades apart at this level, helping to drive European reluctance to bring Turkey into the European Union.
- Western Europe and the US are also partially living in different times, with Europeans viewing Americans as backward on issues such as the death penalty, health care, and environmentalism.
For more, see this Future Atlas page.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers has released a study of potential growth in the world’s 17 largest economies out to the year 2050.
The study forecasts the eclipse of the current developed economies. The E7, largest emerging market economies (China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey), were only 20% of the size of the G7 economies at market exchange rates in 2005, but would be 25% larger than the G7 by 2050. By purchasing power, the E7 economies were only 75% as large as the G7 in 2005, but would be 75% larger by 2050.
In purchasing power terms, the shifts in relative GDP would be stark:
COUNTRY — relative econ size 2005 / 2050
US — 100 / 100
Japan — 32 / 23
Germany — 20 / 15
China — 76 / 143
UK — 16 / 15
France — 15 / 13
Italy — 14 / 10
Spain — 9 / 8
Canada — 9 / 9
India — 30 / 100
South Korea — 9 / 8
Mexico — 9 / 17
Australia — 5 / 6
Brazil — 13 / 25
Russia — 12 / 14
Turkey — 5 / 10
Indonesia — 7 / 19
Note that the values are relative within their respective years, but not across them; all economies are projected to be larger in 2050 than at present.
Purchasing power suggests, among other things, the military power the economy can afford to buy, suggesting that the realignment of power toward Asia will have substantially occurred. It will no longer be possible for the US to massively outspend all potential rivals.
The study also offers some startling numbers for per capita income. The figures suggest that the developed countries could have universal prosperity, and the emerging markets could achieve levels of wealth like those of developed countries today, eliminating dire poverty.
COUNTRY — 2005 / 2050 purchasing power GDP per capita (constant 2004 dollars)
US — $40,339 / $88,443
Japan — $30,081 / $70,646
Germany — $28,770 / $68,261
China — $6,949 / $35,851
UK — $31,489 / $75,855
France — $29,674 / $74,685
Italy — $28,576 / $66,165
Spain — $25,283 / $66,552
Canada — $31,874 / $75,425
India — $3,224 / $21,872
South Korea — $21,434 / $66,489
Mexico — $9,939 / $42,879
Australia — $31,109 / $74,000
Brazil — $8,311 / $34,448
Russia — $10,358 / $43,586
Turkey — $7,920 / $35,861
Indonesia — $3,702 / $23,686
These numbers suggest massive value shifts: countries reaching these wealth levels have shifted toward democracy, social freedom, and humane governance.
There is an underlying problem in these hopeful figures: sustainability will be strained with far more of the planet living at developed levels of wealth.