Outside the West, Fear Is the Root of Order

The Guardian reports, 

The last major mosque in China to have retained Arabic-style features has lost its domes and had its minarets radically modified, marking what experts say is the completion of a government campaign to sinicise the country’s Muslim places of worship. The Grand Mosque of Shadian, one of China’s biggest and grandest mosques, towers over the small town from which it takes its name in south-western Yunnan province.

Jonathan Eyal, the associate director of the once arch-Tory and nationalist Royal United Services Institute, seems not to grasp why, say, Muslims and Arabs are not protesting against the Chinese destruction of the dome of the grandest and oldest mosque in South Yunnan. A certain section of people are stumped about why we don’t see more protests when Muslims are victims in China.

Similar arguments can be heard form the pro-Israel right as well. Why do we see “Queers for Palestine” protests? Do they not know that Hamas does not care about gay rights?

This rhetorical trick is tedious at best, and imbecilic at worst. It is predicated on another historically tedious trope: If only the other side was more knowledgeable and had more information, they’d be, well, enlightened. Every ill of society can be remedied by more information and education. Humans are by nature noble and can be morally enlightened with more knowledge. 

This practically Rousseauian idea of human nature, however, suffers from a slight but notable disadvantage: It’s wrong. No theory that cannot explain an exception is a valid or sound theory.  

The answer to these questions is rather simpler, and more brutal. To take a more mundane example: Why can tourists or new migrants not stop littering on the streets of the U.S. or Europe, or who cannot keep their mouth shut on quiet cars on the trains, when they dare not litter in Singapore or break a law in Dubai, countries and cities with far less aggregate policing or military power? Every single day there are tweets about shop break-ins in the UK or Europe. Try shoplifting in Asia and see where it takes you.

Consider this hypothetical. Country A tediously lectures and promotes human rights and widely is despised by the Third World; it loses influence over all around the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Country B does not promote human rights and is essentially recolonizing parts of the Third World with predatory loans, as well as maintaining labor camps at home. The Third World in turn never raises a finger against Country B, and all but worships it, its money, and its power. What conclusions might one draw from that about the Third World, human rights, and soft power?

The simple answer is a lack of fear. The perception of internal law and order in the West in general and Anglosphere in particular is one of social weakness and lax punitive measures. There’s an under-incarceration problem matched to every social problem—except for the high crime of blasphemy against the state theology. 

“Among the wonderful deeds of Hannibal this one is enumerated: that having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince. “This arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.”

Amid cursed modernity, one does not expect a philosopher prince, feared and loved in equal measure. But in a society that is increasingly imperial in structure, one way to stop the rot is to return to restraint from revolutionary maximalism abroad and strong order at home.