The Immorality of Moral Universalism

The Immorality of Moral Universalism

From the desk of John
Laughland on Wed, 2008-02-13 17:14

Pas de
liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté! No liberty for the enemies of liberty has
always been the revolutionary principle, ever since Saint-Just (“The Angel of
the Terror”) pronounced the phrase in Paris in 1793. Because Islam is now
widely seen as an existential threat to liberal values the speech by the Archbishop
of Canterbury last week, saying that the introduction of sharia law was
both inevitable and desirable, and that idea of a sovereign state with a single
law for all was “problematic” because it is not pluralist and tolerant enough,
has inevitably caused a storm.

The speech
did not come entirely out of the blue. For many decades now, clerics including
in the Catholic church have espoused nothing but a tepid brew of secular
left-liberalism. People used to say that the danger of people believing in
nothing was that they would start to believe in anything. But as Paul Gottfried
argued some years ago in his excellent book, Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, the secularist project merely causes
theological forms of behaviour to erupt into the political realm, often in a
particularly nasty and deformed way. When priests stop talking about morality,
other people start talking about it instead.

This was
illustrated on 12th February in a
speech by the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. He called the
speech “The Democratic Imperative”, perhaps an unconscious allusion to “the
categorical imperative,” the centrepiece of the moral philosophy of the man who
did most to introduce secularism and to banish God from the public realm,
Immanuel Kant. Miliband’s view is that the democratic states of the world have
a moral duty to intervene, including with military force, to support democracy
around the world.

Miliband’s
debt to Kant is very great, since he invokes the concept of moral universalism,
but it is perhaps greater to his mentor, Tony Blair, who advocated the same
thing at the height of the Kosovo war in 1999, in his speech entitled “The Doctrine of the
International Community” and greater still to Leon Trotsky and V. I. Lenin,
the men for whom his
grandfather fought in the Red Army, and who, like Miliband, also believed
in enforcing world revolution by military might.

The Foreign
Secretary marshalled three arguments which, he said, are counter-arguments to
“the democratic imperative”. Although he claimed to demolish each one in turn,
he in fact failed to address the single most important counter-argument to
interventionism and its claim that promoting democracy is “moral”, namely that,
on the contrary, interventionism is deeply immoral.

This is not
difficult to show. Kosovo is about to declare its independence. Naturally there
will be a lot of crowing about how the NATO war of 1999 was fought for
universal values and about how it therefore showed the rightness of
interventionism. Yet you do not have to accept that the original war was evil
(as I believe it was) to see that the subsequent administration of the province
has been catastrophic. As Matthias Brügmann reported in Handelsblatt on
2nd February (“Das
Scheitern der Welt” – “The World’s Failure”), and as I know from my own
bitter experience, Kosovo is a hell-hole. The United Nations administration
there has ruthlessly sacrificed its own institutional self-interest to that of
the Kosovo people; it has consumed tens of billions of dollars without
providing for any of the basics for civilised life – there is no proper
electricity supply and there are power cuts all the time; and the place is run
by the Mafia, the former KLA leader Hashim Thaci having been Prime Minister since
2007. Unemployment is nearly universal and the place is a sump of corruption
and violence. What is moral about that?

Anyone
interested in reading more on this would do well to consult the terrible
indictment published in 2006 by two well-meaning former officials in the UN
administration in Kosovo, Iain King and Whit Mason, Peace
at any price: How the world failed Kosovo. Even the European
Commission’s annual progress report on candidate states admits, Kosovo
government is “weak an inefficient” while corruption remains “widespread” [pdf].

I have written elsewhere about the
immorality of supporting the independence of Kosovo while denying it to
Flanders, Northern Cyprus, Republika Srpska, Transnistria or any of the other
numerous territories around the world which do not want to belong to the states
they are in. David Miliband says that one of his ideological enemies is Realpolitik,
but what other word can there be for supporting the independence of those
countries you like, while denying it to those you do not?

The only
other possible word which describes such an approach is “double standards” and
these are the opposite of moral. Yet they are precisely what another
interventionist, Robert Cooper, once wrote (in The Post Modern State and the
World Order were what should guide the foreign policy of the West: “We need
to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the
basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more
old-fashioned kinds of state outside the post-modern continent of Europe, we
need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive
attack, deception.”

Similar
theories have been advanced, for instance, by Robert Kaplan, another
interventionist, in his apology for brutalism, Warrior
Politics: Why Leadership demands a Pagan Ethos.

On one
level, Miliband’s and Blair’s invocation of morality in justification of
horrible acts of war is simply the sign of a psychotic personality – what one
Iraq expert called to advise the then Prime Minister before the invasion of
Iraq, “a strange combination of moral fervour and cynicism”. At a deeper level,
however, I believe that double standards and hypocrisy are the inevitable
results of any policy based on abstract, universal values. Appeals to universal
values will always lead to hypocrisy because values cannot be apprehended in
the abstract, only in the concrete. The only way to appreciate the value of
something is by comparing it to something else.

We need to
renew, therefore, with the ancient tradition of justice and morality,
formulated by Cicero and Aristotle and transfigured by St. Thomas Aquinas,
according to which justice is the administration to each of his deserts. It is
the role of the state to establish such deserts and administer such justice,
but, more profoundly, it is the role of the polis to provide a forum in
which such values can be publicly apprehended and judged. The state is also the
forum by which accountability for the wielding of power is ensured:
international power, by contrast, is structurally unaccountable because there
are literally no mechanisms by which decisions are subjected to any sort of
democratic scrutiny or approval.

Miliband’s
approach, therefore, is to deny the state its noble role of providing a forum
for the establishment of value, and, in the name of an morality which is as
capricious as it is abstract, to argue for nothing less than the right to wield
power without responsibility.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2964