Hot on the heels of SDP saying that
"foreign pressure is the main way to ship real democracy to Singapore", we have
news reports of George Soros, billionaire financier, philanthropist founder and chairman of the
Open Society Institute criticizing Singapore for lack of political freedom, and especially the PAP's practice of using libel lawsuits to crush opposition politicians. (Correlation need not imply causation, so no need to get too excited about any SDP-Soros connection.) In any case, ST (Jan 11) is reporting--from "Soros opens up on his new passion - democracy":
MR GEORGE Soros, philanthropist and financier extraordinaire, on Wednesday showed 2,000 young Singaporeans that he was not just a money man, but a political philosopher as well. The 75-year-old chairman and founder of Soros Fund Management, who earned fame in the 1990s for his market-moving currency bets, has been spending his fortune on a lifelong pet project - fostering open societies through his foundation, the Open Society Institute.
For the uninitiated, it's called the Open Society Institute in honor of one of Soros' teachers, the Austria born LSE philosopher of science,
Karl Popper. More precisely, with reference to what is probably Popper's most famour book, the two volume
The Open Society and its Enemies. The chief antagonist in the book is Plato, who Popper blames for being the grand ancestor of all (theoretical) enemies to the open society. For me, however, the book holds a different significance--a memorable example of how an otherwise intelligent man can get it so wrong about Plato, especially about the
Republic, one of the most anti-political books ever. Short version: for all the bluster about philosopher kings, Socrates' claim that there will be no rest for political societies until philosophers rule or rulers philosophize is meant to imply that political societies are basically screwed. The best regime according to the light of
reason is an impossibility. (For a more engaging--i.e., gossipy--introduction to Popper and other thinkers of his generation, see
this book.)
Anyway, the ST report continues:
He explained to a packed forum organised by the Institute of South-east Asian Studies why he spends billions on civic causes from funding universities in Eastern Europe to fighting apartheid in South Africa. The Hungarian-born Jew survived the 1944 Nazi occupation by living under a false name and later escaped Soviet rule by emigrating to Britain. He professed support for the Democrats in the 2004 US presidential election, he said, and was against US President George W. Bush's handling of terrorism and the war on Iraq.
(Aside: I've actually met people (scholars) who have benefitted first hand from his largess. When in Berkeley, I met a Czech couple on fellowship. They told me stories about how even back in the dark days under communism, Soros' initiative would bring scholars from Britain, the US, etc., to give talks in Czechoslovakia, help finance students who want to meet up to read philosophy, etc. I have to confess that I found it all very exciting and romantic--meeting up to read some 'forbidden philosophy', say,
The Open Society and its Enemies, while living under an unfree regime.)
Soros' opposition to Bush is well known; and so is his
generous funding of Bush's opponents. The next thing reported, however, seems mildly in tension with other things he said:
'Some people believe that 'might is right'... I don't think that democracy can be imposed from the outside. And it certainly cannot be imposed by military force,' he said. He also said Singapore was 'obviously not an open society', and expressed hope for more political openness, adding that the Republic's prosperity put it in good stead to move in that direction.
No, not the point that Singapore is not an open society. That follows as a matter of a priori deduction in the universe of Soros' theoretical commitments (though it is possible that he's being a tad too stringent here given the original formulations of what an
open society is). |
update: the updated Jan 11 version of the ST article reports the somewhat expected response from the MICA spokesman: "If we were not an open society, George Soros would hardly be able to make the comments at an open forum in Singapore, and be reported in the Singapore media."
Nor am I talking about the slide from "might is right" to "imposing democracy from the outside by military force" (assuming that ST did not managed to edit that in a misleading way). At best (or worse, depending on your tastes), proponents of the latter are asking that might be in the service of right, which presupposes a distinction between might and right.
Nor am I referring to the ambiguity in the very notion of democracy. As far as I am concerned, the US is a democratic country--whether or not G.W. Bush is in the White House. Despite what some might think, there really isn't very much that Bush can do to change that fact--the framers made sure of that some 217 years ago. Soros' support for his favored causes in the US is very much the support of a particular spectrum within a democratic framework--and making full use of that very framework's provisions for political speech to boot. The work of the Initiative in Communist Eastern Europe, on the other hand, was an attempt to help in the very emergence of a democratic framework. The two are works are different enough. But I'll let that pass; only pendant like myself could possibly be interested in a point like this.
It's the point that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside. If democracy cannot be imposed from the outside by military force, can it be so imposed, or perhaps
induced, by some generous financial assistance from the outside? Can one escape sliding from saying "yes" to the latter to admiting "yes" to the former, at least given a range of circumstances? Besides, is the sense of the "cannot" that of technical impossibility--just can't be done, won't be doable, attempts will be unsuccessful, counterproductive--or is it meant to be tinged with a touch of the deontic--it
shouldn't be done, even if it can be done?
These are things that
can and
ought to be sorted out. |
update: The Void Deck takes a first stab.
* * * * *
Even more things to be sorted out after reading Agagooga's
on-scene report of Soros. There's a lot but this bit in particular caught my eye:
Assoc Prof Locknie Hsu next made some general remarks about disputing the veracity of accepted facts, but very importantly zeroed in on how Soros had not defined "democracy" and "open society". I think that lawyers sometimes are too zealous about definitions, resulting in the definitions of concepts almost everyone has an instinctive grasp of becoming more and more precise lose more and more accuracy, until one can have oral sex without this being covered by the legal definition of sex (as it applies to the case). This was a very important point, and I wondered why Soros had not tried to define these concepts in his opening remarks (or indeed Kesavapany in his Welcome Address - after all, the key phrase *did* appear in the title of the dialogue session).
Soros replied to the comment about his not defining his key terms by saying they had no definition, and that people had to define these concepts for themselves. He did conceded, though, that the rule of law was important in an open society, and so you need some legal definitions. I would note that the problem with being so iffy is that definitions can be hijacked in pursuit of political agendas (some would argue that trying to promote civil society in a country is in itself a political agenda, but I have much more faith in the noble intentions of NGOs without vested interests trying to improve the lot of a country's citizens than the motives of repressive governments trying to stifle and control their citizens), and governments, with the aid of co-opted intellectuals, could find all sorts of excuses, including "Western Imperialism", "National Sovereignty", the people not being ready and "Asian Values" to disenfranchise their peoples.
Why should it be important to define terms? (This subject has come up again and again with respect to discussions of the "elite" and "elitism" on this blog.) Because some terms are such that different people have
different instinctive grasp of them; and unless the terms are defined, it's really "chicken and duck talk" to discuss things using them. Unlike "oral sex"--"democracy", "open society", and for that matter, "freedom" are contested concepts, mostly because of their emotive appeal. In fact, I get the sense that the warm, fuzzy, positive feel of both is just about the only thing concerning these things of which almost everyone today has an instinctive grasp. In other words, we all sort of agree that it's a good and wonderful thing for us to have freedom, for a country to be democractic, and to live in an open society. But unless we have a more precise grasp of just what does it mean to have freedom, for a country to be democratic, or to live in an open society, judgments using these terms are not much more informative than "hurrah!". And it doesn't mean that we must settle for exactly one definition for each of these terms either. If, after discussion, we discover that by "the freedom to do X", I mean (e.g.) "the absence of legal constrain against doing X" while you meant "the ability to do X", we discover something important: that "freedom" is ambiguous, and the path is now opened for us to ask
which "freedom" is it we think the possession of which is good, in what circumstances, etc.
It is surprising that Soros, being a student of Popper, should be so dodgy about defintion "open society"--pulling out a copy of
The Open Society and its Enemies and reading a few lines would have settled the matter. At the very least, he owes us an elaboration of what he
means by Singapore not being an open society beyond the--all too obvious--point that Singapore somehow is not quite where it should be in the department of "freedom" and "democracy", etc., in other words, "Singapore? Boo!". But surely one doesn't have to be a George Soros to say
that.
I must confess to not understanding Agagooga's point about "definitions can be hijacked in pursuit of political agendas"--how does one do such a thing? Perhaps along these lines--a manifestly unjust regime applies a novel definition of a normally positive term, say, "democracy", and under that novel definition, the regime turns out to be "democratic". But this is no argument against the usefulness of definitions--when such things happen, all the more do we become aware of the defectiveness of the unjust regime's novel definition.
And obviously, one
would have "much more faith in the
noble intentions of NGOs without vested interests trying to improve the lot of a country's citizens than the motives of
repressive governments trying to stifle and control their citizens" (emphasis mine). But it doesn't say very much, does it? The question is not whether one ought to have more faith in the good guys as opposed to the bad guys, whoever they are, but just who are the good and who are the bad guys. Personally, neither NGOs nor governments should get a free pass. The noblest intentions can be the direct cause of the worst evils, while the basest motives may yet be the engine that actually make the world work.
Many apologies for sounding grumpy but this is what happens when you are mostly buried in work.
Received this in the mail today with nothing else in the envelope (US postmark, from somewhere in NY), and it took me all of 3 minutes to figured out that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have such bad handwriting... Later, I went to their 
