No, I'm afraid you have the causality exactly backwards, both legally and on the timeline. Remember that democracy was a *post-war* justification, pre-war the plan was "shock and awe" followed by "the quick handoff". This was not sold to the American people as a nation-building exercise.
>
> --Thought experiment: without appeals to universals like Democracy and
> Freedom to justify the war, would the war have occurred? Would the U.
> S. still be there?
No, Americans rightly see democracy abroad to be in our interest and everybody's interest. Americans are willing to make sacrifices for that important idea, the administration is not. These universal appeals work because they are right. It is good to promote freedom and democracy. I think the U.S. should even try it some time.
> > If you want to talk about a "universal" then look at warlordism.
> > *THAT* is a cross-cultural, universal societal structure that should
> > be recognized as such. The idea that universals work through exclusion
>
> That is a false statement. Warlordism emerges in certain social
> settings under certain historical conditions. Nothing universal about it.
Name a poor country without warlordism.
> > What society should we emulate? Afghanistan? The People's
> > Republic of China? You want the Cuban legal system in all its
> > one-party glory? Tell me the political party that you would like to
> > take over.
>
> In fact, there are some excellent local examples of democratic decision
> making in Cuba (I'd say democracy at the neighborhood/local level is
> much healthier there than it is here.) --And as Chuck would point out,
> your automatic reference to "political party" control assumes that we
> must have some party in control of a government apparatus to have a
> political system. Governments and political parties emerged under
> specific historical conditions; there is no need--other than lack of
> imagination--to assume that we must have them in some future society.
I don't assume we have to have a political party in control, Leninists do - Leninists, you know, like the ones who rule Cuba and make it so that you can't have democracy at anything but the local level. I don't suggest that we need political parties. Once again you are injecting ideas from outside and trying to associate them with me.
> >> people in the future, or in societies under different environmental
> >>conditions, will produce social and legal systems that look little or
> >>nothing like the systems we're used to.
> >
> >
> > No, I don't agree at all. There are many, many concepts that have
> > endured and will endure because they are good and they work. Instead
> > of makng blanket statements why don't you back up your assertion by
> > telling us, for example, what parts of the Common Law you'd like to
> > throw out and what you'd replace it with.
>
> --So if concepts work under certain social conditions at certain points
> in time, they must work under all possible social conditions? Again,
> your questions reflect a nonreflective acceptance of the status quo: why
> must a society have "Common Law" or law at all? (Insert lawyer jokes
> here.) Human societies thrived for tens of thousands of years without
> anything like laws; why do you assume that good human societies have to
> have governments or laws at all?
This reminds me of a question I once got on one of these lists: "Who says fishing with nets is more efficient than foraging on the shore line?" I don't know, everybody? I don't "assume" that good human societies have to have governments and laws. I conclude it because every time you have a meeting of even the best people you have to have rules of order (you know, like posting maxima). Why the Left has to learn this again and again and again and again, seemingly at every meeting of every group, I don't know, but we'd get a lot more done if we would just accept it.
Human societies did not thrive without laws. They scraped by living in the woods in small groups, dying before age 40 and living their whole lives with bellies full of parasites. Interdependence requires order so that there can be efficient transfer of information and decision-making processes that people feel confident in. The faster and better the communications systems, the less formal the order appears, but that's because the order is built in to, for example, the switching system or the bits and bytes. Still, you've got to have that three-post rule.
You've also got to have dispute resolution procedures. The Commn Law is a set of precepts and procedures built up from long experience and serious thinking, including a lot of asking "why do we do it this way at all?" We do it that way because we come back to the same conclusion again and again. Take the question of a standard of proof: Here's what wikipedia says:
"The standard of proof is the level of proof required in a legal action to convince the court that a given proposition is true. The degree of proof required depends on the circumstances of the proposition. Typically, most countries have two levels of proof: the balance of probabilities (BOP), called the preponderance of evidence in the US, beyond a reasonable doubt (commonly refered to as BARD), or just beyond reasonable doubt. In addition to these, the US introduced a third standard called clear and convincing evidence". I'll call the last "CCE"
There's nothing ethnocentric about it. It is simply an inevitable question: what is the standard of proof you ask? If you look again and again, use complex decision theory and you will still find that there there are basically four standard of proof when judging two interpretations of a single set of facts. Something is reasonably likely to be true, preponderantly likely to be true, unlikely to be untrue, so unlikely to be untrue that it satisfies all reasonably applicalble intellectual/ethical requirements. These basically correspond to Probably Cause, BOP, CCE and BARD. These are not matters of culture but matters of logic. Thus (again from Wikipedia):
"The common law constitutes the basis of the legal systems of: England and Wales, the Republic of Ireland, the states of the United States (except Louisiana), Canada (except Quebec civil law), Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Brunei, Pakistan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and many other generally English-speaking countries or Commonwealth countries. Essentially, every country which has been colonised at some time by Britain uses common law except those that had been colonized by other nations, such as Quebec (which follows French law to some extent) and South Africa (which follows Roman Dutch law), where the prior civil law system was retained to respect the civil rights of the local colonists. India's system of common law is also a mixture of English law and the local Hindu law.
The main alternative to the common law system is the civil law system, which is used in Continental Europe, and most of the rest of the world. The former Soviet Bloc and other Socialist countries used a Socialist law system.
The opposition between civil law and common law legal systems has become increasingly blurred, with the growing importance of jurisprudence (almost like case law but in name) in civil law countries, and the growing importance of statute law and codes in common law countries (for instance, in matters of criminal and commercial law)."
So, you see, the universals of human logic seem to be finding a happy medium, although I would say that as Europe deals with the problems of confederation it will favor a common law system more and more.
> Listen, I'm just saying that we don't know what the future brings, just
> as people in hunting and gathering societies 20,000 years ago had no
> inkling of human life today. To assume that what is politically useful
> at one point in time must be useful at some other point in time is
> dogmatic and naive.
This is based on an untrue truism. "We don't know what the future will hold" is not the basis for an argument, but the basis for abandoning argument in favor of hand-waving. There is nothing more dogmatic and naive than asserting an undisprovable negative - like Fundamentalists asserting "Evolution is just a theory".
Here's a big difference: we only have records of what people were thinking going back about 5000 years. Future generations will have endless, copious writings and records on which they will be able to build.
> > Not pragmatic and not really argument against appeals to universals.
> > It's basically just dogmatic cultural relativism.
>
> So pointing out the actually existing historical and cultural diversity
> in human social life is "dogmatic cultural relativism"? If drawing
> conclusions from evidence is dogmatic, color me dogmatic!
That's just it, you're not drawing conclusions from evidence, you are asserting the truth of your relativism without proof or rational argument. Human beings are human beings and cultural diversity is not some sacred thing. "Cultural diversity" doesn't justify behavior. Nobody can be excused for not following the Golden Rule no matter what culture he comes from. Universals are an attempt to expand the "others" and the "you" in that rule to include as many people as possible.
In the arts, cultural diversity is a great thing. In politics, "cultural diversity" is a bunch of eyewash, used most effectively by fascists and other identity politicians. Inclusiveness is not the idea of encouraging everybody to go his own way no matter how disruptive and destructive he becomes. Inclusiveness is bringing diverse opinions and creative instincts under one, peaceful roof.
Though experiment: isn't "inclusiveness" a universal? Doesn't the process of inclusiveness have univeral, logical demands?
Butler's point is a cute, rhetorical flourish, but that's all it is.
boddi