[BlackFly]

It is not that westerners come from a different set of base assumptions, it is that western society has moved past those base assumptions. Western monarchies were divine rights, people died fighting against those viewpoints.

It is not an assumed superiority. We learn the lesson through our history, whether this lesson is right or wrong. We too had traditions of divine right, holistic medicine, censorship and similar, but those were replaced by current "Western" values. Censorship is seen as an unnecessary, oppressive weakness that we do not want to contribute to.

[marcus_holmes]

Good point. We changed as a society, and what we have now would not have suited us a few hundred years ago, and what we had then would not suit us now. If we had tried to introduce democracy into medieval Europe, it would have failed just as badly.

But by forcing our values onto SE Asian cultures, we are assuming that they cannot come up with "better" answers, and assuming that our way is the only way. Maybe there's an alternative to western society that they'll discover and share with us if we just let them do it their way? Maybe our western society is just not a good fit for their culture?

Of course, this would mean turning a blind eye to a lot of inequality and suffering, something that contradicts our values. We're seeing this play out in Australia with the indigenous culture being destroyed by western culture, (i part) because we cannot turn a blind eye to the poverty that appears to be a consequence of living in that culture. There is no obvious answer to this.

[CharlesColeman]

> But by forcing our values onto SE Asian cultures, we are assuming that they cannot come up with "better" answers, and assuming that our way is the only way. Maybe there's an alternative to western society that they'll discover and share with us if we just let them do it their way? Maybe our western society is just not a good fit for their culture?

There's a lot of "forcing [of] values" going on in many SE Asian cultures, but the forcing is indigenous and towards maintaining existing power structures against other indigenous desires for reform.

If left alone, those "'better' answers" you speak of could be to the question of how authoritarians can suppress the kinds of cultural and political changes that happened in the West to bring about democracy.

In the end, I don't think SE Asian democracy would look exactly like modern Western society, but that doesn't mean that the status quo should be left undisturbed as some kind of experiment.

[marcus_holmes]

I get that. But a lot of the time the drive to enforce Western values does way more harm than good. The obvious example is the Vietnam war (and the US treatment of Cambodia that lead directly to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge). But less obviously, championing a "reformist" in Myanmar lead to a complete mess (and arguably genocide).

Maybe if we started with the point of view that SE Asians have the right to determine their own government, and that may not look like our western ideas of "acceptable" government, instead of starting with the assumption that these people need saving from tyrants and monsters?

Right now the status quo in most of SE Asia is rapidly accelerating wealth. In Europe that brought the kind of social changes that demanded democracy. Maybe leaving them "undisturbed" is exactly the right thing to do...

[BlackFly]

I try to avoid calling them "Western" values to disentangle things which are empirical from things which are less so.

For instance, "Western" medicine is undeniably better than "traditional X" medicine. Because what people actually mean by "Western" medicine is modern medicine leaving behind all the historical western folk remedies that didn't work and keeping the folk remedies that worked. A lot of modern medicine comes from countries which would not be considered Western. You can of course split hairs in this discussion as well.

Censorship? Protectionism? These are less obvious concerns. That someone does not see the tragedy in holding a wife accountable for the democratic leanings and agitations of the husband and seeks to punish the husband by imposing punishments on the wife is so obviously unjust to me. The possibility that maybe society can be better when punishments are imposed in this way (the empirical question that would justify it under a utilitarian analysis) is just unconvincing to me (because I doubt it is true, I devalue utilitarian justice over individual justice and I don't even think the husband committed a crime). I could be wrong, though.