Modernity and Morality

Adams and Orloff claim that in “The Logic of Masculinist Protection,” I condemn what I take “to be a reflex of modernity: the necessary consignment of formerly colonized and peripheral women to the category of ‘other,’ and the elevation of ‘modern’ forms of life above others” (Adams and Orloff 2005, 169). They say further that my ideas are “representative of much new feminist writing, in which the once taken-for-granted association between modernization and progress toward gender equality, and the correlative ideological link between so-called traditional styles of life and masculine domination, have come under attack…. Thus it is not surprising that some analysts are ready to excoriate all things modern and even to dismiss modernity—any modernity—as a political destination as they construe the politics of the day” (p. 171).

It is a bit puzzling that Adams and Orloff take me as representative of “feminist antimodernism.” Neither in “The Logic of Masculinist Protection” nor anywhere else in my writing do I ever discuss modernity as a theme, much less take a stand against it. Their reason for seeing my analysis in this way rests only on my appeal to critiques of European imperialism that exposed the self-interestedness and self-righteousness of European claims in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on grounds that they were helping backward peoples who needed guidance and governance toward becoming civilized. I suggest there, and I am certainly not the only one to do so in recent years, that the attitudes and actions of the Untied States in its present imperial adventure employ some similar ideas.

To construe this critique of Western imperialism as “anti-modern” strikes me as admitting that modernization is inevitably imperialist. In my opinion, however, a moral criticism of imperialism is logically independent of any critique of modernity as such. Indeed, as an intellectual enterprise, being “anti-modern”—or “pro-modern”—seems to me rather meaningless.

As Adams and Orloff point out, modernity as a concept refers to a multiplicity of social phenomena, including science and factory industry; capitalist legal relations and practices; the decoupling of instrumental rationality from cultural values; urbanization, and the decline of small community; and the development of media linking masses of strangers in communicative networks. I do not know what it would mean for a social or political theorist to reject these social facts that continue to sweep the world in the process we now call “globalization.” They cannot be avoided and must be responded to insofar as they may hurt people. For one of the things that we have learned in the twentieth century is that the effects of these developments on the well-being of persons have been extremely uneven, both within and between societies. According to many scholars, a global exploitative relationship between much of Western Europe and much of the rest of the world often imposed modernization in a distorted form (Hoogvelt 1997). Many people have been excluded from the benefits of modernization altogether, while modernization processes have ripped apart the social supports their grandparents counted on. One might claim that this situation describes, for example, the majority of Afghanis today.

Sociologists once theorized the diverse structural transformations I listed here as belonging to a single trajectory of “development,” which also included the rule of law; enforcement of human rights, including women's rights; personalization of religion and its eventual disappearance as an identity marker; cosmopolitanism; economic equalization and the elimination of poverty; and progress toward perpetual global peace. Events of the twentieth century have taught us that there is no necessary relationship between the social structural transformations called modernization and these institutions and conditions that most people in the world today think of as normatively good. Tyranny, genocide, mass aggression, nationalism, racism, gender domination, and religious fundamentalism, to name a few evils, are quite compatible with modern social structures; those enacting these projects often have used capitalist economic relations and modern mass media to unleash their fury in more horrible ways than earlier epochs could have imagined.

In some respects, Adams and Orloff recognize this. Both in this essay and in the volume they have edited along with Elisabeth Clemens (2005), they refer to scholarship on “alternative modernities,” which has challenged the idea that there is a neat and necessary lineup between forms of institutional and structural change, on the one hand, and normatively good social and political relations. Yet in this essay, they decline decisively to break with the idea that modernization tends to bring about societies that are normatively better than those they have displaced, and in particular, that modernity brings about gender equality. Modernity, they claim, offers a promise of gender emancipation that remains incomplete. Feminists therefore must internalize the proper critiques of modernization theory in order to “remake modernity” as a project to further that equality. Neither in this essay nor in their edited volume do Adams and Orloff tell us what such a “remade” concept of modernity is that we should so unambiguously get behind.

Honest scholars and political activists, it seems to me, can neither be “for” nor “against” modernity. We have to understand and respond to the realities of the complex, sometimes cruelly impersonal, social structures that describe most aspects of most of this world as modern, irrevocably different from the kinds of social structures and relations more typical of the world of the fourteenth century. What honest scholars ought to do, however, is separate our description of these realities from a normative teleology.

According to standards of equity, participation and voice, and mutual assistance, some societies are certainly better than others. This has always been true. Some premodern societies have manifested some or all of these values more than others. Some scholars argue, for example, that before contact with modern Europe, some indigenous North American or African societies were relatively democratic (Grinde and Johansen 1991; Wiredu 1997), and many premodern societies have had collective norms of mutual aid more committed to trying to meet the needs of everyone than do many modern states. Some even suggest that women had more power and respect in certain premodern societies than they did when capitalist relations separated a sphere of productive from family relations (Boserup 1970; Brown 1976). These are all controversial claims, of course, but they exhibit a more subtle approach to the relation of social structure to equality and democracy than do classic notions of modernity.

The ultimate point is that we should evaluate societies by these normative standards directly, and case by case, rather than assume that “traditional” societies were less morally developed than are modern ones. We should be “for” the freedom of all persons from domination and the access of every human being to the resources they need to live a decent life. If the Taliban were and are to be condemned, it is for rejecting these values. Insofar as “modern” societies fail to recognize and enact them, they should be condemned as well.

Power and Coercion

Adams and Orloff claim that I assume that “well-behaved, appropriate states … can simply do without coercion,” and that “wielding coercive power, even against terrorists or fascists,” is for me “simply beyond the pale.” They taunt that many like me “cannot conceive of the normative ideal of politics as anything more than deliberative debate or, at most, law enforcement on a global scale.” They suggest that I think away the “conflictual” nature of politics and that I fail to recognize that a fully democratic system will never shed this conflictual nature (Adams and Orloff 2005, 175).

If Adams and Orloff had read some of my other writings, such as my recent book, Inclusion and Democracy (2000), they could not make such ridiculous claims. In the first chapter of that book, I criticize those deliberative democratic theorists who take consensus as an ideal of politics, and I explicitly endorse the “agonistic” understanding of democratic process that Adams and Orloff extol. In Chapter 5 of the same book, furthermore, I argue against those democratic theorists who I think have put too much faith in civil society as a site of social change, and have denigrated positive features of state institutions. I specifically focus on the coercive character of state institutions, and there remind my readers of why even democratic institutions require coercion.

“The Logic of Masculinist Protection” certainly does not question that conflict is endemic to politics, nor that state institutions should often use coercion. It specifically criticizes the use by the most powerful state in the world of a kind of force in which those who have state power do what they think is necessary to get what they want, without regard to the rule of law, accountability to those affected, or the protection of rights. Some people disagree, but I think that the U.S. Patriot Act, as well as various extralegal activities such as detention camps in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, constitute an illegitimate use of coercion. A legitimate use of coercion by democratic states is one exercised within a democratic rule of law.

I also think that the war against Afghanistan, and even more so the war against Iraq, are illegitimate. They have returned the world to the state of nature that many thought we could leave behind after the Cold War. Some saw the first war against Iraq as a historic turning point because the process leading up to it used the United Nations as an institution for international debate and the conferral of legitimacy on military action. Immediately after the attacks of September 11, some politicians and international relations scholars called for utilizing means of international law enforcement to capture and prosecute terrorists, rather than to put this conflict in a lawless state-to-state frame (Greenwood 2002; Kaldor 2003). Adams and Orloff dismiss the idea of a global rule of law as the mutterings of a spineless utopian who cannot face the reality of power. This seems to me to express disdain for the standard of a rule of law itself.

Their celebration of the place of coercive power in politics fails to distinguish the use of force by a powerful actor who can distinguish from the legitimate exercise of force. Many doubt that there is such a distinction, but they cannot be democrats. When I claim that the Bush administration has moved too close to authoritarianism, I have in mind its flagrant violation of standards of due process, privacy, public accountability, and presumption of innocence manifest in several of its policies of the last five years. While this regime is still better than many in the world by this standard, Americans should be disturbed about these developments, especially if we think that we have a modern legal system good enough for export. Adams and Orloff evince no worry at all.

International Rule of Law

Thus far, I have argued that emancipatory values of democracy, human rights, including women's rights, and economic security, do not stand in any necessary developmental relationship with modernization. They must be fought for and defended on their own terms, and many modern societies have repressed some or all of them. I have also argued that the use of force, whether in domestic politics or in international relations, is morally legitimate only when undertaken within legal procedures that in the ideal are democratic. This ideal still needs much promulgation in international relations and does not exist in practice at that level. The connection between these two arguments lies in consideration of the behavior of the United States in recent years in aiming to impose its idea of proper institutions on whole societies by means of war and occupation. In their essay, Adams and Orloff do not tell us whether they think that more modern and emancipated societies are justified in trying to modernize more traditional societies, such as Afghanistan, by bombing them, invading them, and installing their governments. Their celebration of the necessity of force in international relations may indicate that they do approve of such adventures, but on this I will give them the benefit of the doubt. They certainly do not criticize making war for such purposes.

While the Bush administration tried to justify both the war against Afghanistan and the war against Iraq on grounds of self-defense, in neither case have these justifications been able to stick. Perhaps the bombing of Afghanistan weakened Al Qaeda, but the recent horrific bombing in London makes me doubt it. Some international relations experts have argued since September 11 that combating international terrorism networks requires a tighter international cooperation in law enforcement efforts, and that the paradigm of state-to-state warfare as the means of combating terrorism likely undermines such efforts.

Although the Bush administration continues to include the war against Iraq as part of its “war on terror,” there is little doubt that this war has motivated more men to join terrorist organizations. The primary justification that the United States and Britain have used for the war is that it freed the Iraqi people from dictatorship. This is true, but the war and occupation have largely destroyed what was left of Iraq's modern institutions after 10 years of sanction, and has made the majority of people less secure and deprived them of the barest necessities. In today's triumphalist atmosphere, there is far too little discussion of the human costs of the use of military force.

Both the war against Afghanistan and the war against Iraq should teach us that the attempt to “emancipate” a people through war is morally problematic most of the time. Such actions take self-determination out of the hands of those who have it by right, and usually do more harm than good. Certainly they should only be taken by a globally diverse multilateral force, with widespread international approval, so that the world can be confident that the action's motive is not to serve the interests of particular states or organizations. As realists have long counseled, moreover, approval in principle of war for the sake of releasing people from unjust governments would gravely threaten international stability. The list of authoritarian and unjust regimes is too long. War, I would say, remains a primitive tool for trying to accomplish something good. The technological and state-building developments of modernity arguably have helped make war more awful today than it was in premodern times. Feminists and other lovers of justice should work to renew the hope that strong international institutions can be built that convert all legitimate uses of force to the status of policing.

We feminists should also be wary that our positions may be taken up by powerful actors and used as legitimation for unjust policies. This risk is partly the price of success: In the United States, at least, it seems that professing commitment to equal rights for women has become popular. I have argued here that there is no necessary connection between the complex social transformation of politics and economics called modernization, on the one hand, and norms of gender equality on the other. Keeping in mind their contingent relation allows feminists to maintain a critical distance from claims to moral superiority at least partly grounded in military, technological, or economic power.