The silent women whose voices we never hear
I heard Robin Fox explaining that democracy is not ‘natural’ on NPR this morning. He said we think that what we’re used to is human nature, but it’s not, it’s just what we’re used to. Most people in the world are used to tribalism, he went on, and that’s what they want. They don’t care about nation or categories like ‘Arab,’ they care about family and tribe and what brings honour to them.
It’s interesting, and persuasive up to a point, but only up to a point. For one thing, there are objective benefits that tend to go with democracy and don’t tend to go with tribalism. And for a perhaps more significant and more far-reaching thing, what does Fox mean by ‘they’? He means what people always mean by ‘they’ in such contexts: he means the people who determine what ‘the tribe’ wants, and in tribes and all other hierarchical patriarchal arrangements, that means the people who have the power to do that, and that means (some of) the men. In other words Fox doesn’t actually know what everyone wants, because he can’t, because the people without power are silenced. They don’t get to sit around with the visiting anthropologist and tell him what’s what.
Natasha Walter could perhaps fill in the picture a little. She went back to Afghanistan last year, and was shocked and depressed at what she found. On her previous visit, soon after the Taliban was kicked out, she went to a ‘dirt-poor village’ and met women involved in a literacy project after years of no education and house arrest under the Taliban.
When I asked the students, who ranged from 13-year-old girls to 50-year-old widows, if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: “Of course we do,” said one widow furiously. “Even women who are not allowed to come to this class want that. But our husbands and brothers and fathers don’t want it. The mullahs keep saying freedom is not good for us.”
On her second visit, the room was empty.
“They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared. For a while we continued, but we were afraid that they might do something worse. This place is a place of Taliban. Neighbours may work for the government in the morning but at night they are the same Taliban with the same thoughts.”
All very tribal or familial – but ‘they’ are not happy about it. The women are miserable. Let’s not be too sure they don’t want those funny foreign things but would much prefer to stick with their good old families and tribes.
Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls’ schools, due to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements; and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. “Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe,” Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. “We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this.” Women who stand up against oppressive traditions are vulnerable; the number of assassinations and threats against women working for the government and international organisations is rising.
Let’s not be too sure all those women are delighted to be sacrificed for their family or tribe. It doesn’t sound as if they are.
Walter talks to Malalai Joya.
“I have only just moved here,” Joya says. “I have to keep changing my house. I hate guns, but I have to have men with guns guarding me all the time. One day they will kill me. They kill women who struggle against them.”…”Here there is no democracy, no security, no women’s rights,” she says. “When I speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, ‘Take her and rape her.’ These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women.”
Then she makes a crucial point.
Joya talks like this to me, furiously, for more than an hour, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women that still keep them in a state of fear: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women’s rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar earlier this year, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat last year; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan in 2005, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a reported dispute among warlords in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan last month. She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear.
That’s just it you see – we never hear their voices because they’re not allowed to use them. They’re not quiet because they’re content, they are silenced. It’s very very important to keep that always in mind when trying to think clearly about these subjects. Fox is of course right that it’s silly to take it for granted that our way of doing things is the natural and best way, but it’s mistaken to assume that the way group or tribe X does things is the way all members of group or tribe X wants to do them – it’s mistaken to forget that whole swathes of people may be systematically prevented from ever saying or acting on what they want, and that powerful people don’t invariably treat powerless people kindly and generously.
But ‘some’ people is exactly what he didn’t say, except in a global sense – all people in some parts of the globe. He talked as if all people within particular groups or tribes wanted the same things.
We have what we call democracy, and as stated, it might not be the ‘best’ way to operate a planet, but can anyone here (or anywhere), including Robin Fox come up with a better way? It always needs to be born in mind that tribalism possibly worked well when tribal societies had little contact with each other, but it proved almost useless when tribal groups started to interact. Now we have pan-national, pan-geographic groups interacting and the tribe has no place. It has been noted before on these pages that human rights belong to individuals, not groups. Even the nation-state as we know it can no longer act without giving up parts of its sovereignty to the betterment of the whole of the planet. Tribal politics are gone, and those that hold onto them are trying to recreate at mythical past.
How do we know what ‘they’ want other than through a free and fair election, i.e. democracy?
Like the one they just had in Russia, where it turns out that what they want is to be told what to do, even if they don’t….? Truly, it requires a certain amount of reflection to grasp just how utterly contingent and fragile a concept ‘free and fair election’ is in relation to the political circumstances of the vast majority of people.
We can blunder on, as organisations like the UN, the OECD and the OCSE have been doing, pleading for niceness, or we can send in the men with guns to teach people how to be nice… But as Robespierre once said, nobody likes armed missionaries… So, options, anyone?
“Not natural”? What is “natural”, anyway? The hunter-gatherer existence that humans lived in for millennia? Fox is free to live in filth, eating bugs and twigs, under the leadership of his unelected chief. I’ll take “unnatural” modernity.
“so we can maybe assume that he actually knows a bit about silent majorities and oppression”
Well sure, but I was commenting on what he said on NPR, and the fact is that there he simply didn’t say anything about silent majorities. I can only go by what he did say and what he did say is that ‘they’ don’t necessarily want democracies.
And the fact is that even celebrated academics can talk stark nonsense – some academics even become celebrated because they talk nonsense. (This cuts against G’s article of last week, but then I think G would probably agree that there are experts and then there are ‘experts.’) And anthropologists can talk some startlingly nonsensical nonsense at times.
That said, I share your skepticism about the Gulagi Gang – I thought it was interesting but not an unmixed blessing.
But none of this has anything whatever to do with wanting to send in people with guns. But that’s another false dichotomy – the choice isn’t between guns and recognition of individual liberties; there’s a lot in between the two.
“he was trying to explain a prevailing mentality, a world view”
But that’s just it – how do we know that he knows that it really is prevailing? We don’t. People in power just love to assume that we all think what they think, because it’s so damn convenient, which is exactly why we shouldn’t swallow it.
Of course I’m not saying oppressed majorities are necessarily longing for elections, I’m saying they don’t necessarily love all the prevailing customs of ‘their’ group. I’m saying all this lumping is a mistake – both epistemologically and morally.
Arnaud,
It was Adams.
Arnaud:”And another thing is, the reason some of us don’t want to send in the men with guns is not because of a fuzzy liberal faith in the general niceness of people (in a “wouldn’t it be nice if we were all nice?” kind of way*) but because, and I need to insist on this point, it doesn’t work. As demonstrated countless times in history.”
It worked for Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Cromwell, Wellington, Washington, Mongomery, Patton, Stalin, Macarthur and the Chairman. It seems to me to take a certain historical viewpoint to assert that every armed conflict in history was lost by BOTH sides!
And I notice that Gulf War 1 was ‘differently won’ by the Iraqis.
Progressive politics has never been about a fuzzy faith in the niceness of people. Upwardly radicalising self-selection sees to it that the national executive, or politburo or whoever, have slightly modified that charming stereotype.
Arnaud:”I think it silly to believe that even oppressed majorities are waiting for the next general election.”
Good point.
Could a better response to Mugabe and his gangsters starving and evicting the masses to send men with guns? Men with nice words alone have allowed hundreds of thousands starve and die.
Chris,
I was talking about spreading democracy, which I don’t think Caesar, Genghis Khan, Cromwell, Wellington, Stalin or Mao were really interested in doing. My point was that guns are not the best way to that objective. Sorry if I wasn’t clear!
Don,
Thank you! I am afraid I am too much of a Pratchett fan and attribute everything good to him!
OB,
Obviously it’s a mistake to attribute uniform opinions to members of a group or a nation. That’s why I said prevailing. But taking this to extreme stops us from ever talking about other cultures. There are national or cultural traits, there are ideas and ideals that are predominant in some cultures and not others. Fox is actually quite careful, he doesn’t talk about love or attachment to existing customs or ideas, only of the lack of ideas that we take for granted.
You took the example of democracy but Fox also talked about nation, saying that the majority of ordinary Iraqis don’t really have a conception of Iraq as their nation. Now he may be right or wrong about Iraq but it is certainly true of other parts of the world, sub-Saharan Africa for instance has a lot of countries without corresponding nations. Would you dispute that point? So what about democracy? What makes it so special? That’s the essence of Fox’s point : democracy is not a special concept, no more than an emotional attachment to a particular country. We are not endowed at birth with a love of fair, free, more-than-50%-of-the-vote-you-win elections. All the more so if it means we have to surrender power when we lose. As you wrote, democracy has its benefits but they tend to be long term and general, not immediately obvious, whereas tribalism can be hugely and immediately rewarding for the individual if he happens to be at the head or near the head of the tribe or even if s/he is an ordinary member of a tribe with a particularly competent and capable ruler.
Fox didn’t make a point about oppression or minorities (or for that matter about silent majorities), he made a point about broad cultural traits and that we cannot “spread democracy” without knowing who we are spreading it at. We can argue about how prevalent these traits are but we cannot really deny that they exist. If we want to be effective, we have to work with what we have and sometimes what we have can be pretty distasteful.
It’s going to be dirty work, “spreading democracy”.
OT, but…
Speaking of democracy… Hurray for the people of Venezuela for not voting theirs out of existence!
Arnaud, well I did say it was persuasive up to a point. (And I’m not all that sold on ‘spreading democracy’ anyway; democracy can be very tyrannical.) But I didn’t make it clear enough that I did like his basic point that we think whatever we’re familiar with is human nature.
Yeah, well done people of Venezuela, and not all that OT.
“That’s just it you see – we never hear their voices because they’re not allowed to use them. They’re not quiet because they’re content, they are silenced.”
It is all too easy for the authorities to silence people. Principally people from the lower echelons of society who do not have the wherewithal to articulate themselves. I find (so called autonomously elected) Ireland abysmal and grossly blameworthy of performance of this hue. To illustrate, the media over the years, directly, refused to publish letters from ordinary run of the mill victims and survivors of past institutional child abuse. It only ever dealt with self-appointed personnel. It has helped to keep the lid firmly closed on the Pandora’s box on atrocities that took place behind closed doors. To this day, it still continues in this vein. I do not trust the Irish media. Neither do I believe everything it prints. It works hand in hand with the government. It sings from the same hymn sheet. It colludes with the authorities to silence those who already have no voice. If something like this can happen in Ireland can you imagine what it must be like for those living in the third world.
B&W has taken a great stand in voicing the opinions of the downtrodden of the universe. Long may it last!!
Arnaud I would point out that the reason we live in a free continent is because a large number of men with guns made it that way for us and also men with guns keep it that way for us as well!
I dont disagree with any of that O.B I was probably a bit over simplistic because I was ticked at Arnauds remark that he makes living in freedom won for him by other people from both of our continents.I am not sure I would judge the U.S quite as harshly over the cold war though sometimes wasnt it a choice of the least worst option that led to the sort of disasters that you speak of.
No, I don’t think so, Richard. There was no real reason to overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala or Mossadeq in Iran (or Allende in Chile twenty years later). There was also no right to do it: they were all elected. (Which is not to say there’s a ‘right’ to overthrow unelected ‘heads of state.’)
Yes it does seem strange bearing in mind that Tito didnt seem to bother the powers that be, I think it was like a multi level chess game that depended on what the Soviets were doing in any particular theatre at the time, we probably will never know the degree of influence that the S.U were exerting in those countries at that time but I would asume that they had marxist suragates working just as hard as the U.S did, this probably led to the judgement that strongmen like Pinnochet (or other revolting despots) would hold the line, I will concede that whatever the reason it still stank.