Bret Stephens: From Athens to Beijing
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
This could have been the year of Greece. The country where Western civilization was born some 2,500 years ago in a spirit of critical inquiry suddenly offered itself up as a model for where that same civilization may soon end up. Namely, bankrupt, bailed out and deeply marinated in a culture of entitlement, venality and incompetence.
Then Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. Now the year belongs to China.
Freedom or discipline, Athens or Sparta: That's the basic political question. Nearly anyone who lives under a regime based on an idea of political discipline, such as China or Iran or Cuba, wants greater freedom. Without it, life is morally intolerable and often physically so.
Also true, however, is that all free societies are haunted by the fear that their lack of discipline dooms them in the long run. It's why generations of Western thinkers—Shaw, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Chomsky—were drawn to totalitarian regimes. It's why there's such a powerful strain of cultural pessimism in the conservative movement. It's why so many environmentalists would gladly suspend democratic norms to combat the notional threat of climate change.
And it's why so many Westerners make such a fetish of China and its supposedly superior ways. They work; we whine. They save for the future; we borrow from it. They build skyscrapers, nuclear plants, airports and cities seemingly overnight. We spend years neurotically measuring, then greedily litigating, asbestos leaks.
Bottom line: They pay an invisible price for their way of civilization in the coin of freedom. But we pay a visible price for our way of it in the coin of efficiency. Reasonable people are entitled to wonder: Are we really getting the better part of that trade-off?
Or at least they were entitled to wonder, until Mr. Liu won his prize. Who is he?..
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This could have been the year of Greece. The country where Western civilization was born some 2,500 years ago in a spirit of critical inquiry suddenly offered itself up as a model for where that same civilization may soon end up. Namely, bankrupt, bailed out and deeply marinated in a culture of entitlement, venality and incompetence.
Then Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. Now the year belongs to China.
Freedom or discipline, Athens or Sparta: That's the basic political question. Nearly anyone who lives under a regime based on an idea of political discipline, such as China or Iran or Cuba, wants greater freedom. Without it, life is morally intolerable and often physically so.
Also true, however, is that all free societies are haunted by the fear that their lack of discipline dooms them in the long run. It's why generations of Western thinkers—Shaw, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Chomsky—were drawn to totalitarian regimes. It's why there's such a powerful strain of cultural pessimism in the conservative movement. It's why so many environmentalists would gladly suspend democratic norms to combat the notional threat of climate change.
And it's why so many Westerners make such a fetish of China and its supposedly superior ways. They work; we whine. They save for the future; we borrow from it. They build skyscrapers, nuclear plants, airports and cities seemingly overnight. We spend years neurotically measuring, then greedily litigating, asbestos leaks.
Bottom line: They pay an invisible price for their way of civilization in the coin of freedom. But we pay a visible price for our way of it in the coin of efficiency. Reasonable people are entitled to wonder: Are we really getting the better part of that trade-off?
Or at least they were entitled to wonder, until Mr. Liu won his prize. Who is he?..