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SquaredError comments on Open Thread August 31 - September 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Do western civilizations owe something to those civilizations that were disadvantaged as a result of imperialism? A common reaction of national conservatives to this idea is that what happened during imperialism is time-barred and each country is responsible for their citizens.
How much does Mongolia owe Russia? How much do North African countries owe Europe for the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into the Arab slave trade in north Africa? The notion is itself ridiculous.
It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word "owes" is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.
Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb "decides" to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying "a group decides" simply obscures this fact.
Concerning the word "owe", even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word "owe" in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word "owe" from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.
"Western civilizations" is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb "owes" is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word "owe" entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.
In addition to that "being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism" is very dissimilar from "having a window broken by a neighbour", it is not a concrete thing. The central example of "owing something" is "owing a concrete and well defined thing". Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).
In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as "western civilizations" owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb "owes". I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply "new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones", while some of them wouldn't, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.
Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: "owns", "chooses", "decides", "prefers" (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.
Is anywhere on Earth inhabited by the descendants of the humans who first moved in?
Off the top of my head Iceland for sure, Māori-inhabited areas, and possibly the Basque Country. But yes, that's pretty much the exception.
I'm not sure about "first moved in" but there are families in England who have been there for a very long time.
If you focus on utilitarianism the question doesn't come up. The important thing isn't who "owes" but how we can produce utility. If that means the best way is to give betnets to African's than that's the thing to do, regardles of the concept of "owing".
Do all other civilizations owe something to western civilization for the benefits they gained stemming from western science and technology?
Meh, companies did clearly got rich on exporting western technology (and they often didn't export our ethical standards to maximize profit).
Capturing only a tiny fraction of the value they created, and that's just the for-proft companies, not to mention all the scientists and charitable organizations that gave out western science and technology for free.
I would love to see some statistics on that, but it's probably too hard to measure; also how much % of the exported technology was charity.
I would only count debts toward the specific peoples directly affected; e.g. the Spanish Empire lived off Bolivian silver, the Belgians worked the Congolese to death, and the United States is literally built on stolen Native land. Those examples and many others allow for a case in favor of reparations.
However, the passage of time sometimes blurs the effects of exploitation and aggression. Should the UK sue Denmark for the Norman Conquest? Should Italy sue Germany because Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire? Should Hungary sue Mongolia for what the Golden Horde did to them? I admit I don't know how to answer to that in a way that is consistent with my first paragraph.
Related: A British answer.
No.
Could you explain why you see it this way? Our wealth is partly based on exploitation. Wouldn't it be fair to fix the damage we've done to exploited people? This could perhaps be also justified in terms of utilitarianism, as fairness might bring people closer together which prevents wars.
Not to any significant extent. Most colonized places were net money-losers for the colonizer for most of their history. In addition, I doubt most western-colonized countries were made substantially worse off compared to non-colonized countries, since the Europeans introduced some level of infrastructure, medicine, etc.
First of all, who is this "we" you speak of? More importantly, there are a few "control-group" countries which were not colonized while their neighbors were, like Siam (modern Thailand) and Ethiopia, and they don't seem better off than their neighbors. Unlike most African countries, which abolished slavery when the Europeans took control, Ethiopia banned slavery only in 1942--under pressure from the British, who were a bit embarrassed to be allied with a slave state.
But then why did people keep conquering and colonizing new lands?
There is also Japan, which was better off than its neighbors. In 1905 Japan was strong enough to win a war against Russia.
Because the people directly responsible for the colonization profited, even if their nation as a whole did not. To go back further in history, the general of a roman legion often came home from a campaign fabulously wealthy, while the people back home saw far less of the plunder. And asking modern italians to pay spain for what ceasar looted is kind of absurd
Is that true? I can think of examples, like Cecil Rhodes arranging for the British Empire to pay for the Boer Wars for his personal enrichment, but is that typical? The East India Companies were profitable, but they paid their own military costs and used a light touch. I think the question at hand is the 19th century, when European states claimed vast swaths of land.
(I don't like the comparison to Caesar. I believe that he paid to outfit his army, so the Romans as a whole made a profit, in contrast to knb's claim about European colonialism, which I believe is correct.)
Yeah, the 'light touch' thing is just not true. For all the history Moldbug reads, nRxs seem pretty unaware of the nightmare true corporate governance was historically.
Compared to what?
A light touch compared to 19th century state colonialism, which is the context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
Light touch indeed. They fucked it up so badly, the Crown had to come in and take over directly.
Because conquering new lands helps spread the meme that one should conquer as much as one can.
That is a very good question on which books have been written. Some of this was about religion and prestige, and competition with others. Some of it was various sovereigns being convinced to fund dubious (in retrospect) ventures by good marketing.
We have our biases and our cultural zeitgeist, and folks in the past had theirs. After the Otman Turks conquered Constantinople and killed off the Roman empire for good, the Portuguise started looking for an alternative route to do spice trading (and also look for Prester John, the mythical Christian king in the east). "We are looking for spices and Christians" was the motto.
The English had complicated reasons to start colonizing that were not all about money. A lot of the times it felt like colonial things happened for complex reasons (e.g. having to do w/ what was happening w/ Christianity at the time), and the Crown tried to find ways to make money off it.
It was the case that at some point the sugar trade became very valuable (e.g. to Napoleon the tiny sugar-producing possessions of France were worth much more than the entirety of Louisiana), but this happened much later -- there wasn't a "master imperialist plan" at all.
Money is not the only motivator. Power is another one.
I don't see any basis for this claim. More explicitly, I don't see any reasonable and consistent legal/moral theory which would justify such a claim. Note that I do not consider the popular "deep pockets" legal theory to be reasonable.
I think that framing "Imperialism" as belonging to the past is inaccurate.
Many of the problemmatic behaviours grouped together into the term "Imperialism" have not actually stopped. There are Western developed countries that are doing horrible things to non-Western developing countries right now, and doing horrible things to their own people too.
I think a good first step would be to stop doing the horrible stuff now. If the problemmatic behaviour stopped, the topic of redress for past wrongs could be considered from a better vantage point. "I'm sorry I killed your ancestors and stole their stuff 100 years ago" tastes like ashes when coming from someone who is killing your family and stealing your things now, or who is doing something more subtle but equally awful.
"Disadvantaged" is a word that glosses over the damage done. Also, the whole question could benefit from being more specific and defining terms better.
I get the feeling that "national conservatives" is the name of some specific political movement or affiliation in your own country. It is not a phrase I have heard before. What specifically does it refer to? The movement discussed in the Wiki article appears to be of significance mainly in the former-communist European countries, and even there consists mainly of minority parties. These countries are not the ones for which an argument is being made for post-imperial reparations.
I meant people from the right nationalist, conservative spectrum, not a particular group with that name. It's just that I've read that argument often expressed by people who I've associated with this spectrum.
I think that people in a position to actually do something about it generally take a similar view, but not so loudly, preferring the idea to just go away, while avoiding the media storm that would result from saying straight out, "We've got ours, deal with it." That is something that can only be said by those who are not in a position to do anything but talk.
The opposite view, "all of the developed world's prosperity was extorted from the rest and should be restored in full" is of the same nature. No-one can say it and get into power to do it.
This seems to be clearly an ethical question to me, and the field of ethics is far from scientific. What kind of answer are you looking for?
My system of ethics would suggest that developed nations are morally obligated to help poorer nations (at least in so far as significant human suffering is caused by limited resources), and that this is the only relevant factor. So help disadvantaged peoples yes, but the cause (imperialism or otherwise) is irrelevant in determining the need.
If you would like a different answer, I can surely construct an argument pointing in the direction you prefer.
But the cause is relevant to determining the incentives created by your help.