Daniel Hannan
There was an almost cartoonish quality to the bilateral summit of the world’s most evil leaders. Kim Jong Un emerged from his Bond-villain armoured train to tour the Russian far east with Vladimir Putin. The two men exchanged rifles, visited military facilities and talked of rockets. You half expected them to disappear with a thunderclap into a Gothic castle alongside Dracula and Montie Burns.
Except, of course, that no man is a villain in his own eyes. Even the worst monsters – especially the worst monsters, we might say – convince themselves that they are cosmic defenders of righteousness. Hence the corpulent Korean caudillo’s declaration that “the Russian army and people will certainly win a great victory in the sacred struggle for the punishment of a great evil”. He means it. As Roy Baumeister showed in his book Evil, we are hardwired always to see ourselves as the wronged party. In any clash, whether a minor misunderstanding at the office or a full-scale war, we see our own actions as proportionate, justified and one-off, and other party’s as premeditated, sustained and malevolent.
Steven Pinker elaborated the phenomenon in his 2011 magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: “Even in matters when no reasonable third party can doubt who’s right and who’s wrong, we have to be prepared, when putting on psychological spectacles, to see that evildoers always think they are acting morally. The spectacles are a painful fit.” What might be the point of view of Putin and Kim? I think it would run something like this.
“Westerners are hypocrites. They lecture the rest of us about international law but, when it suits them, they bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya. They throw a fit about Russian assassinations, but they kept trying to murder Fidel Castro. And anyway, what’s so special about the Western way of life? OK, it might give them a higher GDP, but look at what it costs them. Fragmented families, drugs, degeneracy. Who’s to say that our values – patriotism, sacrifice and collective endeavour – don’t make you happier?”
One way to answer that question is to ask people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten. Russians score lower than Westerners. North Koreans are not asked. Another is to look at where people choose to live. Here is a striking statistic. On the eve of the Russian revolution, Russia and the United States had roughly the same population. A century later, because of different rates of longevity, migration and abortion (Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world) there were twice as many Americans as Russians. I’d say that’s a pretty strong endorsement of liberalism.
The tyrants (and their Western apologists) might object that this is not a fair comparison, insisting the United States somehow acquired its wealth by war rather than by free contract and property rights. They will struggle to argue that the United States was more imperialist than Russia which, as Henry Kissinger quipped, expanded at the rate of “one Belgium per year”, but let’s leave that aside. If you want a laboratory-quality comparison, consider Korea. The two Koreas began from the same place in 1953. If anything, North Korea had a slight edge, having been more industrialised, although South Korea had a larger population. But in other respects, the two sides were identical. They had the same language, the same culture, the same work ethic, and both had just come through a devastating war. Today, the economy of South Korea is 57 times as large as its northern neighbour’s. Its people live more than 10 years longer (North Korean life expectancy is as low as Russia’s). Its rivers are cleaner, its forests less depleted. Its children are several times more likely to survive infancy – and if that statistic doesn’t correlate with greater net happiness, I don’t know what does. Korea also anticipates the argument that liberal capitalism is a success only in terms defined by the largely Protestant culture from which it emerged. To praise Western liberalism in essentially Western terms, runs the argument, is to beg the question, because non-Western cultures might not put the same emphasis on individual fulfilment. Well, the two Koreas began with the same religious blend: Buddhism, native shamanism and a not insignificant Christian minority. Both are now largely atheistic. But only one has to prevent its population defecting en masse to the other. It is true that defining good and evil without a religious scaffold to hold them in place is not easy. In a famous scene in The Brothers Karamazov, a young aristocrat and a monk discuss the problem.
How can a benevolent God have created a world full of horrors? Then again, in what sense – other than by religious criteria – can they definitively be said to be horrors? How, in short, is any morality possible without God? Their fictional dialogue is set in the Optina monastery near the small town of Kozelsk. In April 1940, in that same monastery, Dostoyevsky’s questions found a non-fictional answer. Optina was a base for the NKVD, the ancestor of Putin’s KGB. As good communists, its officers believed that discarding Christian superstitions would let them make rational calculations – not least about human life. This reasoning led them to condemn 21,892 army officers, priests and intellectuals who had been arrested following the USSR’s invasion of Poland the previous year. The Poles were judged anti-social: they kept their uniforms tidy, continued to observe military rank in captivity and celebrated Christmas. They were duly loaded onto buses, driven into the woods and shot.
That is the system that Ukrainians want to break away from. That is the system that 33,000 North Koreans have succeeded in fleeing, despite the dogs, mines and guns put there to hold them in. States in which you can be liquidated, and your friends will be too scared to complain, are not conducive to human contentment, however much they suit the robber barons who run them. Such states were near-universal until 300 or so years ago. The powers enjoyed by Putin and Kim would have been recognisable to an Iron Age slave emperor. Western liberalism is the beautiful exception. And I fear that that fact is not appreciated, even in the West.
Why, after all, does Putin seemingly want Kim’s stocks of ammunition? At best, they will plug a gap for a few months. Presumably, Putin’s strategy is to hold out until the United States is led by a man who has praised both him and Kim to the skies, namely Donald Trump. The fact that such an outcome is plausible is enough to tell us that an open society is not widely valued in the West. Nothing in our sublunary world is perfect, of course. All countries occasionally engage in double standards. It is true, to cite one of the most common anti-Western complaints, that we are more agitated about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons than about India or Israel doing so – though that is for a pretty obvious reason, namely that India and Israel won’t aim them at us.
It is true, too, that Ukraine is far from being a perfect democracy. But Ukrainians still understand the difference between liberalism and Putinism – between leaders being subject to the law, and leaders making up the rules as they go along. They care enough to fight for that difference. Do we?
