Boorishness begets violence. The fact is that in any culture people like to argue with each other, and often do. I recollect being amused in my childhood by a well-known poem from nineteenth century Calcutta. The poet is describing the horror of death, the sting of mortality. The worst sting of death would appear to be, in this view, the inability to argue, and this illustrates how seriously we take our differences and our debates.
Dissidents exist in every society, often at great risk to their own security.
The view that Asian values are quintessentially authoritarian has tended to come almost exclusively from spokesmen of those in power and their advocates. But foreign ministers, or government officials, or religious leaders do not have a monopoly in interpreting local culture and values. It is important to listen to the voices of dissent in each society. Many of these values have taken their full form only over the last few centuries. While we do find some anticipatory components in parts of the ancient Western traditions, there are other such anticipatory components in parts of non-Western ancient traditions as well.