The current preoccupation with human rights raises very serious political questions, the most serious of which is whether this new emphasis in American foreign policy signals a turning away from the Kissinger strategy of orderly retreat, or, on the contrary, serves as a smokescreen for the continuation (if not actually the acceleration) of that strategy. My purpose in what follows, however, is not to address myself to the political side of the human-rights campaign but to raise a question of a different order. When we make statements about human rights, are we simply giving voice to a specific set of biases of our own? Or is there some universally valid standard of morality to which we can appeal in making judgments about countries with different traditions from ours?
Some Americans are morally outraged by the repression and the bribery practiced by the government of South Korea. Other Americans tend to view these actions more benignly because of the putatively greater atrocities practiced by the regime in North Korea. However one may view the moral condition of the Korean peninsula, it seems to me rather clear that both varieties of American outrage sharply raise the question of ethnocentrism: by what right do we condemn Korean authorities, South or North, for not living up to American standards of political morality? After all, neither bribery nor the harsh treatment of political opponents is a startling innovation of Asian statecraft, and both liberal democracy and Marxism, the two ideologies in whose terms the respective Korean states stand either accused or legitimated, are very recent Western exports to that part of the world.
Similarly, some Americans excuse the repressive policies of left-wing regimes in Asia because these regimes have supposedly established a greater measure of equality, and accuse those taking a different position of ethnocentrism—yet it is hard to think of a more blatantly Western value than equality. Other Americans compare left-wing and right-wing regimes in Asia and conclude that the latter, even if they are repressive, allow for a greater degree of individual freedom—another central Western value. Asian observers may be pardoned for thinking that both bodies of opinion are just a new form of cultural imperialism, and that along with Coca-Cola Americans are now busy exporting ideological biases to faraway places where they are neither wanted nor relevant.
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The question of the universal validity of moral judgments is an old one in the history of human thought. It is, indeed, one of the oldest questions of Western philosophy, going back to the twin sources of Western civilization in ancient Israel and ancient Greece. And the question is just as old in the great religious and philosophical traditions of Asia, as in the passionate quest for the oneness of reality in the religious imagination of India, and the (perhaps more secular) efforts to define the nature of humaneness in Chinese ethical thought. These sources, Western and non-Western, are by no means exhausted, and the issue I have raised can still be fruitfully addressed by drawing from them. In the contemporary world, however, that issue has attained an urgency which I believe is new in human history.
The reason for this is to be sought in one main historical factor—the global process of modernization. The “external” effects of modernization are very clear and generally acknowledged: there has been a quantum jump in what anthropologists call “culture contact,” as a result of modern technologies of transportation and communication. This means, quite simply, that everyone today is rubbing shoulders with everyone else (or nearly everyone else). On a practical level, therefore, the necessity has arisen of coming to terms with all sorts of people different from oneself. This, however, includes the necessity of coming to terms with them morally as well—that is, coming to terms with standards of conduct that are different from one’s own.
Of course, one must make distinctions. Not everyone in the world is rubbing shoulders with everyone else in the same way. The overwhelming majority of people in the contemporary world do not, for example, enjoy the pleasures of international air travel, that emblem par excellence of modernization; those who do, constitute a very small and highly privileged group. Still, very few people in the world today are truly immune from modernization; the same process that hurls mighty jetliners into the sky invades the villages and rice paddies over which they fly, and it does so in innumerable ways—establishing modern political and economic institutions, setting up government agencies and schools, connecting hitherto separated locales with roads and railways, supplying tons of manufactured products, and (ultimately most important of all) drawing people into the massive physical movement of population that is one of the inevitable consequences of modernization.
But the external manifestations of modernization are riot the only manifestations; they are accompanied by profound changes of consciousness. One such change is pluralization—the progressive interpenetration of the worlds of meaning in which human beings live. Through most of history most people lived in situations that were not only highly integrated in terms of their governing values and their definitions of reality, but were also quite effectively protected against challenges to those values and definitions of reality. The most effective protection was isolation, or at least segregation, from all those “others” who perceived and valued reality differently. Modernization weakens and often shatters the protective walls around all traditionally integrated worlds of meaning; the “others,” once distant strangers, now become neighbors in a sometimes uncomfortable way.
The discomfort is not only social, but cognitive and moral as well. For each world of meaning, as it is penetrated by other worlds of meaning, becomes ipso facto relativized. Some three centuries ago Pascal (who, if there had been international air travel at the time, would have belonged to the privileged class making use of it) could exclaim, with a sense of discovery, that what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other. This discovery has by now become commonplace knowledge.
The consequence for morality is simple but revolutionary. When my neighbors make moral judgments different from mine, then the question of the universal validity of moral judgments (theirs or mine) imposes itself urgently. Thus modernization makes reluctant moral philosophers of us all.
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Modernity originated in Europe. Its basic institutional embodiments are European inventions—science and technology, bureaucracy, the economic systems of both capitalism and socialism, political democracy as well as the nation-state. So are the basic ideologies that legitimate these institutions—including our contemporary notions of human rights. Such statements as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations are derived, with only minor modifications, from the classical documents written on the subject in the West since the 18th century. Probably the earliest public declaration of human rights was the one passed by the legislature of colonial Virginia. Then followed those immensely influential documents originating on both sides of the Atlantic: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution.
In other words, contemporary notions of human rights are historically and intellectually derived from the Enlightenment, a specifically Western phenomenon. (It goes without saying that this phenomenon has its antecedents in much earlier moments of Western history—in the Temple of Jerusalem, in the agora of Athens, in the schools of Jewish rabbis, among Roman jurists and medieval moral philosophers.) And this in turn points to the fact that, whether one likes it or not, the process of modernization has everywhere been, at least in part, a process of Westernization as well. Today, almost without exception, even the goriest Oriental despot pays lip-service to the values of human rights—in language borrowed from Thomas Jefferson or Karl Marx.
To be sure, there are exceptions to this international Jeffersonian-Marxian consensus—the traditionalists (often called “fundamentalists” in the Western press) who would restore the classical caste system in India or replace the modernizing constitutions of Muslim nation-states by the Shari’a. Most of these traditionalists are unsophisticated; even those who are sophisticated speak in a highly particularistic language which, by its very nature, is opaque to the outsider. Hence, the traditionalist protest against modernity is easily dismissed intellectually (even if it can make a lot of trouble politically). Yet it should not be so quickly dismissed. Even if one has neither cultural affinity nor ideological sympathy with any of the traditionalists’ causes, their perception of the world is instructive and important. For it is the traditionalists, with the sharp eye of hostility, who see more clearly than anyone else the linkage of modernization and Westernization.
Most of the political leadership of Asian and African countries, however, and a sizable portion of the intellectuals in those countries, are not traditionalists in this sense. Rather, they subscribe to the viewpoint of “modernization without Westernization”—a viewpoint that has both right-wing and left-wing expressions. On the Left, this viewpoint is at the heart of the Maoist rebellion against Soviet ideological hegemony; it is replicated, mutatis mutandis, in other forms of Asian and African socialism. On the Right, it has found an eloquent spokesman in the Shah of Iran, who, with some justification, aspires to a leading role among Muslim rulers seeking a path somewhere between Westernizing modernism and de-modernizing traditionalism; for better or worse, the Shah has been particularly eloquent of late in rejecting the applicability to Iran of a number of Western notions of human rights. And the same viewpoint is a common element in an otherwise wildly heterogeneous medley of ideologies—the neo-Shintoism of the late Yukio Mishima or the various Third World strands of Gandhiism, Arabism, and Négritude.
In regularly dismissing human-rights issues when they are raised by Westerns as irrelevant to their own countries, these leaders and intellectuals force us once again to face the question of how one may make moral judgments with a claim to universal validity. Indeed, they raise the even sharper question of whether the very habit of making universally relevant moral judgments may not be a specifically Western propensity.
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Most intellectual problems are carried further toward solution by the making of distinctions, and this one is no exception. A crucial distinction to be made here is between those notions of human rights that emerge exclusively from a Western view of the world, and which will only be plausible to those sharing this view, and those notions of human rights that derive their warrant from a wider consensus. To draw this distinction fully and conclusively is beyond my abilities. But I believe that steps should be taken toward such a distinction, and need to be taken, if we are to gain clarity on this subject. As a first step I would propose separating those rights that derive from the specifically Western values of liberty and equality from those that pertain to the human condition as such.
The former category undoubtedly includes those rights that have emerged from the Western development of political democracy—the ones which in America are commonly designated as civil liberties and civil rights. Freedom of speech and of the press, the inviolability of the electoral process, equal protection of the law, due process (which includes the peculiarly Western value of impersonality in the administration of justice)—all these (and the list could be easily extended) are rights that find little warrant outside the orbit of Western history.
To this list must be added the economic rights of which the Left is so enamored. The notion that economic justice demands an ever-greater measure of equality is as specifically Western as the notion that liberty is the highest political value; non-Western man, almost everywhere, has been homo hierarchicus. And, needless to say, the same list must include those rights recently proclaimed by various cultural revolutionaries in the West—women’s rights, the rights of children, or the rights of homosexuals and other deviants.
To many non-Westerners, even today, our understanding of political and economic rights is puzzling (which is why, for example, it is very difficult indeed to explain Watergate in Asia); to most non-Westerners, the rights proclaimed by our cultural revolutionaries are symptoms of degeneracy or collective madness. At any rate, these rights are plausible only to those who (whether by inheritance or by adoption) stand within a specifically Western view of the world.
Yet the grossest cases called violations of human rights today are of an altogether different kind. Genocide; the massacre of large numbers of innocent people by their own government or by alien conquerors; the deliberate abandonment of entire sections of a population to starvation; the systematic use of terror (including torture) as government policy; the expulsion of large numbers of people from their homes; enslavement through various forms of forced labor; the forced separation of families (including the taking away of children from their parents by actions of government); the deliberate desecration of religious symbols and the persecution of those adhering to them; the destruction of institutions that embody ethnic identity. Each one of these items is routine policy in many countries today.
It is my contention that, in condemning these as violations of human rights, we can call upon a consensus far wider than that of Western civilization. That consensus emerges from all the major world cultures, especially in their religious foundations—and it is a consensus all the more impressive in view of the vast (and partly irreconcilable) differences among the world religions in their understanding of reality and of human destiny.
When we condemn the horrors inflicted on the people of Cambodia by their present government, we need not do so by reference to Western values alone. Cambodia is a Buddhist country, and it is Buddhism that has as its highest moral tenet the “respect for all sentient beings.” Similarly, the atrocities inflicted on the Chinese people in the course of various Maoist experiments, such as the physical extermination of entire classes of the population or the separation of children from their parents, are not just violations of Western notions of morality (or, as apologists for Maoism in the West like to say, of “bourgeois morality”); rather, they are violations of the entire corpus of ethics of the Chinese tradition, which holds, among other things, that government should be “human-hearted” and that “filial piety” is one of the highest human goods. And if we pass moral judgment on a Muslim ruler (be it in a left-wing or a right-wing regime) for acts of cruelty, we may do so, not alone in the name of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but in the name of the ethical core of Islam itself: every call to prayer, from every minaret from the Maghreb to Java, begins with an invocation of God who is al-rahman al-rahim, whose nature is to be compassionate and who has compassion, and who commands men to be compassionate also.
Drawing a distinction of the kind I have suggested between two sets of rights would, at the very least, help prevent the sorts of intellectual confusion perpetrated by the press in its reports on “violations of human rights,” a catchall category ample enough to cover such disparate and disproportionate phenomena as the expulsion of an American journalist from Nigeria, mass murder in Uganda, election irregularities in Pakistan, genocide in Cambodia, and the inability of women in some Muslim countries to obtain a passport without the permission of their fathers or husbands. But more important, a truer understanding of the moral convergence of the human race on the question of fundamental human rights is essential if Americans (in or out of government) are to speak credibly on the international scene.
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I have argued for a distinction between fundamental human rights and rights stemming from specifically Western developments, notably political democracy. This argument needs to be qualified, or extended, in two ways.
There is, first of all, an undeniable empirical correlation, and a high one, between countries that respect those human rights I have called fundamental and countries that have institutions of political democracy. Many people in the West would maintain that this correlation shows the essential equivalence of the two sets of rights. This, I think, is mistaken. The correlation is rather to be explained sociologically, in terms of the peculiar character of the modern state.
In pre-modern societies there existed a variety of restraints on the arbitrary exercise of political power: religious authority, custom, kinship and tribe, and (most important) the sheer inability of government to extend its controls into every remote corner of society. Modernization weakens or destroys these restraints. The modern state (and not just the repressive or the totalitarian version of it) thus exercises historically unprecedented power—with the implication that human rights are more than ever before at the mercy of unrestrained rulers. It was, indeed, precisely in order to impose restraints upon governmental power that modern democratic institutions arose in the West. Consequently, the high empirical correlation between democracy and a respect for human rights is not surprising—which is not the same thing as saying that it is necessary or complete.
A historical illustration may serve here. In ancient China there was an institution known as the imperial censors. These were Confucian scholars attached to the court, whose express task it was to criticize the emperor and his officials for derelictions of duty. It is not necessary to assume that these worthy gentlemen were immune to coercion or corruption in order to say that we have here a classical case of pre-modern restraint on government. We may then ask a sociological question: under modern conditions, what are the possible functional equivalents of the imperial censors? The sociological answer is that such equivalents, very broadly speaking, will resemble the basic institutional arrangements of modern democracy.
The second qualification is this. To say, as I have said, that certain rights are “plausible” only within a specifically Western view of the world is not to say that any moral judgment emanating from the Western tradition is for that reason deprived of universal validity. On the contrary, if the moral discoveries of the Western tradition—prominent among them the ideas of individual liberty and of the fundamental equality of all human beings—are valid for us, they are valid for all mankind. If we believe in the fundamental unity of the human race, we must also believe that the liberty that is a good in America would also, in principle, be a good in Asia.
This, however, is still a long way from the belief that our own specific social and political arrangements exhaust the possible institutionalizations of morality, and that we are therefore entitled (if not mandated) to preach those arrangements to the rest of the world. Sociological fact is not the same thing as absolute truth. The difference I would establish here is not between moral conviction on the one. hand and an attitude of relativistic laissez-faire on the other, but between ethnocentrism and a respect for the moral scope—the remarkably consensual moral scope—of all the great human civilizations. And this difference is not just a matter of theoretical perspective; it affects the entire manner in which human rights can be argued on the international scene today, and for that reason has considerable political significance.
The question of ethnocentrism in relation to human rights is a complex one, but this complexity need not be paralyzing. On the contrary, the credibility of Americans speaking out on human rights will increase if they speak soberly and with a proper sense of the universal human search for moral truth.
