Today I will be watching The Hunger Games. Today
I went for a bike ride. Today I had a debate on human rights. Today I realized
I didn’t particularly like Ratna Kapur’s opinions on international human rights
but preferred Makau Matua’s. Today I ate two clementines and had a cup of
coffee. Today this is whats in my head:
I understand International human rights
often looks like the West is taking a giant dump on every non-European country
by practising imperialism veiled in humanitarian intervention. I also
understand that liberal democracy is being advertised as the only possible step
forward for every country that isn’t already a liberal democracy, which is
fundamentally stupid. With that said though, I would like to take a second to delve
into the question of cultural defensiveness, and how far can that really go.
Most human rights scholars fall somewhere in between the two extremes, in that we
should attempt to revise human rights and cultivate a culture-neutral set of
standards. Most people (Except for fucking fools) agree that there needs to be
significant discourse that moves from the bottom up for non-Western nations to
even begin chitchatting about the possibility of an international standard of
rights. On this topic, there are three things I wholeheartedly believe, and I
hope this doesn’t change:
1.
International
human rights, though a brainchild of the West, must be open to enough criticism
that it can eventually become a product of all nations. Without open dialogue and
re-interpretation by a new set of actors (The International Declaration of
Human Rights continues to be the same set of principles written up by Europeans
half a century ago) we risk the loss of ideological, political and social
growth and only an expansion of Western arrogance.
2. There
already exists a minimal informal set of human rights that I believe all
cultures adhere to. The right to basic human dignity, the view that murder and
rape are ‘bad’, crimes must be
punished, freedom to pursue the good life. Obviously several of these rights
are only too often violated, but it is done so through general acts of crime,
or in some cases massive illegitimate law (masking itself as valid and necessary)
that ultimately will be overthrown with time or rejected internally (albeit at too
slow a pace). I believe all humans
everywhere on a personal level do not wish to be harmed if they have not committed
a crime or harmed another. It is perhaps this basic shared right that we
should build up from.
3. I
think the overarching goal of human rights, after protection of minorities and
generally setting a standard for human dignity is to weed out unreasonableness.
And this is the where the controversy arises most clearly. As I stated earlier,
the West pointing a finger and attempting to ‘save’ repressed minorities in
foreign cultures often reeks of a paternalist stench. But what about universal unreasonableness?
Being against genocide, unequal gender and sexuality laws, child marriage, torture
and honour killings are not sentiments I have borrowed from the West. They are
practises so unreasonable that I believe any rational human being would feel
repulsed by. They are acts so abhorrent that I think they quell progress before
it can even begin and backtrack the potential of any culture. In saying that, I
firmly believe as an Indian female growing up in the West, cultural defensiveness
has a time and a place. And unreasonable cultural norms that cannot be adequately
justified in a modern society must be quashed.
To go off my third point, I found Ratna Kapur’s “Human
Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Take a Walk on the Dark Side” to hold up
the very thing I dislike. Some of her
points I agree with, that human rights has a darker side that must be acknowledged
before we can even get the ball rolling. Mutua agrees, and goes as far to say
that the West views human rights as a sort of ‘end of history’ and ‘final goal’
of global society which is a detrimental overall. My gripe is with the question of where can we
draw the middle line? The East requires the West to at least consider that they
too can be authors of global law rather than just the addressees. Naturally I agree, how else can the term ‘multicultural’
or ‘global’ even be used otherwise? But for such discourse to even exist there
are some underlying human rights standards that cannot be ‘set aside’ for the sake of ‘dialogue’, rather they must be followed
before the new rules are written up. And
how many of these rules can be re-written? Which standards are up for re-interpretation?
How many of them are “genetically” Western in a sense? Perhaps the most difficult of all questions
is to ask under what conditions can these potential ‘talks’ even take
place? Mutua suggests a domestic,
grass-roots approach to the problem to ensure each nation, culture or set of
people come to terms with the concept through their own means. Habermas on the
other hand says that all answers can be found in democratic deliberation and
fair communication. Forst Rainer, interestingly puts out the idea that all
humans have the ‘right to justification’
regardless of culture, ethnicity or nation, and this will be the basic building
blocks that will be used to develop global rights.
There are several brilliant writers out there who do an excellent job of going deeper into some of the very basic points I have touched upon, mine are musings inspired by the papers I have read, the discussions I have had and the thoughts that do wrack my brain while I attempt to be both a reasonable student and an open minded thinker. Anyway, these were just a few passing thoughts that creeped into my head today (and will almost certainly be a topic I revisit several times in this blog). For now, I’m out and about.
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