Being Liberal in a Plural World

By Namit Arora

(A slightly edited version of this article appeared in The Philosopher, the journal of the Philosophical Society of England, Volume LXXXXVII No. 1 Spring 2009.)

1.

Is ‘human rights’ a Western idea? Yes and no. Yes because the modern concept of human rights arose in the West during the Enlightenment. No because it is only the latest episode in the long human Asianvalues preoccupation with dignity, justice, compassion, and many localized personal and communitarian rights. But despite the UN General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, consensus on what rights all humans deserve remains far from settled.

I believe the question that underlies all debate on human rights is really this: What ideas, beliefs, and values—i.e., what common morality, and institutions for safeguarding it—ought to be promoted universally, and the rest left alone to the currents of diversity? The answer is far from easy and causes much acrimony (recall the ‘Asian values’ debate), with one side calling human rights a tool of Western hegemony aimed at non-Western societies, only to be accused in return of undermining liberty in the name of culture, order or tradition. Both sides make valid points. So what's a liberal to do? Let’s probe a little deeper.

2.

A great many of us today are ‘value pluralists.’ We believe that humans live by many legitimate ethical values and choices: to join the Resistance or care for a sick mother, to adopt a baby or make one, to support socialism or capitalism. Value pluralism entails that often there are no objective grounds for showing one human value superior to another, i.e., that there can be multiple right answers to a single ethical question. Value pluralism also implies that some values may be incommensurate with others, perhaps even making tragic conflict unavoidable—for instance, pro-life vs. pro-choice values, theocratic vs. secular values, warrior vs. monkish values. Often, conflicts of values are manifest even within a person. Whitman wrote, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’

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Birobidzhan!

Justin E. H. Smith

0000-2423~Stroite-Socialisticheskij-Birobidzhan-Posters It is well known among historians of the Soviet Union that, early in his reign, Joseph Stalin rejected Marx and Lenin's strongly internationalist variety of socialism, in favor of the more limited project of building real socialism within one state, while at the same time promoting the distinct national identities of all the ethnic groups within that state. Stalin wrote as early as 1913: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” He bemoaned the fact that “among the Jews there is no large and stable stratum connected with the land, which would naturally rivet the nation together.”

When he came to power, Stalin sought to do something for the Jews that would, for the first time in modern history, rivet the nation together. Some Jews weren't sure they liked the sound of that, but sensed that it was probably better than anything they could expect if they were to remain the neighbors of Cossacks and Belorussians. So they packed their bags and headed for the Far East to start a new life in the newly established capital of Jewish culture, the city of Birobidzhan.

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Obama reaches out

John Esposito in The Immanent Frame:

President Barack Obama has moved quickly to follow up on his inaugural statement: “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” He appointed and sent his special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, to the region on an eight day trip. Then on January 28, on Al Arabiya, the prominent Arab satellite TV network, Obama addressed the Arab and Muslim worlds in his first televised interview from the White House.

For many Muslims, eight years of the Bush administration’s war against global terrorism has looked more like the use of terrorism, WMDs and then the promotion of democracy to legitimate a neo-colonial design to redraw the political map of the Muslim world. Conscious of the popular perception and fear that the U.S. has been fighting a war against Islam and Muslims, President Obama sought to counter soaring anti-Americanism and reassure Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy.” Signaling a shift from the perception globally of U.S. arrogance and interventionism, Obama declared that while “we sometimes make mistakes,” America is not a colonial power and hoped for a restoration of “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

Obama’s message did strike many of the right chords.

Heavy costs of a dirty war

Dushka H. Saiyid in DAWN:

THAT the world changed with the departure of Bush was borne out by Obama’s words at his inaugural address when he said, “Our founding fathers … drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man … those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.” This is what distinguishes the western civilisation from what the Taliban and Osama are selling: it underscores the supremacy of the rule of law, and its cornerstone, that everyone is innocent till proven guilty. It was a rejection of rendition, water-boarding and other euphemisms for the torture of prisoners, incarcerated for years without trial. It is not difficult to fathom why the US, and Britain under Blair, lost their moral leadership of the world.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, a gifted man by all accounts, and son of the well-respected scholar and academic Ralph Miliband, felt that the time had come to accept that the war on terror, as conducted since 9/11, had been self-defeating, and that “we must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law and not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society”. He was articulating much the same vision as Obama, and like him mentioned the need to settle the Kashmir issue, “as that would deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms”. He was referring to one of the “contexts” of terrorism, as Arundhati Roy refers to it, and which must be addressed if a long-term end to terrorism is to be found.

More here.

vegetable stand

Stefany-jowling1

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau set off on a lone journey into the woodlands owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wanted to know if living more simply, in closer proximity to nature, would make him a better person, and if being a better, simpler person was the path to creating a better society. Walden is a unique and pioneering work in civil disobedience. But Thoreau’s two years in the woods were part of late-18th- and 19th-century America’s many experiments with alternative ways of life. All over the United States, people were living guinea pigs of their own idealism. Wacky communes espousing everything from free love to chastity sprouted up from Massachusetts to Texas. These eccentric communities shared one fundamental creed: that self-improvement, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment were essential to achieving a better society. At a time when the Western world was being swallowed by industrial smokestacks, and men, women, and children toiled away in nightmarish working conditions, Utopian community leaders went back to the basics, namely, the power of the individual to control his own destiny and do good, often in opposition to the mainstream. It’s no surprise, then, that diet was considered central to radical self-improvement. Vegetarianism was honored as the most radical diet of them all.

more from Table Matters here.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

buy it here (via Andrew Sullivan via Crooked Timber).

dinner with darwin

Coyne-468w

NH: What would you tell him? Steve Jones: I’d tell him that the thing that defeated him all his life, the mechanism of inheritance, had been solved and it didn’t destroy his theory – as he had thought it might – but actually supported it. He was a very rare thing, an honest scientist. Scientists are often extremely unwilling to accept that some of their ideas might be wrong and will go to any lengths to deny that possibility. But when Darwin wrote On The Origin of Species he was written to by a Scottish engineer called Fleming Jenkins with what Darwin thought was an absolutely fatal enquiry. Darwin thought that heredity worked somehow by the mixing of the averaging of the blood of the parents. In that case, Jenkins asked, if you have an advantageous character in the blood, how could you ever get it back, wouldn’t it just dilute away? Darwin immediately saw that that was fatal to his theory. He did six editions of Origin, each one worse than the one before, as he got more and more tangled up and less confident about the basic idea. But he was working with the wrong substance – blood. Inheritance is based not on liquids, as he thought, but on particles: genes. It’s a digital not an analogue system. Genetics confirms Darwin. Of course this is Mendel’s discovery, which Darwin was sent but never read.

more from Eurozine here.

amis meets updike

Updike

I met up with Updike at Mass General – that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9.30 that morning. It was 10.30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. “You know what I look like,” he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, “storklike,” distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban. “How are you?” I said, with some urgency.

more from The Guardian here.

Sunday Poem

///
“Lord Forgive Me”

Kyrie eleison! I said it in the pub.
I said it to my bitter, then I said
it to my heart, with nothing not to dread:
my sins were great: I drank there with my love.

Kyrie iesu christe, God above
and me below, drinking at the Hog's Head.
“So. Will you love me better when I'm dead?”
He knew it was no joke and didn't laugh

but turned away to look at the TV.
(Arsenal was playing Everton.)
Another man was fixed upon the game

and held his hands together on his knee
and chanted and rebuked. But not my man,
who recognizes neither loss nor blame.
///

Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: the Science of Pleasure

Anthony Holden reviews Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: the Science of Pleasure by Paul Martin in The Telegraph:

Pleasure-Pic_1248379c We Brits have a way of feeling guilty about our pleasures, as if there were something morally dubious, or beyond the merely vulgar, in the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the constitution of our more overtly fun‑loving American cousins. This is not an issue addressed by Paul Martin in his extensive survey of the pros and cons of pleasure, and its bittersweet role in all our lives. Mercifully, however, he does seem to conclude that pleasure-seeking is, on balance, a good thing, for all the efforts of religious and (often) socio-political forces to persuade us otherwise.

But pleasure is also, as he insists from the outset, “a slippery beast”. Plato argued that it was “the greatest incentive to evil”, Aristotle the opposite, and so it has confusingly continued ever since, via the likes of Nero and Casanova to Schopenhauer, Freud and beyond. For Martin, a behavioural biologist, the “holy trinity” of pleasures that can inevitably lead to pain, not least in the shape of potentially lethal addiction, are those of his title – sex, drugs and chocolate.

Sex is discussed in blindingly obvious, at times somewhat alarming, detail and is generally recommended, “preferably with someone else”. In this, as in most of the other pleasures on his menu, Martin is commendably non-judgmental, short of pornography and paedophilia, even when discussing the more exotic sexual variants to which some societies have seen fit to attach a death sentence. Recreational drugs don’t get off so lightly; however tantalising readers might find his evidence that some can apparently evoke sensations 20 times as pleasurable as an orgasm, these kinds of drug can also kill you – which is deemed, on balance, not such a good thing.

More here.

Charles Darwin, Abolitionist

Christopher Benfey in The New York Times:

Benfey-enlarge Charles Darwin, a 22-year-old dropout from medical school who subsequently considered becoming a priest, boarded the Beagle in late 1831 and spent five years on the ship, traveling the world and collecting natural specimens. Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a “gentleman dining companion” whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain.

Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush country­side and the exciting adventures of the Underground Railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are “what I fancy most.”

Two arresting new books, timed to co­incide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be under­stood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.

More here.