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Universal Values
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| HardTranceProd |
At today's press conference, Obama not only used stronger language to describe Iran, but also said that "peaceful dissent" and "the right to assemble" are "universal values" that supposedly span cultures and nations.
I really cringed at that statement; why is he making such an assumption? Sure, it's a prominent Anglo-Saxon value, but I'm not so sure about the rest of the world. For example, I could say that respecting elders is a universal value, but people's practice of it depends on the culture. Some take it so seriously as to make it part of their life, such as the !Kung tribe in the Kalahari desert, while other societies are perfectly OK with violating it.
When Obama made his first statements on Iran, he merely mentioned the Anglo-Saxon values as an opinion from the American side, which is perfectly acceptable. But then he went further and called these values "universal," which is scientifically suspect.
For example, if we consider the freedom to peacefully protest, this value didn't recently exist even in the West. It only descibes Westerners' contemporary understanding of politics and society, already refuting the classification of this value as universal (because universal values are timeless: they're present throughout human history). What came before, and what will come after, in terms of human evolution, may differ starkly from contemporary thought on this subject. Richard Dawkins claims that most values result from a "shifting zeitgeist" which, by definition, is not universal. "As recently as 50 years ago," he says, "all of us in the West would have been racists."
Let's take this particular value even further. Even America, the country that's now preaching it, conveniently discarded it during WWII when Japanese Americans were thrown in jail if their opinion differed from the established one during Pearl Harbor. So, even the country that thinks it's found a value that's universal, doesn't always practice it, certainly making it NOT universal.
You want to talk about true universal values? I got one: long-term male-female bonds. This value has existed throughout ALL of human history, in EVERY society and tribe, and spans millions of years, from historic economic partnership for the sake of raising children to contemporary marriage in the name of love (a Western invention; love and romance don't really exist in many cultures). So, although it takes many forms, it's universal. Or, another one: forming alliances. Today's Facebook and Twitter are merely the latest manifestations of a universal value that's as old as mankind itself--forming social alliances that might be useful down the road.
But certain political ideas that are a couple of centuries old, and exist in certain parts of the world? Give me a break. There might be a lot of good in those ideas, but calling them "universal" is poor terminology. |
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| Krypton |
| The only universal rights in my opinion is the right to life, liberty, and property. |
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| Renegade |
| quote: | Originally posted by HardTranceProd
At today's press conference, Obama not only used stronger language to describe Iran, but also said that "peaceful dissent" and "the right to assemble" are "universal values" that supposedly span cultures and nations.
I really cringed at that statement; why is he making such an assumption? Sure, it's a prominent Anglo-Saxon value, but I'm not so sure about the rest of the world. |
The "value" of free speech may not be universally codified in the legal systems of cultures around the world, but that's not to say that it is not a universal value. I am yet to meet the person who would argue that their own freedom of expression should be subject to a more zealous standard of censorship. There are many who would gladly assent to stripping that freedom away from those they disagree with, of course, but never their own. The suppression of free speech says more about the hypocracy of those in power than it does about the universality of the human need to express ourselves freely.
| quote: | | But then he went further and called these values "universal," which is scientifically suspect. |
Perhaps "values" is the wrong word, but there's nothing scientifically suspect about noting that there are universal norms that (in a broad sense) exist across all cultures at all times. In fact, that's precisely what we'd expect given our common ancestory as a social animal. That probably doesn't extend to the norms governing free-speech in the Jeffersonian, post-enlightenment sense, but that is not to say that the desire for free expression is not a very real and universal human trait.
| quote: | | For example, if we consider the freedom to peacefully protest, this value didn't recently exist even in the West. It only descibes Westerners' contemporary understanding of politics and society, already refuting the classification of this value as universal (because universal values are timeless: they're present throughout human history). |
Again, the fact that the "value" of free-speech has not been particularly well represented in the legal history of any culture is not to say that this value wasn't present, just that the powers that be had every interest in supressing it. It's noteworthy that the spread of democracy and the spread of the right to free speech have gone hand in hand - certainly in the west at least - and the reason for that is simple: no-one would ever willingly cede to the government their right to free expression if given the (democratic) choice.
| quote: | | What came before, and what will come after, in terms of human evolution, may differ starkly from contemporary thought on this subject. Richard Dawkins claims that most values result from a "shifting zeitgeist" which, by definition, is not universal. "As recently as 50 years ago," he says, "all of us in the West would have been racists." |
While I don't believe that humans are evolving via some transcendent dialectic towards a Hegelian ideal, I do believe that there is a pretty unambiguous trajectory to our "shifting zeitgeist". That is to say, we're not just adopting and shedding norms for completely arbitrary reasons, we're adopting and shedding norms based on objectively rational, empathetic principles that cannot easily be forgetten or lost once they've been expounded.
In the case of racism, it is certainly true that if we lived 50 years ago that we would be more susceptible to holding racist attitudes, but that's simply because we wouldn't have had the necessary experiences to act any differently. We now live in an increasingly interconnected globe where we mingle every day with people of vastly different backgrounds to our own and where no point on the planet is more than a day's flight away. We're not less racist now as a consequence of some arbitrary historical trend, we're less racist because the kind of ignorance necessary for racism to flourish is simply becoming less and less tenable. As ignorance continues to shrink (as it must inevitably do - knowledge is cumulative and irreversible process) then it is inevitable that our capacity to debase and subjugate our fellow human beings will shrink proportionally. That is the moral trajectory I'm talking about. |
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