Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus

2. Cultural Foundations for the International Protection of Human Rights

Richard Falk 2. Cultural Foundations for the International Protection of Human Rights It may be helpful to overgcneralize at the outset in approaching this difficult , yet challenging and vital, topic. Until recently, most human rights specialists have taken an all-or-nothing view of the relevance of culture; some ignore culture in favor of some sort of universalism, while others regard cultural specificity as the supreme guide to moral behavior. Those who would disregard culture come from various backgrounds, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. There are, first of all, jurisprudcntial schools associated with positivism or naturalism. The positivists consider the content of human rights to be determined by the texts agreed upon by states and embodied in valid treaties, or determined by obligatory state practice attaining the status of binding international custom. The naturalists, on the other hand, regard the content of human rights as principally based upon immutable values that endow standards and norms with auniversal validity. In neither jurisprudential instance does culture enter into the deliberative process of interpreting the meaning, justifying the applicability, and working for the implementation of human rights. Additionally, there are secularists of many stripes who believe that a universal normative order based on the dignity of the human individualis the only acceptable basis for political governance. The following words are used by Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswcll, and Lung-chu Chen to identify their method of presenting the international law of human rights: The conception of human rights which we recommend . . . can be made to transcend all differences in the subjectivities and practices of peoples, not merely across national-state lines, but as between the different arenas of the larger community.' Cultural Foundations for Protection of Human Rights 45 These images of the human rights enterprise have been principally generated in the West, evolving over time from the Enlightenment mind-set, including a confidence in the possibility of a rational social and political order based on individual rights that, over time, could facilitate progress and happiness for humankind as a whole.2 Underlying such convictions is a belief in the sufficiency of human reason, especially as it is manifested in science and technology, and a vestigial distaste for any intrusion on the terrain of human rights by recourse to religion, tradition, and emotion. The ideological foundations of this secularist approach are often implicit. Nevertheless, it tended to generate a cult of modernization that has for several centuries occupied center stage in the West. One result has been a dualism between progress and backwardness that has been damaging to nonmodcrnizing peoples. On the other side of the debate, keeping in mind that these orienting observations are deliberate oversimplifications, one finds cultural relativists who take their cues from societal tradition, specific religious teachings, and the primacy of cultural settings. Such a position, often oblivious to plural and incompatible elements in cultural precept and practice, leads to an endorsement of the view that cultural attitudes automatically deserve deference and anything inconsistent that claims to derive from the international law of human rights has been either misinterpreted or can be disregarded. This position may also be accompanied by the ideological counterpoint in non-Western societies that alleged human rights standards are more properly understood to be disguised hegemonic claims by the West that, in a postcolonial era, arc no longer entitled to respect and should more properly be repudiated. As will be explained, both of these polar positions on the relevance of culture should be rejected. If the field of the protection of human rights continues to be controlled by these two interpretive perspectives in their various forms, the most probable result is a demeaning encounter between two forms of fundamentalism, the pitting of relentless secularists against hardened traditionalists. The position taken here is that, without mediating international human rights through the web of cultural circumstances, it will be impossible for human rights norms and practices to take deep hold in non-Western societies except to the partial, and often distorting, degree that these societies —or, more likely, their governing elites—have been to some extent Westernized. At the same time, without cultural practices and traditions 46 Richard talk being tested against the norms of international human rights, there will be a regressive disposition toward the retention of cruel, brutal, and exploitative aspects of religious and cultural tradition. One objective of normative standards is the protection of vulnerable individuals and groups from harsh forms of...