Theo Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in their film Submission, depicted a naked female with verses from the Koran painted on her body. They received death threats, but Van Gogh refused to accept police protection. More wisely, Ali agreed; Van Gogh was murdered and Ali lives under 24-hour guard.
In an article in the Christian Science Monitor, she observes: "cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by defending the position that human rights are a Western invention (http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0404/p09s01-coop.html?s=hns)".
Oddly enough for a cultural absolutist, her argument is utilitarian: "In the past two centuries, those in the West have gradually changed the way they treat women. As a result, the West enjoys greater peace and progress. It is my hope that the third world will embark on this effort."
The argument is that societies that promote human rights including and especially the rights of women enjoy greater peace and prosperity than those that do not. Therefore, we should promote human rights to bring about greater prosperity and more enduring peace; not because human rights are a good thing in themselves that is, not even if the consequences are devastating, but only if they are benign (as they are bound to be, according to Ali).
Now, one of the rights that western civilisation granted to women was the right to vote. That is, presumably, a human right. I shall only touch on the question of whether there is or can be anything abstract like "rights" intangible as unicorns, existing nowhere like King Solomon's mines, and endlessly disputed like works of art as opposed to objects, like chairs or mountains. That is a philosophical conundrum and this is not quite the place to raise the problem it is the old realism-nominalism debate. I would merely like to observe that if rights were objective entities like mathematical equations, there would be no dispute regarding them - yet even western civilisation disagrees about rights: the rights of a foetus, the rights of animals used in experiments, the rights of workers to job protection, the rights of prisoners captured in war, the rights of immigrants, the right to assisted suicide, the right to same-sex union....
Now, the question is: has the westernisation of societies for that is her intention: "...we need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures..." - led uniformly to "greater peace and greater prosperity", as Ali claims? Since her proposition is universal, one need provide only a single counter-example to falsify it, and that is precisely my aim here. And the counter-example is that of Central Africa in the early 1990s, when "...the cold war's end prompted western donors to stop propping up anti-communist dictators and to start insisting on democratic reforms" (The Economist, December 18th 2004, p. 69).
In June 1993, Melchior Ndadaye a Hutu won Burundi's first democratic election 'by virtue of being a member of the biggest tribe in a country where a free vote naturally meant a vote along ethnic lines', as The Economist observed (April 9th 1994, p. 49). In October, 1993, Ndadaye was murdered by the Tutsi-dominated army. Over 250,000 people were killed in the subsequent massacre. General Habyarimana, since grabbing power in a bloodless coup, had run Rwanda for 21 years. Tutsi rebels who had fled to Uganda earlier invaded Rwanda as the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990. Under the 1993 peace deal both sides agreed to form an integrated army and to share power in a new national government. Hard-liners shot down Habyarimana's plane on April 6th, 1994, and a well-planned pogrom ensued. 800,000 Tutsis were butchered. The RPF captured the country, and 2 million Hutus fled, mostly to Zaire. In Burundi, a Hutu-led coalition that had won power in the 1993 election was overthrown by a Tutsi-led coup in July 1996. Both Rwanda and Burundi, 80% Hutu, were now controlled by Tutsis. 'For Tutsis after 1994, "democracy means death"' observes David Reynolds in his book One World Divisible.
The Tutsi-led government in Rwanda was afraid that the Hutus in Zaire (now Congo), sheltered by Mobutu Sese Seko, would rearm and return. Rwanda organised a rebellion and toppled Mobutu. They replaced him with Laurent Kabila, who turned against his backers and armed the Hutus. Rwanda tried, and failed, to topple him, despite help from Uganda and Burundi Angola and Zimbabwe, among five nations, came to Kabila's rescue. Nine national armies and their rebel protιgιs shot, hacked and starved over 3 million people to death in Congo.
Now, why didn't the Tutsis want to accept electoral defeat? Because electoral defeat reduces one to insignificance in African culture.
"Democracy...simply has no proper role for political losers in Africa....," observe Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their contemporary classic, Africa Works. "Politicians are expected to represent their constituents properly, that is, to deliver resources to them. It is, therefore, comprehensively useless to be an opposition politician....(Oxford: James Currey, 1999, p. 56)". The "individual" is part of the patron-client nexus.
Chabal and Daloz's observations would explain why the 1990s was such a bloody decade for sub-Saharan Africa. An alien culture, imposed through western financial coercion, resulted in the death of roughly 4 million people and in just one part of Africa.
In a lighter vein, when I was at Kuakata in the south of Bangladesh, I went out into the sea in a fishing-boat. It was evening, and there were periodic power failures on the now - distant coast, so I couldn't at times tell where it was without my compass. I asked the fishermen why there was no lighthouse. There used to be one, but it had broken down. And they were sceptical of getting another lighthouse. Why? Because their MP was a member of the opposition. A member of the opposition in Bangladesh is so comprehensively useless that he can't even provide a lighthouse for his loyal constituents.
The episode also explains why corruption under democracy has soared in Bangladesh. Since there are two families vying for power, they must reward their clients with whatever resources are available. For, with democracy, the rewards of disloyalty have increased, so the price of disloyalty has multiplied. Small wonder, then, that Bangladesh scored highest in Transparency International's corruption perception index for five
When the state in Africa and Asia ceases to be the sole patron, the competition for lucre plainly gets out of hand.
Cultural relativism can take forms not usually associated with the subject. Dr. Kamaluddin Ahmed, a psychiatrist in Bangladesh, observes that in "eastern cultures mental disorders tend to be somatised". A mental condition may appear as physical discomfort. In western cultures of which he's had first-hand experience as a doctor in Australia a patient clearly distinguishes between the mental and the physical, and so does society. In Bangladesh, for instance, patients with the depressive condition known as dysthymia (a low-level form that does not incapacitate the sufferer, but lasts a long time) are usually found popping vitamin tablets instead of taking anti-depressants. According to Dr. Shahrukh Ahmed, a physician, the bulk of his patients have no physical ailments: they should be seeing shrinks instead of coming to him! Indeed, according to Dr. Reza Islam, a consultant psychiatrist in Britain, the tendency to report feelings of depression is very high in western society the individual feels no inhibition about checking himself or herself into a psychiatric ward at the first sign of depression (real or imagined). Furthermore, in his experience, British patients tend to suffer more in one respect than their Bangladeshi counterparts for the simple reason that the former attribute all disasters and setbacks to their own shortcomings. I asked him if the notion of "kismet" or "fate" helped his patients in London; not at all, he said, and he never even broached the subject to his patients, so counter-productive would it be. On the other hand, when he was a psychiatrist in Bangladesh, he routinely used to appeal to the notion of "kismet" to assuage the individual's feelings of guilt: some things are just beyond our control, whether westerners admit it or not!
Had Dr. Islam clung to cultural absolutism, he would have treated his English patients to equal doses of "kismet" as he did his compatriots: he would, then, have been ineffective in London, and ineffective in Bangladesh had he clung to the opposite set of values: "I am the captain of my soul". We meet another undesirable consequence of cultural absolutism, which psychiatrists steer clear of.
"Every year, between 1.5 million and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect," observes Ali, with the mandatory comparison with Hitler's Holocaust. According to her utilitarianism, this sort of inhumanity should lead to loss of peace and prosperity.
Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL TEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. He is also a freelance journalist. He and his wife love to tour Bangladesh.
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