19th Multiculturalism Post

Norm Geras at normblog has a couple of posts up which are related though he doesn't explicitly say so. In the first post, Norm quotes from a Stephen Poole book review of Roger Trigg's Morality Matters:

In a series of careful essays [Trigg] wants to show that, for instance, concepts of human rights are incoherent if we do not accept the validity of an idea of a universal human nature. And if there is such a thing as a universal human nature, then some things must be objectively good or bad for it. There follow interesting discussions on international law, notions of privacy, multiculturalism and nationalism, but one can still suspect that the foundation is not sufficiently well defined. Trigg often appeals to evolutionary arguments, but of course they can equally be used to defend racism and sexism. Who decides what is "natural"?

This is essentially the multicultural argument against the universality of human rights. If there are universal or foundational human rights, who gets to decide what they are? Since it's unlikely everyone will ever agree completely, it's best not to even get into it. Each culture will decide for itself and there is no correct or best answer. All cultures are morally equivalent. To Stephen Poole's question, "Who decides what is 'natural'?" Mr. Geras replies:

Isn't the answer to this that we all decide, doing the best we can on the basis of the available evidence - whether biological, historical, anthropological, whatever. That it's sometimes difficult to decide shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact that it sometimes also isn't difficult; or the fact that there are many other issues on which it's sometimes difficult to decide. Who decides what really happened? Who decides what is good for a child? It can be, indeed, difficult. Nevertheless, anything doesn't go.

In the other post, Geras writes about Guardian writer Ian Brown's failure to condemn Margaret Hassan's killers for her death, instead placing the blame seemingly everywhere else:

The main thing I want to draw attention to is this. In all the criticisms Brown levels or implies - against the governments and political leaders who took the US and Britain to war in Iraq, against Care International and other NGOs for their reliance on government funding, and against Care again for not suspending operations in Iraq - notice who gets a free pass. Those who have actually been taking hostages and killing them in Iraq are treated by Brown as if they were merely part of the natural background and not (what they in fact are) the people to blame for these murders.

What relates the two is that moral equivalence/multiculturalist argument leads directly to the skewed assessment of reality that Norm points out in Brown's article, as I somewhat snarkily demonstate in this old post. If the culture and moral choices of other groups are out of bounds for criticism, then only one's own group may be subject to it. This leads to the unspoken conclusion or operating assumption that only one's own group is capable of moral choice. A person believing this would no more blame terrorists for Hassan's death than he would blame an ox for goring her. The non-Westerner responds like an animal to various stimuli. No moral approbation is useful or even appropriate. This is the racism of the left.

The assignment of blame for Saddam's rule is illustrative of this leftist tendency. While there is frequently the admission that yes, Saddam was a monster, many on the left are quick to point out that the problem was that the US had a hand in installing him, supporting him, selling him weapons, etc. This is seen as the root cause of the problem: the Western stimulus that was ultimately reponsible for the inevitable, knee-jerk, blameless Arab response of dictatorship and genocide. This kind of analysis can be found throughout the left's critique of US and Western policy.

The alternative to assigning blame based on whether the participants are morally capable Westerners or not is of course to base assessments on univeral standards. And these standards must be the same for all. Some on the left proudly state that they hold the US to a higher standard. Juan Williams on Fox's Special Report the other day explicitly stated with regard to the outrage differential between the terrorist killing of Maraget Hassan and the Marine killing of the insurgent in the mosque that he holds the US to a higher standard. Separate yardsticks for separate cultures. Multiculturalism in action.

No, the only reasonable conclusion is that there is one universal standard of human rights. While there is difficulty in discovering what exactly that is, an excellent starting point is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It doesn't say that all Americans are endowed with certain inalienable rights. The culture one is born into doesn't enter into it.