Proud values

Starting from the cartoons controversy Martin Jacques today serves up a half-cooked piece of pseudo-progressivism based entirely on his inability, or reluctance, to make a simple distinction. As I've already said what I have to say on that controversy, I will merely observe of Jacques's brief direct remarks that his way of handling it is to put free speech and respect for others back to back as if that could settle everything. It can't. They're both part of the problem, and they're both part of the solution, but you need to do more than just name them, because they sometimes conflict.

The principal theme of Jacques's article, however, is announced in the subhead:

A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values

He may not be responsible for this wording, of course, but it accurately summarizes the burden of the piece. Thus, Jacques himself writes:

Any continent that has inflicted such brutality on the world over a period of 200 years has not too much to be proud of, and much to be modest and humble about... [W]hen it comes to our "noble values", our colonial record is always written out of the script.

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did.

The short response to this - drawing attention to the simple distinction aforementioned - is that in the historical profile of Europe there are values and values. Its record of conquest and plunder, colonialism and imperialism, contains much indeed not to be proud of. But there are certain other things, possessing a clear lineage in European, and more generally Western, moral and political thought, political practice and institutions: you know, things like individual liberty, the rule of law, pluralist democracy, a concern for social equality, notions of national independence and self-determination, and so forth. As Martin Jacques must surely be aware, it was in the light of these values that the very record of conquest and plunder, colonialism and imperialism, which he urges us not to overlook, was criticized, in the light of them that opposition was mounted to it even within Europe - though it took movements among the colonized and oppressed to bring European rule within their countries to an end.

This isn't any longer an issue of 'European' values. Its about universal human values - as embodied in codes that are internationally recognized, and publicized, monitored and defended by human rights and other NGOs. It's about good values and bad values. To write, as Jacques does, as if this were a matter of the West having to be more receptive to other cultural values - what, all of them? - is to pose the issue falsely and in a way now long past its third-worldist sell-by date.