[The following was written for New Humanist, and appears in the current issue. I post it here with permission.]
Why did I sign the Euston Manifesto? For me the answer lies primarily in the deep division within liberal left politics about moral values and their application, which has been steadily growing over the last few years.
The emergence of the Euston Manifesto is both evidence of that division and a re-affirmation of the values and commitments about which the division has taken place. The Manifesto - originating in a series of discussions in a London pub amongst a disparate group of leftists - is a declaration of support for a set of principles, including liberal democracy and those practices, such as freedom of speech, which support it and which it in turn sustains; human rights, and hence universal moral principles which apply across all cultures; equality and the institutions which promote it, in particular trade unions. The Manifesto endorses internationalist politics, respect for historical truth, and a critical openness to both right and left. There are also things which the Manifesto explicitly rejects: tyranny, wherever it appears; terrorism, whatever the cause supposedly furthered by it[,] and racism of all forms, whether on the right or on the left.
So far, so platitudinous, it might be said - but that would be a mistake. Many of these principles are no longer routinely endorsed by all of the liberal left; some of them, even when given nominal support, are interpreted in ways which leach them of their original moral force.
There are, regrettably, many different examples of this, but I'll focus on a particularly significant case: that of the attitudes to morality itself currently displayed by parts of the liberal left.
On the one hand, some have endorsed a version of moral relativism: the view that there are no universal moral truths, so that our culture has no basis for moral disapproval of practices which other cultures sanction for their members. Hence, it is claimed, we all have a duty to tolerate and indeed respect the views and values of all other cultures. There are very serious problems with this view of morality (Bernard Williams pointed out its logical inconsistency over 30 years ago), but one of its most noticeable features is the double standard with which it's deployed by many of its proponents. They don't hesitate to criticize, and to sympathize with others who criticize, western culture in general, and American culture in particular. It's as if one culture has somehow managed to escape the relativist net - and that culture is the very one which has produced liberal democracy.
One recent example can be found in Martin Jacques' article in the Guardian where he argues that "each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness." But throughout the piece, and most notably in his treatment of the Danish cartoon controversy, he singles out just one culture for its "militant intolerance" - western, especially American, culture, the sole object of his criticism. This gross inconsistency of approach vitiates the moral core (such as it is) of the relativist view - the core which claims that we have no supra-cultural reasons to prefer one culture to another, and hence no grounds for damning any of them. If we allow any exceptions to this, then the relativist view collapses, and with it the claim that we ought to respect all cultures. But this claim is for many people the central moral attraction of relativism.
A readiness to deploy double standards is not, however, exclusive to the relativists of the liberal left. It can also be seen in the adherents of a diametrically opposed account of moral principles which has been adopted by a different part of the left political spectrum (including many who are professionally concerned with human rights). On this account there are indeed universal moral truths that apply to all cultures; they are paradigmatically expressed in the language of human rights and any violations of them are morally intolerable. Different though this view is from the relativist one, again it turns out that the violations which really matter to this section of the left, the ones which attract its most vituperative condemnation, are those committed by America or its ally Israel (variously seen as America's puppet or alternatively its puppet-master) or more generally by the western democracies. An outstanding example is the claim made by Irene Khan, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, that those states prosecuting the 'war on terror' have mounted the greatest attack in the last 50 years on human rights principles and values. Since she is speaking about the period containing the millions killed in the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and what now looks very like an ongoing genocide in Sudan, the numbers alone make her claims morally grotesque.
These systematic double standards, and the prejudicial hostility which drives them, constitute a serious distortion in the moral thought of significant parts of the left. This eviscerates their claims to genuine moral concern for justice and humanity, since it leads to gross exaggeration about the relative criminality of the democracies, and to silence about, or excuses for, the atrocities committed by others, including those who fear and hate democracy and its secular freedoms.
Appeals to the crimes (sometimes genuine ones) of America and Israel are made to justify the special hostility shown to them, but this appeal could only succeed if the crimes were far greater in number or in kind than those of other countries which receive much less hostile attention. Manifestly they are not, and the double standards needed to sustain the pretence that America and Israel, or the west in general, are as bad as or worse than the hideous tyrannies which disfigure our world, are a moral and intellectual disgrace.
That, among other things, is what the Euston Manifesto says; that, among other things, is why I signed it. (Eve Garrard)