[The following is the text of Eve's talk at the Euston Manifesto launch. It draws on the piece she wrote for New Humanist.]
Society - that's all of us - needs the left, the broad liberal-left. What do we want a left for – why does society need the left? It's because of the left's commitment to some profoundly important values:
- universal human rights, including freedom of speech and thought;These values are always hard to maintain, we all find them hard to live up to; and they're always under threat - from the right, of course, but also sometimes from within the left itself. Right now it seems to be one of those times - part of the left seems to have lost its enthusiasm for some of these values. This shows itself in various ways, but I'm going to focus on just two of them: the turn towards cultural relativism, and the readiness to use double standards.
- equality (in some sense of that complicated concept);
- social justice;
- tolerance;
- rational enquiry and scepticism about received truths;
- the power of reason to bring about change for the good;
- openness to criticism;
- and, of course, democracy.
Cultural relativism is the view that we can't judge a culture, in moral and political matters, from the outside - the values and practices which a culture endorses are right for that culture, even if we have different ones; and no one is in a position to say that one culture is better than another. So for cultural relativists, there can be no such thing as universal human rights. (This is because the idea of human rights just is the idea of rights that belong to each one of us just because we're human, whether or not our culture recognizes them.)
Cultural relativism is often adopted because it's thought to promote tolerance. But this is a mistake. Tolerance isn't a mistake, of course, in fact we could do with a lot more of it; but cultural relativism doesn't promote tolerance. This is because some of the cultures which relativism says we're not in a position to criticize are themselves very intolerant, and according to relativism we can't criticize them for that. And also, the view that we all ought to tolerate all other cultures seems to be exactly the kind of universal moral requirement whose legitimacy cultural relativism denies. So it leaves us unable even to criticize the enemies of freedom, equality and democracy. And cultural relativism very easily morphs into cultural determinism, the view that we can't escape the values of our culture; so that we end up by thinking that of course people in these other cultures, these exotic cultures, can't sustain democracy, it's alien to their culture, and who are we to criticize their tyrannical arrangements? But it's not true, democracy isn't the exclusive property of the West, and thinking that it is leaves the victims of tyrannies unsupported by those of us who have the good fortune to live under democratic rule, and can afford the luxury of thinking that tyranny is good enough for others.
Furthermore, the relativist ban on criticism of other cultures is applied very inconsistently, so that cultural relativists often feel free to criticize, and support others in criticizing, Western values and practices, while objecting to similar criticism of more distant cultures. This has the effect of distorting our judgement, and grossly magnifying the misdeeds of the West, especially of America and Israel. A situation in which only the liberal democracies are up for hostile criticism is not one which will promote the flourishing of liberal and democratic values. It's significant that there's a current claim among some people on the left that we can't and shouldn't expect countries in the Middle East to embrace or be able to sustain democracy, there being no democratic tradition in that part of the world - it's not part of their culture. But think back to the period of apartheid South Africa: at the time of the overthrow of apartheid, I don't remember anyone from the left saying that we shouldn't expect South Africans to be able to operate a democracy, since it wasn't part of their indigenous culture. Some people did indeed say these things, but they were of course on the right. To hear such things coming from the left is new and disturbing.
But in fact the use of double standards on the left is actually much wider than this - we also see it in some of those who do support universal human rights, but who regard Western failures to respect human rights as the only ones which really matter, and who reserve their most vituperative criticism for the flaws and failures of the West. Leave aside the implicit racism of this one-sidedness, the assumption that only those in the West are fully responsible moral agents; it also, again, undermines commitment to liberal democracy, and encourages an easy moral equivalence between genuine but lesser crimes over here, and equally genuine but much greater crimes elsewhere. Again the principal effect of this is likely to be an increase in anti-Western rhetoric and a turning away from, a silencing of, the miseries of dictatorial oppression elsewhere.
The most obvious example of this recently, perhaps, is the declaration by Amnesty International that the greatest attack on human rights principles and values in the last 50 years has come from the countries involved in the war on terror. No doubt those countries have done things which erode human rights, I don't want to overlook that. But the period to which Amnesty is referring is one which contains the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the ongoing massacres in the Sudan which look awfully like genocide. The sheer numbers involved here, the numbers killed, make the Amnesty judgement morally grotesque. (This is a great pity, since Amnesty International is otherwise such an admirable organization, of which I’ve been a member for many years.)
The prevalence of these double standards in parts of the left constitutes a deep distortion in its thought - it results in biased judgements because it's driven by biased judgements, by a profound and damaging prejudice against some of the polities which are committed (however imperfectly) to the values which we look to the left to sustain. These double standards are a moral and intellectual disgrace. The left, the broad liberal-left, can do better than this. We can all do better than this, and I hope we will. (Eve Garrard)