Cultural Absolutism and Nostalgia for Community

Abstract

In recent years the liberal approach to human rights has undergone a twofold assault, from both the right and the left. From the right, liberal human rights are attacked by a new version of communalism that promotes the integrative protection of the human being in the community as against the socially alienating effects of individual human rights. From the left, liberalism is attacked by a collectivist approach to human rights based on notions of ascriptively-based privileges or disadvantages in society. In the international debates on the relevance of human rights, right traditionalism has combined with left collectivism; allegedly communitarian third world societies are considered victims of an imperialist liberal agenda of human rights emanating from the Western-dominated United Nations. The concept of cultural relativism is used by both traditionalists and communitarians as a defense of their way of life against the individualism and alienation that liberal human rights are thought to imply. But the relativism that is implicit in such arguments is actually a concept of cultural absolutism. Cultural absolutism is a philosophical position that declares a society's culture to be of supreme ethical value. It advocates ethnocentric adherence to one's own cultural norms as an ethically correct attitude for everyone except loosely-defined Westerners. It thus posits particularist cultures as of more ethical value than any universal principle of justice. In the left-right/ North-South debate that permeates today's ideological exchanges, cultural absolutists specifically argue that culture is of more value than the internationally-accepted (but Western in origin) principle of human rights. Human rights are considered in international law to be rights held equally by every individual by virtue of his or her humanity, and for no other reason. Human rights are non-derogable claims against both society and the state that are not contingent upon performance of specific duties. This article will