Paradoxes of Culture

Abstract

The troubled and puzzling relationships between culture(s) and universalist ethical principles have always challenged efforts to defend and implement such principles. We may note complaints about religious intolerance and anti-multiculturalism when France adopted legislations to curb religious fundamentalism and ban displaying ostentatious religious symbols at public schools. The latest sensational incarnations of these challenges involve, for example, criticisms of a backlash against Muslims in the anti-terrorism campaign after the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001. In some ways, the rhetoric used by some opponents to the ‘anti-terror’ wars that ‘one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist’ mirrors the unease relationships. Some in the Arab world saw the smoke of cultural—psychological warfare after the expose of US soldiers’ use of torture and mistreatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Meanwhile, patterns of abuses and deprivation of legal rights of terrorist suspects in prisons outside US territories outraged many people both inside and outside ‘the Western civilization.’ Such reactions, partly politics for sure, are bound to burden those who dismiss the international ban on torture and ‘cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment’ as a ‘Western’ cultural obsession.2