Westerners, in our current time, take it as a fact that we as a universal whole are endowed with inalienable rights from birth, and that these are natural rights we have as humans. This is fundamentally a myth. It’s something we tell ourselves to justify our society’s tendency to interfere with societies that are far removed from our own. Rights are not determined by birth, but by the society one is born into. To make them universal is to invite conflict, and we don’t want that. People are born into a society and are raised upon those society’s values. The societies mold them through forces like family structure, education institution, clubs and organizations, market forces, religion—and the most explicit: the state. The state exists not only as Hobbes argued (to ensure security) but as the final arbiter of a society. The state, at its core, acts to validate the societies’ coercion of persons within when they do not conform to the other means by which societies coerce those born within them, usually through means that do not sue extreme force. However, if a society feels the actions of a person are too repulsive to its values, it will empower a state to take extreme action to ensure others don’t do the same.
The fact that a society attempts to form people is a distinction that we in the liberal democratic west would like to avoid. We assure ourselves that what we do is because we have decided out of our own rational thoughts, not because we were molded from birth to believe that we are largely detached from others. We would like to think that our parents telling us we could be what we wanted to be, that our commercial enterprises on TV and books present the idea that we are perfectly capable of anything, only if we put our mind to it, and that we can achieve great feats entirely by ourselves. This leads us to conclude that this is the natural state for us, and for everyone. What religion we have generally also is part of this focusing on our personal relationships with a higher power, not the communal relationships.
All of this leads us to believe that we are fully actualized individuals—and that all anyone needs to become one is to be woken up from their slumber. We think that spreading our values of societies that cannot “appreciate” what we enjoy is actually beneficial.
It’s in the spreading of society’s values that avoidable conflicts come to be. Societies that believe their values are universal can easily interfere with other societies. Generally, these other societies they will attempt to interfere with will not be societies that they are closely related to. But we have our conflicts with societies that are largely alien to us, as with Iran calling the west decadent or the west lambasting Singapore for their attempts to spread Confucian values to a population built on the ideas of Cofucius. This failure to accept alien cultures lead to uneasy conflict, and can lead to wards between societies.
Now this is not to say that a society cannot interfere with another if it does indeed pose a threat to it. If a society is warlike and as custom must dominate and exterminate other societies, then it behooves other societies, then it behooves other societies to eliminate this culture. However, unless actual violence indeed is a problem, a society should not interfere.
When the west decries the treatments of homosexual persons in Iran and treats this as a reason to change Iranian culture, the west should remember that barely a century ago it treated those people with similar horribleness, and that it was only through evolving our views as a society as a whole that we changed our treatment of such persons.
To force a people to change their values, and not let them evolve with time to see them is to invite an infinite conflict from the west with those “offending societies.” Change of a society must come from within (unless the views as previously stated require conflict with others). However, if one society is repulsed by another society’s treatment of its persons, it should be free to take in said people. But to go beyond that and actively interfere with that society is to invite extreme conflict. Conflict for the sake of making one societies concept of rights conform of another’s.
The concept of rights can only be changed through peaceful evolution that allows a society the leeway to make advances and, occasionally, to make mistakes. Interference allows for resentment to explode. Outside more radical societies, peaceful evolution can determine a society’s values.
BY SIMON HAWTHORNE Guest Writer