Rushdie in Michigan
This interview with Salman Rushdie is full of good observations. Packed with them.
I suppose I became more intellectually engaged in the subject of freedom. If you live in free countries you don’t have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
It sure does. The more I hear of women not allowed to leave the house without a man’s permission – not allowed to live at all without being owned by a man – the more aware I become of my own freedom, and the more savage I feel at the thought of being any less so, and at the thought that most women in the world are a great deal less so.
Shikha Dalmia: Do you think freedom of speech is threatened by cultural relativism—by the idea that principles like free expression are not universal truths but simply local cultural constructs?
Rushdie: The idea of universal rights – the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is – is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Bingo.
Shikha Dalmia: Where does this leave us on the question of democratic reform in Islamic countries? Do you think that Islam lacks a crucial piece to build a foundation for freedom?
Rushdie: What it has is an extra piece that believes that religion can be the foundation for a state. It’s a question of removing that piece rather than adding something.
Brilliant. Apart from anything else – the accuracy, the explanatory power – it’s politically good, because the idea of lacking a crucial piece is obviously fairly pejorative, but having an extra piece is not.
I was very struck when Joe Lieberman was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate, and there was a certain amount of rubbish talked about whether Americans would vote for a Jewish candidate. I remember a big opinion poll taken by The New York Times in which people were asked whether they would accept as a presidential candidate a woman, a Jew, an African American, a homosexual, and an atheist. In four of those five measures, the result was resoundingly yes, by a gigantic majority, but for an atheist it was no better than 50-50. Somebody who overtly professes not to have religion can’t get elected dog catcher in this country. That’s a problem, because it creates a political discourse full of sanctimony.
Ya think?
There’s a lot more excellent stuff, read the whole thing if you haven’t already. I can’t quote the whole dang thing because it’s, you know, not mine – so read it.
Intereesting support of your comment 2 months ago about religion being mandatory for public office.
In Autralia, it is a definite negative to be openly Christian, not least to the media. Our media is perhaps a bit narrower than yours, but still it is surprising that the ‘liberal’ new class values in the media sector are not strong enough to allow atheists or rationalists a more positive public image.
The link to the Rushdie interview should be
http://www.reason.com/0508/fe.sd.the.shtml
It ceretainly is worth reading in full.
I know this is just me being boring and literal again, but why is it OK to subscribe to one palpable falsehood, viz. ‘all people have intrinsic Human Rights, which guarantee them blah blah blah’, when it’s so not right to subscribe to others like ‘the big Sky Daddy told me to do it’?
Just because one of these positions is NICE, doesn’t make it TRUE….
Have you read the UN Declaration of HR?
Art 22:Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Art 23: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Art 25[1]: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Art 26: (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
I REALLY like the contradictions between points 2 and 3 there…
These are not rights, they are aspirations, unmet in some even of the wealthiest countries in the world [don’t we know it], to attribute them to “our natures as human beings” is just bullshit, and completely leaps over the question of how you get people to assent to the enforcement of these rights… If our only argument as rationalists for these aspirations is basically to have no argument, but to assert “human nature”, we are f—-d.
Dave
Surely Rushdie is talking about belief in the IDEA of universal human rights as important? The rest of his statement shows that he realises that not everyone believes in the thing itself.
I agree with you about the UN thing though. Puts it alongside the ‘constitutions’ in places like the Soviet Union and China in applicability, but perhaps a tad less hypocritical.
But if the IDEA is itself a logical absurdity, what is gained? A basic confusion seems to exist between the proposition that ‘it would be good if this is how people were treated’, and ‘people have the right to be treated this way’.
Incidentally, see http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html for a superb example of how ‘unconditional’ rights can become highly qualified when states need to make them binding…
Now, if we had a declaration of ‘Civilised Human Duties’, breaches of which could land individuals in jail, how different might things be?
“These are not rights, they are aspirations, unmet in some even of the wealthiest countries in the world [don’t we know it], to attribute them to “our natures as human beings” is just bullshit”
Since we seem to all agree that the idea of rights as something external to human construction is false, then the statement is a normative claim, you can call it an aspiration if you wish, and our human nature is what makes us entitled to these rights according to the normative claim.
Sorry, I’m only a thick historian, what’s the difference between a normative claim and an unfounded assertion?
Once again for the record, I love [the things we call] Human Rights, I think everyone should have lots of them, but I don’t see what is gained by trying to ground them in something that doesn’t exist.
The confusion is perhaps due to all the ‘nice’ theists who helped write all this stuff up, big it up as a ‘declaration’ rather than just a bloody good idea and the fact that fewer than 20% of the worlds population ascribe themselves as being ‘non-religious’… (http://www.adherents.com/).
“Sorry, I’m only a thick historian, what’s the difference between a normative claim and an unfounded assertion?”
X should be the case, X is the case. Easy.
You can’t knock human rights rhetoric quite so easily, all morality is ultimately unfounded assertion, but we have to try and work together to agree on what unfounded assertions we want to enforce. The declaration of human rights is one such set. I can’t shoot you and then try and get away with it by pointing out that morality and the law are not grounded, that isn’t the point of them.
Well, a normative claim can be an unfounded assertion, I think. But there is a distinction between an undfounded truth claim and a normative assertion. There is a distinction between saying ‘X exists’ and ‘X should be the case’ – I think.
But a lot of those rights are framed like truth claims. I am confused about this whole issue, as that comment last week made clear, since I ended up contradicting myself. The truth claims make me uneasy, since they seem so obviously untrue. Yet, perhaps they are useful. But that doesn’t make them true. I’m confused.
The problem is that if you frame the rights in terms of explicitly normative claims they really do just become aspirations. But by doing so they lose a lot of their force. Countries will talk about working towards achieving them, whereas what we want to say is that right now it is wrong for you violate those ‘rights’.
I know. But then again if you frame them as factual assertions…it’s sort of obvious that they’re not factual.
Nonsense upon stilts, sort of thing.
So I’m confused, because I don’t see how to resolve the problem.
Thank you, thank you, I knew I wasn’t crazy, it really doesn’t make sense. Is this a problem which could be described as the paradox of normative ethics? Ethics, a la Levinas, etc [as I vaguely understand it] is a sort of Golden Rule thing, viz. ‘how would you feel if this were done to you, how do you think the Other feels’, etc.
‘Human Rights’ evolved out of documents [e.g. in france and USA, both in 1789] that were in essence contractual, and in that sense vaguely ethical, about how the citizens, acting as the state, should treat citizens, found as individuals [and thus, basically, how they should treat themselves].
Turning this into ‘Human Rights’ removes the reflexive quality, and makes the ‘rights’ as-if absolute factual claims, which as we’ve now agreed, they’re not.
Maybe it’s all just an accident of history, but it’s an annoying one!
It’s a well-known problem in philosophy, at least. There’s endless argument about how to ground ethics – and clearly no knock-down answers, or the arguments would stop.
My colleague has contributed ‘Stangroom’s prongs’ to the debate. To point up how unavoidable emotivism is.