After World War II governments came together and established a canon of basic “civil” rights for all people regardless of their nationality, gender, race, political persuasion, social status, property or religion. They did so because they felt that individuals needed to be legally protected from, and morally supported by, governments, particularly after the horrific atrocities committed by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.
These basic rights were bundled into a document known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by 51 UN member states in 1948. It was hoped that with this act, history’s darkest period would never be repeated.
Unfortunately, it did.
Major butchers were still in power or had yet to enter the world stage, including Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and later, in the 1990s, North Korean, Rwandan and Serbian leaders who were responsible for the killings of millions in the name of utopian political ideals or ethnic superiority.
The concept of human rights has nevertheless developed, emphasizing not just the political but also the social and cultural rights of individuals. Nowadays, environmental and economic concerns are also on the international human rights’ agenda.
In recent decades, a critical look at the UDHR has emerged, objecting to the individualist approach of its original provisions. Some countries felt that regional, or culturally imbued values, deserve broader representation in how human rights are defined. This is especially true of so-called “Asian values,” which have been aggressively propagated by leaders from that region, significantly by countries with weak democratic institutions (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and China). Their goal was to contain individual and civil rights in favor of community or national rights for the sake of greater political and economic stability.
There has been outspoken criticism of such values within Asian intellectual circles, most notably from India’s Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Taiwanese author Lung Ying-tai (龍應台).
The political maneuvering by those who defend the so-called “Asian values” has become obvious and there is no reason to believe that civil liberties hamper political stability and economic progress.
What would be the consequences if countries followed culture-based versions of human rights? Cultural and human rights must be strictly separated if the concept of human rights is to be upheld.
Cultural norms prescribe a certain way of life, whereas human rights secure the rights of individuals irrespective of way of life or culture. Human rights are indifferent to specific ways of life; they seek to ensure plurality.
Certain cultures, however, are more conducive to human rights than others.
Cultural habits often contain features that are rooted in traditions that reach back hundreds of years, to when ways of thinking and acting were quite different from ours. Traditional cultures are conservative “by nature,” interpreting their continuous cultural practices as untouchable values.
Consequently, prescribed ways of life leave little space for individuals who do not wish to share given cultural values. Traditional cultures, therefore, are imbued with an element of violence, which surfaces regularly in the name of harmony to forcefully reorient those who deviate from the “proper” way of living.
There is an in-built (more or less) subtle strain of terror in them, especially exerted by those who think they are in the position to define — and execute — the “right” cultural behavior. Usually they are those holding power over others and it is they who benefit. The Taliban are an extreme example.
A softer form of pressure in the name of tradition is ingrained in Chinese culture, where individuals are somehow “persuaded” to live according to a set of untouchable rules that are forced on them by authorities that must not be challenged. Generally, those authorities are fathers, politicians, bosses, teachers or school principals.
In Taiwan, for instance, the whole educational system is still based on the idea that authorities are endowed with the moral license to streamline people’s ways of life. Disputing these norms is not part of the cultural game. The authorities insist that “their” culture matters even if that leads to absurd or harmful consequences.
Too many teachers (including professors) in this country play the traditional game. This is also why so many young brains are being damaged in the name of a culture that cares more for its reproduction than for individuals. Those who profit are either too lazy or unwilling or simply too uneducated to understand that prevailing traditions from the past are killing the hopes of the future.
Indeed, it takes a lot of courage for individuals to protest a culture that values obedience instead of independent thinking as one of its core priorities; a culture that is obsessed with tests that test the ability to successfully pass tests for the sake of passing tests, regardless of the understanding of what is being tested; against teaching methods in universities that venerate textbooks as the major source of information, hence incapacitating students’ ability to read — and understand — “real” books, for example.
What happens in university classrooms in Taiwan is intellectual suicide on a daily basis. Article 26 of the UDHR stipulates that “education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality.” This, however, does not happen if local, or “cultural,” methods of teaching continue to be practiced as they have been practiced for centuries in this culture. They have nothing to do with the “full development of the human personality.”
Rather, the opposite is the case. Test-obsessed education in Taiwan is not designed to foster students’ personalities; personality and knowledge are disconnected. A culture that rewards rule-following students and teachers is simply unfit to set up academic standards.
Students are in dire need of teachers that explicitly break with traditional standards and, instead, pursue new ones that aim to shape students’ ability to think independently, with open results.
Learning, personal development and knowledge are intrinsically related: Successful learning always means the views of the learners are changing. Real experts know it; fake experts don’t. They don’t want their students to change, just like traditional cultures. Both insist that their subjects follow the rules: In such cultures, however, students do not undergo a process of personal formation; they are processed. In traditional cultures fake experts can easily blossom.
Sleeping students in classes is just a symptom of a much deeper problem. Indeed, culture matters — and that’s the problem. This is why advocating human rights on occasions such as Human Rights Day is important in cultures where the dignity of individuals has yet to be as highly esteemed as individuals deserve.
Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at the Applied English Department of I-Shou University in Kaohsiung County.
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