Progressive Emancipation

There was a time, and it wasn't all that distant in recent history, when the left had a mission of social justice that reflected universal values of trust, responsibility and fairness. Several generations ago those who honoured those values saw themselves in an international membership of fairness-inspired movements leading the West to champion internal value-driven mores that would benefit society as a whole.

Labour unions became the leading voice of change and of fair enterprise and sharing of the benefits that arose from the slow and steady rise of mass manufacturing and consumption as nations became wealthier and brought their populations into a mainstream of middle-class lifestyles. The kinds of charitable organizations that existed then were primarily inward-focused, to help the less fortunate in society.

Hard-won battles for fair consideration for all of society's levels of opportunities and attainment from educational opportunities geared toward finding employment and establishing new yardsticks of comfort and sustained aspirations toward success occurred as a result of the left nudging the conscience of the right.

Gradually, the success of the left orders began to turn them in new directions. An alteration in the level and the targets of concern began to sweep the horizon looking for new challenges in the moral compass of neediness and compassionate change. Soon enough something really strange happened as the New Democratic party, trade unions, university faculties, the emulating student movement and humanitarian groups refocused.

They all found new victims to be defended, as-yet-unexplored avenues of righteous anger to be deployed in the defense of human rights. The defense of human rights as a universal concept recognizing certain fundamental entitlements owing to everyone, in fact expanded its mandate. The comfortable, advanced nations of the world were urged to awaken to the misery of the nations with emerging economies, and with their miserable, downtrodden masses.

And soon enough something called "cultural relativism" which refused to stand in judgement over mores and values that diverged from what had always been assumed were universal in nature became the accepted norm in those left-enlightened, progressive circles. Those dedicated to the defence of women's universal rights hesitated to condemn patriarchal societies if their ethnic, cultural, religious makeup seemed to excuse gender barbarism.

Other cultures because of their exotic foreignness could not be compared with familiar cultures; to do so would be the height of egotistical intolerance and therefore forbidden to the enlightened mind. If public stoning or hanging represented a cultural heritage related to an ethnic, tribal or religious custom it was outside the realm of acceptability to condemn these practises as human rights atrocities; they had to be seen through the prism of cultural relativism.

A perverse logic set in where the values that were dogmatically and justifiably honoured at home as basic and civil and reflective of human relations and human rights, should not be exported abroad because in so doing they might offend others' perfectly culturally legitimate spurning of those same reflections in human relations and human rights. What was needful and suitable for an advanced society could be withheld within a religious-cultural-heritage-bound society.

There were no more universal absolutes. What is anathema reflecting violent repression to Western sensibilities may simply be a mode of crowd control elsewhere. Who are we to judge? We who have the advantages that those others have not had? Who must themselves find their way to the kind of social, human-relations balance that best suits their needs?

So villages, from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iran and China, from Iraq to the Palestinian Territories, from South Africa to Kenya, for whom tribal antipathies, female subjugation, xenophobia, biblical-era punishments, social castes and religious imperialism represent the order of their societies, are beyond criticism for their barren anti-humanitarian codices in their common law.