Preserving values in changing Asia

Preserving values in changing Asia

By Arief Budiman

SALATGIA, Central Java (JP): Last month, I attended a human
rights workshop in Seoul organized by the New York-based Carnegie
Council on Ethics and International Affairs. Scholars and NGO
activists from different Asian countries were invited to
participate in this workshop.

One of the purposes of the workshop was to gain an
understanding of the human rights problems in East and Southeast
Asia, including new rights issues that have emerged as the result
of economic development.

Among the issues discussed in the meeting were the rights of
migrant workers, which have grown in numbers in this region, and
the rights of future generations (in relation to environmental
destruction in order to boost present economic development). Also
considered were the classic issues of whether rights are
universal or are influenced by a local culture, and if they are,
how and to what extent does a culture influence the
implementation of human rights in a specific cultural setting?

I will only be able to discuss two of these interesting
issues. One is the issue raised by a Malaysian participant,
Chandra Muzaffar, who pointed out the importance of discussing
human rights in relation to values.

The discourse on human rights so far, according to Chandra,
has placed too much emphasis on the rights of the individual,
without relating them to the question of what values are going to
be realized by these rights. By talking about the rights of the
individual without relating them to values, we will encounter
many difficult problems. Issues such as the right to become a
prostitute, the right of an individual to take his or her own
life (euthanasia) or the right of youths to use drugs to avoid
the hardships of modern life they are facing, would be difficult
to deal with without relating them to mankind's purpose in life.

I recall a discussion among some existentialist philosophers
which dealt with the issue of freedom. They differentiated
between two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom for. The
first type defines freedom in the negative term. Freedom means
that the individual is not limited by anything external in
relation to what they are thinking, saying and doing. He or she
is free from any outside intervention, on the condition that they
do not disturb other people's freedom.

The second type is different. Here, freedom is related to a
purpose. Freedom is a project to realize values. When we talk
about freedom, at the same time, we should ask: What do we want
to realize with this freedom? Freedom is defined here in relation
to a positive action dealing with values. Freedom is not a value;
it is an instrument to realize values. Freedom for freedom's sake
is something absurd.

I think this was the main point raised by Chandra in the
workshop. Unfortunately, the workshop did not discuss how to
identify these values on which human life rests on. Are these
values universal, bound to local culture or the stage of
development of the respective society we deal with?

I myself believe that some values are universal, some are
not, and they are both important to be taken into consideration.
However, even though this question was not discussed in the
workshop, Chandra raised the important issue that the discourse
on human rights did not stop with rights as rights per se, but
with rights in relation to certain human values.

Another issue was raised by a Japanese scholar when he
discussed his observations on Asian values in terms of human
rights. He talked about something he witnessed in a crowded
subway in Seoul. There was an old man approaching, and a young
man spontaneously stood up, giving him his seat. "In the West,"
the Japanese scholar said, "it has become difficult to expect
that this will happen. They need to apply law enforcement. They
need to imprint an announcement on the seats of the train saying
that the seats are reserved for the elderly. Then there will be
an endless public debate on what age should be considered as
`old': 60, 65 or 62.5?"

So, he concluded, we in Asia have to maintain these Asian
values. We have to teach values to the young generation. One of
these is to respect the elderly, for instance. We don't need to
explicitly define the age border between young and old, and we
don't need law enforcement. We should simply leave things to the
personal wisdom of the individuals. This was, said the wise
Japanese scholar, what we had to revive in Asia: Asian values and
the Asian way of dealing with these values.

I have some problems in accepting this argument, which I
expressed in the meeting.

The above Asian values described by my Japanese colleague
existed in the past, when Asia was still a precapitalist society.
Most of Asia was still agrarian then, in which collectivism and
communalism were still a way of life. Individual consciousness
was the same as collective consciousness; individual wisdom was
collective wisdom. So, when we left values to individual wisdom,
it was still, to a great extent, a collective wisdom also.

Asia has changed. It is entering the global capitalist
world, where individualism and the materialistic way of life is
slowly but surely achieving domination. In this process,
individual and collective interests have become two separate
things, if not competing with each other. Capitalism has
encouraged individual greed and individual competition. Human
greed is now called "market demand" and destruction of the weak
is called "free-market competition", which is needed to overcome
inefficiency. These "values" are the prime engine that moves this
system.

Within the present capitalistic Asia, could we rely on
individual wisdom as we did in the past? I am afraid the answer
is negative. Not because I think that Asian values are bad, but
because I think they have lost their strength. Like a certain
plant that grows beautifully in a certain kind of soil, the soil
has now changed. Asia is no longer the Asia of the past. It is
becoming more and more like Western society, although the two
societies are not the same, and probably never will be. But
nobody can deny that they have become more and more similar.
We are the ones who changed things, and if we change the soil, we
can't blame the plant when it fails to grow healthily.

So, rather than telling people that Asians have lost their
Asian values and that we have to work hard to recapture them, we
now have to raise the question: Does Asia, the way we used to see
it and wish to see it, still exist?

The writer is a sociologist and researcher based in Salatiga.