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.