Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie for The Hindu. An excerpt:
GV: The question of relativism is a very interesting one in your work: it seems to work for you when it comes to resisting a single origin from which all things and beings derive. But you draw the line when it comes to saying that cultural difference cancels out a single standard of justice.
SR: I don’t know how unfashionable this is, but I think there are universals. I think there are things that are universally true and I think there are such things as universal rights. They are not culturally specific, in my view. The argument made by relativists is that it is culturally specific to argue that there are universals. I think there are other ways of approaching it.
One way of approaching it is to say that there are things which are essential to our nature as human beings, wherever in the world we come from. To go back to what I was saying about Ibn Rush’d, one of those essential characteristics that we all share is the characteristic of language. We are a language animal which always, from the beginning, has used language in order to understand itself, and in order to define and shape the kind of creature that it is. So then, if you begin to restrict, limit, forbid, circumscribe how language can be used, you are committing an offense which is not culturally specific: you are committing an existential offense. We have to be allowed to use language to understand ourselves. Therefore, to defend the freedom of language as a universal human right is justifiable not by appeal to this or that cultural tradition but simply to the biology of the beast.
So it seems to me that it is possible in this way to argue for the universality of certain rights. We are a dreaming animal. We live very richly through things that we imagine. Were it not for the capacity of imagination, there would be very little progress in human rights, in human existence. All through human history, imagination precedes reality, and things move constantly from the border — through the border — between imagination and reality. What starts as a dream becomes reality. So again, to start restricting our ability to dream and envision, and to tell us that there are things we can dream about, and other things that are bad dreams, which we must not have — it’s a crime against humanity.
I think relativism is the dangerous death of liberalism. If you will justify anything that anybody does because it comes from their tradition, it means you abdicate your moral sense and you cease to be a moral being. Going back to the article you mentioned which talks about the question of women, if you were to take religion away as the justification, nobody would tolerate that for a minute. The kinds of limitations that women have been placed under and the crimes against women in the name of religion are so profound, and yet somehow people don’t get as agitated about them as when the same things are done by somebody who wasn’t using God as the reason. That seems like nonsense to me.
One Comment
‘We are a language animal which always, from the beginning, has used language in order to understand itself, and in order to define and shape the kind of creature that it is. So then, if you begin to restrict, limit, forbid, circumscribe how language can be used, you are committing an offense which is not culturally specific: you are committing an existential offense. We have to be allowed to use language to understand ourselves. Therefore, to defend the freedom of language as a universal human right is justifiable not by appeal to this or that cultural tradition but simply to the biology of the beast.’
Wow. I’ve never seen this put better.