Death: Natural or Cultural?

What is true of Western society, in a historical perspective, should be true of other societies in today’s world.

From a cultural-historical point of view, the notion of childhood was invented about 200 years ago. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile played a large part, but the notion of childhood was essentially a product of the Romantic movement. Looking to the visual arts is our best guide on this subject: it was not until the turn-of-the-century transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism that children appeared in portraits. Before then, only small people had existed, painted like miniature adults. In the Middle Ages, adulthood among the peasant classes began at the age of six, or eight, or sometimes 12, with all the rights and responsibilities this entailed.

It is often said that the loss a mother experiences when she loses her child must be the same in every culture. Yet in many societies the value placed on life is different from that of Western society. This is the case not only in primitive societies where blood feud (or blood money) substitutes the loss to the social group (the tribe or extended family). In many African states, child mortality rates are above 30 percent. Though surely no mother would not be profoundly saddened by the loss of a child, the situation of an African mother is fundamentally different from that of the one-or two-child mothers of contemporary Western Europe or North America. For a man to die in the Arab world or in Africa is different, not only because of religion, but also because he is part of a much larger community that will survive. Again, a comparison to differences across history can help us to understand differences across geography: would Western societies still be prepared to fight World War I if life was almost certain to be lost?

I can only mention these problems here, and I sympathize with readers who will not be convinced, or who will not wish to be convinced. One more example, however, may clarify the point.

I used to be a convinced human-rights universalist. I believed that international human-rights tribunals should address the worst violations. But the wisdom of such tribunals may resonate only with a Western mind: In Cambodia, one of the most horrifying genocides of our century occurred. While the international community demands a tribunal, the Cambodian government is dragging along, trying to retard and delay it. But it seems it is not just the government but also the people who oppose the tribunal. Knowledgeable observers point to the Buddhist teaching that even the death of millions of people does not justify vengeance, which would only increase negative karma. I am not a specialist on Cambodia, but it seems that Cambodians wish to forget the millions of people who died because death, for them, means something very different from what it does to us.

Social Security

A major difference among societies today is their respective conceptions of individual-social-group relationships. Freedom of religion, for example, can only be granted in societies where religion has lost its primary importance as a formative ideology, where it is no longer the basic cement that holds the society together. Religion in some societies is what social security is in the West.

Most peoples and states in the world do not have social security. The social safety net is the extended family, the tribe, or the village. He who has work or income or property must share it with others—and the community will in turn provide for his sustenance in a time of need. In order to benefit, he must, of course, share the basic values of his community. Normally, religion would be one such set of social values. A person wishing to opt out of religion would opt out of society. No social group can accept a member’s radical denial of social coherence and social values and not declare such a person a total outsider; he would be free to dissent, but would also thus be free to die.

The question of love and marriage (as an illustration of the status of women) and its human-rights implications is also central to our exploration of the individual as the tacit foundation of the Western human-rights concept. Most societies in the world which do not recognize individuals in the Western sense believe marriage comes first and love will follow. Only the West has invented the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, another marker of the individual. The result is that marriages in non-Western societies are much more stable than they are in the West. Divorce as a mass phenomenon in the West became possible only since the introduction of generalized social security. The problem today is caused by Hollywood invading the African village and the Islamic city. And this has human-rights implications. Should Romeo and Juliet become a universal model? One thing is certain: for the great majority of people in the world, Romeo and Juliet is not an anthropological model.

Take another example: a more close-knit society, even a state, may not be in a position to grant full freedom of expression. If a country like China were to allow its citizens free choice of residence, it might encounter a total exodus from the countryside and a breakdown of society as such. In Sudan, its capital, Khartoum, like all capitals in Africa, has experienced an enormous influx of people from the countryside—probably more than two million in the last 10 years. The government has reacted with a very assertive policy, the only one of its kind in all of Africa: squatter settlements and slums have been systematically destroyed, with no participation from the people concerned. The removed population was resettled in the city’s periphery, where every family has received title to a small plot of land. As a result, Khartoum, with six million inhabitants, is one of the few big cities in Africa without favelas, or shantytowns, and thus without the crimes associated with large slum areas. Khartoum, unlike Nairobi, Lagos, and Johannesburg, protects the human right not to be killed in the street.