My Take | Abstract, noble-sounding principles have led many astray
- In Hong Kong, for those who tried to commit laam chau, or “burn-together-ism”, now is the morning after. Reality is nothing like what their idealism tried to create
Ideas such as truth, justice, knowledge, freedom and mercy are universal; complex or sophisticated conceptions of them exist in all known higher societies, cultures or civilisations. They have been realised or violated differently, in varying degrees, in different cultural, social and historical contexts. Contexts, in other words, matter above all; contexts, and therefore knowledge, of the societies you are judging.
But the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a one-size-fits-all notion of justice – isn’t universal. Just because someone says something is universal doesn’t make it so. Consider mathematics, which most people think is universal, and numbers, the building blocks of maths. Mathematicians can’t agree among themselves whether some types of numbers exist or are real. If they can argue about maths, I think we mortals can argue about messier subjects such as truth, justice and rights.
It strikes me that the UN declaration is an attempt, one that is rather successful, to particularise abstract ideals such as mercy and justice, into actionable codes or laws. There is a distinction to be made between the universal and the particular; any real practical, actionable and defendable notion of a universal concept such as justice has to embody the particular or the concrete and the universal, like yin and yang. You can’t have justice, say, without bricks-and-mortar courts and a judicial system to administer it.
I was led to thinking about this by a new and very challenging essay in the philosopher website Aeon, titled “Ideas that work: Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origins”.
The heavy dose of philosophical pragmatism is a bit too much for my own taste, but I take the author, Matthieu Queloz’s, point.
Some people, and I would say a majority of those who identify themselves as pan-democrats in Hong Kong, accept some UN version of human rights as a starting point, a given, and not as something that needs to be defended or may be falsified. Words such as democracy and freedom are likewise granted from the outset, and need not be explained or elaborated further.
They seem to think that such lofty political ideals as human rights and democracy must be universal – exist for all times and everywhere. It strikes me that’s another version, untrue in my opinion, according to which all those lofty ideals and morality itself would be without foundations and meanings if there is no God. But which God? Yahweh, Allah, the Holy Trinity or some others?