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 Asian Values by Iftekhar Sayeed
In the inside pages of the Bangladesh Observer, an article penned by Human Rights Watch appeared in October. I was in a hurry to get away to St. Martin's Island, so neglected to cut out the copy. Nevertheless, the piece was objectionable enough to have survived the retroactive inhibition of sun, sand, and sea-turtle - for, on returning, I seemed to remember its contents vividly. Naturally, Human Rights Watch would have no truck with Asian values. They dismiss the idea out of court. It's merely an excuse for authoritarian governments to torment their hapless citizens: but for September 11th, its days were numbered. Unfortunately, the US government again countenances the brutality of Asian governments. But for September 11th, the world would have happily converged by now on the utopia of universal - that is, western - values. But for September 11th. It never occurs to Human Rights Watch - and others of their ilk - that September 11th was a reaction precisely to those precious western - that is, universal - values. September 11th was no mere hiccup in the world's digestive tract in the effort to swallow those values. One of those values, of course, is accountable government. Pity the US government is not accountable to Palestinians. Freedom of the media? Pity the US people think the Palestinians are evil-doing barbarians who must go the way of Red Indians. But Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others are not naively suggesting that western governments respect human rights. Regarding values, they are making a deeper observation: they are saying that Asian values are a myth. The world is one big family. Let's start with family. Throughout Asia, the extended family is the norm. Indeed in India and Bangladesh, you have the "joint family" - several families living under one roof. The joint family is celebrated in those Bollywood [a play on Hollywood] films that are watched by - wait for it - expatriate Indians in California. It used to be believed that after the Industrial Revolution, the extended family disappeared in Europe, giving rise to the nuclear family. Subsequent research has proved this wrong. Laslett and Goode and McFarlane have pointed out how the nuclear family was the pre-Industrial norm, and only with the harshness of the Industrial Revolution did the families start to pool resources. In Asia, the extended family has always been the norm. Now, in the west, even the nuclear family is in its death-throes. Indeed, our local hypocrites who pretend to espouse western values - voting and that sort of thing - refuse to quit clinging to the extended family. The reason is not far to seek: the extended family commands resources, and any individual who breaks off from the extended family has his or her share of life's goodies severely rationed. And this is more true the richer the family: consequently, the greatest nepotism and hypocrisy takes place among those families that pose as "women entrepreneurs" or "social activists." When western consultants come, they know they have to negotiate an elaborate network of privileges - they have to be nepotistic. They don't mind: they're in it for the money, too. Now that we have despatched the individual, let us despatch the related notion of freedom. Another ineluctable fact about Asia is the absence of slavery: western civilisation was based on slavery. The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary gives the historical meaning of "slave" as "someone owned by and acting as servant to another, with no personal freedom." Presumably, the description is meant to fit the Sumerian, the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish, the American and the Spanish slave. In fact, there is no word for slave in the Sumerian or the Hebrew languages. The Greek word for slave was "doulos" - the word erected a clear linguistic boundary between slaves and free men. No such boundary existed in the East. In the Sumerian cuneiform sign for slave, the word means "a man from the mountains," that is, a captive from an alien land. This vagueness infects the Egyptian word "b'k." The Hebrew word "ebed" denotes anyone from "slave," "servant of the lord" in the phrase "ebed Jahwe" to "ebed al malek," the servant of the king. Some form of participatory government and the associated idea of liberty persisted throughout Greek, Republican Roman and Western European history as the reflex of slavery and exclusion. Centralised, absolutist states are more "free" than democratic, decentralised polities. Where you cannot lose your freedom, the concept of freedom cannot arise. And a strong, "despotic" state precludes slavery for it would entail loyalty of slaves to private persons, rather than to the "despot." The state in Asia demanded absolute loyalty, even from slaves: the western state demanded loyalty only from citizens. Liberty and slavery, then, necessarily coexisted in the west, but not here; the extended family was a corporate unit that fit perfectly in the collectivist state. Thus, when the Spartans were at the gates, Pericles, that imperialist scoundrel and early Churchill, was able to boast: "The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty." In Asia, jealous surveillance over what others do is the norm: The author knows a lady who wanted to emigrate from Bangladesh because she was driven to distraction by the constant inquiries of her friends, family, colleagues and neighbours as to whether she was pregnant or not! Only when she had her first baby did the incessant nagging stop. My wife and I don't have children. Whenever we meet somebody new (a total stranger, of course), the first question she would ask my wife is: "How long have you been married?" The second question: "How many children do you have?" Third question: "Have you seen a doctor? I know this very good doctor. My sister-in-law was having trouble having babies, but she visited this doctor a couple of times and ...." (At this point, of course, my wife is sorely tempted to ask: "And does the baby look like the doctor?") And remember the Japanese proverb, "the nail that sticks out will be hammered down." Indeed, the Japanese are a good example of Asian values at work. It is absolutely de rigueur for the Japanese sarariman to hobnob with his colleagues in the karaoke bars after work; and the Japanese travel in herds. There's an excellent short story by Graham Greene in which he depicts a self-absorbed young lady who aspires to be a novelist. Her poor fiancĂ© tries to talk her out of it and the entire dialogue takes place in a restaurant where a group of Japanese tourists are noisily bowing and taking each other's pictures. When they leave, her lover refers to the tourists. "What Japanese tourists?" screams the would-be writer: the woman's powers of observation must be incredibly feeble to miss a congregation of Japanese tourists. In Bangladesh, tour operators to the Sundarban mangrove forest love Japanese tourists: they travel in groups, so a package is easily put together. But then so do Bangladeshis: large families of 30 travel together to Cox's Bazaar, and the children make a devil of a noise and break glasses at the Sagorika restaurant. Anthropologists have found that only in western civilisation do the children sleep in separate rooms from infancy: in no other society on earth (I'm not sure about Jupiter or the newly discovered solar planets) are kids packed off to another bedroom: they snuggle in with the parents. Really! by Iftekhar Sayeed © if6065@yahoo.com |
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