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Universalism: The Premier “Gift” of Western Civilization to the World

By Walter Donway

July 30, 2024

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“Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies…few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.”

“…intellectuals see themselves as friends, allies and defenders of racial minorities, even as they paint them into a corner of cultural stagnation.”                                                                 —Thomas Sowell[1]

Rosters of the themes (or concepts) that we owe to the philosophers of the Enlightenment (1785-1815) invariably include reason, individualism, pursuit of science (empiricism), natural rights, and religious tolerance, among many others.[2] Far less often included is “universalism.”

And yet, universalism arguably comprehends within itself the concepts of human rights, individualism, the rule of law, tolerance, and the beneficence of trade—in a word, an emphasis on the individual human being over his racial, cultural, ethnic, or other “identity” or affiliation—and represents perhaps Western civilization’s premier theoretical “gift” to mankind.

And “premier” is saying a lot, in view of such other benefits as Western science (including health and medicine), agriculture, technology, knowledge resources, and industrial revolution—to name but a few.

In his masterful Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the American scholar, Thomas Sowell, writes: “It would take a vast study to elaborate the benefits that the West has created for itself—and for the rest of the world. But Western advances in the realm of ideas and institutions have been fundamental…”

He continues: “Perhaps the most important, and certainly the most distinctive, characteristic since at least the eighteenth century has been a growing universalism.” He then illustrates (“nothing is easier”) that for peoples throughout history and across the world the norm was “to disregard the troubles inflicted on the people outside of the group to which they happened to belong.”[3]

That is putting it mildly—very mildly—but with his eye for the telling historical detail, the often-indelible imprint on our memory—he makes real what it has meant to view the different tribe, race, religion, class, nationality—as the “other” species. Extermination of “different” peoples, routine pleasure in torture of captives and others, enslavement (as slavers or slaves), wars of conquest and domination, oppression of “lower” classes and castes, expulsion of minorities, oppression of women, The Roman saying (attributed to Plautus circa 210 BC) that “Man is a wolf to man” has been called “a slur on wolves.”

“Universalism” holds that human beings by nature—whatever their race, culture, group affiliation (tribe, nation), level of development, geography, or time in history—share without exception characteristics that make them of equal moral significance and therefore warrant the same fundamental moral consideration. Or these variants: Being human, like us, their ethical “good” is our “good.” Being human, like us, we should treat them as we wish to be treated.[4]

That does not, of course, dictate unconditional benevolence. If we assault others, we expect to be assaulted in return. If we elect to deal with others not by reason but by force, we have set the terms of our interaction. But even such trespasses, to whatever excess, cannot warrant “inhuman” treatment such as cannibalism, rape, “recreational” torture, or slavery.

The classical philosophical foundations of universalism are a view of man as characterized:

  1. By a rational faculty,
  2. By metaphysical freedom to act on his rational judgment,
  3. By requiring freedom from physical coercion to act in the world on his judgment to achieve his life’s chosen “goods.”

On these essential elements of universalism rests the philosophical logic of “natural human rights” and freedom to act within those rights protected by the rule of law.

 

The Philosophical Roots

The origins of universalism are found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (circa 350 B.C.), where he identifies a natural moral order that provides a basis for genuinely rational systems of justice—and thus yields possible universal criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of “man-made” legal systems. He writes, “natural [e.g., justice] is that which has the same validity everywhere and does not depend upon acceptance.” Criteria for a truly rational system of justice pre-exist social and historical conventions. The form and content of natural justice can be determined by reason free from the distorting effects of mere prejudice or desire.

These ideas flourished among the Greek and Roman Stoics, such as Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, up to the 3rd century AD, and, like much of Stoicism, eventually were transmitted through the “Church fathers” to the underpinnings of Christian theology.

It is too long a stretch to attribute the concept of “human rights” to Aristotle or the Stoics. Aristotle, entirely within the context and knowledge of his own time, justified slavery, as did the Stoics. The concept of human rights is a logical derivation from universalism, but Aristotle stopped with the universalism of human nature and morality.

It is too long a stretch to attribute the concept of “human rights” to Aristotle or the Stoics.

Some scholars claim universalism lived on through centuries of Christianity in Europe in the Christian doctrine of a soul in all men and thus potentially universal salvation. Certainly, this is a variant on metaphysical universalism. The same “universalism” is claimed by Islam for all who adopt that religion. It is not therefore philosophical universalism but theological universalism, which admits to the universal human family those who subscribe to Christianity or Islam (but not to both or to neither). In a sense, it is a conditional universalism—a contradiction in terms.

The well-spring of universalism in early modern times, at the beginning in the Age of Enlightenment, is John Locke (1632-1704), who in his Two Treatises on Government (1688) made explicit the logical connection between the universally shared rational nature of all humans and their universal “natural human rights.” He derived the rights to life, liberty, and property from the metaphysical necessity for men freely to exercise rational judgment and the implied requirement for protection of their freedom of action in doing so. Here, again, natural rights are prior to and independent of recognition by the state or society.[5]

Locke also began his chain of reasoning about universalism, natural rights, and government limited to protection of those rights with God—discerning in the natural order the will of God and thus an authoritative moral order with a duty for self-preservation. To discharge this duty we must be free from threats to life and liberty, but our prime positive means of self-preservation is personal property.

The Lockian argument for rights also could begin by observing human nature and how that nature fitted man for the world.

Per deism, however, God is known only as the author of the natural order, created for the benefit of all creatures including man. Thus, the Lockian argument for rights also could begin by observing human nature and how that nature fitted man for the world. Intellectuals who led the founding of the United States—mostly deists—based rights on human nature with reference to the Deity as creator. Jefferson’s immortal preface to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” [6]

Rights, then, are derived directly not from God but from the “endowment” that is our human nature. That is, God did not create mankind and then give him the gift of rights–the way a king grants rights to his subjects. God endowed men with a certain nature, including essential shared characteristics rendering their natures morally “equal” and characteristics such as reason, free will (implying moral choice), absence of inherent such choices (meaning men must make their choices by reason with knowledge), and no automatic or “programmed” path to survive (implying a man must exercise his reason and make his choices to sustain his life. These characteristics, shared by all men, imply in turn the cardinal moral value to our survival of mutually refraining from initiating force against other men.

Already pointed out, here, as part of the concept of universalism and human rights are certain corollaries. Human rights are ‘prior” and “independent”—that is, they exist as moral principles derived from human nature prior to any society or government that might “grant” them or “recognize” them. Their existence and validity are a universal implication of human nature. This independence means that any government can be judged by the independent and valid standard of its recognition of rights.

A final seminal contribution to universalism often is attributed to the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant[7] (1724-1804), viewed also as crowning the Age of Enlightenment. Kant forged perhaps the first secular philosophy of universalism since Aristotle and Stoicism. He did so in the name of a philosophy based on intuition, which he characterized as “transcendental reason,” and entirely divorced from self-interest.

His formulations of this “categorical imperative,” among the most famous statements in philosophy, are “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”—a formal or logical statement about rational conduct. And: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end and never as only a means”—a statement about acting morally.

Many scholars believe, insist, that this is the crucial historical and logical foundation of universalism. Notably, however, Kant does not offer an identification or formulation of universal human nature; instead, he invites each individual to “will” what will be universal. Treating all humans as “ends” in themselves and not “means” to the ends of others proffers a kind of universalism, but one abstract in the extreme and, again, left to each individual to decide how to implement.

Most notable is that German philosophy after Kant did not continue the concepts and insights of the Age of Enlightenment. The movement in German philosophy is described, in fact, as the “counter-Enlightenment” or “anti-Enlightenment;” and its evolution via the premier German philosophers Fredrich Nietzsche, Georg Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard (Danish but educated in Germany), and Martin Heidegger led to Karl Marx and, in the twentieth century, National Socialism (Nazism). See Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.[8]

 

“Universalism” and the World

From the eighteenth-century, and founding of the United States, universalism and its logical implications never ceased to be a challenge to the world. America exemplified the concept of universalism—as did other Western nations.

It is certain that the philosophy of universalism, enshrined in America’s founding documents, drove the concerted effort to abolish slavery.

It is certain that the philosophy of universalism, enshrined in America’s founding documents, drove the concerted effort to abolish slavery. Within less than two decades of ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the New England states began the (often drawn-out) process of abolishing slavery (some had done so before the Constitution).[9]

The victory of the philosophy of rights never was easy or automatic as the French Revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), and then the terror, taught the Enlightenment. In the United States, public opinion widely identified and condemned slavery as inconsistent with the rights the new nation had just incorporated into its Constitution and that all human beings shared. Agitation kept driving political demands on the South until the “inevitable conflict” exploded into the bloodiest war ever fought by the United States.

The same philosophy and example of universalism made inevitable a mounting crusade against slavery and the slave trade worldwide with Great Britain spending years and huge national resources policing the slave trade, even long after slavery ceased to exist in Great Britain. Other countries joined, as the United States built a navy to attack the Barbary pirates and the Islamic enslavement of some million Europeans, most of them women.[10]

The impetus has continued and up to our time, when the aspiration for human rights has been expressed in declarations and legal conventions over the past half century, initiated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and perpetuated by, most importantly, the European Convention on Human Rights (1954) and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (1966). The three documents are viewed by many as a moral doctrine capable of becoming the contemporary geo-political order with what amounts to an international bill of rights.

(Although the conceptual base for the defense of human rights had existed since the eighteenth century, a full declaration of human rights finally occurred in response to the Holocaust. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 explicitly to prevent the future occurrence of any similar atrocities.[11])

 

Can Universalism Survive?

Survival of the ideal of universalism in the world today is entirely dependent upon its philosophical foundation. Here is a very typical, standard contemporary statement about the “moral guarantees” that universalism entails:

Human rights are best thought of as potential moral guarantees for each human being to lead a minimally good life. The extent to which this aspiration has not been realized represents a gross failure by the contemporary world to institute a morally compelling order based upon human rights. [Emphasis added.][12]

And “universal” declarations of human rights today always include nutrition, health care, and education—among other requirements of “a minimally good life.”

Replacement of the classical definition of universalism rests upon a distinction now applied to “rights.” Rights can be both “negative”—for example, protection from coercion of the individual’s judgment—and “positive”—protection from deprivation of the requirements for “a minimally good life.”

The two concepts of “rights” are inconsistent because to provide some people with food, health care, and education, other people must be required (e.g., coerced via taxation) to produce and provide those goods, violating their rights to liberty and property. But now, we are urged to recognize that implementing “rights,” like all principles, requires compromise, “balance,” or, philosophically, Pragmatism. The principles of liberty and property, once breached by compromise, have steadily eroded with no end in sight.

The logic of Locke, of course, posited the universal metaphysical identity of human beings—what all human beings share at all times in all places. That sharing does not include varying environments, education, habits, outcomes, or luck. Universal human nature can be acknowledged without imposing any “positive” obligations on anyone. My moral obligation is to leave free your judgment and actions and your use and enjoyment of your property.

Unusually, some standard philosophical references [13]acknowledge Ayn Rand as a prominent contemporary exponent of classical universalism based upon statements such as “Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.”[14]

 

Universalism or Multiculturalism?

Today’s dominant philosophical view of humanity, however, is what used to be called “cultural relativism” but now is most often called “multiculturalism.” Occasional efforts are made to distinguish the two, but increasingly they are used interchangeably. Multiculturalism prioritizes race, ethnicity, and culture. It is true, of course, that all people do have a race, ethnicity, and culture; but those are what differentiate people, not what they universally share as human beings and citizens.

One standard reference explains that multiculturalists urge that “the continued existence of protected minority cultures ultimately contributes to the good of all and…preserving of cultures that cannot withstand the pressures to assimilate into a dominant culture can be given preference over the usual norm of equal rights for all.”

That we acknowledge differences in cultures, however, does not imply that we must refrain from judging, criticizing, or urging changes on other cultures. (Except, of course, Western culture, which liberals insist must be cleansed of unlimited transgressions against humanity. To them, the culture of the West is not universalism but “ethnocentrism.”) But if we must not judge, criticize, or urge changes on other cultures, then universalism as a “prior” and “independent” set of criteria, a standard for judging the condition in which people live and shaping them toward consistency with human nature—such as reason, freedom of judgment, the rule of law, human rights, and tolerance—is nugatory. In their implications, then, universalism and today’s multiculturalism are opposite and incompatible viewpoints.

Thomas Sowell[15] points out that the West can “export” to other cultures products of its culture such as technology, scientific know-how, electoral politics, and constitutionalism. But it cannot export the attitudes, philosophical assumptions, social norms, and values such as commitment to education, dedication to science, prioritizing work, optimism, and informed patriotism that over centuries have developed and evolved (to the extent that they have) to make it possible to create and sustain those products.

Culture can be transmitted only through emulation by individuals in other cultures; but multiculturalism denigrates and discourages such imitation as a stance of seeking a culture “superior” to one’s own. Sowell writes: “A far more urgent challenge faces the West than spreading its culture to other lands. The real culture war is within Western civilization itself, and history is one of its battlegrounds. There is a “fundamental and…pervasive attempt [by liberal scholars and activists] to make the sins of the human race look like peculiar depravities of Western civilization.”

Today’s intellectuals who do this have the potential to cause immeasurable harm to other cultures:

First, they give easy arguments to those in other countries (e.g., China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Mexico) who view liberty, the rule of law, free elections, religious tolerance—as modeled by Western countries—as against their interests.

Second, they discourage emulation by individuals of those cultural patterns that have made Western countries—whatever their shortfalls—economically more prosperous, relatively freer, more educated, healthier, safer, and more law-abiding.

Such harm may be done but never suffered by those Western intellectuals indulging their moral righteousness by selectively “localizing” historical and present-day evils in Western civilization.

Sowell comments[16]: “The multicultural vision of the world also serves the interests of those in the media, who thrive on moral melodramas. So do whole departments of ethnic “studies” in academia and a whole industry of “diversity” consultants, community organizers and miscellaneous other race hustlers…. The biggest losers in all this are those members of racial minorities who allow themselves to be led into the blind alley of resentment and rage, even when there are broad avenues of opportunity available. And we all lose when society is polarized.”

We need a renaissance of classical universalism, including its indispensable philosophical foundations in reason and reason’s implications for consistent definition and application of human rights—thus forcing “multiculturalism” back to its appropriate role in studying and understanding other cultures but not exempting them (including our own) from independent universal standards.

 

____________________

Walter Donway’s latest book is How Philosophers Change Civilizations: The Age of Enlightenment. He is an editor of and frequent contributor to Savvy Street.

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2070135/thomas-sowell-multiculturalism-is-counterproductive/

[2] Walter Donway, How Philosophers Change Civilizations: The Age of Enlightenment (New York: Romantic Revolution Books, 2024). See: “Enlightenment Themes: An Overview” p. 19).

[3] https://archive.org/details/blackredneckswhi0000sowe

[4]https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/101160/how-does-the-enlightenment-philosophy-tackle-the-asymmetry-it-has-with-non-enlig

[5] https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2023-04-26-donway-locke-foments-revolution

[6] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

[7] https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/2023-09-20-donway-immanuel-kant-crisis-enlightenment

[8] https://www.stephenhicks.org/explaining-postmodernism/

[9] Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

[10] https://news.osu.edu/when-europeans-were-slaves–research-suggests-white-slavery-was-much-more-common-than-previously-believed/

[11] https://iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/#H1

[12] https://iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/#H1

[13] https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_moral_universalism.html#Top

[14] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html

[15] https://archive.org/details/blackredneckswhi0000sowe

[16] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2070135/thomas-sowell-multiculturalism-is-counterproductive/

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