Page 151 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

• Everyone to be recognized as a person before the law (Article 6).
• No arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence
(Article 12).
• Right to marry with free and full consent of intending spouses; family is
natural and fundamental group unit of society (Article 16).
• Everyone has the right to own property alone (Article 17).
• Freedom of thought, conscience, religion, opinion, expression, peaceful
assembly, and association (Articles 18–20).
• Everyone has the right to work, and to free choice of employment, and
equal pay for equal work (Article 23).
• All people have the right to leisure and adequate standard of living
(Article 25).
• Everyone has the right to basic, free education (Article 26).
• All the world’s people have the right to participate in the cultural life of the
community, including the arts and sciences (Article 27).

The United Nations’ stated intention for issuing the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights is to promote freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
Whether or not global compliance with the requirements of the Declaration
would achieve such objectives cannot be said with confidence. In fact the
Declaration – with its explicit emphasis on marriage, family, property owner-
ship, individuality, freedom, rule of law, even the right to leisure – reads like a
laundry list of basic Western, middle-class, heterosexual values and lifestyles.
With the United Nations organization as its high-profile launching mechan-
ism and public relations arm, news of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights has traveled widely and entered the consciousness of many people in
most parts of the world over the years. How the document has been inter-
preted and acted upon by diverse populations, though, is by no means uniform.
In fact, the universalist moral posturing of the United Nations is frequently
considered to be little more than a tool of American-led, Western global
hegemony. Many Westerners themselves tend to be blind to or not interested
in what’s happening globally, however. As the American political scientist
Samuel P. Huntington points out:

The West, and especially the United States . . . believe that non-Western
peoples should commit themselves to the Western values of democracy,
free markets, limited government, human rights, individualism, [and]
the rule of law . . . the dominant attitude toward [these values] in
non-Western cultures ranges from widespread skepticism to intense
opposition. What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest.
(Huntington 1996: 184)

Universalism, it seems, is hardly universal. It emerges from a partisan political-
economic space, promotes some values and interests over others, and is put to

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