[Part 2 of 3] Is social justice negotiable? The political and cultural interpretations of social justice

Excerpt from keynote given at the 2022 Alliance for International Education conference: Educating for Peace and Social Justice: the role of international education.

Is social justice negotiable? The political and cultural interpretations of social justice and their implications for international education: An exploration of the extent to which the term social justice has universal implications as opposed to being a political or social construct that is determined with locally determined parameters and constraints.

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Part two [ Part one here, part three here ]

We have seen that even before we get to contentious topics in peace and social justice, schools are already in the business of operating within political or social constructs.  Different schools already frame their whole raisons-d’etre, their Missions, rather differently.  And that’s because education is one of the theatres where we answer fundamental questions such as What kind of human beings would we like to be? What kind of society would we like to have?  And if education is both a reflection of and a means to the ultimate end of how it is best for humans to live, then it’s always going to be subject to different views, and we should rejoice in that, difficult though it makes our jobs.

So it would appear the answer to the question has to be ‘yes’, social justice is negotiable.  And perhaps we know this from practice, because there are no universally agreed approaches to many matters; either for the visions for the desirable outcomes or for the best paths to get there.  Reasonable, good people can and do differ.   So let’s look at a few real cases that I have come across (from different schools):

• Some students and families demand that the school stops trips to a country where the government behaves in violent and overtly anti-democratic ways.  There are many students from wealthy families from that country at the school.  The country is not subject to UN sanctions.

• Students ask for school support to demonstrate against a local custom which involves treating animals in ways they deem to be cruel.

• A family asks to see all lesson plans that address issues of racial privilege or oppression, and assert the right to have their children miss those lessons.

• A family asks to restructure PE lessons into gender-segregated groups, citing cultural reasons

• After the launch of a new relationships strand of the PSE curriculum, a group of families asks the school to ensure that LBGTQ+ issues are confined to High School only, and that Primary and Middle School students are shielded from these ideas, citing religious reasons.   And in High School, they ask that the LGBTQ+ group should not be led by openly gay teachers

• Following a peace conference involving discussion of domestic violence and including local schools, the school receives a call from the authorities asking the names of these teachers involved in leading it, without explaining why

• An online petition is started to change school policy to automatic expulsion/firing  for issues of racism, sexism, homophobia for students and staff.

• One national community asks the school to remove another specific flag from any school events involving many national flags, asserting a highly contested territorial position

In all these cases and others like them, answers are found either by action or inaction, explicitly or implicitly. And there are a range of possible outcomes.   The challenge is to draw a credible, defensible, reasonably consistent line between those cases where we can go along with different views co-existing side by side without asserting one over another, and those where there is some genuine point of moral principle or operational necessity which we are not prepared to compromise.  There are no single answers here, and as these are all related to social justice some way or another, it does seem to be the case that matters are negotiable.

There’s a lot of sense to this view; and as liberals we should deplore Fundamentalism - the intellectual style not the religious movement - because the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong is disastrous.  I think it was Ayatollah Khomeini who told an interviewer in 1979 “do you know that during my long lifetime I have always been right”.  Of course, that does not seem credible to us. But there are those all over the political spectrum who seem to assume implicitly, without any critical examination, they have a monopoly on truth.  It’s not uncommon, and in my view, these people set back what may otherwise be solid cases, good causes. If we think we have the whole truth, we will be walled into our own belief systems. Our ideas will be static, immune to improvement, set apart from the systems that we all work in. In the worst cases, that's where truth-monopolisers want to be, secure in the cocoon of their assumptions. You can tell who these folk are because they make explicit exhortations against intellectuals, against over-intellectualising, against thinking too hard - basically against critical analysis. Now there is something worth thinking about, for sure; analysis-paralysis can be a danger. But the solution to analysis-paralysis is not to stop thinking. It is to think harder, think better, to be more decisive. Anyone, whatever view they have, good or bad, anyone who tells us not to think, but just to do as they do is modelling their leadership more on a cult than a case. Debate and uncertainty is just the way of things, and I suggest that anyone who says differently is not to be trusted.

So is that it?  Is everything, ultimately, negotiable, with the variables being to do with school, Mission, local cultural context, gender, religious affiliation, racial status, sexuality and so on…. even personal preference?  I have started with school examples to suggest this is a possibility, but it’s hardly a new idea.  British political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously argued for this negotiability in 1958, when he asserted that there are many incommensurable goods in life; which is to say that there may be equally valid but irreconcilable actions and outcomes, that are perhaps not capable of being simultaneously realised.   It is in the nature of some virtues and values to squeeze out others.   As Berlin said in his famous lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’: “Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows: the liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others.”

So these days we are suspicious of grand narratives, of things that claim to transcend culture and context.  Even in the few places where there are claims to generality, they are tempered.  Let’s take the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Much of this declaration was drafted  by major colonial powers that saw no contradiction between colonial title and human rights.  Double standards existed  in 1948; they are still here today.   As even Eleanor Roosevelt, (Saint Eleanor) the driving force behind the UNDHR wrote ‘naturally it is not a perfect document.  Being as it must be, a composite document to meet the thoughts of so many different peoples there must be a significant number of compromises.’  So perhaps it is foolish to accept that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is indeed Universal. Perhaps it's even dictatorial, to insist on a single set of norms that apply to some 7 billion people.  Such an approach might even smack of neo-colonialism, arguably subordinating non-western cultures to western ideology.    This is certainly how China currently sees things, as well as others who do not see Human Rights as universal at all.    And as a liberal I am rather hoisted by my own petard here.  By my own lights, I need to value diversity in all its manifestations - lack of human rights included as one part of that diversity.

Of course, as a liberal I also, ironically, find a diversity of views on democracy and human rights hard to accept. I am instinctively drawn to the Universal part of the UNDHR.   This is of course, the familiar problem of cultural relativism set in a political context.  I want to have it as a universal principle that we should be liberal.  A Singaporean ex-diplomat recently - and rather undiplomatically   - wrote that there is nothing more intolerant than a liberal in full bray in defence of liberalism asserted somewhat self-contradictorily as an absolute value.  And he’s got a point. 

So let’s examine this a little more, and in the spirit of what seems to me like even handedness, but which could also be described as pusillanimous cowardly vacillation,  let me now argue the reverse of what I said before; that in fact there are some universals (and by universal I mean approaches that should be the default, regardless of culture).  So I am going to briefly offer two reasons why perhaps Human Rights can indeed be understood universally; that it’s not all negotiable:

• Firstly, Human Rights are not a Western idea, but an idea common across so many cultures.  Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have shown that critical elements of Human Rights exist in both Indian and Chinese traditions (religious toleration, for example, was advocated for by Buddhist emperor Ashoka in third to second century B.C.E.). The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights came from many nations in 1948 – including Egypt, China and France. 

• Secondly, Even if Human Rights are ‘Western’, that's no reason they cannot be universal. This 'it came from out of town' argument is, to my mind, not really an argument. An idea has to come from somewhere, so to question its origin is not a serious objection. All societies borrow and steal ideas from each other precisely because some ideas transfer well across time and space.  From details like dress and food, to whole world views like Capitalism, Buddhism, Marxism, and Christianity, ideas will spread.  Now of course there is a question about how they spread. Sadly we do not need to look to history to see that violent imposition of ideas remains a reality.  From Western neo-liberalism to Chinese suppression in Tibet to Indian religion-based violence, to gender-based aggression globally there is always the possibility for ideas to be spread at the point of a gun.  But that’s not an argument against the possibility of universal values.  Indeed, it’s precisely because we feel violence is to be universally avoided  that we feel sure that spreading ideas by force is so wrong.   

So the source of an idea is not in itself inherently objectionable; the value of an idea has to depend on its quality (just as we judge people by the quality of their thinking, not where they were born). 

So contrary to the pluralist, relativist approach, we can assert that the Human Rights agenda upholds the equal worth and dignity of all persons and so is one example of a universal standard.  The idea of equal worth is not especially Western, and it is not imperial.  It is not a value forced by the strong in the weak -  it is, instead, the ally of the weak against the strong.  That seems to me to be a strong statement of values, and one that sails well between the opposite poles of relativist diversity and universal social justice.

[ Part three ]

Reference 

Engel, R. (2022) Pathways to global citizenship: a critical analysis of the International Baccalaureate’s Diploma Programme in the Asia Pacific region, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2021.2011585