Lecture IV: THE MYTH OF UNIVERSALITY: THE GEOPOLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

As I stand here before you, at least three different things are happening simultaneously: what I think; what I say to convey what I think which, because of the limitations of language or by design, will not always be the same as what I think; and what you hear and understand of what I had intended to convey, which is again not necessarily the same thing. Misunderstanding of some degree is inherent in all human communication; indeed in all human perception. One might call this the “Rashomon phenomenon” after the title of the short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Human rights and democracy more than other subjects are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon. Anything really “universal” ought to be less prone to misunderstanding. In fact the evidence of our senses tells us that the most salient characteristic of the world we live in is diversity, not universality.