Can East Meet West on Human Rights? : Asia: Scholarly attempts to reconcile deep traditions with ideals of personal freedom do not translate into mass practice.

During Bill Clinton’s travels to Japan and South Korea, he reaffirmed American support for these Asian outposts of democracy. The idea that the Japanese and South Koreans are freedom-loving democrats “like us” reinforce a characteristically American faith in the universality of individual rights as we understand them. But the leaders of some of the Asian countries that Clinton did not visit--Singapore and Malaysia, for instance--do not share this faith. They urge Asians not to trade their communitarian traditions for a cult of personal freedom that has, these leaders say, blighted family and community life in America with crime, drugs and children having children.

At a recent conference here on “Asian values,” scholars and activists from a dozen Asian countries explored the middle ground between traditional identity and modern alienation. Most of these reform-minded thinkers argued that one can and should reunderstand local cultures to make them conducive to human rights in ways that authenticate freedom without letting it become license.

But is this happy outcome possible? Can Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam be reinterpreted to make them constructively compatible with Western human rights? Or, as many Americans seem to believe, do human rights, including freedom “from” religion, come in a single package that cannot be broken up?

Consider Buddhism. It entirely lacks the idea of an absolute or autonomous self with inalienable rights. But that did not deter Thai social critic Sulak Sivaraksa. At the conference he took the core Buddhist concept of bhavana, or mindfulness, to be an invitation to acknowledge and champion the rights of people oppressed by “capitalism, consumerism, sexism” and other modern threats to a wholesome life.

Sulak illustrated his argument with the case of an activist monk, Luong Pho Nan, who had spread bhavana among debt-ridden Thai farmers and thus helped them become conscious of--and defend--their economic rights. While organizing the villagers to improve their material welfare, Luong had also helped them strengthen, through meditation, their spiritual resistance to alcohol, gambling and domestic violence. But these temptations had proved easier to abjure than material greed. Escaping from poverty, the farmers had fallen into a new trap: materialism. Far from creating a viable alternative to capitalism, Luong had enlarged the ranks of its driving element, the Thai middle class.

Hong Kong University lecturer Joseph Chan turned the idea of ren, or benevolence, into a filter for absorbing into the Confucian tradition the compassion but not the egotism of human rights. Chan reasoned that a Confucian, seeking benevolence, would have to be sensitive to the suffering of others, including suffering caused by what a Western liberal would call the violation of basic human rights.

A wife, Chan argued, could use Confucian discourse to prevent her husband from exploiting her. Rather than asserting her inalienable rights, she could remind him of his Confucian responsibility to act benevolently. Chan acknowledged that if this failed to change the husband’s ways, the wife might have to assert her legal rights, but only as a fallback. Thus could Confucians work toward justice between men and women without breaking up families.

Another workshop participant, Malaysian scholar Norani Othman, based her case for an Islamic appreciation of human rights on the Koranic idea of fitrah, or humanity. Acknowledging in fitrah the common human origin and nature of all people, regardless of religion, race or gender, Islam in Othman’s eyes was not only compatible with human rights, it justified struggling to achieve them.

Othman belongs to a group of Malaysian women--Sisters in Islam--who are trying to advocate human rights in Islamic terms. In a pamphlet titled “Are Muslim Men Allowed to Beat Their Wives?” the group’s members cite Koranic passages--for example, that “men and women are protectors, one of another”--to justify their answer: No, Islam does not allow Muslim husbands to abuse their wives.

Sulak, Chan and Othman showed me that Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam can be construed to favor, if not universal and intrinsic human rights per se, then at least the just outcomes sought by Western advocates. But I am less convinced that modernity can be selectively validated in spiritual terms for society at large. Scholarly logic is not the same as mass awareness, let alone mass practice.

From my hotel window here I can see 23 building cranes but only one Buddhist temple. It will be easier for intellectuals to reunderstand East Asian traditions around a conference table than to implant those understandings in the minds and souls of the millions of East Asians caught up in this region’s headlong material growth.