Getting lectured

On Sunday night, while I was on the phone with my parents, I heard terrible screaming coming from somewhere outside. There was a rhythmic smacking sound -- loud, definitely not made by a human hand -- followed by shrieks of pain. I went outside to ask the guards to see what was going on. (I found them both sound asleep, by the way, at 10 pm. Not that there is a good time of night to find your so-called guards sound asleep...) One of the guards went out to look, but by that time the sound had stopped.

The following morning, I related the incident to our cook, who made some enquiries. It turned out that the sound, as I had assumed, was not random violence in the street, but a domestic beating. Specifically, it involved a 12 year-old girl who was being beaten by her father for being "heady" (this is a direct translation from what I was told in French. I think it must mean headstrong, disobedient.) When I expressed disapproval to our cook, she was clearly perplexed. Children (of whom she has six) need to be disciplined, she told me. I said that I agreed, but that it was very clear to me that "discipline" in this case involved a stick, a belt, or some other weapon, and was therefore totally over the top. G. gave me a sort of bemused look and went about her business. I'm pretty sure that she was thinking something along the lines of, "Yet another thing that Westerners think they have all the answers for."

Sometimes I feel a bit like that myself. We show up in a country like this, and we act like we have all the answers. We embark on campaigns to "sensitize" the population about issues we feel are important, things we think they are doing wrong. We seem to forget that there is room for considerable -- sometime heated -- debate on many of these issues at home; instead we pitch up as though we solved it all a hundred years ago and these people just need to catch up. No issue is too small or too personal, and none is too big, either. Wash your hands. Breastfeed your child. No to female genital mutilation. Yes to condoms. Don't marry your girls off at 13. Plant these kinds of seeds. Use these kinds of tools. Liberalize your economy. Institute this kind of political system. Resolve your legal disputes this way. Smacking a disobedient child with a stick is wrong.

All these things -- and the thousands of others we "sensitize" about -- are important. But are they equally important? Sometimes I worry that with all the different Western organizations pushing their various messages at the same time, "sensitization" becomes a cacophony of lecturing that is impossible to sort through. Pushing all our messages at once, in an uncoordinated, unprioritized manner, risks muddling them all to the point of pointlessness. Not only that, we look like a bunch of sanctimonious know-it-alls -- which, frankly, we are. If I was a Central African, I might well roll my eyes at yet another lecture from a white person about how I ought to live my life.

It reminds me a little (perhaps oddly) of Amnesty International. I've mentioned on this blog before that I think they've totally lost the plot. A hard-core human rights person will disagree with that. The fact that Amnesty writes reports about France that are every bit as scathing as those they publish about North Korea is perfectly appropriate, according to the core human rights principle of indivisibility. This principle holds that all human rights -- including economic, cultural, and social rights -- are inseparable, equally important, and cannot be prioritized according to any hierarchy.

That, in my view, is utter rubbish. Ask a room full of people if they would rather vote or live, and I think you'll see a convincing show of hands. If that sounds ridiculously simplistic, let me point out that Americans, Brits and others have allowed their civil liberties -- their rights -- to be curtailed rather significantly over the past few years in the name of security, following the onset of the War on Terror. Clearly, an implicit hierarchy of human rights exists on some level, even if human rights organizations don't recognize it. The idea of indivisibility also happens to be very Western. The idea that Singaporeans could be happy living in a very safe, very clean and very authoritarian environment doesn't resonate with us liberal democrats, so it must be wrong.

My point -- and I do have one -- is that even if we allow that the West has a lot to teach countries like CAR, are all of these things equally important? If not, shouldn't we prioritize our messages in order to ensure that at least the critical ones get through, before moving on to less life-and-death issues later on? Of course, agreeing to this seemingly reasonable principle presents a quandary: which messages are the most important, and who gets to decide? I'll leave that dilly of a pickle to someone else.