The Religion of Human Rights: Part 2

by Alain de Benoist

This is the second part of excerpts from Alain de Benoist’s timeless essay ‘The Religion of Human Rights’, published in 1988, in which he questions the applicability of ‘universal’ Western ideologies in different cultures.

The monohumanism associated with monotheism logically leads to that particular form of racism based on ethnocentrism. To claim that fundamentally there is only ‘one’ human being means ultimately to judge all humans by the same criteria, to sift them through the same sieve. However, there cannot be completely objective criteria — all the less so because there is no model for the whole of humanity on a cultural and historical level. To consider humans as equal, cultures as belonging together, and to ascribe to them the same aspirations and rights means to always view them from a single standpoint, from which they cannot be equal. Edmund Leach argued that for the average person the term human means ‘our kind, people of our sort’, and often the scope of such a category is extremely limited. We infer from this that there never was and never will be an effective human society within which all individuals, even approximately and in some sense, are equal to each other — unless it would be tiny in scale. In other words, egalitarianism consists in considering all humans as equal, on the condition, however, that they accept my moral values.