Community and Collective Rights by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

V. THE SERVICE PRINCIPLE AND COMMUNITY SURVIVAL

This section will argue that a theory oriented around the Service Principle can support claims to community survival over time, claims of the sort Charles Taylor labelled la survivance.52 Thus, unlike Kymlicka, whose failure to acknowledge moral reasons for preserving cultures over time was at issue in chapter three, we can maintain that there can be valid claims to la survivance. After first examining an argument that suggests the Service Principle is itself sufficient to rule out preservation of ‘tradition for tradition’s sake’, I will argue that there are stronger arguments for the preservation of cultural traditions as living traditions.

A critic, whom I will call the Anti-Traditionalist (A-T), might challenge any claim that a cultural group has any right to maintain a cultural practice. A-T would say that a collectivity cannot make out any claim to carry out a traditional practice on the basis that it is traditional – whether this is observation of, say, cultural/religious prescription of certain modes of dress or certain aboriginal First Nations’ performance of the annual Sun Dance. A-T says that such traditions serve no individual interest. Indeed, A-T might tell us that there can be no claim by an Israeli Ultra-Orthodox community to require its members to wear modest dress when this is uncomfortable on hot summer days, much less to require others passing through Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods to conform,53 because there is no evidence that wearing modest dress rather than tanktops does individual members any good and such a requirement plainly limits autonomy. A-T might even tell us that the elements of self-inflicted pain in the Sun Dance mean that the First Nations who practise it can have no legitimate objection to legislation that prohibited it,54 because they do not come with Western scientific evidence that their dancing does anyone any good. There can be, says A-T, no claim to tradition for tradition’s sake.

To analyse matters carefully, we need to distinguish two interwoven elements from A-T’s position. First, A-T is purporting to describe the interests that individuals have, essentially saying that she understands better the interests of individual Ultra-Orthodox Jews or of individual Plains Cree than the groups themselves do. Such an assumption has, no doubt, been part of the historical reason behind legislative suppression of certain cultural traditions, as in the banning of the Sun Dance.55

It will sometimes be permissible to act based on such an assumption. Although I will return in chapter nine to principled grounds for deference and for interference, some examples are clear at once. If someone were proposing policy steps to help prevent the followers of Jim Jones’s cult from being brainwashed into committing mass suicide, there would be no question that the proposal was right. The cult’s claims as to what is in its members’ spiritual interests differs so substantially from what can be reasonably accepted, its consequences are so serious, and its brainwashing is so suspicion-raising that there are clear grounds for interference. But this is not the usual case, and we more often see the potential reasonableness of a group’s claims.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.