A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka deliver a lecture in Claremont, CA: Deities for a Secular Dispensation. In the lecture, he acknowledged that while religion had been invoked for horrible atrocities, it may have been a restraining factor in human history. Perhaps without religion, the human species would have been even worse.
While I am plagued with concern over the role of religion in contemporary global politics, I thought of Wole Soyinka today when I heard that China is strengthening its economic ties with the genocidally criminal government of Sudan (see BBC article, “Chinese leader boosts Sudan ties”, from which the above image was taken).
The Sudanese government has committed unpardonable atrocities in Darfur, carrying out an ethnic cleansing that involves a religious dimension (just in case you thought I was letting religiously motivated murder off the hook). But for a major political and economic power like China to support such a regime is equally unpardonable. Of course, the Chinese government likewise has its own horrendous record of human rights abuses (consider, for example, the ways in which the Chinese government silences the dissent of its own people).
Yet this decision on China’s part combined with its own history of human rights abuse does remind us of the need for universally accepted (and enforced) ethical standards for the treatment of all human beings (something the USA would benefit from having as well). What would be remarkable in the real adoption of universal ethical standards like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the decreased emphasis on national boundaries in dictating the application of such universally recognized standards. I know this is a complex issue, and I don’t mean to talk about it overly simplistically. Yet we as citizens of the world are over a half-century too late. We should already have recognized the universal appeal of truly adopting these standards.
In cases like China economically supporting the Sudan, or the USA economically supporting apartheid South Africa under Reagan, one can recognize that the lack of any ideology higher than nationalism is indeed the problem. In both cases, these decisions were not made for the good of Communism or the good of Christianity (although one cannot deny the atrocities committed in the names of both); they were made purely for the economic and political power of the nation. Nationalism has often colluded with what it likes from a particular religion or ideology in perpetrating horrific violence. Yet as dangerous as fundamentalist religious and/or ideological views have been and continue to be for the world, perhaps it is unchecked nationalism that still poses the gravest danger to the future of humanity.
