The Religion of Human Rights: Part 2

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…

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Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist is the leading thinker of the European ‘New Right’ movement, a school of political thought founded in France in 1968 with the establishment of GRECE (Research and Study Group for European Civilisation). To this day he remains its primary representative, even while rejecting the label ‘New Right’ for himself. An ethnopluralist defender of cultural uniqueness and integrity, he has argued for the right of Europeans to retain their identity in the face of multiculturalism, and he has opposed immigration, while still preferring the preservation of native cultures over the forced assimilation of immigrant groups.