Democracy and Natural Right

“[If] principles are sufficiently justified by the fact they are accepted by a society, the principles of cannibalism are as defensible as those of civilized life.” — Leo Strauss

In his recent opinion piece on the recently-announced candidacy of Mohammad Khatami for the upcoming presidential elections in Iran [“Him again“], Trita Parsi proscribes the steps he believes the purportedly reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami should take in order to fulfill the broken promises of his previous stint as President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What most stands out from Mr. Parsi’s article however, is his characterization of the elections themselves: “The Iranian presidential elections will not be democratic by Western standards,” he writes, “but they won’t lack excitement or fierce competitiveness.”

This statement not only reveals a great deal about Mr. Parsi’s political assumptions, but also epitomizes the morally and intellectually contorted stance assumed by all those who endorse as legitimate the political life of the IRI — while knowing full well that elections in Iran are an utter sham.

The operating term here is, of course, “Western standards.”

The use of this term implies that the Iranian people’s legitimate demand that candidates for high office should not be disqualified by unelected bodies on dubious ideological grounds is somehow a “Western” convention. To insist on allowing more than one political party to contest the polity only reflects a “Western” bias. If only critics of the regime were more open-minded and “tolerant,” they would come to see that the IRI’s elections are democratic by other-than-“Western” standards!

Unfortunately, the dominant politically correct, multicultural discourse of the West itself lends credence to such viewpoints. Mr. Parsi, in other words, places the moral perils represented by the relativism dominating our media and campuses on full display.

Where then can supporters of truth and democracy turn to find recourse against this reigning relativism? Thankfully, a number of thinkers from across the political spectrum have recently taken it upon themselves to critically interrogate contemporary relativism (the Marxian-psychoanalytic philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek are shining examples).

The most cogent refutation of relativism however, comes from the German-American political theorist Leo Strauss. Strauss was a lifelong student and proponent of natural right, the philosophical quest to seek what is right by way of nature and, crucially, as separate from ancestral authority or communal convention. That is, the search for universal moral insights that transcend tribe and nation. While rooted in pre-Socratic philosophy, notions of natural right have been tremendously influential through subsequent centuries. When the American Founding Fathers, for example, spoke of “self-evident” truths, they were referring to natural right: what is right is naturally and universally so and hence self-evident.

Strauss’s insistence on the primacy of natural right put him directly at odds with relativism. “To reject natural right is tantamount to saying that all right is positive right, and this means that what is right is determined exclusively by the legislators and courts of various countries,” he wrote. “If our principles have no other support than our blind preferences, everything a man is willing to day will be permissible.” Therefore, “the contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism — nay, it is identical with nihilism.”

Echoing Strauss, we may ask: what is more nihilistic than the attempt to mask the oppression of freedom and the negation of equality under regimes like the IRI under the false pretense of multiculturalism? What Iranians dissidents and opponents of the IRI seek has nothing to do with “East” or “West,” and everything to do with the recognition of their fundamental rights, which are natural and universal.

After all, ancient Persians were responsible for initially propagating notions of universal rights. “Some time before Plato,” Strauss tells us, “Herodotus had indicated … the place of the only debate which he recorded concerning the principles of politics: he tells us that free discussion took place in truth-loving Persia.”

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