Sentimental Declaration of Human Rights
My birthday (Dec, 10) coincides with Human Rights Day.
Sometimes I remember this, sometimes I do not.
I cannot say that I am an activist on behalf of any cause, beyond my own. Oh, I’ve been passionate about things, over the years. I’ve been a supporter of human and animal rights, been (privately) outraged, debated the issue with friends and family (over wine), I’ve signed petitions, walked in rallies, held placards, sent letters and emails as a (sometimes) PETA member, even written a few ‘urgent action’ letters as an Amnesty International member. But I have saved no one, and I secured no rights – apart from my own, that is.
Well, of course, I’ve not even secured my own rights. I was simply born with them. When I was born – in a lucky and safe country – I received a very full package of rights – each and every right listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I was born free, equal and with dignity. I have been secure and never enslaved. I have never been tortured, never degraded, and always recognised as a person before the law. I have moved freely from country to country and from job to job. I have never been deprived of my property, nor my right to social security. I have expressed my opinions freely.
I have enjoyed all of these rights because I was simply born human.
It happened so effortlessly I could be forgiven for believing that human rights are indeed based on some universal and fundamental and rational truth, and that this truth, by virtue of its rational universality would apply universally.
It does not.
I have these rights because I was born in a particular society and community, at a specific time in history. Others, born in other societies and communities during other historical periods, do not have these rights.
This is the paradox of human rights.
It is our intuitive understanding of human rights that they are universal, that they are based on some rational and a priori moral principle and may thus apply to all human beings, always. In reality, they do not, and not because all human beings should not be equal, but because human beings are historical and political beings and they exist within given societies which govern citizen relations in various ways. When human rights violations occur – during wars and dictatorships – the violators never think they are violating “human” rights, because they believe that they are not dealing with humans at all, but sub-humans or “pseudohumans” (referring to Richard Rorty). Take the American Christians and the Muslims – for the former, the Muslims are not real humans, but some weird, inferior sub-human beings – as such, how can they claim inalienable rights?
Well, that’s the paradox then. Hannah Arendt understood this paradox of human rights as one which was founded in the understanding of a human being as somehow “abstract,” as apolitical and ahistorical, some sort of fundamental human being, some Platonic idea maybe? Abstract humans would surely enjoy universal rights because there is nothing – no society, religion or regime – in the way.
In any case, despite the problems that the socio-political reality poses for the universal application of human rights – we still feel that human rights should be universal. Richard Rorty says we feel this not because of an appeal to some rational foundation for a universal moral code, but because of an appeal to our emotions. Morality is sentimental, he says, it comes from the heart, not the head. It is based on things like love, sympathy, empathy, friendship, care, on senses that are profoundly human. When we support universal human rights, we do so because we care that all humans enjoy the same rights we believe that humans should, we care that others do not suffer. We do not, in the first instance, ever really support human rights because it is in some rational way, correct and fundamental.
Today, I watched the Black Pimpernel, a movie about Harald Edelstam, Sweden’s ambassador to Chile in the 1970s, who saved over 1,300 people during the Pinochet dictatorship. At the end of the movie there is some real-life footage of Edelstam being interviewed.
At one point he says that in matters of life and death you cannot negotiate, there is no time to act diplomatically, but instead, you must act as a human being. With this statement, Edelstam appeals to human sensibility rather than rationality.
All human rights matters are essentially either literal matters of life and death or, at least, matters of quality of life and death. In such matters, it is human emotion that is the best weapon. All of the greatest human rights activists may have based their fight upon some rational foundation, but it was not to this that they appealed to. They were passionate human beings and it was their passion – that fiery human emotion that creates and destroys – that made all the difference.
My Facebook profile says that I’m apathetic about political matters, and I certainly am. I became confused by the paradoxes of rational foundations – if human rights are universal why is this place such a nightmare? - and at one point suppressed my sentimentality about such matters, retreating into that sad place called apathy. Not that I stopped caring, but I guess I did stop believing.
Maybe it is time to fire up the heart again.
12.10.08








































