Human rights are an extensive study nowadays. There are concerns in international relations, concerns shared by religious bodies, concerns that may result in military interventions, legal issues, rights of indigenous peoples, women’s rights, the continuing problem of actual slavery, human trafficking issues, and various specific rights issues. Any effort to explain human rights to ordinary persons has to contend with the frustrating fact that the term has been co-opted and distorted; it has been used hypocritically by politicians who count on public ignorance about real human rights. And genuine political freedom means that any organization can call itself a “human rights” organization, when it is really designed to make a financial profit; to promote a singular, self-serving ideology; to promote a religious agenda; or to further a certain political objective.
American presidents, ambassadors and secretaries of State have invoked human rights in criticizing other nations’ infringements of freedom of expression and press freedom. And, since most Americans do not well comprehend human rights, anyone who succeeds to the presidency of the United States must share the views uninformed constituency; he or she must engage the casuistic terms palatable to the unenlightened voting public. They must primarily appeal emotionally… such are the sound bite pronouncements so common to political speech today. And the rare enlightened politician is the target of derision, for he or she does not share the emotion-driven views that often prevail among the voting public. The politician works at cross-purposes: he or she seeks to advance a cause in the political realm and also to advance his or her respective career. This inherent requirement of politics and politicians – that they take care of “number one,” is what marks their most fundamental corruption. This is often mischaracterized as disingenuous speech or “playing to the crowd,” but it is required of them that they do not propose a conscientious perspective on an issue when that perspective is not at all shared by their constituents, when it seems to have something “soft” or traitorous in it. Political leadership is required – yes, required – to acquiesce and deign to all the emotional and confused and uninformed expectations of the voter who elects them. American citizens and voters deeply resent anyone who “talks down” to them, but also anyone who uses terms they do not understand, what seems quite the opposite: talking up. The sagacious politician must mirror the people he represents in all their ignorances and prejudices. If he appears dumber or smarter than his constituents, he is somewhat discredited. A “compromise” of what the speaker truly believes is necessitated by circumstance, and what begins as compromise ends as corruption and spineless obsequy.
I am a blogger, not a politician. Hence, I type the following words in full awareness that many Americans will object to the compassionate, humane, and dignity-exalting ideas I promote here, the basic human rights to which supposedly everyone is entitled.
Human rights stands adamantly opposed to oppression, tyranny, inhumanity and social injustice. Since 1945, the human rights regime has had the expressed expectation that its full, coherent and widespread adoption will conduce to the obviation of war.
Let’s start with a background understanding of why human rights arrived as an idea and ideal in the late 18th century West. In 1750, all people in all parts of the world were subject to the arbitrariness and injustice characteristic of undemocratic governance. But the political revolutions in the United States (1775-81), in retrospect, set modern history on a democratic course. (a) Human rights terms began to appear in the writings of political dissenters such as Thomas Paine. However, a full appreciation of how important human rights was to civilization and to the wider ideal of human fulfillment was still far off. Intellectual writers often saw the usefulness of human rights to the aims of civilization (order, peace, security, justice, equality of opportunity, etc.), but human rights made no real sense in a world that still dealt in slavery; in a period where many countries and territories still dealt in the foul institution, there was no cultural basis – no foundation – upon which human rights could cohere and gain strength. And even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson can be counted among the misguided souls that did not commit to manumission until the reading of their wills after each of them died (1799 and 1826, respectively), as if they intended only to do what might logically be required for admittance into a Christian heaven, not what morality compelled one to do.
The point here is that slavery was a reality at a certain time in our past, and that nefarious reality meant that human rights could not possibly be realized. As we know, that moral failure led to the American Civil War. What we today little realize is that a politics and culture of the kind that places some value above the dignity and integrity of the human person adds to the mindset of war. And we invariably think that moral failings are only in our enemy, not in ourselves. Today Americans think ignorance is an affliction of only Americans of the past, and they do not seek to question their political views, but to champion them. Rooting for the team and the agenda has eclipsed the importance of the rightness and coherence of the agenda.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century politics followed the predictable course of narrow self-service, and virtually any opinion that could be expected to prevail was either self-serving or supportive of the status quo. And what history yielded was two world wars. The people of the developed nations of the world were ultimately influenced by the impressiveness of their machines and armaments, more so than by considerations of what human rights structures might do. And, as I remarked above, there was no political ethos within which to comprehend holistic human rights; politics was inherently selfish, and everyone understood it that way.
Finally, at the end of World War Two, some of the most progressive and enlightened minds in the world were so consternated by the war and so motivated to make a more promising future that they grew insistent that the United Nations add a human rights element to its basic mandates. The United Nations began its work in 1945, and its three mandates are security, development and human rights.
In 1948, the U.N. adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and this seminal document remains as the most authoritative of all international human rights instruments.
The UDHR is not long. It states unambiguously in its preamble that the undoing of war, injustice and oppression are its target objectives, that its creation was a response to “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” The UDHR has 30 articles, the first two of which reference no specific rights but to whom such rights apply: it tells that they are to be enjoyed by all, by all equally, and that they are not revocable on any pretext whatever.
One last thing before closing here: Human rights can be considered of two sorts. There are, firstly, those actions that governments and claimants to political authority are obliged not to do. These are called the “negative human rights,” and they include the death penalty, torture and repressive political policies or laws. Secondly, there are the “positive human rights” which are those actions and provisions that a government is supposed to extend to those within its jurisdiction of authority.
More on human rights (specifically) later.
(a) Perhaps a bit of prolepsis here: the term was “the British colonies of North America.”