Human rights theorists should watch out. They stand to be undone by a six year old boy and his stuffed tiger. A short Calvin and Hobbes strip finds the two debating the meaning of moral virtue. What, Hobbes asks little Calvin, is your new year’s resolution? Calvin’s reply contains enough sophistry to leave ethicists dazed in lifelong conundrums. I haven’t got one, he says. To have resolutions one need aspire to a value system of good and bad, right and wrong . But why should I prefer one to the other? I refuse to discriminate between two binary choices. I have embraced diversity. I’m tolerant.
Calvin’s relativism has a simple and immediate charm. Its reasoning can be used to justify almost any of the means used in obtaining our pleasure-driven ends. Yet as an argument, it is nothing short of being a plague on human rights. Gender, race and cultural values have been confounded by this sleight of hand of modernity. Yet it wasn’t always like this. 60 years ago, this month, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly agreed to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights in the good old spirit of grand absolutes. It was a monumental step. A set of minimum moral entitlements were accepted and agreed upon by world citizenry. Representatives of every colour and hue, adhering to the world’s major faiths, with varying political and ideological backgrounds sat down, thought, discussed and came to an agreement over what the human condition is. They might not have told us who we were, but they did a fine job of telling us what we could expect to be entitled to.
Purists would say I am overstating the case. Let us admit, then, that there were certainly problems. Saudi Arabia, unhappy over the right to profess faith by choice, chose to abstain. Christendom also had its sceptics. Like Saudi Arabia some asked why the name of God was omitted. One Vatican newspaper even went as far as to warn, “If God be not the builder of the house, its building will be in vain.”
Culturally, the text was presumptuous. It was clearly a Western product. It assumed Enlightenment values, stressing, for example, ‘equality’ rather than ‘equity.’ Further, the world’s legislators were not as varied as their countries of origin might suggest. Many of those involved had been intellectually nurtured by the academia of the West. The rights, themselves, were muddled. No hierarchy of rights exists. Remarkably for a legal document, the document lays itself open to over-riding each one of its own stipulated clauses. Things were certainly amiss.
What then? To leave, or to leave be? For all its faults we should be wary of dismissing our forefathers’ absolutism too quickly. That direction, that certitude was a godsend smack bang in the midst of the bloodiest century has ever witnessed. The text stands chronologically in between the inferno of two world wars and the deathly chill of American-Russian relations. We saw Hiroshima, Vietnam, the emergence of concentration camps, the rise of police state, the first million plus genocides and the most sophisticated political, historical and biological arguments ever advanced for the eradication of whole peoples. Cuba, let us remember, almost pre-empted Fukyama by 30 years in bringing history to a premature end.
The document may yet redeem the bygone century from the worst of its excesses. For legal positivists and cultural relativists the text assumes too much. Yet for the vast majority, it strikes a chord. Its idea that in every human there is an innate sense of right and wrong – a sense that transcends the barriers of language, ethnicity and culture is almost universally accepted. To have that admission, on paper, on behalf of the wider human species, carries immense weight. The text is an argument for the uniform necessities of man, no more, no less. And that is why it is so important.
Still, we cannot merely wish away our problems. What should we say of the flaws of the UNHDR? Could they not be bettered? Is it not worth starting afresh? We should certainly continue to ponder upon the text and its wider implications. If ever enshrined, we will need to painstakingly work through the clauses, and cover all the loopholes, one by one. But we would ill forget that the text has morale mandate. A whole world signed up to this. If the text was represented to the UN today, I doubt it would get very far. So let us leave the text for the moment as it is. It is good enough for now. At least… relatively.
