Heart of being human: `human rights' is such a common phrase that we no longer hear its deep echoes, no longer see its burning light

New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Todd Gitlin

HUMAN rights: the literal words deserve a moment's scrutiny. Human: member of the species, the single race homo sapiens. Whatever persons are called, or call themselves, wherever they live, they are human. Therefore human rights: benefits to which people are entitled simply by virtue of being human.

The very fact that `human rights' has become a catch-phrase, that it is inscribed on picket signs and diplomatic agendas everywhere, that the rights generate passions and motivate organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Medecins sans Frontieres, even that these rights are frequently honored in the breach, represents a human achievement of enormous proportions. The very lip service of governments is a measure that a value has achieved a certain legitimacy. Lip service is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

ARTICLE 28. EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO A SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN WHICH THE RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS SET FORTH IN THIS DECLARATION CAN BE FULLY REALIZED.

The fact that there exists a Universal Declaration of Human Rights - called `universal' rather than `international' to indicate that these rights pertain to human beings everywhere by virtue of their humanity, not by virtue of the existence of nation-states - is monumental. The Universal Declaration is an unprecedented affirmation of the unity of the human race, and a weapon against all who would usurp. That this Declaration is taken more seriously today than when it was adopted 50 years ago is all the more remarkable. The Declaration is a resource in the hands of the unjustly deprived everywhere. It affirms that rights are, in language taken from the American Declaration of Independence, `inalienable' - they cannot legitimately be rescinded or given up.

But obviously such high-flown claims immediately run up against the world's real and specific differences. There are immense material differences, observable from the outside, in human condition, health, longevity and so forth. We live in a period when people perceive and strongly assert other differences as well - differences experienced from the inside. These are differences in the answers people give to the question: `Who are you?'

`Identity' is the term in current use, and the common answers include understandings of nationality, `race', religion, sex, sexuality. These identities, with the exception of sexual matters, are all products of social life; they are not natural. They change, and they are multiple - a person `is' many things at the same time. But this is not to say their understandings, these labels, are casual, superficial. People live them deeply. To be Jew or Muslim, Serb or Croat, Greek or Macedonian, is a matter of passion - it tells to whom people feel connected deep down. This is who I am. Existence for most people feels local and partial more than universal.

So the fact that governments have agreed on paper about the nature of human rights only begins the debate, for the nub is that people disagree about exactly what constitutes human rights, and they disagree because their attachment to human universality is weaker than their attachments to partial and local identities, and thus divergent interpretations of what they, as particular human beings, need. Many would argue today that human rights are not an ensemble but a list, and even more, a zero-sum game: that, in the realest of real worlds, choices must be made. Human rights do not constitute, in this view, an indissoluble chain. Security trumps free expression, for example, or vice versa.

In particular, the charge is frequently made that freedom of expression or association is `Western'. What does this mean exactly? There is an argument from origins (these rights come from the West and are therefore colonialist) and an argument from power (these rights ratify and rationalize the power of the West and the rich).

Take the two arguments separately. It is undeniable that the concept emerged in the West - although as an oppositional force, not an official doctrine. Insofar as human rights achieved formal recognition, it was because they were forced upon official authority from below, by popular demand. The American Bill of Rights, for example, was added to the Constitution in 1789 as a concession to anti-Federalist forces and states that would not have approved a Constitution without them. But what do origins have to do with validity? The concept of zero originated in Egypt, but a Christian or Jewish mathematician from the United States is not entitled to dismiss it. All ideas occur to someone somewhere and circulate from there before they occur to others in other places, but where they crop up first has no bearing on their truth (or falsehood). As there is (whatever the Nazis thought) no `Jewish science', and (whatever the Stalinists thought) no `bourgeois biology', there are no `Western human rights'.

By the same token, the fact that certain arguments have been deployed by the powerful first does not mean that they would not also work to the advantage of the less powerful. History is replete with examples of a principle once reserved to elites but subsequently generalized by large populations to their advantage. The rights of lords to property or education, once exclusive or close to exclusive, were later claimed by serfs. In time, slaves appropriated the rights of their masters to literacy and women the rights of men. The rights of owners were appropriated by workers - all at great cost, and all to the benefit of society as a whole.