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

Can we move beyond a simple restatement of positions, the mind's rights versus the body's? Individual's rights versus a culture's? How many more persons must be tortured, murdered, displaced, starved, unemployed, to serve the appetite of the custodians of power? How many of the poor (and disproportionately young) must die amid the complacency of the wealthy (and disproportionately old)?

It would serve all people well to exercise great care before assuming that the various human rights are incompatible. The appropriate way to honor the right to eat is to act on behalf of the right to eat, not to subtract the right to publish. We do not need a race to the bottom.

Not only is the confrontation tedious; it does no good for those who suffer. The rights of the Tibetans to self-determination are not supported if China cannot feed its people. The rights of women to sexual lives are not protected if the rights of Kurds are abrogated. Salman Rushdie and his readers are not protected from the fatwa when Muslims are subordinated in Israel or Algeria. No partisan of the debate about the universality of human rights is entitled to hold one right hostage against another.

The burden on the West is to move past smug restatements of its Enlightenment faith, to acknowledge that its own record with respect to the rule of law has been deeply flawed, and to acknowledge that sustenance and security matter as much as the right of expression. The West could use humility about its own achievements, for it was not born with liberties intact in its breast. Centuries of struggle were required to abolish slavery, to secure freedom of the press and the rest of the freedoms that are still too casually dismissed as `bourgeois' or `luxuries of the prosperous'. Concretely, it is also incumbent upon the West to acknowledge by its actions that sustenance matters - not simply to croon praises of free markets. Free trade does not solve, and may exacerbate, the travails of poor countries, and countries that experience wrenching poverty are not good guarantors of law or liberty.

Meanwhile, the burden on the East and South is to acknowledge that the ensemble of human rights are (largely if not always) compatible in practice. They are not automatically at loggerheads, and human ingenuity allows for many complex permutations and combinations of values. Jailing writers does not help a country feed its people. Torture does nothing to make a local economy sustainable. On the contrary: the jailers of writers are often the same governments that suppress workers' rights and collude with the destroyers of rainforests. Suppressers of women are often deniers of bread.

Moreover, `Asian values' are not the Confucian monolith that certain rulers proclaim. There is a multiplicity of traditions available under the rubrics `Asian', `Buddhist', `Hindu', `Muslim', just as there are many Christianities, many Western traditions - including one not so proudly advertised these days, fascism.

After Communism and the Cold War, with their spurious unifications, the world is awash with conflicting claims, competing ways of seeing. It bears repeating that the political problem is not difference - difference is a human fact, or rather, a multiplicity of human facts. The problems include murderous conflict and the ruthless suppression of difference. From the present vantage-point it is blindingly clear that the Cold War served to stabilize an ignoble world order. With its meltdown comes centrifugal motion, which in some ways is the proof of the world's plenitude, its wealth of diversity. But much avoidable suffering also results. The horsemen of the apocalypse ride high. Nationalist and tribal resurgences seem to mock all universal declarations.