Our universal human rights are dated and not universal
About the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why large parts of the world can actually shrug their shoulders about human rights.
In the previous newsletter on human rights, I described how we arrived at the concept of human rights. It was about the age-old concept of natural law, the French and American Constitutions of 1789 and John Locke's theory, which formulated what people can claim by nature, also against the government. And it was about US President Roosevelt, who, on the eve of the Second World War, was prompted by the Vatican that human rights should be recorded worldwide. This idea served Roosevelt well to rally support for a war against the Nazis and fight against the colonialism of the European powers.
In this newsletter we will delve into the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will see that it was a Western get-together with one enfant terrible from Moscow. Apart from Latin America, the rest of the world was mostly along for the ride.
Ambitious networkers at Unesco
The war was barely over when in 1945 the United Nations and its subsidiary Unesco were founded. There would be a human rights declaration from the UN, that was already clear, but things did not go smoothly at the UN. The staff at Unesco was ambitious and more agile, and in 1946 it started its own research. No fewer than 150 leading thinkers worldwide were queried about universal rights in order to arrive at a multicultural consensus.
In 2018, the anthropologist Mark Goodale investigated the creation of that Unesco report. His report is shocking. Most of the running was made by two idealists: the British patrician Julian Huxley and the young, promising French philosopher Jacques Havet. Due to their elite background, both had a wonderful international network. Indeed, some 150 questionnaires were distributed all over the world, mainly among prominent thinkers, politicians and artists whom they knew, either directly or indirectly. However, only 56 answers were returned, and not all answers would please the researchers, let alone be processed in the report.
For instance, the British-American poet T.S. Eliot replied:
A statement of the rights of man, unless it was a tissue of ambiguities, could never, I think, be framed in such a way as to command the assent of all intelligent men.
— T.S. Eliot, quoted in: Mark Goodale, The myth of universality: The UNESCO “Philosophers’ Committee” and the making of human rights, Law & Social Inquiry (2018)
Even if such a statement were eventually drafted, the consequences of such a statement, Eliot said, would likely "turn out to be positively mischievous."
Eliot's response was wisely not included in the reporting.
Via-via, they also managed to elicit a response from Mahatma Gandhi. His response was a polite scribble, written in a moving train, with one substantively telling paragraph:
I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.
— Mahatma Gandhi, letter to Julian Huxley, 1947, published in: Unesco, Human Rights: contents and interpretations (1948)
This contrarian view of Gandhi was, of course, so out of order that it was politely included in the later compilation, but then completely ignored.
Although Huxley and Havet's network was extensive, it was by no means universal. Of the 56 responses, almost half came from the United Kingdom and the United States. If you add the responses from the rest of the Western bloc, you arrive at 80 percent Western respondents. Six responses came from the Soviet Union, three from (colonial) India, two from (Catholic) Latin America, and one from a Chinese Unesco employee in Paris. That was it.
And then the questionnaire. It started with the introduction, in which the development of Western ethics was explained in five pages, with special attention to the Enlightenment and Marxism. In one paragraph, some passing attention was paid to non-Western cultures, in which reference is made to:
… those numerous Indian thinkers who believe in the social importance and individual value of meditation and mystical experience. And we can be reasonably sure that the ferment of thought now apparent in the peoples of black, brown, or yellow skin-colour, from Africa to the Far East, is destined to result in still other formulations.
— Unesco, Human rights: contents and interpretations (1948)
The ignorance and lack of interest in non-Western cultures can still be explained from that time and context. But the pretence that it concerned a universal study, that makes your jaw drop.
And that was just the introduction. The questionnaire itself excels at questions that barely transcend the level of "don't you agree that ...?". This mainly concerns requests for substantiation of a list of 25 enumerated rights and freedoms:
In today's world, what are the theoretical grounds, practical scope and effective guarantees of specific rights or freedoms, such as: (…)
— Unesco, Human rights: contents and interpretations (1948)
The pious catholic Thomist Jacques Maritain also contributed and was asked to write the foreword. Maritain was very close with the pope (he is now up for canonisation). He was asked how it is possible that such a globally diverse group could come to a consensus on such a complex question. His answer: "We agree on the rights, but only on the condition that no one asks why."
No wonder Maritain said that one shouldn't ask why: the outcome was already in the questionnaire.
The final Unesco report that followed eventually became an unsystematic and biassed summary edited by two people: Havet and American philosophy professor Richard McKeon, an Aristotelian. So much for the intellectual underpinnings of universal human rights.
The ladies table
In the meantime, New York had not been completely idle. In 1946 a Human Rights Commission was formed with representatives from eighteen countries: in addition to a number of communist countries, three Islamic countries, India and China, the Western-Christian bloc formed the majority.
In 1947, the Commission installed an editorial committee, chaired by the widow Eleanor Roosevelt, a devout Protestant. Roosevelt was certainly not stupid, and very zealous, but she was not an intellectual, let alone a philosopher. When tempers ran too high again about, say, Thomistic scholasticism, she poured another cup of tea. Her role was first and foremost that of a diligent process facilitator, mainly fixed to keep relations with the soviets workable. And of course she had short lines of communication with the men of rank in Washington.
The editorial committee consisted of eight members: a Soviet communist, a Confucianist, a French Jew and five Christians. The Canadian lawyer John P. Humphrey was appointed secretary and was given the task of writing a first draft, mainly based on previously received drafts from various organisations. Humphrey was a Social Democrat. He spent a lot of time with his soulmate on the committee, the Chilean Catholic socialist Hernán Santa Cruz. Partly at the insistence of Latin American countries, where a Roman-Red ideology had many supporters, he had already included social and economic rights in the first draft. This, of course, was not against the will of the Communist delegates.
The French-Jewish René Cassin would later grossly exaggerate his role in the creation of the text. It would earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. In reality, Cassin was a charismatic vain, with no more than average clout, who could communicate only with the help of interpreters because he spoke only French. He hardly listened to the others, and felt that the declaration should resemble the French Declaration of 1789 as closely as possible.
In the background, the aforementioned French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain read along. He had great influence over a number of delegation members, particularly Charles Malik, one of the more high-profile members of the committee. Malik was a Lebanese Catholic, strongly influenced by Tomasso d'Aquino's natural law, and educated at American universities. Malik was a man with a mission: to spread Christian ideas in the Middle East.
Malik often quarrelled with the Chinese delegate, the Confucianist P.C. Chang. Chang had had his academic training in the United States. He represented China, but not Mao's China, but the pro-American Kuomintang, which had taken refuge in Taiwan. Chang was an outsider in the group, constantly having to point out to his fellow members that Christian natural-law thinking and 18th-century Western Enlightenment ideals were by no means universal ideas. He succeeded in denouncing overly explicit Western perspectives, but the main rights-based structure of the declaration, with freedom and equality ideals as the main focus, remained unchanged from the outset. He based his flexible attitude on the flimsy story that Confucianism had had an essential influence on the Western Enlightenment. As time progressed, Chang found himself increasingly alone against the Seven Wise Men from the West, who hadn't even bothered to delve into Confucianism or any other Eastern philosophical culture. Chang gradually became more and more irritable.
The communist delegates formed one bloc and participated intensively and usually even constructively in the deliberations. Nevertheless, they ultimately decided to abstain from voting. The idea of universal human rights was not compatible with their Marxist-Leninist views: human rights can only apply within a state. If such rights are not protected and implemented by the state, human rights become mere abstractions, empty illusions, easily written down and just as easily put aside. Only in a classless society such as theirs was there unity between the individual and the state that allowed rights to have real meaning.
What was the discussion about?
If you look at the final text of the declaration, firstly you see an amalgam of the American Bill of rights and the French Déclaration, both of 1789. The assignment to the committee had literally stated that there should be a universal Bill of rights. That had already been agreed during the war between Washington, London and Moscow. It was clear from the outset that the declaration would be based on rights.
Based mainly on input from Latin America and the United States, the Canadian Humphrey came up with a first version. There is no evidence of any initiatives from other parts of the world outside some European input. Humphrey's approach is clearly a liberal piece of work, with all the classical freedoms that entails. Locke's hand is recognisable in a right to life, liberty and property. Everything that is not prohibited by law is permitted, as stated in Article 25. The exercise of rights is limited by the rights of others, as stated in Article 3.
In addition, Humphrey had also included social and economic rights. Equal access to all professions (article 23), a right to health care (article 35) and education (article 36), good working conditions (article 38), a fair income (article 40) and social security (article 41). A right to housing, food and leisure was also included.
Tempers ran highest in the committee about colonialism. Despite pressure from the Soviet Union, Africa and Asia, the protection of minorities and the right of peoples to self-determination have not been included. England and France in particular blocked this. Most colonised countries were simply not yet represented in the UN.
Women's rights were also much discussed. Roman Catholic delegates, in particular, were not very forthcoming. And there was pressure from Latin America and the Soviet Union to explicitly include trade union rights, which Europe and the United States were less enthusiastic about. A number of family values have also been included, and the text avoids references to a supreme being or to creation. The word right occurs 54 times in the text, the word duty once, the word responsibility nowhere.
If you want to read more about the discussions that have taken place, I refer to the book by Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: origins, drafting & intent (1999). Suffice it to say that Latin American countries, the Soviet Union, the United States, the Western European representatives and India in particular set the tone in the deliberations. And that many discussions can be traced back to the ideological and political topics that were current at the time. There is actually no detachment among the participants: the reporting does not show any efforts to abstract the Declaration from time-related, cultural or political differences of opinion.
Like the Soviet countries and South Africa (apartheid!), Saudi Arabia abstained from voting on the proposed draft of the Universal Declaration. The Saudis had particularly resented the right to freely choose marriage and the right to change one's religion. The Arab objections had been brushed aside by the assembly.
The authors of the draft statement have largely considered standards recognised in Western civilisation and ignored older civilisations that are beyond the experimental stage and whose institutions such as marriage have proven their wisdom over the centuries. It was not for the committee to proclaim the superiority of one civilisation over all others and to establish uniform standards for all the countries of the world.
— Jamil Al-Baroody, Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations, in the General Assembly (1948)
Conclusion
The world of 1948 looks different from that of the 21st century. Colonialism is largely over, Communism has succumbed, the Cold War is over, Western dominance is on the wane, new world powers such as China and India have emerged, the Islamic world is asserting itself, the population of Africa is exploding, post-war Western development aid has proved largely paternalistic and ineffective; nevertheless, global prosperity and life expectancy have increased immensely. In 1948, religiously inspired natural law and eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking still formed the mainstream view in legal philosophy. Where in 1948 the authors were still sincerely convinced to impose a universally applicable, superior standard according to Western design, there is now every reason to doubt this.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a time-bound document, an amalgam of the French and American Bills of Rights, a representation of political relations before decolonisation and during the Cold War, a document with disproportionate Roman Catholic influence of natural law thinking and shaky Enlightenment ideas. The idea that citizens have any rights vis-à-vis the state at all, especially rights of liberty and equality, is alien to varying degrees from various prominent, especially Asian, religious cultures.
Despite all those caveats, you'd probably rather live in a world with this human rights catalogue than without it. But the claimed universality is a myth. “We” have imposed our cultural values on the world. And if that is no longer accepted in other parts of the world, that may be nasty, but at the same time completely understandable.
Further reading
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), Human rights, comments and interpretations (1948)
Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: origins, drafting & intent (1999)
Mary Ann Glendon, A world made new. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2001)
Michael Ignatieff, The attack on human rights, Foreign Affairs (2001)
Samuel Moyn, The last utopia: Human rights in history (2010)
Mark Goodale, The myth of universality: the UNESCO “Philosophers’ Committee” and the making of human rights, Law & Social Inquiry (2018)
More episodes
This is the second newsletter in a series about human rights and toleration. The series consists of the following episodes:
Was drawing up human rights really such a good idea?
Anyone who questions the existence of universal human rights can count on outrage. Yet that's exactly what I'm going to do here.Our universal human rights are dated and not universal
About the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why large parts of the world can actually shrug their shoulders about human rights.How to lose your dignity
Out of human dignity, everyone can make their own sense. This is convenient when looking for universal human rights. About the conflicting meanings of human dignity, and why we aren't born with it.No, by nature, you have no rights to anything
Why we aren't born with rights. Rights as a social construction. About natural law versus natural rights. About innate moral modules and our ingrained sense of justice.Against human rights
Anyone who is sceptical about human rights does not make himself popular. But since the 17th century, criticism of human rights has not been soft. On criticism from Hobbes, Bentham, Marx, the communitarians and the Confucianists.Down with human rights!
The negative effects of universal human rights predominate. We have to get rid of them. There are alternatives. We can move from rights to duties. From a legal to a moral dialogue.
Sarandë, 28 April, 2023
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