The Humanist Basis for Human Rights.

William F. Schulz AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION HUMANIST OF THE YEAR

It was a great and undeserved honor to be named the 2000 Humanist of the Year. It is chastening, to say the least, to be included in the pantheon with the likes of Alice Walker, Ashley Montagu, Isaac Asimov, and Helen Caldicott. When I departed the presidency of the Unitarian Universalist Association seven years ago at the age of forty-three, someone remarked, "He is a young man with a brilliant future behind him." The generosity of the American Humanist Association in honoring me rescued me from that fate and I will be ever grateful.

I'm particularly thankful because the humanist tradition is one I long have cherished--from my early days as a young person in the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the feet of an unreconstructed humanist UU minister, Edward Cahill; through my days at Meadville/ Lombard Theological School, where I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the "Making of the Humanist Manifesto"; through my years in the parish ministry and as president of the UUA.

I have tried to keep alive in my professional life the spirit of a Leon Birkhead who, as humanist minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Kansas City in the 1920s, joined a group of his Christian colleagues in a prayer service designed to alleviate a terrible drought that had struck the Midwest that year. But Birkhead showed up at the meeting with an umbrella--an item his more orthodox colleagues had all forgotten to bring. "I take it," Birkhead later told a reporter, "that I am the only member of the clergy who has any faith."

When Pat Robertson was running for president of the United States in 1986, the second year of my UUA presidency, he announced that he would surely win because he was running with God's blessing. When he came in fourth in the Massachusetts primary, I announced to the public that Robertson should be prosecuted forthwith under the Massachusetts blasphemy laws for losing the election and thereby violating the law that prohibited bringing scorn and ridicule to the name of God.

So I appreciate this honor and trust I will be deserving of it. Part of the way I do that, of course, is through my work as executive director of Amnesty International. But I want to address here not international human rights crises but, rather, the philosophical basis for the whole human rights struggle.

While everyone--even the world's most notorious tyrants--agrees that human rights are codified in that remarkable little document--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)--passed in 1948 by the United Nations at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt, very few people understand the basis upon which that document's authority rests. And that basis, interestingly enough, is one that could quite reasonably be described as derived from humanism.

In one sense it would be wonderful if we could prove to the satisfaction of the world that God has imbued human beings with a set of rights and even better if we could show that those rights happen to coincide with the ones articulated in the UDHR. Such proof would offer human rights such an elevated status that not even the most vicious dictator would dare to challenge them.

But it doesn't take a sophisticated thinker to recognize that, given the diversity of religious opinion in the world, God's injunctions are not going to provide satisfactory grounds for defending the notion of rights beyond a certain circle of believers. Even within singular religious traditions, there is often widespread disagreement about how God wants human beings to order their lives here on Earth.

My favorite example of such a difference of opinion within the Christian tradition concerns the school of devotees in the early church called Montanists who believed that only by eating a steady diet of radishes could a person be saved. Had the Montanists' view prevailed, today's Christians would take vegetables with their communion wine rather than bread. It was exactly because of this recognition--that to base a justification of rights on an appeal to deity or religion was bound to result in endless quarrels--that those who composed the Universal Declaration firmly rejected placing any reference to a deity in the document.

But if God isn't the direct source of rights, perhaps human nature is. The second major argument in defense of rights has been the argument from natural law: that rights are derived from what we share in common as human beings, from the fact, for example, that we are "rational" creatures. But what makes an appeal to the "laws of nature" a problematic basis for defending human rights is not too different from why God fails the test. It is simply impossible to discern to the satisfaction of a fractious world what counts as ethical imperatives derived from observation of human nature. Whose nature, after all, provides the standard? Is it the nature of a Hitler or the nature of a Gandhi? Both, after all, were human beings, much as we have tried to label Hitler a monster. "What is man," Isak Dinessen asked, "but an ingenious machine for turning red wine into urine?" Is that the measure of humanity?

The fact is that the world community has never been able to agree upon either a divine basis for human rights or a basis derived from natural law. But there is a third broad way to justify human rights which, while it doesn't provide them the status of God's endorsement or nature's sanction, does ground them in the experience of the human community. That third way goes by many names--pragmatism, communitarianism, and postmodernism, among others--but ultimately is nothing more than an expression of the humanist impulse. Whatever name you use, this third way appeals to that which is recognizable throughout the world: the consequences of cruelty and the signals of suffering.

The only hotel still open in 1997 in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, following years of civil war, had a stunning view of the ocean from its front porch. Monrovia had been all but destroyed by the fighting, but this hotel had survived (its Lebanese owner, I was told, would rush out waving dollar bills at any soldiers who approached it with impure intentions) and its front porch had become the center of intrigue in the city. The afternoon I arrived on a human rights mission in Liberia, the porch resembled the setting for a Graham Greene novel.

In one corner sat two mercenaries, enjoying their beers and swaggering loudly, their rifles propped against the railing. In another corner a couple in tie-dyed T-shirts and Birkenstocks discussed their next destination--the smoke from their hashish mixing lazily with the humidity. In still a third corner a middle-aged man hunched over his table, a jeweler's magnifying glass clenched in his eye as he examined mineral specimens--their apparent value signaled by the frequency with which he glanced warily over his shoulder. But it was the occupant of the fourth corner who made the scene complete: a beautiful parrot, chained by his left foot to the perch, who repeated the same refrain at ten- to twelve-second intervals: "Welcome to Liberia. Fuck you! Welcome to Liberia. Fuck you!"

If the hotel's porch was straight out of a novel, the city's prison could have been lifted from Bosch's depiction of hell. Sixty-four prisoners, most still awaiting trial, usually on charges of theft, occupied six or eight filthy cells. Dried vomit and feces caked floors, walls, and the one mattress provided per cell. Scabies and gangrene were rampant among the prisoners, but it was one youngster, about sixteen years old, who stands out in my memory. His body was covered with red dots. He gave no sign of having been beaten or tortured in the conventional fashion, and he readily admitted that the Nigerian peacekeeping forces had caught him stealing a radio. But how to account for the dots? When the Nigerians had taken him into custody, they apparently weren't content just to turn him over to the local authorities or toss him in prison. They had decided to have some fun and had forced him to lie down for over an hour in a pit of red ants. Even a week later the bites were driving him mad.

I hear stories of mistreatment like this all the time. Sometimes the ingenuity of the perpetrators takes my breath away. Before they were largely defeated by the Taliban, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan had devised a simple but terrifying form of punishment: they strapped their prisoners to dead bodies and left them "coupled" for days on end, after which the prisoners were forced to eat what they were told was human flesh. When the Taliban came to power, they at least equaled the ferocity of the Mujahadeen, chopping off the thumbs of women seen in public wearing nail polish and executing gay men by ordering battle tanks to topple concrete walls onto them, crushing them to death in front of a crowd of spectators. And consider the practice of some units of the U.S.-trained Salvadoran military during the war there. Not only did one of the battalions reportedly harden its men by having them slit the throats of their prisoners, but other soldiers took part in what was called dewombing in which a pregnant woman was killed and her fetus ripped from her womb and tossed in the air, to be caught by the soldiers on bayonets.

Whenever I hear stories like this, I am, as most people would be, both stricken at heart for the victims and repulsed by the cruelty. And why do I have these reactions?

I am stricken because I have the understanding to imagine, at least in proximate form, what the experience, the pain, must have felt like. I am stricken because on some level I identify with the victims; I know what it is to bleed. Though I have never been bitten by a horde of red ants or had a thumb amputated or been crushed by a wall, I have enough acquaintance with human suffering--either my own or that of those I love--that my memory of it stokes my recognition.

In a magnificent essay called "The Moral Necessity of Metaphor," the novelist Cynthia Ozick quotes a biblical passage from Leviticus: "The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you and you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (19:34). And then she goes on to say that it is exactly because we remember when we too were strangers in the land of Egypt and can apply it metaphorically to others that

   Doctors can imagine what it is to be their patients. Those who have no pain
   can imagine those who suffer. Those at the center can imagine what it is to
   be outside. The strong can imagine what it is to be weak. Illuminated lives
   can imagine the dark.... We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of
   strangers.

Robert Frost once observed that poems begin with a lump in the throat, and I think human rights do, too. The third way to justify human rights, far better than appeals to God or nature, is to point to the capacity to identify with others--the capacity for empathy or solidarity. This is a capacity of such richness and complexity that something like it--at least as concerns mothers and children--is required for the propagation of the human species. Children in our own culture as young as one year old have been known to evidence it, and some ethologists even believe it can be identified in other animals. It is in any case a phenomenon so widespread, if not universal, that we can hardly imagine a society existing without it.

How then can empathy, solidarity, or fellow feeling (what used to be called fraternity)--the recognition of our common humanity and fate--be the grounds for human rights when we are confronted on a daily basis with overwhelming evidence of its exact opposite, of human cruelty? What about the incontrovertible fact that torturers often simply deny the humanity of their victims and liken them to brutes or animals? In The Merchant of Venice Shylock cries out:

   I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
   senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same
   weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means? ... If you
   prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison
   us, do we not die?

What do we say to the killer who responds to Shylock, "Yes, a Jew has eyes, but so does a pig"?

The answer to this question is twofold. First, we need to understand that the existence of cruelty doesn't necessarily vitiate the power of empathy. In some ways it can even confirm it. For how could those Nigerian soldiers have known that throwing the Liberian prisoner into an ant pile would inflict pain if they themselves lacked the capacity to imagine such suffering were they the victims? It isn't that all torturers are incapable of understanding suffering. In a sense some understand it all too well. This is one of the reasons it isn't helpful to label the purveyors of torment "monsters," "demons," "animals" or "sickos." It is exactly because most of them are, in Nietzsche's phrase "human, all too human" that their actions are in some measure recognizable to us. Most torturers are not pathological in the clinical sense; they are, unfortunately, in many cases quite common or, in Hannah Arendt's famous word, banal human beings.

I said that when I heard of cases of cruelty I responded with revulsion. But it isn't the kind of revulsion I might feel at a science fiction character's violence or at a lion attacking a human child. It is a revulsion grounded in part in recognition that the capacity to inflict suffering, like the capacity to reel compassion, is a familiar one.

When I was a child, I made friends with a gentle little dog across the street from my home. Every day after school this dog Amy and I would play together. One of our favorite games was a dancing game in which I would take Amy's forepaws in my hands and we would dance around the yard. I noticed though that, after a minute or two of dancing, Amy's hind legs would get sore and she would pull away. The first few times that I sensed her discomfort, I let go of her paws immediately and we went on to another game. But one day, when I felt Amy pull away, I decided to hold on. Finally, after three or four minutes, when she yelped in agony, I let her go. But the next day I repeated my demonic act. It was fascinating to feel this little creature so entirely under my control.

Naturally, the longer I kept this up the less eager Amy was to see me, until finally she cowered and whimpered at my approach. I was lucky that she was such a gentle dog for she had every right to have bitten me and, when I recognized what I had done, I was deeply frightened and ashamed of myself. Whatever could have taken hold of me that I would hurt something so tame and innocent that I thought I loved? I tried to make amends to Amy but our relationship was never again the same. And though years later I came to understand much better why I had acted as I had, this little incident taught me at an early age how easy it is for each of us to acquaint ourselves with cruelty.

Studies of how torturers are trained reveal that they often are intentionally subjected to extreme forms of physical and verbal abuse by their trainers--designed not just to induce pliability but to stimulate anger and stress so profound that it readily trumps any feelings of compassion that may have been present before the training began. It takes much more than this, of course, to make a torturer, but the point is that cruelty is pervasive in this world and yet that fact doesn't nullify the importance of empathy. It merely reinforces the need to buttress it, to encourage whatever impulses in me finally led me to let poor Amy go.

This is exactly why the world has created rules or norms in the form of human rights: to "institutionalize" empathy so that we can respond to the person who would claim that a Jew is no different from a pig. This is the second part of the answer to the challenge of cruelty: that far from invalidating the claims and imperatives of memory and metaphor, our human capacity to wreak havoc, to ignore the angels of our inspiration, leads directly to the need for some agreement among us as to how best to order our common lives, especially in relationship to strangers and the weak.

Solidarity is an ephemeral passion. And if sociobiologists are right that its power fluctuates in direct relation to how much genetic material we share with one another (the closer the kin, the more empathy we feel, a theory that prompted J. B. S. Haldane to offer to sacrifice himself for either two siblings or eight first cousins), then we are especially in need of standards that treat of our behavior toward those with whom we share no inherent bonds--those outside our family or nation, those whom we may be tempted to label "nonhuman." We need standards to protect us as much from legislators--like those during the Korean War who said that the life of even one American was more important than "all of Asia"--as from the most blood-thirsty tribalist.

Likewise, those who lack the power and resources to ward off oppression are as much in need of imperatives that will protect them as are those we simply dislike or who may have committed a great crime. That we often fail to honor our empathetic impulses ("Auschwitz, oh dear, no!" Sonia Orwell said of a friend, "That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very minor death camp.") or that some of us are hard-hearted and some downright cruel doesn't mean that we ought to ignore the best that is within us when envisioning how to live together.

It is a remarkable achievement that the international community has formally agreed upon a set of norms--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--by which all nations are expected to abide in their treatment of strangers, the weak, and the oppressed--a set of standards designed to counter cruelty and organize society for the common good. But can the UDHR alone prove to the tyrant that those abhorred as subhuman are deserving of respect? Can it convince those Nazis who worried that packing cows too tightly into cattle cars might constitute cruelty to animals to extend that sympathy to human cargo? Of course not, but no other document or argument could either.

What the declaration does specify, however, are rights in the form of norms to which every person can appeal--rights that the international community has derived from the human capacity to identify with others' plights and that are designed to depict the best way we know of to counter cruelty and build a decent society. In this sense, rights constitute a set of promises that those with power make in recognition of their obligations to order our collective life in a way consistent with what we regard as humane.

Such a conception of rights doesn't lend them the kind of irrefragable authority that God's will or nature's command might. But this conception of rights does have its advantages. For one thing, its authority devolves from the fact that it reflects values that all member states of the United Nations have at least implicitly agreed to share. This is very helpful in responding to those who would criticize the notion of universal human rights because they claim that the rights itemized in the UDHR grew out of a Western, Enlightenment tradition and therefore have no bearing on non-Western practices. To hold us accountable to your standards, such critics say, is like calling the ancient Aztecs to account for human sacrifice when, according to their beliefs, it was necessary to make the sun rise every day.

The response is simple. The UDHR doesn't pretend to reflect cosmic values ascertainable by some process uninfluenced by culture. Of course, it emerged out of an Enlightenment tradition. But all values have some cultural source and their origin is no measure of their validity. The UDHR provides a set of norms affirmed by as wide an assortment of nations and cultures as we are ever likely to find, designed to describe how best to organize certain aspects of society today. Rejection of these norms puts one at odds with the vast majority of the members of the international community.

The question to ask about rights is not "Are they true?" but "Do they work? Do they spread empathy, combat cruelty, and protect the weak from their oppressors?" Our experience is that they do. As Jerry Adler once observed, we "know better than to think that the sun needs a fresh heart to rise every day ... [but] we keep on killing one another. We just don't have any reasons that would make sense to an Incan priest." That we have fewer and fewer reasons to torture and kill one another that make sense to the international community is thanks to the notion of human rights. And that we have a notion of human rights at all is thanks to the philosophy of humanism.

In the final analysis, of course, the human rights movement welcomes all comers to the struggle, no matter what they think the source of rights to be. The Catholic church is one of the major opponents of the death penalty and I revere it for that stand; I don't care how it came to its conclusion. But we ought never forget that the fundamental rationale for human rights--at least as far as the world community is concerned--is a humanist rationale in all its nonsectarianism and generosity of spirit.

Dr. William F. Schulz is executive director of Amnesty International (U.S.A.) and the immediate past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He has been involved in a wide variety of international and social justice causes and traveled extensively on behalf of human rights. He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, has appeared extensively on television and radio news programs, and lectures widely.