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Introduction:
Justice
Ruth Hutchinson
Comment:
Be Not Deceived...
David McMillan
From
the Director
David Porter
From
Just Us to Justice
Duncan Morrow
Right
Relationships or Justice
Brian Lennon
The
Truth, the Whole Truth
Alwyn Thomson
Walking
for Ministers
Graham Cheesman
Dealing
with the Pain
David Bolton
The
Case for Human Rights
Martin O’Brien
What’s
Wrong with Rights?
Alwyn Thomson
WHAT'S
WRONG WITH RIGHTS
Human Rights is the new religion of Western liberalism. Its scripture
is the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Its
denominations are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Its priests
are the Human Rights advocates and activists. To challenge this ideology
is to blaspheme. Nonetheless, there is much that needs to be challenged.
Liberal Fundamentalism
The ideology of Human Rights is one key expression of the ideology of liberalism. Its advocates portray liberalism as standing above the world’s ideological conflicts. In the playground squabbles of nationalism, socialism, Christianity, Islam and the like, liberalism is presented as the patient teacher refusing to take sides, seeking to educate the unruly children, armed only with the virtues if tolerance and respect.
In truth, liberalism is down in the playground with the rest fighting its corner. Liberalism is, after all, just another worldview doing what all worldviews do — attempting to interpret the totality of human life and experience within its own frame of reference.
However, this liberal worldview is at odds with the Church's worldview. Consider the following from the UDHR.
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” (Article 18)
This Article makes two assumptions central to the liberal understanding of religion. First, it assumes that liberalism has the ‘right’ to define the limits of acceptable religious behaviour. Second, it assumes that religion is primarily a matter of private belief. Both assumptions are at odds with Christian faith. For Christianity is not a set of private beliefs to be graciously tolerated by the liberal state. Christianity, embodied in the Church is an alternative way of talking about and relating to our world. And part of that alternative way of talking about the world involves denying to liberalism the pretence of neutrality and civility with which it cloaks itself. Until we understand the assumptions that lie at the heart of liberal ideology we cannot clearly address the implications of Human Rights ideology for society or for the Church.
The Fallacy of Universality
All major declarations of human rights assert that Human Rights are ‘universal’. That is, they are held to be in some sense inherent in all human beings simply by virtue of their being human. They are, moreover, held to be more fundamental that the specific laws and traditions of particular societies. So, in a clash between Human Rights and the laws and traditions of a particular community, it is the latter that have to give way.
However, this assertion is unsustainable. The definition of Human Rights is shaped by the particular social and historical location of those drawing up particular declarations. Human Rights are neither inalienable nor universal. They are built on the shifting sand of power politics and popular opinion (or prejudice). The UDHR, for example, clearly assumes and reflects a Western liberal political system (Article 21), economic system (Articles 23, 24) and judicial system (Articles 8,10,11). It also clearly reflects its historical context — the aftermath of World War 2.
To take a more specific example, consider the death penalty. The UDHR makes no mention of this issue. It does, however, state in Article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” This language reflects the language of the US Bill of Rights: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” (Eighth Amendment). In 1972 the US Supreme Court, for a variety of muddled reasons, declared that the death penalty constituted ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. However, in 1976, for equally muddled reasons, the same court decided that it did not and executions recommenced. What had changed? The Bill of Rights had not changed. But American public opinion and the political complexion of the court had.
Confusion also reigns in the European Convention on Human Rights. Having asserted the right to life, it promptly concedes to signatories the authority to execute criminals (Article 2.1). In 1983 a Protocol was drawn up on the abolition of the death penalty (Protocol 6). However, it allowed for the retention of the death penalty in time of war. Moreover, states that had ratified the Convention were under no obligation to ratify the Protocol.
If the UDHR is silent and the US Supreme Court muddled, at least Amnesty International is clear: “The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and violates the right to life.” If on an issue as fundamental as life and death, non-governmental organisations, governments and international bodies cannot decide what is a human right and what is not, how can the claim to universality and inalienability be sustained?
Give Me My Rights
The ideology of Human Rights tends to reinforce the ideology of self. Individuals or groups rename their desires as needs to be satisfied, asserting that it is their right to have them satisfied. A consequence of this is that we then absolve ourselves of responsibility. Asserting our own needs, we dismiss or ignore our responsibility for others. When our needs are not satisfied there is always someone to blame. We are not at fault, we are victims, we have been denied our rights. The consequences of the Human Rights ideology are all around us in a culture of self, of victimhood, of blame and resentment.
I'll See You In Court
Finally, the ideology of rights tends to create societies marked by confrontation and accusation. This is not surprising given that the ideology is so strongly legal in nature. Human Rights advocates are also advocates of international law, international courts, incorporation of Human Rights declarations into national law and the like. With this legal emphasis within the ideology it should come as no surprise that the result is conflict, for Western legal processes are confrontational by their very nature. The result once more is a culture of blame and victimhood.
These practical difficulties are clearly illustrated in the conflict over abortion in the United States. Both sides present their arguments with an appeal to rights, both sides attempt to use the law and the courts to impose their views on society as a whole, both sides demonise and abuse the other. Worse still, this conflict has often been violent and is, at times, murderous. And all of us should be able to see the central role appeals to rights play in the conflict over disputed parades in Northern Ireland.
An Alternative
To point out the flaws and failings of Human Rights ideology is not to disparage the many sincere activists and advocates, who believe wholeheartedly that the pursuit of Human Rights is fundamental. Yet the aspirations to the creation of a different kind of society are not matched by the reality. Human Rights simply become another weapon in the armoury of weapons we humans use against one another.
This disjunction between the aspiration and the reality simply reflects the disjunction between our createdness in the image of God and our fallenness. As bearers of the divine image we turn upwards to God and outwards to the creation - not least our fellow human beings. As a fallen people we turn against God, turn away from our neighbours and turn in on ourselves.
So, on the one hand we turn to the world with a desire for justice and human well-being; on the other, we turn to the pursuit of justice for ourselves (often merely to sanction our own desires) and our own well-being. Worse still, we pursue our well-being through hostility to God and indifference towards our fellow human beings. Against the power of this sinful turn, that lies at the root of our human being, liberal ideology has no answer.
That liberalism does not have the answer to the challenges facing us as people is recognised by some within that tradition. So Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that “a decent and humane society requires a shared language of the good. The one our society lives by — a language of rights — has no terms for those dimensions of the human good which require acts of virtue unspecifiable as a legal or civil obligation.”
But it is not the business of the church to simply fill the gaps in the discourse of liberalism. For liberalism and its Human Rights offspring is incompatible with Christianity since Christianity, too, claims to be a way of interpreting the whole of life. Liberalism gets around this difficulty, this challenge, by policing the social space in a way that allows churches a role only on terms determined by liberalism itself. Thus the churches are subservient to the pursuit of liberalism's goals and values.
It would be a tragedy, if the church in Northern Ireland, having finally broken free of its subservience to the discourse of nationalisms, were to voluntarily make itself subservient to the discourse of liberalism.
What then should the church’s role be? Two things spring to mind. First, the church’s key role is to be the church — that place that knows and understands the all encompassing discourse of biblical and Christian tradition. Moreover, it is to be the place where that discourse is proclaimed and effected in the internal relationships of the body. The church is not to be one strand of civic society but an alternative community, an alternative ‘civis’. In this community human dignity is not intrinsic but God given — without God we are as the dust of the earth. In this community we do not demand that our God given dignity be recognised, but we recognise that dignity in others and serve the, having the same mind as Christ.
Second, from this position the church has an obligation to engage with society. It may be that there are indeed common grounds for working with and speaking to the wider society. This can be understood in various ways — through the commonality of human creation in the divine image, through the operations of divine grace, through the historical fact of the presence of Christian tradition in the life of Western societies generally, or through some sense of natural law. However, this should not blind us to the fact that ultimately Christian discourse is given and shaped by the God we know in Jesus, while the discourse of liberalism and Human Rights ideology is not. A truly Trinitarian church in practice as well as in belief cannot be comfortable in liberal society or in any society that counterposes an alternative discourse — even one so apparently noble as Human Rights.
Alwyn Thomson - Research Officer with ECONI.
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