| | | The History of the “Human Rights”Are Human Rights a “Western, Modern” Concept? |  |
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أحمد محمد لبن Ahmad.M.Lbn
مؤسس ومدير المنتدى
عدد المساهمات : 49023
العمر : 72
| | موضوع: The History of the “Human Rights”Are Human Rights a “Western, Modern” Concept? الثلاثاء 15 يناير 2019, 10:49 pm | |
| The History of the “Human Rights”Are Human Rights a “Western, Modern” Concept?
Views vary widely concerning the inception and history of human rights. For example, Mayer writes, “Concepts of human rights are just one part of a cluster of institutions transplanted since the nineteenth century from the West.” J. Donnelly is one of the most adamant in denying that any other civilization (including the pre-modern West) had any concept coming close to the contemporary concept of human rights. He wrote, for example,
Most non-western cultural and political traditions lack not only the practice of human rights but the very concept. As a matter of historical fact, the concept of human rights is an artifact of modern western civilization.
Elsewhere, Donnelly unequivocally reiterated this when he said, “I argue that non-Western cultural and political traditions, like the premodern West, lacked not only the practice of human rights but also the very concept.”
On the other hand, Yogindra Khushalani claims that “the concept of human rights can be traced to the origin of the human race itself.” Perhaps more realistically,the Encyclopedia Britannica states,
Most students of human rights trace the historical origins of the concept [of human rights] back to ancient Greece and Rome, where it was closely tied to the premodern natural law doctrines of Greek Stoicism (the school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium, which held that a universal working force pervades all creation and that human conduct therefore should be judged according to, and brought into harmony with, the law of nature).
Additionally, as noted earlier, some Muslim authors imply that the idea of human rights began with the coming of Islam. Commenting on this phenomenon, Donnelly writes,
In almost all contemporary Arab literature on this subject [human rights], we find a listing of the basic rights established by modern conventions and declarations, and then a serious attempt to trace them back to Koranic texts (Zakaria 228). Many authors (e.g., Tabandeh 1970:1,85) even argue that contemporary human rights doctrines merely replicate 1400-year-old Islamic ideas. The standard argument in this now extensive literature is that “Islam has laid down some universal fundamental rights for humanity as a whole, which are to be observed and respected under all circumstances … fundamental rights for every man by virtue of his status as a human being” (Mawdudi 1976:10). “The basic concepts and principles of human rights [have] from the very beginning been embodied in Islamic law.”
(Incidentally, Donnelly ends that passage by expressing his views toward such claims, “Such claims, however, are almost entirely baseless.” )
Ishay highlights the fact that the origin of human rights is a politically charged question wherein some privilege will be given to a particular value system against any challenges to that original orthodoxy. Thus, one can find such various claims about the origins of human rights.
The most obvious question that arises now is:
How could these researchers come to such different conclusions concerning the history and origins of human rights? The answer to that question is actually remarkably simple. With all the talk about the importance of human rights today, the sometimes unmentioned fact is that various people have very different understandings of what human rights is actually all about. Hence, some can argue that “human rights” can be traced back to ancient history while others can argue that it is a “modern, western” invention.
It is hard to conceive that earlier civilizations had no recognition of certain “rights” that every individual human possessed. Rights such as the right to form a family, freedom of movement and so on were more or less—just as nowadays many rights are “more or less” —accepted and respected without having such things spelled out as “human rights.” This was particularly true in Islamic Law wherein there is a general principle that states that all things are considered permissible unless there is a stated prohibition against it. In other words, in essence, every individual has the right or the freedom to do any or all things that have not been prohibited by the law. This was probably never stated as a “right” as such since that terminology was not in vogue in earlier times.
At the same time, it is very important to recognize that there is a current conception of “human rights” that can be rightly claimed to be recent and Western origin. Donnelly highlights how this conception has to do with the rights of humans and has virtually nothing to do with the obligations of humans, the latter being an aspect found in other and earlier societies. In his words,
“Traditional” societies—Western and non-Western alike—typically have had elaborate systems of duties. Many of those duties even correspond to values and obligations that we associate with human rights today. But such societies had conceptions of justice, political legitimacy, and human flourishing that sought to realize human dignity, flourishing, or well-being entirely independent of human rights. These institutions and practices are alternatives to, rather than different formulations of, human rights.
Although the difference between obligation and rights can be overblown, the fact is that there is something truly modern, Western-grown in the contemporary view of human rights that sets it apart from other conceptions that may seem, outwardly, to be similar to the human rights conception. The unique aspects of this history have colored the current conception of human rights, as this history reflects a revolt against various types of authority, in particular the authority of the church and the kings. It has been this struggle that has led to the emphasis on “rights” only and not on obligations or duties. That is probably why there is no such thing as the “universal declaration of human obligations” coming from these Western-derived bodies. In reality, individual “obligation,” as opposed to “right,” is virtually the antithesis of what this struggle has been all about and this historic reality has steered the discussion that has followed.
In sum, the claim that the concept of human rights is Western has some validity to it—in the sense that the contemporary human rights schemes as proposed by many human rights activists is indeed Western and modern in its nature. It is therefore of some importance to understand the background of the development of current human rights thinking as that background to this day still greatly affects many of the contemporary proponents of human rights. Incidentally, this history and development also sheds some light on the question of whether the contemporary human rights platform can deservedly be called “universal” in nature.
The contemporary human rights movement is closely related to the unique history of Europe. Obviously, the entire world did not experience the same kind of history as the West did, part of which shall be described below. At the outset, then, one could argue that it will be difficult to imagine that concepts born out of such a unique history will necessarily be suitable for the remainder of earth’s inhabitants who did not suffer a similar fate of history.
The ideas of freedom and equality were born out of environments in Europe wherein freedom and equality were restricted. For the most part, they were restricted by religion and government—these two bodies were actually closely entangled in the theory of the “divine right of kings.”
The historical process is well and succinctly described in the following passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica,
The scientific and intellectual achievements of the 17th century--the discoveries of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, the rationalism of René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke--encouraged a belief in natural law and universal order; and during the 18th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, a growing confidence in human reason and in the perfectability of human affairs led to its more comprehensive expression.
Particularly to be noted are the writings of the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke--arguably the most important natural law theorist of modern times--and the works of the 18th-century Philosophers centred mainly in Paris, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke argued in detail, mainly in writings associated with the Revolution of 1688 (the Glorious Revolution), that certain rights self-evidently pertain to individuals as human beings (because they existed in "the state of nature" before humankind entered civil society); that chief among them are the rights to life, liberty (freedom from arbitrary rule), and property; that, upon entering civil society (pursuant to a "social contract"), humankind surrendered to the state only the right to enforce these natural rights, not the rights themselves; and that the state's failure to secure these reserved natural rights (the state itself being under contract to safeguard the interests of its members) gives rise to a right to responsible, popular revolution.
The Philosophers, building on Locke and others and embracing many and varied currents of thought with a common supreme faith in reason, vigorously attacked religious and scientific dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and social-economic restraints. They sought to discover and act upon universally valid principles harmoniously governing nature, humanity, and society, including the theory of the inalienable "rights of Man" that became their fundamental ethical and social gospel.
It is interesting to note, though, that this early “human rights movement,” which greatly influenced the American and French constitutions, did eventually, to some extent, weaken. It weakened mostly because it was lacking any firm basis. As many of the theories of the Renaissance and Enlightenment began to be questioned, the question of natural law and similarly other theories were more or less discarded, leading to a very large vacuum and decay in the progress of human rights.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the development of such human rights thinking in the West is hardly anything to “boast” about, as it has most to do with failures and extremes that existed in the West. The extremes of the church and the rulers led to human rights demands (in the same way that the extremes and atrocities of the Western nations in World War I and World War II as well as via colonialism also led to human rights demands).
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| | | | أحمد محمد لبن Ahmad.M.Lbn
مؤسس ومدير المنتدى
عدد المساهمات : 49023
العمر : 72
| | موضوع: رد: The History of the “Human Rights”Are Human Rights a “Western, Modern” Concept? الثلاثاء 15 يناير 2019, 10:52 pm | |
| This is been aptly summarized by the Encyclopedia Britannica in the following passage:
In sum, the idea of human rights, called by another name, played a key role in the late 18th- and early 19th-century struggles against political absolutism. It was, indeed, the failure of rulers to respect the principles of freedom and equality, which had been central to natural law philosophy almost from the beginning, that was responsible for this development. In the words of Maurice Cranston, a leading student of human rights, " . . . absolutism prompted man to claim [human, or natural] rights precisely because it denied them."
Ignatieff’s discussion on this point is also very enlightening. He wrote,
The Declaration may still be a child of the Enlightenment, but it was written when faith in the Enlightenment faced its deepest crisis of confidence. In this sense, human rights is not so much the declaration of the superiority of European civilization as a warning by Europeans that the rest of the world should not seek to reproduce its mistakes.
In fact, human rights thinking was partially a reaction in Europe to a time in which there was virtually no freedom of religion. The state would declare its religion and, for the most part, people were not free to practice and perhaps even accept any religion other than the State’s.
Ishay describes part of this dark history of Europe—the likes of which the rest of the world has probably never seen:
Yet the battle for religious freedom was far from over. In France, an important advance in that struggle had been the Edict of Nantes (1598), in which Henry IV had sought to end the French wars of religion by guaranteeing religious freedom to French Protestants (or Huguenots).
In 1658, however, Louis XIV revoked the edict, depriving the Huguenots of all civil and religious liberties. In England, the Parliament passed the Tolerant Act in 1689, which, though allowing some dissenters to practice their religion, continued to exclude Jewish and Catholic worship.
Ishay makes the developments in Europe sound very logical and rationally drawn out, when she writes,
Yet if a series of long-lasting religious wars eroded the initial aspirations of Christendom, the international nature of the wars incited the development of a new vision of world unity based on rational thinking rather than on revealed truth—principles that had shown their divisive nature during the wars of religion. By asserting individual responsibility in matters of salvation and in seeking happiness on earth, the Protestant influence helped advance a new credo relying on individual choice and rights. The belief in the value of individuals and their capacity to reason was further strengthened by a burst of scientific breakthroughs.
However, that rosy picture of the development of “rational thinking” may not be sound at all. In fact, the process by which Europe developed new understandings about life were not necessarily “rational” and well-thought out. In other words, the changes that occurred in Europe were brought about as a reaction to European civilization’s and religion’s own shortcomings and weaknesses. For example, a typical contemporary European view of “religion” is not necessarily rational but more emotional in its roots.
As McGoldrick noted concerning the French approach to religion and secularism:
The modern French approach to religion was not arrived at after principled and philosophical reflection on the importance and value of religious freedom. Rather, it was reached after centuries of bitter, and often violent, state-church conflict.France has a long history of religious hostility and conflict including Religious Wars from 1562-98. In much of that conflict the Catholic Church played a dominant political role. Indeed, one of the objectives of the French Revolution (1789-95) was to diminish the political power and the social and cultural influences of the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1789 the Constituent Assembly declared that Catholic Church property would henceforth be at the disposal of the nation. In 1790 a Decree was made which dissolved all monastic vows and a Civil Constitution of the Clergy was adopted. Thousands of Catholic priests were murdered or deported.
It is very important to understand and realize this background of the human rights movement because it still has a strong influence on the movement today. There is a clear movement away from the authority of any type of religion to the authority of what isinnocently called “human reasoning,” “freedom” and the like. In fact, they are fighting against dogmatism or the belief that a principle or rule is fixed and remains so. This is given up in the name of the authority of human reasoning which no longer accepted the beliefs of the Christian Church, especially with respect to the physical world. In fact, one of the messages of the Enlightenment, this major root of the contemporary human rights movement, is that everything is about “man.”
As Rasmussen noted:
This Enlightenment narrative understood humanity as a species apart, just as it conceived the rest of nature in Cartesian and Kantian terms. Kant himself was utterly clear: “Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.” “Nature,” “natural rights,” and “natural law” are, to be sure, serious moral, religious, and metaphysical subjects and key terms in Enlightenment rights discourse. The appeals of Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Paine, and other such champions of this good cause rest here. But the attention is anthropocentric without qualification… The theocentric universe of medieval cosmology, with all nature alive as an ocean of symbols linking earth to heaven, is thoroughly secularized in the same broad movement that set the thinking, judging human self at the center of rights discourse and ethical theory. God, and nature as a fecund expression of divine emanations, are discarded in favor of morally self-sufficient humans set over against mechanistic and passive nature. For better or worse, then, rights language arises within and inhabits a moral world that is neither theocentric nor biocentric, but anthropocentric.
The following passage sums up the important points on the history of the modern rights movement—it is a passage in which Mayer admits some important aspects concerning human rights that once again demonstrates that freedom of belief and religion cannot possibly be part of the overall contemporary human rights platform.
Mayer writes,
The human rights formulations utilized in international law are relatively recent, although one can find ideas that anticipate human rights concepts in ancient times. Certainly, the development of the intellectual foundations of human rights was given an impetus by the Renaissance in Europe and by the associated growth of rationalist and humanistic thought, which led to an important turning point in Western intellectual history: the abandonment of the premodern doctrines of the duties of man and the adoption of the view that the rights of man should be central in political theory, During the European Enlightenment, the rights of man became a preoccupation of political philosophy, and the intellectual groundwork for modern human rights theory was laid…
It was on these Western traditions of individualism, humanism, and rationalism and on legal principles protecting individual rights that twentieth-century international law on civil and political rights ultimately rested. Rejecting individualism, humanism, and rationalism is tantamount to rejecting the premises of modern human rights.
It is amazing that such a history of the current human rights movement—and such characteristics of it must be recognized—and yet the questioning of the universality of such human rights is considered virtually “blasphemous.”
Among the writers in the West who are willing to recognize and comment on this fact is Stackhouse who wrote,
To be sure, some of the purported defenders of human rights leave themselves open to critique and the unwitting discrediting of the human rights ideas they wish to defend. For instance, Rhoda E. Howard and Jack Donnely argue that the idea of human rights “is rooted in structural changes that began to emerge in the late medieval and early modem Europe.” However, if it is so that such ideas are little more than a by-product of a particular historical and social context, it becomes very difficult to argue that they ought to be taken as governing principles when the context has changed substantially, or is not contiguous with other areas of the world. Of course, we may believe that some inexorable logic of universal history moves toward ever fuller and fuller actualization of rights and autonomy everywhere, along with social, political, and economic change. But such a quasi-religious conviction is beyond the evidence and beyond most people’s confidence in history’s logic. History does not seem to warrant a rollicking confidence in an innate drive to do good once life is liberated from all religious and social constraint, as some thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted so much to be the case. Nor is it obvious that autonomy should be the highest moral purpose. |
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