Thu, Dec 10, 2015 page8

• Falling short of the UN’s rights goal

  • By Herbert Hanreich
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  Each year the international community commemorates the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948.

  The document contains 30 articles formulating basic rights for all human beings regardless their religious, cultural or sexual affiliations.

  The provisions of the declaration are meant to be universal; they seek unconditional respect. Many other rights documents specifying the 30 articles have followed, promoting the vision of respecting human dignity, equal treatment and individual freedom at a global level. Much has been achieved in this aspect in the past decades, but we are still far from fully accomplishing this ambitious goal.

  Human rights violations happen everywhere, to varying degrees. In some regions, the situation is particularly deplorable. There, very different visions of humanity prevail. However, none of them is an example of humans flourishing; rather, the opposite is the case. There is no dignity for people without human rights.

  The quintessence of human rights is the protection of an individual’s dignity. Human rights stipulate that political institutions and social arrangements are designed for the individual’s well-being. Alternative visions see it just the other way around: they oblige individuals to contribute to the well-being of believed, declared or fabricated entities. Those entities might be religions, cultures, traditions, but also politically motivated ideologies such as communism, nationalism or fascism.

  What they have in common is that for them, the individual is merely part of a larger entity deemed of higher value than its individual human components. What also comes with this viewpoint is that it legitimizes an elite — often self-appointed — to claim authentic representation of that “sacred” entity, urging others to live or think in accordance to demands supposedly originating from there. Those demands, they urge others, need to be fulfilled, adhered to, satisfied, honored or appeased with sacrifices and the like. Non-compliance could entail sanctions imposed by the elite on the rest, the “ignorami.”

  We see the results when such alternatives are taken to the extreme. The fatal attacks in Paris a few weeks ago typically have their raison d’etre from such a perspective. Religious fanatics committing massacres in France or elsewhere are inspired by the idea that their entity demands the elimination of aberrant thoughts and, ultimately, the elimination of their bearers.

  For most of us this is not religion; this is sickness. Yet monotheistic religions are not always innocent when prayers are followed by killing sprees. They invoke absolute truths that allegedly provide answers to vital questions of life, whereby the faithful are often asked to submit their lives to this truth accordingly. Those who do not see must be blind, they think, offering remedies which, in extreme cases, come with guns.

  This logic nurtures a mental predisposition that has the potential to mislead people to commit acts of violence in the name of a supreme something that trumps individuality.

  Nationalism, racism and communism are other examples venerating abstract entities that would justify the sacrifice of individuals in favor of an idea deemed to be of greater dignity. This idea can be the “nation” that devours its citizens in wars, often led for the sake of raising its international stance. Or it can be race. The harm racism can do is well documented. No place has been spared from racially motivated violence over the past 100 years. Communism offers at once two such intangible entities: the party and the truth. Communist parties are never wrong, they insist, and neither are their ideologies — Marxism, Leninism, Maoism or any other “isms” — that deliver, as their leaders brazenly claim, an infallible rationale for the party’s superior role to which individuals have to adjust themselves accordingly. If not, sacrificing them for the sake of the higher truth, or the party, has always been an option throughout the history of all forms of political totalitarianism.

  Looking at contemporary China, there is a combination of communism and nationalism — a fatal melange of ingredients that utterly disregards individuality. Yet things are even worse: There is a third ingredient of this precarious kind that is simultaneously at work — culture. Culture could be yet another candidate that pretentiously ignores individuals in favor of something seemingly more important, especially when it comes in the form of traditional thinking. Admittedly, this kind of entity is much less harmful than others. Yet, cultural thinking can be suppressive, too, inflicting harm on individuals in more subtle ways. Particularly “thick” cultures, like the Confucian one, inculcate schemes of ever-repeating life-designs that leave little space for individuality. Those prescriptions usually come from a distant past, handed down from generation to generation. Their heralds are often unbothered by social changes that have taken place in the minds, especially of young people. Traditional thinking often ignores that the world has become more complex and diverse, and, subsequently, it ignores the desire of young people to pursue more complex and diverse ways of life.

  In Taiwan, traditional thinking is still a veritable mental force. Despite the integration of essential human rights provisions into the legal system, everyday life still does not breathe the declaration’s spirit. Local cultural paradigms hamper the full realization of human rights at a social level.

  Cultural paradigms here are neither driven by the idea that education “shall be directed to the full development of the human personality” (Article 26.2), nor that “everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitations on working hours and periodic holidays with pay” (Article 24); they neither encourage people “to join trade unions for the protection of [the employees’] interest” (Article 23.4), nor do they promote the idea that legal limits should restrain an individual’s freedom “solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others” (Article 29.2).

  Implementing those guidelines at all levels is a political challenge. However, the local culture objects, deeming its reproduction more important than the realization of individual rights if at odds with its values. Therefore, the government should distance itself from such a pre-modern mentality that haunts the nation in the name of culture and tradition. Taiwan needs a humanistic revolution, freeing its people, especially its young people, from the burden of what is in many aspects an outdated mentality.

  Most laws are already in place; what Taiwan needs now is a revolution of the mind. However, the government seems to shy away from this task, bumbling through its term while ignoring such urgent matters. It puts culture on par with human rights, often, as the practice shows, at the cost of the latter.

  Herbert Hanreich is assistant professor at I-Shou University in Kaohsiung
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