First, the increasing mobility of the human race and the de-spatialization of culture in the form of dispersed cultural diasporas as well as the emergence of a global public square make property rights and narrow territorial interests at least less important in human affairs than in the past.
Second, the contours of vulnerability have changed dramatically for the human race. In ancient times, when life was lived in local space and time, vulnerability of all kinds was similarly local. Threats to one’s survival and security were generated close to home. The surrounding wild, warring lords, and disease and pestilence rarely had effects beyond the region. For this reason, the political institutions needed to provide a sense of security were local and regional. In the modern era, when improvements in communication and transportation brought people together across greater distances and in more dense patterns of activity, threats to one’s survival and security also expanded. Commercial activity extended to broader geographic markets, human mobility increased dramatically over far greater distances, and the pace and flow of human activity quickened. Vulnerability, in turn, expanded in direct proportion to the compression of space and time and the acceleration of human interactivity. Local principalities and city-states were too parochial and narrow in their reach to protect their subjects. The result was the formation of nation-states.
Today, the compression of space and time is giving rise to a global flow of human activity. The dramatic increase in the density of human exchange, in turn, is creating new threats to security whose effects are often immediate and global in scale. Terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, global warming, computer viruses, the cloning of human beings, the death of the oceans, the loss of biodiversity, the growing ozone tear, a scandal in regional trading markets, and any number of other events can tip the world into chaos.
Nation-states are too geographically constrained to effectively deal with global threats and risks. Moreover, nation-states are designed to protect property and defend territory. They are exclusive, not inclusive, governing institutions. They were never conceived of as vehicles to manage global risks and threats.
What would happen, however, if millions—even billions—of human beings were to really believe that global threats to their security were at least as real and dangerous as the more localized threats that they face each day? Addressing these threats would require a new covenant among human beings that extended their commitment and allegiances, as well as their sense of security, beyond the narrow limits of territory, and the more limited protection afforded by property rights and civil rights.
Universal human rights is the next political chapter in the evolving history of our species. Some champions of universal human rights mistakenly believe that support of human rights ultimately stems from altruism and is motivated by goodwill alone. While altruism and goodwill play a role, there is another side to human rights—one that finds cause in a sense of vulnerability and the need for security. David Beetham writes that “it is as much the exposure to common threats as the sharing in a common humanity that justifies the claim that the human rights agenda is universal.”1
The first real awareness of humanity’s shared vulnerability came with the dropping of the atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. We quickly came to realize that our common humanity was at risk in the event of an all-out nuclear war. Ulrich Beck writes that “with nuclear . . . contamination, we experience the ‘end of “the other.” ’ ”2 Today, we are subject to a host of global problems that affect all of humanity. Solutions, in turn, require a collective effort.
Cambridge University political scientist Bryan Turner argues that the notion of “human frailty” and “vulnerability” and the accompanying feeling of sympathy are the only universally shared emotions that have the power to unite humanity and provide a foundation for acceptance of universal human rights.3 Turner notes that rights have traditionally been tied to Lockean notions of property. These kinds of rights, by their very nature, cannot be regarded as universal, because they establish, from the get-go, the idea of “mine vs. thine.” Individual property rights and, by extension, the territorial rights of nation-states are meant to be exclusionary. While one might make the case that everyone has the right to acquire property, it’s not the kind of right that brings all of humanity together in some deep, fundamental way.4 On the contrary, the struggle between the possessed and the dispossessed over property rights has probably done more to divide our species than any other socially constructed phenomenon. Even the more vague right espoused by Thomas Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence, the right to pursue happiness, is “notable for its cultural diversity,” observes Harvard sociologist Barrington Moore. “Only misery,” notes Moore, “is characterized by its unity.”5
Borrowing from the earlier works of Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Plessner, Turner makes the point that “human beings are ontologically frail, and . . . that social arrangements, or social institutions, are precarious.” 6 People are subject to natural disasters, hunger and disease, the wrath of their fellow human beings, and natural decay and death. Now these frailties are compounded by the unpredictability brought about by the increased density of human exchange and the introduction of powerful new technologies whose negative impacts can be felt quickly and on a global scale.
Turner’s views about the “human condition” differ substantially from those of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that people were inherently aggressive and acquisitive, rather than frail and dependent. Hobbes believed that people entered into a social contract to ensure a certain kind of security—their right to acquire property without fear of expropriation by others. Turner, however, believes that what unites people is not acquisitiveness—How could greed be a uniting force?—but participation in a “community of suffering.” His thoughts might be regarded as a secularization of the Christ story.7
People require political institutions, according to Turner, because they are open and vulnerable, not because they are cunning and aggressive.8 By reconfiguring the universality of the human condition in this way, Turner opens up the possibility of advancing a new vision for the human race to embrace. In the medieval world of Christendom, humanity’s fallen nature was considered its universal condition, and eternal salvation was offered up as the dream to unite humanity. In the modern era, humanity’s utilitarian and acquisitive nature was thought of as its universal condition, and material progress was embraced as a unifying dream. In the global era, frailty and vulnerability become humanity’s universal condition, and global consciousness becomes the sought-after dream. Likewise, proprietary obligations structured the faith-centered salvationist worldview of Christendom, property rights structured the utilitarian era of material progress, and in the new world coming, human rights become the indivisible norm to advance global consciousness and foster a sustainable stewardship of the Earth.
Frailty and vulnerability are arguably a universal condition. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to automatically embrace universal human rights. For that to happen, human beings would need to internalize a sense of empathy with the same passionate commitment that earlier generations felt when they substituted reason for faith. Only by empathizing with another’s plight—their suffering—does one come to value the notion of universal human rights.
From the Age of Reason to the Age of Empathy
The social glue that kept the Christian dream of eternal salvation alive and vibrant was faith. In the modern age, reason became the coveted behavior to secure material progress. In the new era, empathy is the human response to shared vulnerability and the key to global awareness.
To empathize is to cross over and experience, in the most profound way, the very being of another—especially the other’s struggle to endure and prevail in his or her own life journey. Even though empathy has deep biological roots, like language, it, too, has to be practiced and continually renewed to be of use. Empathy is the ultimate expression of communication between beings.
In the long sweep of human history, what becomes clear is that the human journey is, at its core, about the extension of empathy to broader and more inclusive domains. Parents’ empathy for their child is the first classroom. At this stage, the process is both biologically driven and socially constructed. Each step beyond this most biologically rooted connection requires patient revelation. Empathy is something that reveals itself to us if we are open to the experience. And we are most often open when we have experienced personal hardships and travails in our own individual journeys to endure and prevail.
While the human journey, then, is often littered with defeats and failures and suffering of immense magnitude, the saving grace is that the hardships we endure, both individually and collectively, can prepare us to be open to the plight of others, to console them and champion their causes.
“Do unto others as we would have others do unto us” is the operational expression of the empathetic process. At first, the Golden Rule extended only to kin and tribe. Eventually, it was extended to people of like-minded values—those who shared a common religion, nationality, or ideology. Today, the global risk society has become like a giant classroom for the extension of empathy. Modern communications and transportation allow us to witness the frailty, vulnerability, and suffering of our fellow human beings, as well as our fellow creatures and the Earth we inhabit, on a daily basis. We begin to experience the plight of others as our own. When, for example, an American parent watches a television interview with a bereaved parent in some distant part of the world who just lost her child to the ravages of AIDS, the connection is immediate and heartfelt. We think, That could be my child.
Turner’s point is that “human beings will want their rights to be recognized because they see in the plight of others their own (possible) misery.” 9 Altruistic feelings don’t run as deep as empathetic ones. So while altruism may be a basis for some people believing in universal human rights, it doesn’t penetrate deep enough to the core of our being like empathy and therefore is less powerful an emotional force in engendering a transformation of human consciousness.
If utilitarian reason wed us to a world of “mine vs. thine,” encoded in property rights, then empathy takes us into a new world of “we,” embedded in universal human rights.
Empathy is the new social glue and universal human rights the new legal code of behavior for promoting a global consciousness. That’s not to imply, however, that the older social glues of faith and reason that wed humanity to a transcendent quest and material progress are therefore no longer relevant and ought to be abandoned. Rather, a fully articulated global consciousness makes room for all three social glues but in a non-hierarchical fashion. Faith, reason, and empathy are all critical to a mature human consciousness. One does not preclude the other but, rather, suggests the other. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century scholastic of the Church, struggled to find an accommodation between faith and reason—the so-called “delicate synthesis.” The urgent intellectual task of the coming global era is to create a new synthesis that unites faith, reason, and empathy in a powerful mix that allows each to be a door to the other.
Enforcing Universal Human Rights
Universal threats require the adoption of universal rights and obligations. While the shrinking of the world is helping to expand our notion of vulnerability and empathy, how do we create an institutional vehicle to give universal human rights the same enforceable status that property rights have enjoyed in the nation-state era?
We’d have to begin by rethinking citizenship. Traditionally, the rights people enjoyed were by dint of their status as citizens of a sovereign country. In recent years, however, the state’s right to confer citizenship and be the ultimate arbiter of the rights of each citizen has steadily eroded. The proliferation of multiple identities has significantly weakened the state’s hegemony over citizenship. For example, historically, a person could not claim citizenship in a new country unless he or she renounced his or her previous citizenship in the country from which he or she emigrated. This view held sway in most countries until after World War II. The U.S. State Department would regularly inform dual citizens living abroad that if they reached maturity while still living outside the U.S., they would forfeit their U.S. citizenship. Governments were leery of citizens whose loyalties might be compromised, especially in times of war.
In the more mobile world of global labor flows and cultural diasporas, dual citizenship is no longer an anomaly but is, rather, a fact of life. Most Americans would be surprised to learn that 90 percent of the more than one million people who immigrate to our shores each year come from countries that allow multiple citizenship. (More than half the nations in the world honor multiple citizenship.) Currently, some forty million Americans are eligible to claim citizenship in another country.10 That means that one out of every seven Americans could potentially vote in another country, run for office, and even serve in its armed forces.
The concept of citizenship is changing dramatically to meet the needs of a globalizing world. In his now famous essay Citizenship and Social Class, published in 1950, T. H. Marshall, the British political philosopher, outlined three stages in the history of citizenship and the rights and duties conferred by it. Citizenship, he wrote, conferred civil rights in the eighteenth century, political rights in the nineteenth century, and social rights in the twentieth century.11 Civil rights guaranteed the right to private property and other associated rights, including the right to privacy, the right to bear arms (in the case of America), as well as the rights to freedom of expression, religion, and press. Political rights extended the franchise from white male property owners to women, minorities, and the poor. In the twentieth century, citizenship included social rights, including the right to health care, education, and pensions. The evolution of citizens’ rights was meant to allow each person the opportunity to pursue a full and meaningful life.
Now, the notion of what a full and meaningful life means has broadened and deepened once again, suggesting the need for a further metamorphosis in the idea of citizenship and the rights and obligations that go along with it.
Sociologist John Urry lists six new categories of citizenship emerging in the post-modern era. First, there is cultural citizenship, which recognizes the right of every culture to preserve and nurture its identity. Second, there is the right of minorities to take up residence and remain in other societies and receive the full rights as well as undertake the full responsibilities of the native-born population. Third, there is the right of ecological citizenship. Every human being has the right to live in a sustainable and harmonious relationship with the Earth and to enjoy the fruits of the natural world. Fourth, there is the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship—the right of every human being to enter into relationships with other citizens, societies, and cultures without interference by state authorities. Fifth, there is consumer citizenship, by which we mean the rights of people to open access to goods, services, and information flowing across the world. Sixth is mobility citizenship, which covers the rights and responsibilities of visitors and tourists in the passage through other lands and cultures.12
All of these new kinds of citizenship exist below and beyond as well as within nation-state borders. Each in its own way undermines nation-state territoriality as the exclusive realm of citizen engagement. The new forms of citizenship are de-territorializing rights and making them universal in nature and scope. The rub, notes Urry, is that “there is an increasing contradiction between rights, which are universal, uniform and globally defined, and social identities, which are particularistic and territorially specified.”13
Citizenship is becoming increasingly international as human activity becomes increasingly global. The old idea of tying citizenship to nationality appears almost quaint in a world of global commerce, transnational civil society movements, and shifting cultural diasporas.
Even the very word “citizen” is grossly inadequate to define the new rights and obligations that are emerging in a glo
balized society. “Citizen” comes from the Latin root civis, which means “to be a member of a city.” One’s rights and obligations, therefore, are tied to a place. Universal human rights eclipse any particular place. They exist independent of territory. That’s why rights activists use the term “human rights” as opposed to “citizen rights,” to make clear the difference between the old idea of tying rights to territory and the new idea of de-territorializing rights and making them universal.
The Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which governed the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, was the first multilateral government agreement to acknowledge rights and duties in a moral community that transcends sovereign states. The U.S. and its allies put Nazi war criminals on trial for “crimes against humanity.” While Nazi officials argued that they were just following the orders of their government and were protected from prosecution because of their rights as German citizens, the Allies disagreed. They argued that under the Nuremberg Doctrine, Nazis had the right and obligation to disobey “unlawful orders” from superiors—which they defined as orders that denied people their basic rights as human beings. If Nazis carried out unlawful orders, they could be tried for crimes against peace and humanity.
The human rights era began in earnest with the formation of the United Nations in 1945. The UN Charter states that one of the main purposes of the UN is to promote and encourage “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”14 In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first international agreement to articulate the idea of the inalienable rights of all human beings and to establish a list of particulars outlining the specific rights and freedoms of all human beings. In that same year, the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It would be forty years before the United States finally ratified the treaty.
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