It is futile to beseech the people of poets and thinkers in the
name of its poets and thinkers. Every prejudice that one thought had been
abandoned long ago brings forth a thousand words each day, like clarion.
It is futile to offer your right cheek when your left cheek has
been slapped. It does not in the least give them food for thought, it does not
move them, it does not disarm them: They strike your right cheek likewise.
It is futile to throw out reasonable words amidst their frenzied
screams. They say: What! He dares make a fuss? Shut him up!
It is futile to act in an exemplary fashion. They say: We know
nothing. We have seen nothing. We have heard nothing.
It is futile to search for security. They say: The coward. He is
hiding. His bad conscience pushed him to it.
It is futile to go out to them and to offer them your hand. They
say: Who does he think he is with his Jewish importunity?
It is futile to be faithful to them, either as fellow fighters
or as fellow citizen. They say: He is Proteus, he can do all.
It is futile to help them, to remove the chains of slavery from
their limbs. They say: He will certainly have profited from this somehow.
It is futile to neutralize the poison. They will brew it anew.
It is futile to live for them and to die for them. They say: He
is a Jew.
You may have heard the story, possibly apocryphal, about New
York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. At one time during the Depression, he was
serving as a night-court judge when a woman appeared before him who had stolen
food to feed her children. Wanting to be both just and merciful, La Guardia
told the woman, I fine you ten dollars for stealing, and I fine everyone else
in the courtroom, myself included, fifty cents each for living in a city where
a woman is forced to steal to feed her children. The money was collected, the
fine paid, and the extra money was given to the woman.
Today we enter into this field, as we consider one response, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the fact that we live in a world
where the author of the reading I shared earlier could come to that level of
despair, because of what we are capable of doing to one another.
In 1958, the tenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration,
Eleanor Roosevelt stood before the Commission on Human Rights, with a copy of
In Your Hands, a guide to community action in her hands, and said: Where after
all do human rights begin? In small places, close to home--so close and so
small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet, they are the world
of the individual person: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college
he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places
where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal
dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning here, they
will have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold
them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
Thus, we believe that the destiny of human rights is in the hands of all our
citizens in all our communities.
She then called for a massive world-wide education campaign to
familiarize people with this document. Today’s sermon is in part a response, 45
years later, to do just that.
The Universal Declaration is a story of political maneuvering,
it is a story of how to light a candle in the dark and it is a story of
personal triumph.
On this last note, consider the following: This declaration was
created out of Eleanor’s personal struggle to define and defend the rights of
marginal persons. How is it that a woman orphaned at a young age, facing
significant obstacles as a child and young women could emerge as a pillar of
international humanitarianism? She was exposed to a remarkable teacher and
schoolmistress in London that opened her mind to the suffering of others. She
experienced settlement houses in New York that opened her eyes. She then
experienced the war wounded that opened her heart and enabled her to exhibit
what one professor at Wesley Seminary calls "a saintly capacity for
love."
When I think that I am unable to make much of an impact because
my childhood has tripped me up, or that life has gotten me down, that I am not
charismatic enough or attractive enough, I think of Eleanor. When I think that
the little I might do won’t be enough, I think of Eleanor. When I think that I
am inexperienced or afraid, I think of Eleanor.
Her husband’s political rise enabled her to conduct tours and
broaden her already significant exposure to the powerless and the voiceless.
She became their advocate. She wrote 12 books in her lifetime, including an
important book called the Moral Basis of Democracy, which outlines her interest
in universalized human rights and its relationship to hope and democracy—and
also her conclusion that poverty debases democracy.
She assumed that when her husband’s life ended, that her
political involvement would end. The public would not stand for that, and
neither would President Humphrey who sort of needed her name and reputation.
The sheer force of her personality and vision would not be silenced She became
a leading advocate for the United Nations and for its Universal Declaration.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
55 years ago, on December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was approved by the United Nations General Assembly. The United
Nations was conceived as the war was concluding, during a series of meetings in
which Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met to discuss the world after the war. The
World Bank and the IMF were created around the same time.
The UN preamble, with its focus on human rights, its respect for
self determination and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction,
stands as a testimony to hope, amidst the current realities of the day.
Eleanor reacted to the UN with guarded optimism. She knew that
greed was not banished from humanity, and she prepared herself to be
disappointed, but she wrote, I intend to try for a peaceful world.
As the UN began, one of its first tasks it set for itself was to
create a commission, or commissions, for the promotion of human rights.
To enter into such an endeavor brought forth a ton of questions:
What of national sovereignty? The big three and the big five (France and China)
were not going to allow their sovereignty to be trampled upon. The smaller
countries had their concerns as well. Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia under
the pretense of protecting its people. But he had also hidden behind that term
national sovereignty. From the beginning this was a big, tough issue facing any
one taking on this task. When could the international community intervene? When
could they not?
What if my tradition—Asian or African folks said—does not
include this idea of individual rights. Is this western imperialism all dressed
up in really nice clothes?
All of these concerns were on the table from the beginning, and
I must say, they still are.
Eleanor entered the fray. When President Truman nominated her to
be a delegate to the UN, she was surrounded by doubters, including herself. She
wrote, How could I be a delegate to help organize the United Nations when I
have no background or experience in international meetings? John Foster Dulles
thought she was too liberal. Senator Fulbright thought she was too inexperienced
and that she would signal a lack of serious intent on the part of the United
States regarding this new body.
If anyone could have said, No, call on someone else, it was
Eleanor. As she embarked on her first meetings she was engulfed in personal difficulties.
Doubt and selfishness could have been her undoing. Her husband had just died.
She was grieving his death, and the knowledge that he had died in Warm Springs
Georgia with his mistress, and the knowledge that her daughter, her beloved
Anna knew that the affair was going on, often in the White House. Her children
were of some concern. Her personal finances were cloudy. She could have stayed
in bed.
Instead, she did what she did so often as a way to deal with the
disappointments of life, she attended to the work in front of her nose.
Despite all of her doubts (they did not disappear once she got
to the UN meetings), she soon became convinced of the importance of the UN. She
was asked to chair a visioning group on a commission on Human Rights, which met
in the spring of 1946 in New York. From the beginning, a Chinese fellow, Dr.
Chang, a Lebanese fellow named Dr. Malik and Roosevelt were the driving forces
of this Human Rights Commission. Jefferson, Madison and maybe Eleanor was
George Washington!
Fault lines appeared from the beginning. The Soviets wanted a
sub commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of
Minorities, as a kind of dig at American Apartheid. The Americans wanted a
group to look into freedom of information, as a kind of dig at the Soviets.
The preamble, which takes up a discussion of the nature of
humankind, was sure to muddy the water The communists wanted there to be an
emphasis on the idea that freedom exists only in community, where there is
harmony between the individual and the collective. The westerners wanted to
ensure that the freedom of the individual be safeguarded. The debates went on
and on.
There is a delightful story about these three coming to Mrs.
Roosevelt’s apartment in New York to initiate a draft writing session. Dr.
Chang started in about pluralism and including non-western ideas. Dr. Malik
then starts in on a long discourse about Thomas Aquinas. Another jumps in and
then Dr. Chang stands up and says that the Secretariat would do well to spend a
few months reading Confucianism. And charmingly she writes, By that time I
could not follow them, so lofty had the conversation become, so I simply filled
the teacups again and sat back to be entertained by the talk of these learned
gentlemen. (She knew what she was doing!)
Eventually, UNESCO and the Commission came to see that it was
possible to see a strain of human rights in all traditions and they set out to
create this document and to go about the work of passing it. Out of the depths
and despair of World War II, a beacon appeared, a new world was promised.
Optimism, no hope, would not be silenced.
Questions remain. Professor John Rawls believes that a deep
philosophical theory, one that is exclusively tied and obligated to western liberalism,
is required to believe in a universal anything but especially individual
rights. Where others see bedrock truths, he sees Western imperialism and
hegemony. For Rawls, persons in society are not viewed as free and equal; a
state religion for example may largely control governmental policy and grant
certain privileges to a particular religion and its members, but it does not
accrue to individuals but rather to a group.
Stanley Hauerwaus, an influential professor of ethics at Duke
Seminary, is a postmodernist who believes that America was founded on a
philosophical mistake, namely the notion of inalienable rights. He offers an
alternative that is more communal, more interdependent.
Scholarship coming out of Africa provides a microcosm of the
whole debate. An ethic of resistance characterizes recent African scholarship
against imperialistic forces of all sorts, including this western idea of
universal rights. Scholars there attempt to answer two questions: Was human
rights a consideration in indigenous African culture> Who is the subject of
human rights in Africa: the individual or the group.
This is the individualistic versus collective argument that
emerged from the very beginning. Some look at the situation in Africa and say
that there were always appropriate checks and balances in place and limits on
governmental impact and that their cultural values always included a base level
of freedom. Others see that indigenous African values are in conflict, at odds
with western conceptions. There is no value placed on the individual as such,
but rather a communal sense of human life. These scholars denounce attempts to
incorporate an individual framework in the African human rights discussion. It
is imperialism and oppression, they say.
Those founding writers, Roosevelt and Chang and Malik, attempted
to bridge the gap. And scholars continue to do so. Professor Illesami, for
instance, wants to affirm a personalist theory of human rights in her land, to
affirm both the intrinsic value of the individual and the social nature of each
person. She does so in a very comprehensive way. But I think this is the
important piece: She insists that her current context calls for an emancipatory
interpretation--a shift from the nostalgic idealization of the past to a
liberative engagement with the present. She wants to develop a paradigm of
relationality, in which all lives, individual and associational, are caught up
with each other. Echoes of King there, you see. Rights enable one to be built
up into a sense of community and connection.
She also says something very worth hearing: Unless the discourse
on rights is linked to a larger question of what it means to exist
authentically as an individual and a society, "it will continue to be
picked up and dropped at the will and pleasure of rulers whose own rights
(privileges) are too often realized at the cost of fundamental rights to
others."
Professor Jurgen Moltman, of Tubingen, a Green Party oriented
theologian, has identified two enduring questions that are posed to the
Universal Declaration: 1. In the case of conflict what takes precedence: the
desire for fundament human rights or national sovereignty? We’ve covered that a
bit. And 2. In the case of conflict, who or what takes precedence: the desired
society of humanity or the interest of one’s own nation?
These are questions that are in some ways unanswerable except
through precedent and experience. They endure as questions and must be
negotiated over time. Moltman, at the end of the day, wants to know if the
Universal Declaration needs to be enhanced. He writes: Either way, there are
too few powers for realizing them over against injustice and oppression. The
rights of freedom, he writes, are only effective insofar as there are free
persons who intercede for the liberation of the enslaved. Ideals if one takes
them seriously, can change reality. But they can also become the mere
justification of good intentions, without a corresponding will for realization.
It is really matter then of clarifying the relationship of the theory of human
rights to practice in order to exclude misuse. But the practical fulfillment
of human rights is humanity for the oppressed. The practical realization of
freedom is the liberation of the enslaved. The practical function of the
Universal Declaration can only be revolutionary. For me, he writes, the
decisive issue is the transformation of rights which secure the freedom of
individuals into obligations to liberate those whose rights are withheld by
others. If the UDHR is not to be only an ideal suspended above an inhuman world
(read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families),
but desires the realization of these rights, then rights must be articulated in
terms of their realization. Up to the present time, there is nothing expressed
in the Universal Declaration about suffering within the world which is
necessarily entailed in the struggle for liberation.
The founders debated Moltmann’s point and decided that one must
hope that the Declaration would promote peaceful resolution to stormy
conflicts. Otherwise, the rule of law trumps the desire for revolutionary
liberation. This is an open question, and disagreements result.
Once again we come to the question, so what. Why should we care?
It was Reinhold Neibuhr that said, "If religion cannot transform society,
it must find its social function in criticizing the present realities from some
ideal perspective and in presenting the ideal without corruption so that it may
sharpen the conscience and strengthen the faith of each generation.
In answer we might hear the words of Eleanor: The thing which
counts is the striving of the human soul to achieve spiritually the best that
it is capable of and to care unselfishly not only for personal good, but for
the good of all those who toil with them upon the earth.
Well, the thing which counts is the active soul, is the striving
of the human soul. What can we do?
When you look at the issues at Amnesty International’s web page,
or the Human Rights Watch, there is so much. President Bush is meeting with the
Prime Minister of China on December 9th. Write Lane Evans or Tom
Harkin and ask that the President press for the release of this businesswoman
and human rights activist. Lee Malvo, the sniper in Washington, will likely
face the death penalty in Virginia, though he was under 18 when he committed
the crimes. This violates international human rights law. Write in opposition
to the CLEAR Act, the Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal Act,
which encourages police officers to enforce civilian immigration law. It is
likely to marginalize already vulnerable immigrants. It is likely to increase
harassment of documented immigrants and US citizens who appear to be from
another country.
Well, it really is in your hands, as Eleanor’s book suggests. We
might wish to talk about some of these things. We might wish to join the
Interfaith Network for Human Rights at amnestyusa.org. We might want to start a
letter writing campaign against the administration’s working conditions and
business structure it is building in Iraq. Unions are being outlawed. Rules are
coming around to enable foreign ownership of businesses. Unemployment is
rampant with no safety net.
Or we might wish to do something entirely different.
We’ve celebrated one response to living in a world where
suffering occurs. The question now becomes what response will history record
about us? What light will we shine in the darkness? What evidence will there be
that our souls were active and striving for a better world, the only thing that
counts? It is in your hands.
May it be so.
December 7, 2003, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Rev.
Roger Butts