The
Sources Of Rights Talk
Glendon,
Mary Ann,
Commonweal, 00103330, 10/12/2001, Vol. 128,
Issue 17
Database:
Academic
Search Premier
On December 10, 1948, the UN General
Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). There were
no dissenting votes, although the Soviet bloc,
If you are like most Americans, and
like me before I got interested in the Declaration, you probably do not stay up
nights thinking about the United Nations and its various pronouncements. But
what I discovered about the history of the Declaration in doing research for my
book, A World Made New, should be of particular interest to Catholics as well
as to all those concerned about protecting human rights. Let me begin with a
little background.
During World War II, the idea began
to percolate that there should be some kind of international bill of rights--a
common standard to which all nations could aspire--and by which they could
measure their own and each other's progress. One of the first suggestions came
from Pope Pius XII, who, in a June 1941 radio address, called for an
international bill recognizing the rights that flowed from the dignity of the
person. Another came from the British writer H.G. Wells in a little pamphlet
subtitled, "What Are We Fighting For?" But in practical terms, the
most consequential support came from several Latin American countries, which
composed twenty-one of the original fifty-five member nations of the UN when it
was founded in 1945.
Largely due to the insistence of the
Latin Americans, joined by other small nations, the UN established a Human
Rights Commission composed of members from eighteen different countries. It was
chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt who was just then making a new life for herself
after the death of her husband. When the Human Rights Commission set to work in
early 1947, its first major task was to draft a "bill of rights" to
which persons of all nations and cultures could subscribe. But that assignment
rested upon a couple of problematic assumptions: no one really knew whether
there were any such common principles, or what they might be. So UNESCO asked a
group of philosophers--some well known in the West, like Jacques Maritain, and
others from Confucian, Hindu, and Muslim countries--to examine the question.
These philosophers sent a questionnaire to still more leading thinkers, from
Mahatma Gandhi to Teilhard de Chardin,
and in due course, they reported that, somewhat to their surprise, they had
found that there were a few common standards of decency that were widely
shared, though not always formulated in the language of rights. Their
conclusion was that this practical consensus was enough to enable the project
to go forward.
The judgment of the philosophers was
borne out by the experience of the delegates on the Human Rights Commission.
This group, too, was highly diverse, but they had few disagreements over the
content of the Declaration. Their disputes were chiefly political, and mainly
involved the Soviet Union and the
The framers of the UDHR, like legal
drafters everywhere, had done a good deal of copying. They drew many provisions
from existing constitutions and rights instruments. They relied most heavily on
two draft proposals for international bills that were themselves based on
extensive cross-national research. One of these proposals was prepared under
the auspices of the American Law Institute, and the other was a Latin American
document that became the 1948 Bogota Declaration of the Rights and Duties of
Man.
The final draft was a synthesis
drawn from many sources--and thus a document that differed in many ways from
our familiar Anglo-American rights instruments--most noticeably in its
inclusion of social and economic rights, and in its express acknowledgment that
rights are subject to duties and limitations. It also differed from socialist
charters, notably with its strong emphasis on political and civil liberties.
Several features of the Declaration
set it apart from both Anglo-American and Soviet-bloc documents, and these
should be kept in mind as contests over the meanings of the Declaration's
provisions continue. Consider the following: its pervasive emphasis on the
"inherent dignity" and "worth of the human person"; the
affirmation that the human person is "endowed with reason and
conscience"; the right to form trade unions; the worker's right to just
remuneration for himself and his family; the recognition of the family as the
"natural and fundamental group unit of society" entitled as such to
"protection by society and the state"; the prior right of parents to
choose the education of their children; and a provision that motherhood and
childhood are entitled to "special care and assistance."
Where did those ideas come from? The
immediate source was the twentieth-century constitutions of many Latin American
and continental European countries. But where did the Latin Americans and
continental Europeans get them? The proximate answer to that question is:
mainly from the programs of political parties, parties of a type that did not
exist in the United States, Britain, or the Soviet bloc, namely, Christian
Democratic and Christian Social parties.
And where did the politicians get
their ideas about the family, work, civil society, and the dignity of the
person? The answer is: mainly from the social encyclicals Rerum
novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo
anno (1931). And where did the church get them? The short answer is that those
encyclicals were part of the process through which the church had begun to
reflect on the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century revolutions, socialism,
and the labor question in the light of Scripture, tradition, and her own
experience as an "expert in humanity."
The most articulate advocate of this
complex of ideas on the Human Rights Commission was a Lebanese Arab of the
Greek Orthodox faith, Charles Malik. In reading the
old UN transcripts, I was struck by Malik's frequent
use of terms like the "intermediate associations" of civil society,
and by his emphatic preference for the term "person" rather than
"individual." When I had the opportunity to meet Charles Malik's son, Dr. Habib Malik, I asked him if he knew where his father had acquired
that vocabulary. The answer was: from the heavily underlined copies of Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno, which Malik
kept among the books he most frequently consulted.
Contrary to what is now widely
supposed, the most zealous promoters of social and economic rights were not the
Soviet bloc representatives but delegates from the Latin American countries.
Except for the Mexican delegates, most of these people were inspired, not by
Marx and Engels, but, like Malik, by Leo XIII and
Pius XI. Their focus was not on the exploitation of man by man, but on the
dignity of work and the preferential option for the poor.
Catholic social teaching, however,
was just one of many sources of influence on that impressively multicultural
document. Considering some of the ways in which the Catholic influence was
reciprocated is harder to follow. It begins, I believe, in
Roncalli's subsequent actions suggest that
events in the UN that fall must have made a great impression on him. It also
seems clear that he must have agreed with Maritain and other Catholic thinkers
that there was value in discussing certain human goods as rights, even though
the biblical tradition uses the language of obligation. In Pacem
in terris (1963), John XXIII referred to the
Universal Declaration by name and called it "an act of the highest
importance."
Many Catholics were surprised, and
some were even shocked, at the extent to which the documents of Vatican II, and
John XXIII's encyclicals Pacem in terris
and Mater et magistra (1961), seemed to reflect a
shift from natural law to human rights. Some writers regard this shift as
mainly rhetorical, an effort on the part of the church to make her teachings
intelligible to "all men and women of good will."
But I believe it was more than that.
I would say it was also part of the church's shift from nature to history, as
well as her increasing openness to learning from other traditions. The church
has always taught, with
Needless to say, the church's
adoption of rights language entailed the need to be very clear about the fact
that she does not always use that terminology in the same way it is used in secular
circles. Those who think the church should never have gone down that road at
all often fail to notice two important facts about the church's use of rights
language. First, the rights tradition into which the church has tapped is the
biblically informed, continental, dignitarian
tradition which she herself had already done so much to shape. "The
Catholic doctrine of human rights," Avery Dulles points out, "is not
based on Lockean empiricism or individualism. It has
a more ancient and distinguished pedigree."
Second, the church did not even
uncritically adopt the dignitarian vision. In Vatican
II's Gaudium et spes, the
council fathers say that the movement to respect human rights "must be
imbued with the spirit of the gospel and be protected from all appearance of
mistaken autonomy. We are tempted to consider our personal rights as fully
protected only when we are free from every norm of divine law; but following
this road leads to the destruction rather than to the maintenance of the
dignity of the human person." In the same vein, John XXIII noted in Pacem in terris that everything
the church says about human rights is conditioned by their foundation in the
dignity that attaches to the person made in the image and likeness of God, and
everything is oriented to the end of the common good.
In this context, some of the most
striking interactions between Catholic social thought and human rights have
occurred in the field of international advocacy. With more than 300,000
educational, health-care, and relief agencies serving mainly the world's
poorest inhabitants, the church has become an outspoken advocate of social
justice in international settings. But it is a hard sell. Challenging passages
like this one from John Paul II's 1997 World Day of Peace message do not sit
particularly well with affluent nations and first-world interest groups:
Living out [the] demanding
commitment [to solidarity] requires a total reversal of the alleged values
which make people seek only their own good: power, pleasure, the unscrupulous
accumulation of wealth...A society of genuine solidarity can be built only if
the well-off, in helping the poor, do not stop at giving from what they do not
need. Those living in poverty can wait no longer: They need help now and so
have a right to receive immediately what they need [emphasis supplied].
At first glance, words like "a
right to receive what one needs" sound uncomfortably like simplistic,
secular social advocacy. But the church's use of rights language in this
context cannot be equated with crude mandates for state-run social engineering
programs. For one thing, the church has always refrained from proposing
specific models: her gift to political science has been, rather, the principle
of subsidiarity--which is steadily attracting interest
as the
Moreover, the church teaches
solidarity not as a policy, but as a virtue--a virtue that inclines us to
overcome sources of division within ourselves and within society. Like any
other virtue, solidarity requires constant practice; it is inseparable from
personal reform.
The church's advocacy of the
preferential option for the poor has led her to become a staunch defender of
the Universal Declaration as an integrated whole. While most nations take a
selective approach to human rights, the Holy See consistently lifts up the
original vision of the Declaration--a vision in which political and civil
rights are indispensable for social and economic justice, and vice versa.
As for the future, I believe the
dialogue between Catholicism and the human-rights tradition will continue, and
that it will be beneficial to both. One may even imagine that the resources of
the Catholic tradition may be helpful in resolving several thorny dilemmas that
have bedeviled the human-rights project from its outset, especially the
dilemmas arising from challenges to its universality and its truth claims. The
long Catholic experience in the dialectic between the core teachings of the
faith and the various cultural settings in which the faith has been received
helps us to see that to accept universal principles does not mean accepting
that they must be brought to life in the same way everywhere. The experience of
Catholicism with the inculturation of its basic
teachings shows that universality need not entail homogeneity.
The framers of the UDHR had similar
expectations for the relatively short list of rights that they deemed
fundamental. Their writings reveal that they contemplated a legitimate
pluralism in forms of freedom, a variety of means of protecting basic rights,
and different ways of resolving the tensions among rights, provided that no
rights were completely subordinated to others. As Jacques Maritain put it,
there can be many different kinds of music played on the Declaration's thirty
strings.
Another dilemma for the human-rights
project is the challenge of historicism and relativism. If there are no common
truths to which all men and women can appeal, then there are no human rights,
and there is little hope that reason and choice can prevail over force and
accident in the realm of human affairs. It is one thing to acknowledge that the
human mind can glimpse truth only as through a glass darkly; and quite another
to deny the existence of truth altogether. Hannah Arendt has warned, "The
ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced
Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction...and
the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."
The Reason that the church defends
is not the calculating reason of Hobbes--in the service of the passions--nor is
it narrow scientific rationalism. It is the dynamic, recurrent, and potentially
self-correcting process of experiencing, understanding, and judging that has
animated her best theologians from Thomas Aquinas to Bernard Lonergan.
I trust that my enthusiasm for
Catholic social thought and philosophy as seen in the light of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights will not be understood as unbridled boosterism. I am well aware that much of what our tradition
has to offer was learned painfully after mistakes and sad experience. But when
it comes to the creation and continuing relevance of the Declaration, the
church has reason to be proud of its contribution.
~~~~~~~~
By Mary Ann Glendon
Mary Ann
Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at