Society: Mental Health and Welfare
This chapter provides a bridge between our initial understanding of the power of the idea of human rights, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the centerpiece, and certain major developments after its endorsement with no dissent by the UN General Assembly. It is Janus-faced, looking back and forward, as in the instant when Sisyphus, who is “superior to his fate,” nears the top of the mountain and contemplates the stone rolling backward, only to have to push it up again, which “crowns his victory” (Camus, 1991, p. 121). Discussions of human rights cannot take place in a historical-philosophical vacuum; they must be attuned to history as they take up the struggle to engage in action and service in the name of social justice.
Perhaps philosopher George Santayana is right that what we learn from history is that we do not learn from history, that history books mirror only the stories of the victorious. Success has many parents, seeking credit for their roles in successful historical outcomes, but few acknowledge their roles in failures, which are orphans. We also need a dialogue of understanding among various interpretations of the historical record, fully aware that some may have simply jockeyed themselves into the limelight. Truth may remain elusive; searching for truth is always a struggle. Falsehoods can easily become part of a people’s collective consciousness—for instance, that the land now known as the Americas, and inhabited by millions of people, was “discovered” by a man with three ships and a map. Does discovery mean ownership? Is it even important? We can never know the definitive history of anything, but any event or place can have a number of histories. Given the vicissitudes of the human condition, one hopes that humanity will remain willing to learn from the past; we must confront it, as Santayana reminds us, so that the world is not condemned to repeat it.
Toward a History of the Idea of Human Rights
Humankind has been searching for immutable truths since time immemorial. Even in the beginning, this search for a universal, unchanging reality may have been a Western attempt to understand the world, whereas Eastern approaches acknowledged that the only certainty is uncertainty. The human species, a “flaw in the diamond of the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964), lacks the kind of genetic programming in other life forms (Gil, 2013) that, for example, prompts certain species, such as whales, to migrate long distances, or, like bees, to do a dance directing other members of the colony to a field of flowers containing honey. In Homo sapiens, that is, the human species, issues aren’t as clear-cut. The human mind seems to differentiate us from other life forms; humans must choose ways of life that protect them from extreme vulnerability to the elements and the frailty of the human condition in general. Perhaps that explains why, as the sage Friedrich Nietzsche said, humans had to invent laughter, and Nikos Kazantzakis, through his playful character Zorba, reminds us that whatever adversity we face, humans always have the power to dance and play.
Cultures as Reflective of Human Choice
History reflects the choices humans have made in this dance of life. The myriad social structures and cultures in the world reflect the multidimensional mosaic of human choices, crystallized into ethical and legislative frameworks embedded in documents such as the Universal Declaration and major international covenants. Not surprisingly, the etymological origins of both religion and constitution (religare and constitare), which often provide the guiding principles for our ways of life and reflect the social-environmental contexts of the time, mean “to choose.” The word religare, however, is somewhat stronger in that it means “to moor,” much like a ship moors on a dock. Indeed, knocking down that foundation can put someone adrift in a troubled sea, perhaps a reason for many religious wars. It’s worth noting, moreover, that the Greek etymological root of the word heresy also means “to choose,” suggesting that one person’s freedom fighter may be another’s terrorist; one person’s iconoclast, another’s religious leader. St. Augustine, in his classic City of God, illustrated this paradox with the example that taking over a ship makes you a pirate, but if you take over a fleet, you are an admiral. If groups with massive, well-equipped, and well-financed armies kill close to 30 million people, as in World War II, or more recently, roughly 2 million in the war in Vietnam, they are called governments. Groups not as well-endowed are called terrorists.
Violence may be understandable, as in the Newark riots in the late 1960s—a kind of counterviolence to racist and classist structures in the United States. Yet a major theme of this work is that violence engaged in by governments, terrorists, or oppressed groups should not be condoned. Stooping to another’s level, perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century, will only result in more violence. It is a sad statement on the human condition and our culture that people too often begin to listen only when the channels of communication are closed. As Eric Fromm, author of the Art of Loving (and former patient, then husband, of the psychoanalyst Freida Fromm-Reichmann), asserts, “Unlived life leads to destruction” (Hornstein, 2000). During the time of the Newark riots, the U.S. government formed a commission whose report acknowledged that white institutions have established, condoned, and maintained racist structures in the United States.
Counterviolence needn’t be on such a grand scale, however. Another example is the senseless homicides by 20-year-old Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, killing 20 children and 6 adults. Not long before in 2007 there was a homicide/suicide committed by a youth proclaiming his anger toward and hatred of the wealthy that claimed 33 victims. Those individuals were ultimately responsible for these uncondonable acts. Yet society may need to come to grips with the possibility that its profit-motivated system, which subordinates human needs, rights, and dignity, creates the frustration and violence, residues of unlived lives, that lead to atrocities.
As the historical record has often shown, humanity’s greatest challenge, in groups and as individuals, is to choose nonviolence over violence; the latter, Gandhi reminds us, has not worked for centuries. Surely, a major aim of understanding historical processes is to see the interplay between the environment and human choice in ways that uncover the reasons, however elusive, for violence and to seek an alternative social justice constructed from precepts of human dignity and rights.
Although the term human rights was officially coined by the United Nations at its founding in 1945, the human rights concept is rooted in the complex struggle between contending choices to ensure survival of the human species, which at times has been a violent response to oppressive structures. Violence is obvious in massive killings, such as the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, in which thousands of French protestant Huguenots were killed in Catholic France (Ebenstein, 1960). Soon afterward this event was celebrated at a Mass of thanksgiving. But violence is also often masked with euphemistic language. Thus, neutral words like restructuring and downsizing might really mean the firing of persons over 50, whistleblowers, marginalized groups, and the like. Talk of forgiving or canceling Third World debt easily obscures the historical violence inflicted by the rich on the poor countries of the world: centuries of enslavement in the Americas, broken promises with Indigenous Peoples, and more recently, triumph of the postindustrial First World in the Cold War that has produced a kind of global apartheid. Indeed, the so-called race to the bottom—that is, corporations searching for the lowest wages for every worker in any country, often under the auspices of international trade agreements among elites such as NAFTA or the TPP and organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO)1—may actually be an orchestrated global alliance of “haves” to violate the basic human right to socially useful work, at a reasonable wage, that contributes to the development of the human personality.2 Understanding history, then, may require looking at the struggle of humanity’s failures and successes as it attempts to eke out a socially just, nonviolent world.
A History of Human Rights From the Humanistic Tradition
Violence does not have to exist on such a macro scale, however. People also act violently in their everyday and professional lives. For example, it is easy to view stereotypes of people as “actualities” rather than “possibilities”: that is, women are not actually good at mathematics; African Americans can actually perform only menial tasks. Such prejudicial attitudes pollute relations with others, whose human dignity and rights, and all the possibilities for human development, are thwarted in such a discriminatory atmosphere. Professionals may see Indigenous Peoples as inferior intellectually because they may have not performed well on intelligence tests, generally culturally biased toward white standards such as quick reaction times, planning for the future, or even mathematical acumen—values not traditionally associated with some cultures. If the Inupiat living in the Arctic tested whites on skill in gauging whether ice is too thin for fishing or knowledge of what to do if a moose’s ears move backward,3 they would find similarly low intelligence scores.
Sartre (1993) lamented that research in the social or human sciences often seeks meaningless facts rather than meaningful essences, and perhaps we ought to acknowledge how numbers and categorizations, though certainly useful in some contexts (e.g., in administrative functions), nevertheless can do a disservice to human dignity. It is all too easy to define a person by a score on an IQ test that measures not necessarily intellectual potential but rather class. Alfred Binet, whose work led to the development of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, expressed concern about this issue, fearing that test results could be used to further class interests, if not produce a kind of fascist mentality. It was not long after his test was developed that Hitler began gassing people with disabilities, many having scored low on intelligence tests, and with the collusion of helping and health professionals! Diagnoses, as discussed in Chapter 1, can also sanitize oppression; the poor may be diagnosed as “juvenile delinquent” or as having a “personality disorder,” whereas the wealthy are seen as “suffering from a ‘situational adjustment of adolescence’” or perhaps as “anxiety neurotic.” Health professionals know only too well that knowing people’s blood pressure, height, weight, and cholesterol levels doesn’t mean you understand them entirely. These numbers serve as markers, but the challenge is to understand an individual’s world of experience that may have played a role in producing such measurements.
Thus, we may violate people’s human rights by placing them and their multiple ways of experiencing and acting as a being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1959), devoid of environmental-social context, into a theoretic system’s framework, whatever sanction that system might receive from the academic, professional community. People do not engage with each other solely as “schedules of reinforcement,” like Pavlov’s dogs or Skinnerian rats, shaping one another’s behavior through sophisticated processes of rewards and punishments. People can love one another with all the mysteries and intangibles such profound interconnectedness involves. The problem, however, may be that it is easier to discern such concrete entities as easily distinguishable rewards and punishments than to reflect on and try to understand the lived world of the experiencing, loving person.
What we need is a humanistic approach that is phenomenon bound rather than systems bound. This approach is discussed in more depth in Chapter 5, in the context of integrating research methodology into the helping and health professions in a human rights framework. For the time being, it is important to acknowledge that human rights do indeed emerge from this tradition, the human being constantly struggling to be seen as a potentiality with the ability to transcend any straightjacket of categorization or prejudice based, for example, on gender, class, race, national origin, or religion. Is that not what discrimination is, seeing a person as an actuality rather than as a possibility who is more than a score, a diagnosis, or a stereotyped character trait of his or her group? We may sum up the history of the idea of human rights by saying it represents a struggle of the human race to transcend any actuality thrust upon it, to proclaim loudly that people are human beings, more than just numbers, diagnoses, subjects of a schedule of reinforcement, wage slaves, second-class citizens, or poor defenseless persons who must be helped by those who have no understanding of the indignity of their favors and handouts. Undeniably, this concept has a lot to do with the human need for self-actualization, which, as Abraham Maslow (1987), a major architect of the humanistic movement, asserts, is intimately intertwined with human dignity.
Human Rights Documents as Historical-Philosophical Compromises
Human rights documents are really historical-philosophical compromises in response to violence, in which human development is thwarted. These documents are indeed teaching tools (recall that docere means “to teach”), representing choices, kinds of constitutions, that reflect the wisdom of many members of the global community, most often governments, ideally with input from the “will of the people,” a phrase found in every state constitution in the United States (Wronka, 1998b). Indeed, some human rights documents are called conventions or covenants, whose Latin root, convenire means “to meet, to come together.” But in some cultures, such documents, which ultimately crystallize values into legally mandated rights, are not written down, for example, indigenous cultures in which sharing was traditionally highly valued, as in the Inupiat Ilitqusiat movement in the Arctic region of Alaska. Other handed-down values were knowledge of language, sharing, respect for elders, love for children, hard work, knowledge of one’s family tree, avoidance of conflict, respect for nature, spirituality, humor, family roles, successful hunting, domestic skills, humility, and responsibility to the tribe (Wronka, 1993). Ultimately, human rights documents are variations of a theme, representing choices in response to broadly defined violence. The Inupiaq value of sharing reflects the need for communal responsibility in a harsh environment; the U.S. Bill of Rights’ emphasis on freedom of religion reflects the colonists’ terror from the religious wars in Europe.
It would be a mistake, however, to view the history of human rights as merely a struggle between the forces of good and evil. The world is more complicated. Such a Hobson’s choice4 may be tempting, but it could easily result in a kind of evil imaging of the Other, which is hardly a productive way to engage in positive social action and service. Such a dichotomy could also result in a holier-than-thou attitude on the part of the human rights defender or social justice advocate. The helping and health professions may be prone to such self-righteous attitudes. The helper, for example, may feel more self-actualized than thou, better psychoanalyzed than thou, more in touch with feelings than thou, more able to empower than thou, healthier than thou, or more organic than thou.
Indeed, a little humility might help. Historically, human rights defenders have had their share of issues. An obvious case is the beheading of an early feminist activist, Olympe de Gouges (Healy, 2001), by those supposedly concerned about human rights. Concerned that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, drafted soon after the French Revolution, was limited by excluding half of the human race—that is, women—she drew up a document on the Rights of Women. For her heresy, she faced the guillotine. Thus, the history of the idea of human rights involves a struggle, yes, but not necessarily between the forces of good and evil. Rather, to paraphrase Zorba, it is a story of the people’s agony in making sense of their lives as they deal with the basic ontological question: What does life mean in the face of death? Shall we, asked Shakespeare, “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or rise against them? The story of human rights is about the struggle of the human race to ascend to the heights rather than cave in to circumstance. Indeed, human rights documents have emerged as guiding lights in a world of darkness.
Figure 2.1 Olympe de Gouges, author of the French Declaration on the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, facing the guillotine.
Figure 6
Source: Wikimedia Commons/Exécution d’Olympe de Gouges; Description: Lavis; Artist: Mettais; Year: 1793. Public domain.
The Human Rights Triptych
To get a further sense of this journey, it is now necessary to examine what René Cassin sometimes referred to as the “true father of human rights” (Szabo, 1982, p. 23), the human rights triptych. This triptych is akin to works of artists such as Peter Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch, in particular the latter’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in which the central panel depicts the main theme, the descent of humanity; the right panel depicts the seven deadly sins; and the left, the Garden of Eden. The side panels elaborate on the essence of the main theme. In the human rights triptych (see Table 2.1), the central panel, the most important in understanding human rights, is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose five crucial concepts are discussed in Chapter 1. (Included here also is the UN Charter, which preceded the Universal Declaration but has emerged as an extremely powerful voice in world affairs, especially because of its status as a treaty. It is important for the social activist to have some awareness of the Charter’s major principles as well.) On the right side are the guiding principles, declarations, and covenants that followed it; on the left are the means of its implementation, which consist largely of filing reports pertaining to human rights committees, and world conferences. Both side panels embellish the essence of the Universal Declaration.
The following are nine major human rights instruments that came after the Universal Declaration, along with their acronyms and the dates they entered into force (that is, became law in the international community): (a) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1976); (b) the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1976); (c) the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1990); (d) the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1981); (e) the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT, 1987); (f) the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD, 1969); (g) the Convention on Migrant Workers (CMW, 2003); (h) the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD, 2006); and (i) the Convention on Enforced Disappearances (CED, 2010). These conventions have the status of treaty, and, when ratified, according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, the Supremacy Clause, they must be considered “Supreme Law of the Land” and “judges bound thereby” (Weissbrodt, Fitzpatrick, & Newman, 2001). As of 2015, the United States has ratified the ICCPR, CAT, and CERD, but still with the caveat that they be “non-self-executing”—that is, nonenforceable in U.S. courts (Buergenthal et al., 2002). Given this notion of “non-self-executing,” the argument could easily be made that the United States has ratified none of these conventions. One hopes human rights defenders will one day succeed in removing this shameful caveat. Ratification ultimately should be more than a mere symbolic gesture, even though U.S. ratification at this time may still provide fodder for social action vis-à-vis human rights reports soon to be discussed.5 Symbols can move people, but legally binding documents buttressed by the will of the people are preferable.