The era of George W. Bush and Tony Blair will be remembered for one thing 20 years hence — the world went backwards on human rights after 50 years of steady advance. Yet I predict within less than a handful of years forward momentum will be restored. The foundations for pushing forward the frontiers of human rights are well laid, and we will come to regard this present political era as more of a setback than a rout.
Many scholars have argued that a doctrine of natural rights was already implicit in Judeo-Christian teaching. But Moses’ law was commandment. So were Jesus’. Natural rights theories are essentially a relatively recent Western invention, dating from around the 12th century, at the height of the medieval period.
12th century European civilization was marked, like no other culture, with a new emphasis on humanism and personalism. Not least courtly love literature explored the pain and joys of human lovers. In marriage law the simple consent of the man and the woman, without the need to go to church, was regarded as sufficient for a valid sacramental marriage. What a human right that was!
When the French Franciscan philosopher, William of Ockham, arrived on the scene in the 14th century, he took this a step further. Natural rights and natural law, he wrote, were derived from human rationality and free will and were independent of Christian revelation. Pope Benedict is today an enthusiast of this idea of natural law.
The Enlightenment was the next great watershed — led by Rousseau (“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains”) and Voltaire (“I know of many books that fatigue but not one that has done real evil”). In France these ideas fuelled the agitation against the Ancien Regime. In the American colonies they inspired the rebels who defied the British establishment. It was the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 that first synthesized the best ideas of the Enlightenment — and did that in the most beautiful prose.
But a mere two years later the Enlightenment started to run out of breath. The terror in France had much to do with this. “When I hear of natural rights”, said Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, “I always see in the background a cluster of daggers and picks.” Karl Mark was vociferous critic of The Rights of Man — they “are nothing but the rights of egotistic man”
Human rights went out of fashion and even the carnage of World War I didn’t bring them back. Neither did Stalin’s show trials and mass executions nor the persecution of the Jews in Germany reignite the cause. The dam of apathy was not breached until H.G. Wells, the great science fiction writer, shortly after the onset of World War II, together with a few socialist friends including A.A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh, published a declaration of principles on human rights. This was the first time since the 18th century that there was an attempt to restate human rights in a homely way. Penguin Books quickly followed up the declaration by publishing “H.G. Wells on the Rights of Man”. It was translated into 30 languages. President Franklin Roosevelt was one of its readers. On Jan. 1, 1942, just after the US entered the war, the Allies pronounced that “complete victory over the enemies is essential.... to preserve human rights and justice.”
From Eleanor Roosevelt’s chairing of the UN committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, through the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, through the founding of Amnesty International, the decision by President Jimmy Carter to make human rights a cornerstone of US foreign policy, and on to the world wide majority vote in 1998 for the establishment of an International Criminal Court, the world has increasingly nailed its colors to the mast of human rights.
It will take more than the eight years of George Bush and the ten years of Tony Blair to reverse this advancing tide, now 900 years strong, although the setbacks have been severe. As we prepare for a changing of the guard in Britain and in the US, we must take a deep breath and push their successors to build civilization to a new level of order — ensuring by the observance of law that tyranny is kept in check, that liberty and justice prevail and that the strong do not trample on the weak and vulnerable.
