Full Thread: 'Human Rights'
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Old January 13th, 2012 #13
Mike Parker
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Join Date: Jul 2007
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I used to scoff at all this as so much self-serving silliness. Superficially, the Cold War was a global competition between two rival conceptions of human rights: roughly, political equality vs. economic equality. You can imagine how little real people cared about either such abstraction. As it turned out, the US won the competition in most non-contiguous places (like Egypt) simply by virtue of having more money to throw around at local potentates, who understandably rejected both conceptions of human rights.

Later on, I read an article that tried to justify human rights in realist terms. It argued that full Wilsonian self-determination for all who want it is too destabilizing of the existing order; for strategic and economic reasons, many states want or need to incorporate minority populations. At the same time, aggrieved minorities have themselves sometimes been destabilizing forces, generating conflicts with neighboring states. Examples include Russia as protector of the Slavs prior to WWI and the Sudeten Germans prior to WWII. Using international institutions to force states to grant minorities full human rights in the form of strict equality, so the argument goes, eliminates the grievances and thereby the pretext for other states to intervene individually.

Putting aside the merits of that argument, the question that troubles me is why these—self-determination extremism and human rights extremism—are the only two alternatives under consideration by serious Western thinkers. The Muslim world offers up a third option in the form of dhimmitude. Notwithstanding religious universalism, they manage to keep distinct minorities around without treating them identically to the majority, or feeling guilty about that. Christianity doesn’t seem to have evolved such a reasonable approach. Except for the singular case of the codependent jews, when the Christian looks around at people he sees only Christians and potential Christians. That’s bound to blur otherwise perfectly defensible lines between groups. Another failure of logos, I’m afraid.