Saturday, March 10, 2007
Rick's question catches me just as I am preparing to hit the road for the better part of the next two weeks. Got to pack and take care of some odds and ends, so this will be quick. I've read the review of Lynn Hunt's book (Hunt, Rick, not Hurt), and what the reviewer (Joshua Muravchik) says seems sound to me:
To
connect human rights to social history in this way is an original and
interesting approach to the subject. But it is not entirely convincing.
If bodily boundaries changed after the 14th century, why did a change
in the perceptions of rights not happen until the 18th? Did a revulsion
toward torture bring about new ideas about rights, or did the
cause-and-effect relation go the other way, with a sense of rights
coming first and revulsion after? Or is it possible that some third,
underlying cause affected both?
Similarly,
Ms. Hunt does a nice job of explaining the era's epistolary novels and
their themes of empathy, but she offers no evidence of their direct
connection to the emergence of human rights. Maybe "coincidental" is
indeed the right word. In any case, it is hard to believe that
epistolary novels were a more potent engine of empathy than the book of
Genesis, which enjoins against murder on the grounds that "in the image
of God made He man."
In
Ms. Hunt's interpretation, our sense of rights is infinitely elastic
and vulnerable to shifting emotion. She might have stopped to address
the possibility--advanced by Steven Pinker and James Q. Wilson, among
others--that morality has a strong genetic component. She also plays
down the power of intellect in human affairs. For Jefferson's and
Locke's ideas to take hold, must we assume that the 18th-century brain
required some extraneous preparation? Couldn't it be that the insights
and arguments of the era's great minds were forceful in themselves,
playing a much greater role than "Clarissa"?
To
say that the theory at the heart of Ms. Hunt's book is unpersuasive,
though, is not to deny its value. Along the way, she offers a lively
and informative history of human rights, even if the source of them
remains something of a mystery.
In any event, we find (what I call) the morality of human rights as least as far back as the Gospels. I discuss the morality of human rights, and its religious ground, in my new book, Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts (Cambridge 2007).
Let me seize the opportunity to alert MOJ readers in the Salt Lake City area to a discussion that will take place at the University of Utah this Thursday afternoon, March 15. Fellow MOJ blogger Steve Shiffrin, Michael McConnell, and I will be discussing establishment clause issues.
The British Parliament's joint committee on human rights has issued a report that appears to call for increased (and intrusive) supervision of the content of education in private and religious schools, toward the end of making sure these schools do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Here's a bit:
In our view, the prohibitions on discrimination in the Regulations limit the manifestation of those religious beliefs and that limitation is justifiable in a democratic society for the protection of the right of gay people not to be discriminated against in the provision of goods, facilities and services. ... [T]here would be a compatibility problem if the Regulations provided for a wider exemption which expressly exempted religious bodies from the obligation not to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. ... An exemption to protect the absolute right of freedom of conscience and religion would therefore be likely to be justifiable, but not an exemption to protect the right to manifest one's conscience or religious belief, which, as we have sought to explain above, is capable of justified limitation and in our view can be justifiably limited in order to protect gay people from discrimination.
And then this:
We do not consider that the right to freedom of conscience and religion requires the school curriculum to be exempted from the scope of the sexual orientation regulations. In our view the Regulations prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination should clearly apply to the curriculum, so that homosexual pupils are not subjected to teaching, as part of the religious education or other curriculum, that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong. Applying the Regulations to the curriculum would not prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful. In our view there is an important difference between this factual information being imparted in a descriptive way as part of a wide-ranging syllabus about different religions, and a curriculum which teaches a particular religion's doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true. The latter is likely to lead to unjustifiable discrimination against homosexual pupils.
(Thanks to David Frum for the links.)
It turns out that it is not only in America where the government's schools fail the poor, and special-interests slight the amazing achievements of private schools. Check this out.
Our fellow blogger here at MOJ, Michael Perry, has written, among other things, an important book called "The Idea of Human Rights." I'd love to get his reactions to this review, by Joshua Muravchik, of a new book by Lynn Hurt of a book called "Inventing Human Rights." The book asks, "[w]hat had happened that suddenly made the notion that 'all men are created equal and endowed with . . . unalienable rights' so resonant, both in Europe and America," in the late 18th century?
Hurt's answer? "Brain changes" -- that is, "new feelings" that were, in large part, the product of a new art form, the epistolary novel. Interesting. Michael?
David Bell has an interesting review (subscribers only) in a recent issue of The New Republic John Bowen's book, Why The French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Bell emphasizes, first, "the utter centrality of conflicts with organized religion to the identity of the French Republic, dating back to the French Revolution"; second, "the fact that in the French Republican imagination, when it comes to religion, women hold a critical and distinct place"; and third, the country's "sudden and jarring" shift away from being a Catholic country. Later, he writes:
A more important reason [for the headscarves controversy], which Bowen also discusses, involves the complex and even deceptive nature of laïcité itself. Advocates of the concept tend to define it in terms of the separation of church and state, but in practice it has as much to do with control as with strict severance. The state may insist on keeping religion out of the public sector, but it also supports religion to an extent that Americans would find unimaginable, under the justification that religious belief in general contributes to the health of civil society. . . .
French authorities have long tried to pursue the same pattern of accommodation and control with Islam. . . .It often seems that what matters most to these officials is not an Islam separate from the Republic, but an Islam subordinate to it.
This context suggests an alternate explanation for what drove the headscarf controversy forward. The crucial factor may not be that Muslim schoolgirls were "bringing religion" into the schools, but that they were actively defying school officials. The secular state can accommodate certain "public" forms of religion, but it will not tolerate blatant religious opposition to state authority, however minor the gesture, however young the opponent. . .
