Dignity and Human Rights

Language Philosophy and Social Realizations

Stephan P. Leher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351665124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is it impossible to assess dignity, the agency of autonomy and equality of rights under the current rule of law, when we are met by global challenges like climate change, financial crisis, food crisis, natural disasters, inequality, violent conflicts and trade disputes?

Drawing on European philosophical enlightenment to rethink dominant theories of contemporary Western Human Rights, Stephan P. Leher explores the philosophical foundation of the concept of 'dignity' and Human Rights. Using specific examples from Africa and Latin America to explain these concepts as social realizations in the world, Leher demonstrates the link between justice and peace and contends that dignity, freedom and Human Rights law rule are social realizations and claims by all people. He argues that sentences and propositions about social choices and realizations of real life expressed in ordinary language constitutes the basic element for the foundation and protection of human dignity and Human Rights. The social choice to claim one's freedom and right can be considered as the dignity agency of the individual.

Dignity and Human Rights sheds new light on the academic assessment of dignity, the agency of autonomy and equality of rights under a rule of law in a time of changes and challenges of human rights policies and politics.

1 The End of History or the Beginning of a Human Rights History?

 

Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist and, at the fall of the Iron Curtain, deputy director of the US State Department’s policy planning staff, drew on philosophical concepts to diagnose the possible end of history (Fukuyama 1989¹). Fukuyama uses central concepts from German philosophical Idealism and applies them to political science. This philosophy draws on the concept of “consciousness” as the idea of the cultural realization of the autonomous self that guides history not only for a contingent moment of reflection but as a principle of absolute validity. A plurality of philosophical world views would imply a plurality of equally conclusive concepts of consciousness, but Fukuyama’s philosophy is not shaped by embracing plurality. Rather, he champions the behaviorist paradigm that “Western liberal democracy” will determine the behavior of the world and the social and political development of the peoples on this earth now and forever.

In drawing my own picture of the situation, I need to stay alert to the fact that I, too, do not present only a single state of affairs. I hope that the arguments I advance show that life founded on the basis of dignity and equal freedom and rights can actually be socially realized, not just an imagined, perfect idea. Fukuyama creates a compelling vision of the power games played on this earth to interpret the flow of history. Writing at the center of US foreign policy design, Fukuyama was conscious of the fact that he was serving as a high-ranking mandarin in the interests of the unchallenged, number one world power. His essay from 1989 implicitly makes the seemingly self-evident assumption that the United States of America—as the number one world power at the time—would retain its position of strength; he does not question that the United States will be the central player in the world for a long time to come. Just as sentences speak for themselves and do not need other sentences to interpret them, Fukuyama behaves like one of those self-assured American citizens who proclaim their arguments, convictions and analysis throughout the world with unshakeable confidence. Such certainty sounds convincingly positive when Fukuyama asserts the end of history, in the sense that the coming centuries will fulfill what is already present, namely “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukuyama believes that the ideas of liberal democracy will “govern the material world in the long run.”

The contradiction underlying the claim that the democratic rule of law finally governs humanity and the actual situation of the real world today is a painful and evident fact. Hegel’s concept of “consciousness,” understood as explicit self-awareness, can be analyzed as a speech-act that reflects on liberty. “Consciousness” is not a self-evident concept in Western culture; it is expressed by speech-acts of individual women, men or queer.² As long as there are women, men and queer to speak about their lives, history will go on—whether or not they use concepts like “consciousness.” “The world is all that is the case,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus 1), and “The world and life are one” (Tractatus 5.621; 1999).

In an egalitarian world view of the liberty of free speech and freedom of expression all sentences and speech-acts would be considered of equal importance and no single sentence would be privileged over another. Reading about history and Fukuyama, I wonder at the fact that the world exists at all; that there is life and that it is not yet gone. As Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus 6.44: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” I wonder that the world exists at all; I wonder that women, men and queer give testimony on their lives and the world. “The world is all that is the case” (Tractatus 1). “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (Tractatus 2), that is, the state of affairs and their logical pictures that are the sentences of ordinary language.

Despite all the violence that historians describe, it is still a fact that life exists. Fukuyama dared in 1989 to propose the hypothesis that “Western liberal democracy” can be universally considered “the final form of human government.” Fukuyama does not further investigate the plausibility of his claim, nor does he try to discuss arguments to confirm or deny his hypothesis. Basically, he seems to stick to Hegel’s belief in the progress of the social evolution of history and to the behaviorist conviction that, because man was the product of his concrete historical and social environment, therefore the idea of liberal democracy will materialize by the necessity of history; and all women, men and queer in the world will become liberal democrats. Fukuyama does not present validity conditions to confirm his claims; and what would the validity conditions of his claims and hypothesis look like? What if poverty, injustice, hunger, sickness and illiteracy constitute a destructive alternative social and historical environment for the majority of mankind? Or, how can be we certain that in future women, men and queer will not continue to further develop Western liberal democracy’s model, but create new forms of social organization that would allow hitherto unknown means of personal, political, cultural and economic participation in society? How can we be certain that social evolution will not start to devolve, ending in the destruction of mankind? Only if we limit our attention to the few privileged rich of this world can we maintain Fukuyama’s argument that the concrete historical and social environment of Western liberal democracy has no challenging alternative in the world.

Does the hypothesis of the following sentence deserve the truth value “true” and can we again call war the mother of democracy?

The two world wars in this century and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending [the basic principles of the liberal democratic state] spatially, such that the various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most advanced outposts, and of forcing those societies in Europe and North America at the vanguard of civilization to implement their liberalism more fully.

(Fukuyama 1989)

Speaking of the effects of the two world wars, one has also to remember the millions of women, men and queer who suffered and died in these wars. I would want to remember in silence and humility the Shoah. Personally, I am grateful to the Allied forces that liberated my country, Austria, from Nazism. The fact of “democratic law,” coming from the polities of national liberal democratic states, was introduced to the world with the help of states—or, as Fukuyama says, of “human civilizations”—that obeyed “the rule of democratic law.” But the Soviet communist dictatorship, which in the countries east of the Iron Curtain oppressed liberty and “democratic law,” also contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. There is a kind of silent forgetting that the eastern part of my home country Austria was liberated from the Nazis by Soviet soldiers who were ready to fight and die for the liberation of the Austrian people from Nazism. Why speak of states in general when so many forms of states exist: democratic and dictatorial, for example? Why speak of “forcing” democratic states to implement democracy on others? It is clear that the implementation of democratic liberties must follow a democratic process and the rule of law of free people. Was democracy forced on Germany and Austria in 1945? We may think of many democratic governments or institutions that were established according to the laws of democratic states. Governments may be “forced” to adopt democracy by circumstances like pressure from the people, from lobbies and persuasive individuals, but also from powerful allied forces that dictate peace treaties after a lost war of aggression. What motivated the individual French woman, man and queer to undertake the French Revolution? How does the idea of liberty and equality correlate with “the finger on the trigger of the gun,” the guillotine and, for example, the exclusion of women and queer from the idea of liberty and equality in the French Revolution? Fukuyama is right to claim that consumerism, economics and the politics of liberalism presuppose a democratic polity and policy that follow the rule of law.

Who is the single agent of liberalism, of democracy, of a democratic policy, politics and polity? It is the single woman, man and queer. Accepting that the world is all that is the case, means accepting all sentences as spoken and realized agencies of subject agents called speakers. When regarding Fukuyama’s use of the term “universal” to describe democracy, this can only be true if individuals’ speech-acts, which constitute the beginning of the process of universality, claim democracy and—through this claim by speech-acts—spread the message of democracy all over the globe.

I claim the truth value “true” for Fukuyama’s claim in 1989, and again in 2016, that “China could not now be described in any way as a liberal democracy.” It is up to the historians to demonstrate that “Maoism … became an anachronism.” It is also up to the historians to describe Lenin’s “conviction that a revolution could not be successfully made by a democratically run organization” and to remember “Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and various other Menshevik and Social Democratic rivals” who were against a “dictatorship of a hierarchically organized vanguard Communist party.” It will also be up to the historians to refute or verify Fukuyama’s claim that “for the moment … the fascist and communist challenges to liberalism are dead.” If, from the fact of the existence of Western liberal democracy as the presently unchallenged and historically successful model of social, political, cultural, etc., organization, one concludes, deduces or postulates any necessity of history for Western liberal democracy to first rule the consciousness of women, men and queer, and then the world as a whole, attentive logicians will identify this as a fallacy: the fallacy of violating the distinction between a fact—that is, the existence of Western liberal democracy without attractive alternatives—and the wish, the claim or value judgment that Western liberal democracy will reign throughout the world.

It is hard to imagine that the “universal homogenous state” for Fukuyama would be anything other than a certain state of mind of a small political and economic elite with members all over the world. Concerning the nation state and the fact of many nation states in the world, I doubt that Fukuyama thinks of some international organization like the United Nations as a future model for a “universal democratic and liberal state.” Giving away the sovereignty of the United States and US citizenship for something like a global citizenship of women, men and queer born free and equal in dignity and rights does not appear to be an attractive option for the United States or its citizens. The realization of “the democratic rule of law” in this world remains a huge challenge.

Looking back on his history of the world in 1973, Arnold Toynbee (1976) concluded that only the establishment of a government that included all communities on earth would be able to end the sickness of wars and barbarism. The reader of Toynbee’s history doubts that this is near to being realized. Toynbee is clear that the development of the social skills of empathy, respect and love did not grow alongside men’s and women’s technical capacities. It seems that mankind will not learn to walk the way of peace, but will continue to destroy; the fact that gives rise to wonder is that mankind exists at all.

Toynbee starts out wondering about the existence of the biosphere, the possibilities for life on a small, grain-of-sand-like planet called Earth in a universe that extends to limits unknown and unseen. Life’s possibilities are bound by strict and sustained variables of this universe and all of these are given. Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period in the fourth millennium BC. The Sumerian culture was the first on this planet to organize agriculture through the construction of irrigation systems between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and left testimony to their culture by leaving written messages in the sands for the following centuries. Egyptian civilization was soon to follow, with similar cultures in India and China coming relatively late. From the steppes of Eurasia for most of the last 5,000 years, streams of nomads have repeated the rhythm of settlers being conquered but passing their culture on to the invading nomads. In Greek-Roman antiquity the inhabited part of the world was called “oikumene.” Looking in 1973 on the “oikumene,” Toynbee reasons that, for the first time, men and women who have barely changed since the Neolithic period have the capacity to extinguish themselves, with nuclear power and industrialism’s toxic wastes.

Mankind has effectively dominated the environment, with improved standards of living, education, public health, sanitation, medicine, housing and nutrition. But Toynbee describes mankind’s unsolved social problems. From a Human Rights perspective, the challenge to the dignity of all men and women is the fact that the majority of men and women on this planet do not fully participate in these substantial environmental improvements delivered by the industrial age.

The technological achievements of the fourth millennium BC needed and produced specialists—miners, blacksmiths, engineers—to plan and organize big public projects like drainage and irrigation systems. Their contribution to the surplus food production was more significant than the contribution of the mass of unskilled laborers. Unequal distribution of the profit therefore seems inevitable and probably justified. In time, these differences grew to intolerable gaps that passed to the next generation by heredity. Social injustices and war were the consequences. These two original sicknesses of civilization have plagued men and women to the present day. Toynbee argues that few men and women recognize that the system of nation states that we have known for the last 5,000 years is not capable of satisfying the political demands of the people. The globalized society of mankind asks for a different solution for political organization. The nation state can wage wars, but is incapable of ensuring peace on earth. Today’s nation states are not able to secure peace, to stop men and women from polluting the biosphere, or to maintain the earth’s irreplaceable and indispensable resources. This demonstrates political anarchy in a world that has become technically and economically globalized. We have had the technology to build a worldwide political organization of the world’s villages for the last 100 years.

During the last 200 years, technological progress has augmented mankind’s richness and power. Industrialization and the invention and use of the machine have created industrialized capitalists who seem to combine exploitation of their working men and women with a hitherto unknown appetite for money and reckless ambition, lacking any consideration of the dignity of all men and women. These European and North American capitalists excelled in stealing the precious inventions from humble inventors to make profit and wealth. Since the rise of civilization there has been a discrepancy between technological progress and the social behavior of men and women. The development of the social skills of empathy, respect and love have not grown with men’s and women’s technical capacities. It would seem that bridging the gap between the possibility to do evil and the ethical faculties to overcome it is almost impossible.

Looking back on history in 1973, Toynbee concluded that only the building of a government that includes all communities on earth could end the sickness of wars and barbarism. Toynbee, like Fukuyama, spoke of a government that could administer all communities on earth; neither spoke of the United Nations as a possible nucleus of this kind of world government.

Notes

1 Fukuyama based this article on a lecture presented at the University of Chicago’s John M. Olin Center.

2 Rather than the abbreviation LGBTQI, I shall use the expression “queer” to include all non-heterosexual and gender-variant people on the grounds of their non-normativity. The term “queer” highlights the normativity and intersections of sexual and gender identities; the term expresses inclusiveness for all human experiences attempting to ensure the individual’s sexual identity and integrity. This is important especially because the fight for identity is in reality a daily struggle.

References

Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest. Summer. www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm.

Toynbee, Arnold. 1976. Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World. London: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. New York: Dover.

2 Two Surprising Facts

There Are a First Case and a First International Court to Hold Defendants Responsible for Their Crimes According to the Rule of Human Rights Law

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1999) writes in Number 6.44 of the Tractatus: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” Two facts in the world to wonder about: the use of the term “humanity” by an international court of justice and the fact that this international military tribunal complied with the rule of law. Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) served as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954. From 1945 to 1946, Justice Jackson was the chief prosecutor of the surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.¹ The term “humanity” was precisely and meticulously defined by Jackson in 1945, in his opening statement as chief prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. There are tons of collected documents constituting the evidence that Justice Jackson, the architect of the international trial process, presented at the trial. The historic realization of this first international court, which effectively enforced the rule of law and brought to justice criminals who were accused of barbarous crimes against humanit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The End of History or the Beginning of a Human Rights History?
• 2 Two Surprising Facts: There Are a First Case and a First International Court to Hold Defendants Responsible for Their Crimes According to the Rule of Human Rights Law
• 3 The Individual Woman, Man and Queer Is the Subject of International Human Rights Law
• 4 There Is a Plurality of Understandings and Realizations of the Concept of “Human Dignity”
• 5 Dignity, Human Rights and Language Philosophy
• 6 The West’s Adherence to Privileges, Cultural Contexts and Arguments on State Sovereignty Challenge Universal Human Rights
• 7 Democracy Is about Self-Determination of Women, Men and Queer within Their Communities
• 8 Choice and Ability to Claim One’s Dignity as Policies of the Individual
• 9 A Question to Be Answered by Empirical Social Research: Are Women and Men Conscious of Their Dignity in Relation to the Quality of Their Social Choices and Social Realizations?
• 10 Language Philosophy, Interview Sentences, Dignity and Human Rights
• 11 Conclusion
• Index