Each year, the world community commemorates the anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly, which was ratified on Dec. 10, 1948 — Human Rights Day — with the exception, of course, of governments who ignore, defy and violate human rights. These are exclusively governments without any democratic legitimation.
This simple fact makes it obvious that democracy and human rights are interdependent.
Democracies, unlike dictatorships or authoritarian regimes, grant citizens (through their elected representatives) the basic right to pass laws, which permits sufficient individual freedom to live in accordance with their ideas of a “good” life. The common laws, together with the institutions that help to enforce them, safeguard this and other basic rights; they guarantee individual freedom and at the same time, limit this very freedom in case the freedom of others is ignored. Basic rights, therefore, need legal protection and in democracies they are granted this protection through laws citizens give themselves. However, there is more to basic rights — there is also a moral dimension.
Basic rights are rights people have not only as citizens, but also as human beings or as persons — ie, regardless of their cultural, social, ethnic, religious or national background. As persons, each individual is equal and endowed with equal rights. This surplus of validity, which is legally protected by the basic laws, but which, at the same time, transcends their legal scope, is the (moral) essence of human rights.
Article 1 of the declaration reflects this surplus: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
This moral dimension of the basic laws, unlike common legal provisions that change with history, can be rationally and universally justified and hence functions as a critical tool against manipulation and corruption of laws and people for cultural, national or other purposes. That all human beings are equally free can be morally legitimized.
There is no conceivable rational argument that would not support this equal freedom. All objections against universal human rights lack legitimacy; they oppress the moral dimension. They are ideologically corrupt, no matter whether they are presented in the name of culture, religion or national interests.
The moral value of human rights consists of the idea that individuals should be equally free to define and determine their own life plans for which they can be held responsible. It is in the genuine interest of citizens to mutually grant this very freedom to anybody else, for one’s own freedom depends on the freedom of others. Individuals, therefore, should never be defined or identified by cultural, religious or national values, especially if these values deny the freedom of self-determination. They are derivative, secondary values vis-a-vis the human right to self-determination; they always can be misused. The human right to self-determination can never be misused.
This is also why individuals cannot be defined at all, for definitions are easily exploited by putting the defined into the perspective of the definer’s purpose. Philosophically, individuals are indefinable.
We have seen enough terror and crimes against individuals in the name of anti-individual identities, committed in the name of communal (communism in all forms), national (Japan’s imperialism), religious (Sept. 11, 2001, attacks), cultural (female genital mutilation) or ethnic identity (Nazi Germany).
Individuals have the right to live according to their ideas and governments have the duty to secure the possibility of this. The state itself, however, must remain neutral with regard to the life choices of individuals. It should not privilege one form of life against another form. State institutions are not moral institutions; they are not in the moral position to prescribe and honor certain ways of life, which is exclusively a matter of the individual. Instead, the national laws should guarantee the moral freedom of individual self-determination.
This approach has been always contested. More recent criticism comes from countries still immersed in “thick” traditions, insisting on the communal nature (or definition) of human beings, which, subsequently, would require a cultural reformulation of human rights that secures greater influence of the state or the community on the individual’s way of life. China’s propagation of so-called “Asian values” is such an example.
US political philosopher Michael Sandel’s “encumbered self” is another one and it is no coincidence his book, Justice, has become so popular in countries with “thick” cultures, such as Taiwan, China and Japan.
In a paid advertising supplement to the Oct. 27 Asia edition of the International Herald Tribune, Beijing propagated Chinese culture and values through its culture-and-values-propagating Confucius Institutes.
In this supplement, the teachings of a rejuvenated Confucius (孔子) are at the center of these efforts when recommending that readers “should still try to achieve the perfect education he [Confucius] so passionately advocated, 2,000 years ago.”
Apparently, the Chinese authorities believe that this is exactly what they are doing.
“Is it?” one is tempted to riposte with Monty Python’s John Cleese.
It is not difficult to see a connection between China’s educational values, the self-proclaimed Confucian legacy with its defense of communal/state priorities vis-a-vis individuals, and the reality and how this affects human rights, such as the right to an “education ... directed to the full development of the human personality,” as Article 26, Subparagraph 2 of the declaration states.
The reality is the extent to which the minds of my students from China are manipulated by a political and cultural system that privileges itself with the right to interfere with the lives of its “subordinates.” It is utterly discomforting to learn, semester after semester, that, as it seems, the huge majority of young, extremely bright, intelligent, polite and, yes, open-minded students with high academic aptitudes and attitudes, keep on naively reproducing the same old lies that they hold as truths because they were the only “facts” the authorities back home allowed them to consume.
Here just a few examples of “perfect education”: Many of our students from China earnestly think that 90 percent of Taiwanese want unification with China (just ask the people in Taiwan); that former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong (as the worst criminal in history, he was 100 percent wrong — just ask historian Frank Dikotter); that the world loves China (well, ask the rest of the world); and that the time is not yet ripe in China for democratic reforms (well, ask Ai Weiwei [艾未未] and other Chinese political prisoners).
The manipulation and corruption of information is not exactly an “education directed to the full development” of a person.
It is neither a “perfect education”; it is the opposite. It (implicitly) defines individuals as corruptible beings that need to be told what to think. Apparently, China’s government wants the people it rules to live a life in accordance with its own — and not the people’s — ideas. Living their own lives would make them have their own ideas and this is what non-democratic governments steeped in “thick” traditions fear.
Denial of democratic rights is the true heritage of Confucianism where people in power claim they know “The Way.” Under such political conditions, self-determination is difficult. This is why governments deliberately restrict information. Instead, they treat people as if in need of permanent guidance, hence preselected content and undignifying teaching styles in such a culture. Those who think that this is tolerable are either cynics, liars, idiots, criminals or, as victims, already deprived of their dignity.
The struggle for human rights is a human endeavor to preserve and, in cases where it has been denied, to restore human dignity.
Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at I-Shou University in Greater Kaohsiung.
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