Human Rights and Wrongs

We Americans are waffling between God’s blue sky and the Red Devil on the issue of human rights. It’s time to face the issues.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights forged by the United Nations in 1945 deserved both plaudit and censure.

On the plus side, it pledged U.N. member states to promote “universal respect for, and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction.”

On the minus side, totalitarian and other powers frequently violate the U.N. Declaration; membership has in fact become a matter of sovereign nationhood more than of mutually shared principles. The summons to fulfill U.N. ideals is now often rebuffed as an unwarranted intrusion into the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The U.N. has frequently declared itself powerless to act on rights violations. Tens of thousands of protest petitions reach the U.N. annually; only a few categories among them—currently apartheid and decolonization—get much attention.

The U.N. Declaration contrasts adversely with the notably more explicit statement on human rights embodied in the United States Declaration of Independence. Not only does the latter differ somewhat in its particularization of rights, but it identifies the divine Creator as the transcendent source and sanction of human rights. To a radically secular society, this may seem to be a bit of quaint poetry. But the fact remains that the insistence of the classic American political documents on a transcendent source and sanction of human rights (whether it was ventured on theistic or deistic principles or both we need not argue here) is of immense importance. Since the United Nations document is silent on the theme of the source and sanction of human rights, it leaves open the possibility that, should it someday emerge as a self-policing world body, the U.N. itself would assume the role of creator and stipulator of human rights. In that case, no appeal would be possible to any higher authority; the place of God in the American political creed would have been usurped by a world government.

Therefore it is highly important to remind Communist spokesmen, and other totalitarian spirits who swiftly insert themselves into all political power vacuums that the summons to respect human rights is not an interference in a nation’s internal affairs. Nor is it simply a matter of integrity in keeping pledged U.N. commitments to internationally shared principles, though President Carter has rightly emphasized this aspect. Rejection of the universally binding character of human rights, whether by Soviet spokesmen or others, reflects an intolerance of God’s transcendent claim upon the human species. It is a morally inexcusable frustration of rights that the Divine Creator intends for mankind. The writers of the Declaration of Independence did not hesitate to say so in response to the King of England; they would not have hesitated to say so today despite the tirades of totalitarian-minded Communists. The fact that we today are less disposed to say so indicates how deeply naturalistic secularism has penetrated our own society.

At a Bicentennial education conference in Philadelphia last year, a key speaker commended the historic American political documents for their distinctive emphasis on human rights. But when I asked whether the philosophy department of any great public university in America today espouses the supernaturalistic world-and-life view presupposed by the Declaration of Independence when it asserts that there are inalienable rights grounded in divine creation and preservation, the answer was crystal clear. What now dominates the intellectual arena is a naturalistic evolutionary philosophy or a radically secular view of reality and life.

This antisupernaturalistic, anti-God development ought to chill our souls. Neither a utopian evolutionary philosophy nor a radically secular alternative can persuasively maintain the case for human rights. A merely evolutionary view of human origins and development cannot vindicate either the permanent or the universal dignity of mankind. Bertrand Russell reminded us many decades ago that if we take evolution seriously, no reason remains for attaching finality to man. Strict regard for evolution implies the future emergence of a still higher form from which standpoint man as he currently exists will be as insignificant as is the primal protozoa as viewed today by man, who is declared to have risen from it. In short, philosophical evolution cannot guarantee the permanent dignity of the human species.

Equally important, evolutionary naturalism cannot guarantee the universal dignity of mankind. Given evolutionary emergence, no reason exists why a superman, as Nietzsche held, or a superspecies, as Hitler thought, may not appear within the wide spectrum of humanity. Hitler declared the Nordic race superior and Jews inferior and unworthy to be preserved. Communists tend to consider theists intellectually retrograde, refuse them university faculty posts, and routinely restrict religious freedom.

Radical naturalism dismisses utopian evolution as a myth. But it meanwhile espouses still another myth by reducing all reality to purposeless natural processes that man, himself supposedly a cosmic accident, can creatively manipulate. The radically secular notion that ethical imperatives are nothing but self-serving postulates that promote individual fulfillment clouds the meaning of truth and of human rights and duties. An evolutionary or relativistic philosophy can preserve no unrevisable agenda of human rights, if indeed it has any role whatever for “rights” in distinction from self-interest. The loss of God as the source, sanction, and stipulator of human rights befogs the precise identification of human rights.

A generation addicted to the premise that moral distinctions are relative to the culture in which they arise should not be surprised when Marxist sympathizers consider Marxism the basic human right, declare non-Marxism the essence of injustice, and urge capitalistic countries to get on with the task of redistributing wealth. Even Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos recently told the board of governors of the Asian Development Bank that verbal criticism of human-rights abuses is a ploy to distract attention from the desirable goal of equitable global redistribution of wealth between rich and poor nations.

This is not to say that human rights outrank all other concerns (e.g., national interest, security and peace) in foreign policy. But any dismissal of human-rights concern as extraneous to national interest, security, and peace is morally insensitive and, in an enlightened society, politically inept. To exempt adversary nations from criticism, moreover, while we belabor the compromises of allies, is cosmetic window-dressing.

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