Zweifel

Part 1:

www.freitag.de/community/blogs/zweifel/human-rifles----a-critique-of-western-human-rights-regime---part-1

(Continuation:)

II. Human Rights, discriminating

In this section I will address who's discriminated by HR. Whereas privileging happens some­times explicitly, discriminations in a set of norms that are understood as an emancipative and equal­ling achievement of course are not explicit. But they can be found, anyway. Helpful here is method called pragmatism of religion (Kippenberg 1991, 1992; Author A 2000). In this new, so far hardly developed science within the scientific study of religion semantics and pragmatics get separately studied: the first is 'belief in a transmitted or revealed truth.' (Kippenberg 1992, p. 53; here: the be­lief in and explicit reference to HR) 'The other has to do with the meaning people attribute to this belief. […] For a pragmatic ana­lysis of religion it is of paramount importance to know whether or not beliefs are connected with ac­tions.' (Kippenberg 1992, p. 54f.) Or, as Nagel puts it, 'the prag­matic analysis of religion deals with the interplay between religious world views and group action. It focuses on demands of legitimacy of revealed scripture and orders as well as on demands of reli­gious groups for corresponding actions of their followers.' (Nagel 2006, p. 387, my transl.) Kippen­berg 'combines meaning- and ac­tion-level similarly to Weber's concept of a subjective meaning of action and focuses more on performing power, power relationships and the symbolic-affect­ive-aspect than Weber ever did.' (Koch 2010, p. 174, my transl.) It is a clearly functional approach, as Kippenberg's meticulous start of the chapter shows: 'Religion has been able, irrespectively of the beliefs of the singular individual, to organize the relationships of humans to other humans, thus founding hu­man-world-relationships without the people in question even becoming aware about it.' (Kippenberg 1991, p. 21, my transl.) Recently, Falko Grube has challenged HR exactly this way in his study on 'HR as ideology. The role of HR in legitimating military interventions' (2010), understanding codi­fied law in general as well as international law in particular 'as a set of rules and hence, as part of a social construction. […] The law […] and its position and function gets determined within the so­cial construction by the actions which it provokes.' (p. 20, my transl.) HR, in Grube's view, is, 'like all other world views […] a set of conceptions, ideas and principles distributing power by being rules and making statements which persons and institutions in which social situation or constellation are protagonists and defining their statuses in certain contexts.' (p. 363, my transl.) Both HR military in­terventions in Kosovo, in Irak and Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan Grube regards as illegal. He acknowledges the self-limitations of his work justifying the somewhat opportunistic or scientifically necessary premise of the legitimacy of international law. (p. 370; cf. Author A 2000, without that premise) The scientist's Grube (in ordinary life a politician) self-limitation hints in this context to the somehow holy status of the United Nations established by self-tabooing art. 14.2 of HR-declaration: Outlawed without deserving the right to asylum are those acting 'contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations'.

To give a crude example for implicit discrimination: If you beat your dog when it doesn't follow your commands, you immediately know it's not against HR whether or not you know the full text of the HR-declara­tion and other documents. It is not necessary to explicitly address the lawful punishment of animals in the HR-declaration to know it's allowed. Humans are protagonists and their status is above dogs.

Twenty-five years of talks about animal rights haven't changed the situation that HR discriminate animals to the extend that in most countries and areas of the world animals de facto are object of virtually uncontrolled treatment, abuse and cruelty, with very few exceptions. The Great Ape Pro­ject starting in 1993 (Cavalieri 2001) did make some change as e.g. the legislation in New Zealand does give great apes a certain protection by virtue of their rights. However, for more than 90 Percent of 7 billion humans is valid: How you treat or punish animals in your custody, as long as you have the power, is up to you. The point is not to hold HR responsible for the situation, it has been like this for thousands of years before, but HR haven't changed the disaster, and won't. To be precise, HR have aggravated the situation, as with the victory of HR-regime an even stronger separation between humans and the rest has been imposed.

For beings, to which human traits have not been awarded, doom is near (monsters, weeds, pests, etc.), or they are destined for slavery (pets, farm animals, zoo animals, reservation residents with touristic, ecological or gene saving tasks, laboratory animals, crops, timber, renewable materia­ls, etc.). In the opposite direction, some beings with humane feature or connections can be re­warded certain rights: inheriting pets, machines with the right not to be destroyed, artificial intelli­gences.

Future humans get discriminated as well by HR: HR protect people between the exit from the womb and the medically established time of death. Claims of future generations can indeed be in­voked in Sunday speeches. In practice there is no rights for future humans. They have no free choice which form of culture they want to live in: there is just the highly specialized industrialised society as option, at least in the long run, even for back-to-the-country-fans. Hunter-gatherers live or subsistent farming is no option. Furthermore, with heating global climate, emptied oceans, huge losses of fertile soil through erosion, growing deserts, less and less pure water in deeper and deeper regions, almost disappeared rainforests, changed demographic only hard boiled industrialists would sustain that they leave their offspring a comparable life to their own.

My main concern here is the third group of discriminated presently living humans – not the women. While the dis­crimination of women by HR or its 'androcentrism' has been described often and deplored correctly, 'human rights treaty law has developed more substantially since 1948 with respect to the rights of women than in any other area excepting possibly the rights of the child.' (Beitz 2009, p. 186) Never­theless, even in a country like Germany, proud of many of its achievements like a female head of government, women in the average earn up to a third less than their male competitors – disregarding sixty-four years of art. 23.2 ('equal pay for equal work'). What a shame!

But the most discriminated presently living humans are those with either traditionally or volun­tarily chosen modes of living differing to modern industrialized life-style, at least as soon as they re­quest without paying a share of common goods like resources, land, fresh water, prey, wood and freedom to roam without fences and frontiers. Because families including marriage and its dissolu­tion get secured (art. 16), and not bands, groups, tribes, convents or room mates.

HR entail clear instructions how a society and its reproducing mode, hence: its culture, has to be organized and shaped. It calls for conditions that are known from 'large scale social units' (Müller 1991, p. xi) like the United States or the United Kingdom: sedentarism, exploitation rights limitable just by law, guaranteed property, guaranteed contracts, penal justice, prisons, punishment and lawful deportations (art. 9 al­lows deportations coherent to the law), schools, rule of the majority by periodic elections, free cir­culation of information (with the exclusion of non-penetrated territories, penetrated and controlled by free science, states' secret services, and journalists, by means of electromagnetic waves and by visual satellite imagery), pictures, goods and persons (restrictions see above, section I), stress on lit­eracy, scientific progress (art. 27) and orientation. Hunting horticulturists (with no property rights written in the register), illiterate, minors, stateless, non-obeying, unlawful or unscientific people are treated as retarded, behind, to be educated, maybe primitive.

As it is easily understood, city dwellers, scholars, scientists and intellectuals are among those profiting the most from HR. Others aren't. When the HR-declaration was published, 29 percent of humanity lived in towns, less than a billion. Recently, after sixty years of HR gaining power, more than half of humanity settles in towns, the absolute number having more than quadrupled.

An extended form of discrimination is exercised by HR towards wild nature. Nature conserva­tion, if nature is understood as the given result of human-environment-interaction with less human impact (mostly by means of less population density), is made impossible at a place where a HR-bearer calls for his state to enable him to enjoy his rights. The further the HR-guarantee is extended on the surface on the earth, the larger is the necessary constructional effort, the bigger is the summed up technometabolism, what 'is defined as the inputs and outputs of human populations of materials and energy which are due to technological processes. Technometabolism contrasts with biometabolism, which is the material inputs and outputs, and the throughputs of energy, of human organisms themselves.' (Boyden 1992, p. 72f., for a multicoloured graph of technometabolism see Haber 1993, p. 100) As urban planning and sprawl finishes what agriculture has started, in the artifi­cial city it's up to humane deliberate decision whether or not more or less natural nature is being in­cluded. (Popitz 1995, p. 133, my transl.) By any means, land consumption even grows if no demo­graphic growth is happening, as always more people want to live on more square meters, want to show their status by their property and their mobility, and want to participate in more cultural fruits of modern society. The frontier between city/metropolitan area and protected or still almost untouched natural habitat is moving unstoppably in the direction of the last – all over the world.

Human Rights, an intellectuals invention to arm themselves with human rifles

For the time of civilization being, intellectuals have sought to be close to the power centers. It is there where they can use their comparative surplus of wisdom and competences, not in the outback, where the more cocksure missionaries and robust pioneers have their advantages. Hence, for millen­nia, their destiny was to muddle through, not sticking to close with this emperor, to be able to carry on working with his successor whoever it would be. Scholars like Shmuel N Eisenstadt have contributed to the insight in the lives of orthodoxies and heterodoxies. New religions, churches, kingdom and imperial mergers and acquisitions kept the intellectuals alert and trained not to stay to long on the wrong side. Finally, in the philosophical tradition called liberalism, the concept of the individual, of the person appeared on the scene. Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Louis Dumont and Heinz G Kip­penberg have reconstructed this advent of the individual and of the notion of the person (Author A, 2000, pp. 149-193) The author has guessed and meticulously argued that HR, which base on the core ideas of human dignity, person, free will and the individual, could be sketched as humanistic reformula­tion of former theological concepts (Author A, 2000, pp. 69f.) Administering an independent, presumed secular political philosophy useful for any place in the world the intellectuals finally found a do­main where even super rich people or cruel dictators in the end can be overwhelmed by otherwise powerless, slight – intellectuals, lawyers, philosophers, bureaucrats, and teachers. This time with no famous founder, again intellectual heterodoxies have successfully come up with a new, fast spreading set of norms, beliefs and rules.

Here it is sufficient to show that intellectuals and the power elite take more profit out of HR than others. And to make my point very clear and sharp: In question here are ordinary forms of massive violence with lots of casualties, both human and non-human. People suffer, die and get extinct, such as anim­al populations, in consequence to what other people munitioned with 'human rights' do to them. As HR only in the last 30 to 60 years have become more considerable in interna­tional polit­ics, or as 'the concept' has become 'pervasive' in BSA-wording,iv this is a recent phe­nomenon, while the forms of violence are much older. It is, so goes my critic, only the actual form of popular legit­imation. And as this legitimation is not any longer depending on the worship of a god or the undis­puted legitimacy of an emperor, the present basis of legitimation can be, should and – hence – here is subject to fundamental criticism.

Even among scholars of moral philosophy there are few who would see much need for systematic changes in politics in western countries. For more than 90 percent of global population the phenom­ena criticized in this article by perception are virtually invisible. Or they lack the education, or the time, or the means to figure processes of the dimension in question. For the other 10 per cent they are theoretic­ally visible, but as they are so long time during, accustomed, ubiquitous and large, for them it is pointless to consider them as to be changed. And for the final 0.01 percent of critical geo­graphers, philosophers, sociologists, scholars of political science, anthropologists and environmentalists, whilst being visible and criticizable, the devel­opments have no clear responsible agents. I hope I can contribute to make the agents, humans of flesh and blood, more visible. But, stemming from the shown invisibility is a huge, almost incomprehensible responsibility. If only so few can actually figure the problems, it is the responsibility of the few first to broaden the percentage and second, if that doesn't lead to any improvement, to even take decisions without everybody's consent – anyway, world democracy isn't existent, it's a myth.

Facts and numbers about casualties are difficult to get: If we define as casualties those that got af­fected by the expansion of, for example, europe into the world, and go along with Alfred Crosbys, an 'extremely influential' biologist and geographer (Armiero 2010), still unmatched and metaphor of combined military and biological conquest in several waves,v there is John H Bodleys estimation of at least 27.86 million, probably 50 million deceased indigenous hu­mans worldwide between 1780 and 1930 (1983, p. 57f.), who immediately got replaced by 50 mil­lion european emigrants into the 'new Europes' Canada, USA, Argentina, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand (Crosby 1991, p. 240). And, on the ill-fated Guanches of the Canary Islands: 'Very few experiences are as dangerous to a people's survival as the passage from isolation to membership in the worldwide community that in­cluded European sailors, soldiers, and settlers.' (Crosby 1993, p. 99)

I will use Crosby's metaphor ('metaphor, please, not a theorem', p. 295) here to unwrap my meta­phor of human rifles. Crosby had suggested 'that the Amerindians, Aborigines, and Maori were shock troops – marines – seizing beachheads and clearing the way for the second wave. They chiefly came on foot […], those who came chiefly in the age of sail as the army'. (p. 295) Crosby, to justify that part of the metaphor, reminds that 'half to two-thirds of the whites to migrate to North America before the American Revolution were indentured servants who had contracted away their freedom for up to seven years in return for passage to the New World.' (p. 295) The next wave of Europeans who mostly came by steamship Crosby considers to be the civilian wave, 'harvesting the benefits of the prior invasions' (p. 295), coming mostly as 'free and independent individuals.' (p. 295)

To leave Crosby's metaphor: In an all-over-conquered-world under the geographically immobile but juridically expanding rule of HR one can still imagine the Europeans and Neo-Europeans as in difference to the once indigenous local (first and second wave) people that saw the invaders coming. Only now, it's more like gated communities with residents- and invited-visitors-only signposts at the guarded entrances. Within the gated communities, the residents try to enlarge their fortune and to prevent the outside poor to take over. Here they need and employ servants, guards, housemaids, mechanics, and the like to main­tain their comparative luxurious life-style in their retreat. (Bauman 2008) The art is now to find a solution how all these poorer, hard working people can be contracted like the two-thirds in the army wave to New World without being paid. Unfortunately, there is no New World at hand to negotiate for a seven-year-hardly-paid-duty. Here, HR and is promise of a Millennia show up. Why not tell all the servants, guards, housemaids, mechanics and the like that in reality they are the kings, they will soon reign the whole empire by virtue of their membership to the species homo sapiens, luckily born in an era where the civilization's Endsieg through HR will take place?

Anthropologists like Robin Dunbar (Dunbar et al 2010) consider that all of today's people are descended from a manageable group of not much more than 5000 indi­viduals who lived around 250,000 years ago in the eastern tropical Africa. Not a bad performance for 5000, one could say. Others would say: That's enough now, turn the steamboat in another direction. Possible or necessary counter-measures are easy to identify: There must be fewer people. People need to be equipped with less power. The few people without power must be limited to small areas in the tropics of the world. The remaining parts of the world have to get systematically cleared and freed from legacies. Domesticated animals should get freed from slavery, thus to be reduced gradu­ally. German conservative-liberal government recently (May 2011) has made unilateral steps to dis­mantle nuclear power technology by the year 2022 – without urge, but due to ethical and risk con­siderations; all right, for electoral campaigning motives, too. Some country could start a more amp­lified withdrawal and begin to disarm their human rifles. –