The Rights Revolution Read Online Free

without harm to others is the proof that we actually believe in human rights.
    Yet human rights alone are not enough. In extreme situations, we need extra resources, especially humour, compassion, and self-control. These virtues in turn must draw on a deep sense of human indivisibility, a recognition of us in them and them in us, that rights doctrines express but in themselves have no power to instil in the human heart.
    In this sense, that old reactionary, Joseph de Maistre, was wrong. We have met Man. He is us. Human rights derive their force in our conscience from this sense that we belong to one species, and that we recognize ourselvesin every single human being we meet. So to recognize and respect a stranger is to recognize and respect ourselves. As paradoxical as it may sound, having an intense sense of one’s own worth is a precondition for recognizing the worth of others.
    On the other hand, recognizing other people as human is not easy. Sometimes the humans in question may be violent, gross, abusive, crazy, or just so plain different in language, values, and culture that it is genuinely hard to see what we do have in common.
    Let us also admit that there is nothing especially natural about this kind of human recognition, about the feeling that the human species is one. Historically speaking, this idea, the work of monotheistic religions and natural law, is a rather recent addition to the moral vocabulary of humankind. This universalism has had to make its way into our hearts against a much more intuitively obvious notion: that the only people we should care about are people like us.
    In
Bleak House,
Charles Dickens left us an immortal satire of the good philanthropic lady of mid-nineteenth-century England, Mrs. Jellyby, who never stopped campaigning for the welfare of children in Africa. Her face had the faraway look of someone always focused on distant wrongs. Dickens’s problem with this charitable lady, of course, was that she shamefully neglected her own children. 10 We all know people who combine high-flown commitment to human rights with lowdown disregard for all the actual human beings who stand in their way. It seems obvious that charity, not to mentiondecency, begins at home, and that we have good reason to put our primary moral emphasis on particular duties to those nearest us.
    Yet our commitments are connected — ever-widening circles that begin with those who are close to us and move outwards to embrace the needs of strangers. Human-rights commitments are on the outermost arc of our obligations, but they can be only as strong as our innermost commitments. Believing fiercely in the value of those we love is the very condition for believing in the value of those farthest away. Universal beliefs that do not draw their fire from the passion for particular people are not going to stay alight for long.
    To say this is to commit ourselves to a special way of thinking about the relationship between human equality and human difference. In this way of thinking, human equality actually manifests itself in our differences. What we have in common as human beings is the very way we differentiate ourselves — as peoples, as communities, and as individuals. So it is not the naked body we share in common, but the astoundingly different ways in which we decorate, adorn, perfume, and costume our bodies in order to proclaim our identities as men, women, members of this tribe or that community 11 .
    To be forced to strip naked before a cold-eyed stranger is a terrible experience. Human beings clothed, arrayed, disguised even, are the ones who have dignity, not human beings stripped and bare, hiding their shame with their hands. To be naked before a stranger is to be deprived of decency and also of agency. Of course,nakedness can awaken pity, and this is a very basic form of human recognition, but it is also the most vulnerable form, for it implies the weakness and fragility of one party. We know from historical experience