57. WE HAVE TO LEARN TO LOOK AT TOTALITIES, RATHER THAN AT FRAGMENTS OF REALITY. (Part 3 of 16)

When looking at totalities, what will count as facts will depend on the concepts we use, on the questions we ask. Asking different kinds of questions produces quite different kinds of answers. It is well and good to question the violation of human rights (HR), but in so doing, are we asking the right questions? That is, do we not obfuscate the problem by avoiding the real issues behind these violations, i.e., the issues of wealth and power and their distribution in society?

For example, there is the naive perception that food and nutrition interventions are intrinsically good; who can be against feeding mothers and children? But many do not realize the importance of addressing the social and political context of the often abject poverty in which those programs play themselves out.

How does one deal with abject poverty around the world if, by our behavior, we bend to those who favor an elitist and authoritarian view of society (and who see left-wing-subversion in every attempt to change the way people have been treated unjustly)? Whether we like it or not, which ideological positions we take towards the problems we want to solve guides the choices we make and the things we actually end up doing. And what we teach also depends on what we are all about. The subjective conviction that one is in the right gives one the inner strength to do what one is doing. But we too often find ourselves accepting or supporting ‘ethically neutral’ although ‘value biased’ premises.

When people who hold the fate of how HR are respected in their hands make fine distinctions, semantics become statements of policy. Words have always been ideology and ideology has been policy.

To put it more bluntly, in terms of political reality, outcomes depend on whose claim(s) can muster more support –based on the real interests of those who have the power to grant, sanction or deny unpostponable actions. This, then, is what the public is made to accept.

Morally, might is not right. Politically, it often is. If we had the might, flowing from the fact that we know that we are doing the right moral thing, we could, perhaps in time, receive the sanction of a growing number of people and of time itself. But not only do we not have the might to overcome blatant HR violations, not only do we not have the power to rally the needed support, and not only does time work against us, but the very attempt to rely solely on our moral strength may lead to disaster. It may be good rhetoric to say that we need no one’s confirmation of our rights, that we will in all likelihood win morally, but politically, however, it may bleed us to death. The question is not our right to fight for these rights, but how –and that, unfortunately, cannot easily be imposed only from an ethical vantage point.

To fight HR abuses we have a supreme moral claim, sanctioned by the entire world. For the solutions we propose, the claim for structural social changes, we have no universal sanction. (Note that the moral code of any given community also legitimizes established relations of power!).

A system that has no decent place for the majority of the people has lost the moral authority to prescribe what should be done. It has lost its civilization.

It is by participating in the political life of a community that one acquires a sense of who one is. It is through such a political discourse that a rights-oriented new system or paradigm comes into being. The right to equal access to such a political discourse should be the essence of our demands.