The Ambiguity of Human Rights …

… in the Face of Escalating

Violence

… … or the dangerous mess we are in

““Although there is general awareness of the mess we are in both at personal and

governmental level, practice demonstrates an unwillingness to pursue necessary changes in

structures and policies.”

John Burton, ISAAJohn Burton, ISAA

Road MapContext & Contours

Girard’s Mimetic Theory

1. UDHR Text or Pretext ?

2. Relationship between Players

3. Violence & the Rule of Law

From Anthropology to

Theology

200 million died in armed conflicts,

half of them civilians … not counting

police action.

The 20th Century

1. The crisis is now global

2. The Human Rights System has failed to immunize the world against violence

Two Inconvenient Truths:

Why is this so?

Contours and Context

UN founded in 1945Horrors of WW II

The UN Founders –

Sought to keep violence in check UDHR

Looked for state security in the traditional military sense.

Global Challenges and Threats

International Terrorism

Nuclear & Chemical Weapons

Hunger & Infectious Diseases

Micro-nationalism vs the Nation State

Overpopulation & Climate Change

Sixty Years On

Nuremberg Legacy

• Crimes against humanity were prosecuted for the first time

• Politics and law began to govern the Human Rights debate

Precedent:

René Girard (1923 - )

• Foremost cultural anthropologist• Member of the Académie Française• Grand Prix de Philosophie 2005

The Theory of Imitative Desireor Mimetic Theory

Human desire does not arise spontaneously between an object and a subject

Human desire is ‘mediated’ by a model (Don Quixote imitates his knight-model)

Theory of Imitative Desire

Object of Desire

Human SubjectModel

First, model points out desirability

This arouses “imitative” desire in the Subject

Mimesis

Theory of Imitative Desire

Model arouses mediated or imitative desire

Theory of Imitative Desire

• When the imitative urges of individuals or groups converge on the same object, their desires generate conflict.

• Mutually imitative interactions result in rivalry that easily leads to violence.

• Anthropologically, this is humanity’s Achilles’ heel.

Schema of the Mimetic Crisis

Mimetic Desire

Reciprocal rivalry leads to mimetic violence

Due to mimetic contagion, more and more participants are drawn into the conflict so that group rivalry escalates

Crisis

Paroxysm Transfer to Scapegoat or

The Age of Annihilation

1916 the Battle of Verdun

The Conflict-Prone Structure of Human Desire

• Is so deeply entrenched in the human subconscious that we are unable to extract ourselves from its powers.

• This collective process also subverts institutions like the human rights system in fulfilling their functions

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 59)

“The desire for equality always becomes more insatiable in

proportion as equality is more complete.”

Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679)

Hobbes understood the causal link between competition, envy and war

making.

Prof. Wolfgang Palaver

“We live in a world that promises happiness and recognition to everybody, but the more we try to

reach these goals, the more we become obstacles to each other causing frustration and resentment

leading easily to violence of all sorts.”

The Universal Declaration of Human RightsThirty Articles

• Right to life, liberty and security

• Principles of civil, political and cultural rights

• Universal longing for peace

Raises expectations of measurable outcomes

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The UD and the Genocide Convention were powerless in changing international attitudes to

violence.

The false consensus of the nations was unable to curb the politics of cruelty and violence they

practiced at home and abroad.

Killing Fields …

Victims, not words reveal the human condition.

The Angst of the Nations: Loss of Sovereignty

Internationally, the Model / Obstacle dynamics over sovereignty unleash the Scapegoat Mechanism characterized by deceit, false

accusation, preemptive strikes and killing of the rival.

Characterized by fear, deceit, expulsion and the death of disposable victims

Fear over sovereignty corrupted relationships, even the UD itself

The UD has no answer to the scapegoating mechanism which is driven by fear, envy and

rivalry.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

Human Rights Arena Relationship Between Players

Akin to market behavior of corporations

Requires business-like management

Players compete for market share in an arena that commodifies human suffering

This market trades on the symbolic capital of human rights and would cease to exist

without their violations.

Violence and the Rule of Law

Violence is highly contagious

Humans, unlike animals, possess no instinctive brake on violence

Unless channeled, outbreaks of mimetic violence can lead to community paroxysm

Historically, two system for channeling violence have evolved

Channeling Mimetic Violence 1

In archaic society sacrifice or sacred violence channeled pent-up internal violence

Culture and religion have their origin in the sacrificial order

Channeling Mimetic Violence 2

In modern society, this preventive function belongs

to the judicial system.

Even the judicial system must declare its violence ‘holy’ and conceal the fact that violence is the only legitimating

power of the rule of law.

The Ambiguity of Human Rights

On the one hand, human rights seek to transcend violence as it violates human rights and dignity..

On the other, nationally and internationally human On the other, nationally and internationally human rights depend on violence as the legitimating rights depend on violence as the legitimating authority for the enforcement of human rights authority for the enforcement of human rights

law. law.

Summary so far … ∑1. Anthropologically, the cause of the crisis lies

in the conflictual nature of human desire with its

victimizing consequences.

2. Our hope for a better world must rest on foundations other than “good intentions” to

adopt the values of human rights (as important as they are).

3. Human rights as a system is powerless to breach the cycle of violence because it

belongs structurally to the same order it seeks to correct.

Moving Beyond AnthropologyTwo Thesis:

Hope for better world will depend not on the

proliferation of norms but on a transformation of desire from rivalry to

peace.

Unless humanity can acquire a pre-conscious disposition of self-giving love, reciprocal violence has the potential of

becoming unstoppable.

Theology of Non-Violence

Christian theology holds that –

Humans are created in the image of God

God’s self-disclosure is understood as Trinity, or as Love-in-relation.

Human beings and communities malfunction when they are not existentially embedded in that

relationship

Humans are structured for openness and mimetically so

in order that they may desire God above all desiring.

Theology of Non-Violence

Three Urgent Needs:

A deeper understanding of who God is, and …

How he is involved in the redemption and transformation of the world

The realization of our calling to be a society of non-violence and peaceful imitation of God’s image

In the Christ-event, we are pointed unambiguously to the revelation of God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ, and at the same time, to what it means to be fully

human.

Theology of Non-Violence

Theology of Non-Violence

Two Urgent Questions:

“What if we were to come face to face with the Creator and find out that our only experience

was one of love and forgiveness?

“If this was our universal experience as well as the new model of our desire, what would

happen to the mess we are in?”

Theology of Non-Violence

Would we not do what the Motto of UN says,

“… and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against

nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”? Isa 2:4

Path for Investigative Action

Admit our inability to breach the cycle of reciprocal violence without a new model of desire.

Investigate with scholarly rigor and without prejudice the evidence for the claims of Jesus Christ.

If his claims are true, two things become inescapable for the present world order:

The fundamental crisis which his claims pose for all

forms bourgeois monotheisms and cultural idolatries.

The critical realism of his call to change course

in the power of his Spirit of reconciliation, forgiveness and love.

Path for Investigative Action

Thank You for Your Attention

For more on the theology of non-violence, please visit my website

http://www.livingpeacesite.org

Textual Evidence

Work Date Written

Earliest Copy

Time Span

No. of Copies

Herodotus 488-428 BC 900 AD 1300 yrs 8

Thucydides 460-400 BC 900 AD 1300 yrs 8

Tacitus 100 AD 1100 AD 1000 yrs 20

Caesar’s Gallic War

58-50 BC 900 AD 950 yrs 9-10

Livy’s Roman History

59 BC – 17 AD

900 AD 900 yrs 20

New Testament

40 – 100 AD130 AD for

parts350 AD full

MS

300 yrs5,000 Grk

10,000 Latin9,300 other

The Symbolic Use of Violence in Culture

Is it innocent or a symptom of the contagious nature of

violence?