Will Self

06/04/2009

How do we set legal boundaries in the touchy-feely arena of human rights?

Will Self

I often wonder about Tsunami, a sushi restaurant on Voltaire Road in Clapham, south London. Did its proprietor – even for a split-second, as he saw news footage of the great, life-annihilating breakers washing up on the shores of south-east Asia, India and Ceylon – consider a name change?

In the dark days of January 2005, while casualty figures mounted and the fatalities rotted, might he, she, or they have doodled absentmindedly on a pad, jotting down such alternatives as Massive International Relief Effort, ‘Early Warning System’, or possibly the catchy ‘Humanitarian Aid’? For any of these designations, you might think, would be more sensitive. Or did the sushi master view any such tinkering as mere sentiment?

After all, the coasts of Japan have been struck by tsunamis since time out of mind – the restaurant’s name might well be a reference to this very fact, and simultaneously an encouragement for everyone, passers by, clientele to focus on the Tao of being that spins eternally in the void, and which alone can liberate us from the painful go-round of human mortality?

Of course, Voltaire – after whom, presumably, this otherwise undistinguished suburban street is named – was crucially influenced by the biggest natural disaster of his era. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people, and it led the French philosopher to painfully re-evaluate the possibility of Divine providence.

Voltaire’s response was “Candide”, a satire on the notion – best summarised by Leibniz – that: “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss stalks through this short novel, discovering the evidence of God’s grand designs wherever and whatever  he regards.

Obviously, such credulousness leads him to endorse the most dreadful of excesses, and so the term “panglossian” has entered the vocabulary as an expression meaning just this tendency to place human nature in the rosiest possible light. All of this revisited me last night, as I found myself at an art opening dinner, in a posh restaurant, sitting opposite a wealthy German gallerist and a human rights lawyer.

I challenged the latter to explain to me what exactly “human rights” were? After all, I continued, voles do not have inalienable rights by virtue of being voles and nor, so far as I can establish, do stick insects.

Surely there can be no rights without an authority capable of enforcing them? Citizens have rights – and they also have responsibilities – because national governments exist, but “human rights” could only possibly be established if there was dominion over all the world?

The gallerist was appalled by this blunt rejection of all the touchy-feely, Bono-Blair rhetoric that cinches the modern psyche like a coloured wristband.
He launched into a passionate peroration about how, far from not existing, human rights were the only things that existed at all, and we should dedicate our lives to fighting for them.

The human rights lawyer, being in the game, understood rather better what I was driving at and conceded that, yes, it was technically difficult to argue that such rights existed in abstract: “But that,” she urged me, “shouldn’t stop us supporting them as an ideal, something we can aim at and use as a standard in order to call repressive and tyrannical regimes to account.”

The lawyer was the Voltaire at the table. The French thinker, despite his rejection of faith in Divine providence, believed human life was intolerable without faith in a supreme being; so he put forward the idea of a religion shorn of the bogus historical accretion of myth, a religion that would rationally fulfil our spiritual needs and provide us with a moral exemplar.

Of course, that’s what “human rights” do in the current era, and I suppose the lawyer was correct to say they can be aspirational. But then, traditional religion can do the same job, while God or gods at least have the virtue that they might possibly be there.