What are human rights and how can they be rescued from utopians now creating dystopia?

“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.” - Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas (1550)

Since it is akin to asking what color Napoleon's white horse is, the definition of human rights ought to be self-evident at first glance. Human rights are those that you have just by virtue of being a person. These rights ought to apply to everyone since they are fundamental to being a human. 

The modern concept of a universal human rights standard, despite its simplicity, was not even discussed until the 1550s. In a discussion concerning the rights of the native people of the Americas, Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas presented a universal concept of human rights for the first time.

“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.”

The French revolution is tied the emergence of rights to a particular national experience while appealing to enlightenment values. At the same time critical voices, such as Edmund Burke, emerged that challenged the abstract rights discourse with concrete examples and through his own prior actions provided a working alternative rooted in tradition, and moral values.

Bartolomé de Las Casas by Parra

Why return to these ideas now?

 Theologian Nigel Biggar and The European Conservative's monthly show, The Forge, "hosted by Harrison Pitt which aims to revive the art of Socratic dialogue and intellectual combat," discuss questions that this blog has previously addressed and returns to them because of their conversation which raise important questions. "What is the proper relationship of these alleged rights to other important concerns, from duties and virtues to democratic politics and national traditions? Do natural and/or human rights exist at all? And even if they do, how did rights-talk come to be so effectively weaponized by utopian activists?  

 

The failed enlightenment human rights project

 

Enlightenment liberalism is committed to full equality, individual rights, dignity and has a discourse to protect the marginalized. All of that is true and is backed up in the historical record. An excellent example of a document that is a pure product of enlightenment liberalism is "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," also known as the "Declaration of Human and Civic Rights" adopted on August 26, 1789 and is a product of the French Revolution as is the even more egalitarian document produced in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the Constitution of Year I. Article 1 of the 1789 declaration reads: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."

Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature and its contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely both free and equal. Edmund Burke believed that "full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is unattainable and a dangerous fiction. First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies. Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities.  The French Revolution: How utopian aspirations led to dystopian results 

The execution of Robespierre and his supporters on 28 July 1794.

The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority. This is what happened in the French Revolution and reached its apex with Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794 with an observation that he applied in governance: "The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." It is a contradiction in the same way that combining absolute freedom and equality as revolutionary goals are in contradiction and doomed to failure. Robespierre was only applying the logic of enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau's who spoke of "forcing men to be free." The "rights" that emerged out of the French Revolution were a rejection of tradition, the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church more specifically, gave Europe its first modern genocide of peasants in which men, women, and children were systematically exterminated, The Vendee, and the end result was the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and a world war that took three million lives.  Edmund Burke, and a conservative conception of Human Rights

Edmund Burke

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, written less than a year into the French Revolution, Edmund Burke predicted in 1790 that the follies of enlightenment liberalism and its abstractions would lead to widespread slaughter, tyranny, and ultimately a dictatorship.

Burke provides an alternative approach to the defense of human rights that rejects abstractions, defends tradition, but also has a moral sense informed by his Christian faith. Edmund Burke's lifelong opposition to "entrenched and arbitrary power" led him to clash with enlightenment liberalism at pivotal moments. He was the prosecutor who attempted to remove Warren Hastings, the Governor General of India, ten years before the French Revolution, for poor leadership, personal corruption, and mistreatment of the Indians he was responsible for. On February 15, 1788, Edmund Burke opened with a speech which is excerpted below:

My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the King has no arbitrary power to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons, nor the whole Legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection—all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir. 

Edmund Burke in the trial against Hastings advocated for the idea that people of different races should not be exploited and of the need for accountability. It was not the first time Burke spoke out against arbitrary rule. In his March 22, 1775 speech on conciliation with America he explained to the British government that the way to keep the allegiance of the colonies was to maintain the identification with civil rights associated with colonial rule warning that if that relation were broken it would lead to dissolution. 

Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you.

Edmund Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator combined with a concept of man's moral equality has deep roots in the Christian tradition which incidentally is where the very language and concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.  Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a Christian moral vision of the universe. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace, man has freedom but it is not absolute:

As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct.

Conservative skepticism

The skepticism expressed by conservatives Nigel Biggar and Harrison Pitt in their conversation on human rights is not new. Paleo-conservative writer Thomas Fleming in The Morality of Everyday Life asks: “If rights are claims to be enforced by government, then what are ‘international human rights’ if not the theoretical justification for world government?”[Fleming, T. 2007 ] American conservatives are also concerned with the proliferation of rights into areas that undermine traditions.

It has been demonstrated that governments have a history of mass killing. Why should one think that a world government would be any better? The question has not only been raised by American conservatives but also by a man who the official media of the Soviet Union described as a reactionary utopian upon his death in 1948. Mohandas Gandhi looked upon an increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear because, although it appeared to be doing good by minimizing exploitation, it did the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality. Furthermore Gandhi believed that: “Centralization as a system is inconsistent with [a] non-violent structure of society.”

Nature abhors a vacuum.
 
Despite this skepticism the fact remains that both human rights discourse and the universality of human rights emerged out of one of the most conservative institutions: The Catholic Church. Conservatives must not abandon the conversation on human rights to the Left. Therefore, if one wants to understand how human rights came to be and what can be done to ensure that they can be preserved in a way that, while acknowledging that utopia is unattainable, aims to improve the lives of their fellow humans, one must have a conservative conception of human rights. The Revolution in China, France, Russia, Cuba, and many other countries demonstrate that, when left to their own devices, the Revolutionary's imposition of expanding abstract rights results in a dystopian hellscape rather than a utopian paradise.

Independence on July 4, 1776: Triumph of American political genius, and a failure of the British Parliament's political imagination and magnanimity

"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." - Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775

Edmund Burke

 

July 4, 1776 is Independence Day, and marks the publication of the Declaration of Independence by thirteen former British colonies against the government in London. It is a day of great celebration in the United States and with good reason. It marks the decision of free peoples to establish a new Republic that has now endured and prospered over 245 years, but for Great Britain it was a magnificent failure that could have been avoided, but Parliament failed to address American concerns and dealt with harshness against their colonists. 

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others who would lead the American Revolution drafted and signed the Olive Branch Petition that was adopted on July 8, 1775 and reached London on August 14, 1775 seeking redress on colonial grievances from the British King, and for the colonies to remain within the empire, but it was not to be. 

Months earlier the British statesman Edmund Burke spoke out against arbitrary rule over the 13 colonies in his March 22, 1775 speech on conciliation with America in which he explained to the British government that the way to keep the allegiance of the American colonies was to maintain the identification with civil rights associated with colonial rule warning that if that relation were broken it would lead to dissolution. 

"Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you."

Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator , combined with a concept of man's moral equality, has deep roots in the Christian tradition which is where the language and concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.  

Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a Christian moral vision of the universe. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace ,man has freedom but it is not absolute:

"As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct."

Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature and its contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely both free and equal. Edmund Burke and modern conservatives believe that "full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is unattainable and a dangerous fiction. 

First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies. 

Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority.

Edmund Burke's counsel in 1775 remains relevant today, as do his warnings of embracing political abstractions to impose government policies, and calling for magnanimity and wisdom in political deliberations.

 

Remembering Roger Scruton on the one year anniversary of his passing

"Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."  - Edmund Burke

Sir Roger Scruton died one year ago today, at age 75, and the world is a lesser place with his absence. A one paragraph press statement on his website announced the death of the writer, philosopher, husband, father, and brother following a six month battle with cancer. Months earlier on September 19, 2019 he received the "Defender of Western Civilization award" from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and spoke about "a thing called civilization." 

Sir Roger was a courageous man who in the midst of the Cold War traveled behind the Iron Curtain into Poland and Czechoslovakia to meet with dissidents, and demonstrate his solidarity with them, while risking prison himself.  He helped create "a pool of light" in which they could converse in freedom. He would continue this kind of work for the rest of his life.

He was a 21st century Burkean. Edmund Burke who was born 292 years ago today is viewed as the founder of the British conservative tradition, and Roger Scruton was a continuation of this tradition. Therefore it is interesting to read his 2018 essay on the current President of the United States titled "What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism" in which the late British conservative concludes:

"Conservative thinkers have on the whole praised the free market, but they do not think that market values are the only values there are. Their primary concern is with the aspects of society in which markets have little or no part to play: education, culture, religion, marriage and the family. Such spheres of social endeavor arise not through buying and selling but through cherishing what cannot be bought and sold: things like love, loyalty, art and knowledge, which are not means to an end but ends in themselves.

About such things it is fair to say that Mr. Trump has at best only a distorted vision. He is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion. And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment."

We are in the midst of a political and cultural crisis in America, and now is the time to reflect on what is going on, return to first principles, and in the case of conservatives that means to rediscover and embrace Burkean conservatism applying its lessons for reforming and saving democracy in the United States.

The Concert of Europe: Conservatism's successful seven decade frustration of communist aims

"Every country has the government it deserves." - Joseph De Maistre, diplomat  (1753 - 1821)

A street of Paris in May 1871: The Commune by Maximilien Luce (painted 1903-05)

Earlier today was visiting the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France and the collections of art that span 1848 through 1914. Coming upon this work by Maximilien Luce some questions arose in my mind: "What would Paris be like if the communists had succeeded in 1848? Would this museum even exist?" Think of the loss in lives, art, and treasure over the past century when communist regimes killed over a 100 million and plunged hundreds of millions more into lives of squalor.

Karl Marx announced in his 1848 manifesto the arrival of communism in Europe in the midst of ongoing revolutions. There were multiple reasons for the unrest: poor grain harvests, blight in potato crops, and depressed economies across Europe over the previous three years and conditions were ripe for revolt and radical new doctrines to be well received. Conservatives in Europe, following the disastrous French Revolution of 1789 and the continent wide blood bath of the Napoleonic wars, organized against revolution creating a conservative order. In the United Kingdom, conservatism was manifested in the writings of Edmund Burke and his critical reflection on the French Revolution. Policies of reform successfully countered revolutionary impulse.

Visiting France once is confronted with a different conservative tradition. On the European continent the conservative ideas of Joseph de Maistre held sway. De Maistre represented a counter-revolutionary and authoritarian strain of conservatism that rejected the French Enlightenment and the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke. Having suffered the effects of the Revolution of 1789 in France de Maistre "argued for the restoration of hereditary monarchy," and "for the indirect authority of the Pope over temporal matters as a prerequisite for stability in Europe." Unlike Burke, his writings are a reaction to the destruction of his way of life in the French Revolution. Nevertheless his ideas would have a profound impact on French conservatives. De Maistre died 27 years before Marx's Communist Manifesto,  but his ideas lived on to resist the bolsheviks.

Joseph de Maistre in Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg wrote in 1821: "False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing."  This can still be seen today by those who continue to circulate the writings of Karl Marx, despite the disastrous human cost this theory has exacted upon the world.

Marx and the communists organized into revolutionary transnational networks to overthrow the existing order but following the French revolution, a conservative counter-revolutionary network already existed to resist the new threat.

Édouard Dubufe (1819-1883), The Congress of Paris, 1856, Musée national du château de Versailles

 The end of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars led to an enduring peace forged by conservative European statesman. It was a peace that endured without a major war, more or less, until 1914. The architects of the peace were Klemens von Metternich of Austria, Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry (usually known as Lord Castlereagh), Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord of France. Out of the ruin of a continent wide war emerged the Concert of Europe.  Wikipedia described it as follows, "[t]he Concert of Europe, also known as the Congress System or the Vienna System after the Congress of Vienna, was a system of dispute resolution adopted by the major conservative powers of Europe to maintain their power, oppose revolutionary movements, weaken the forces of nationalism, and uphold the balance of power."  The last gathering of the Concert of Europe was in 1878 in Berlin. These were statesmen who understood the necessary relationship between freedom and order. Metternich gave it context, "[t]he word 'freedom' means for me not a point of departure but a genuine point of arrival. The point of departure is defined by the word 'order.' Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order."

"Lamartine, rejects the Red Flag," Feb 25, 1848. By Henri Felix Emmanuel Philippoteaux

The Concert of Europe had no formal structures and operated as a powerful network to counter both nationalists and communists from 1815 to 1914. The weak point turned out to be France. The monarchy was restored on April 6, 1814 with Louis XVIII and was succeeded by Charles X in 1824 but the new King of France was driven out of office by the July Revolution of 1830 on August 2, 1830. The King of France was replaced by a King of the French within the constraints of a constitutional monarchy. Louis Philippe I was the new king under the more liberal Orléans line, replacing the Bourbons. 18 years later he would abdicate his rule on February 24, 1848 and flee to England. The second Republic would be declared on February 26, 1848. This was the end of the French monarchy in France. Conservative forces were able to shut down radical revolutionary projects using violent repression combined with reforms to meet the demands of the populace preventing a repeat of 1789. Metternich explained the conservative need to accommodate and shape change as follows, "[t]he events which can not be prevented, must be directed."

Barricades in Paris in 1848

Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and French provincial nobility, at a critical point in the February Revolution rejected the red flag of the revolutionaries and made the case for maintaining the French Tricolor flag:

"I spoke as a citizen earlier, well! Now listen to me, your Foreign Minister. If I remove the tricolor, know it, you will remove me half the external force of France! Because Europe knows the flag of his defeats and of our victories in the flag of the Republic and of the Empire. By seeing the red flag, they'll see the flag of a party! This is the flag of France, it is the flag of our victorious armies, it is the flag of our triumphs that must be addressed before Europe. France and the tricolor is the same thought, the same prestige, even terror, if necessary, for our enemies! Consider how much blood you would have to make for another flag fame! Citizens, for me, the red flag, I am not adopting it, and I'll tell you why I'm against with all the strength of my patriotism. It's that the tricolor has toured the world with the Republic and the Empire with your freedoms and your glory, and the red flag was that around the Champ-de-Mars, dragged into the people's blood."

The painting by Emmanuel Philippoteaux, depicting the moment Lamartine rejects the red flag is on display at the Museum Carnavalet in Paris. This "revolution" brought General Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, to power. He was the President of France from 1848 to 1852. The French Constitution barred him from running for re-election so he organized a coup d'état in 1851 and became Napoleon III, the Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870. His rule ended due to his defeat in the Franco - Prussian war.

In 1853 Napoleon III ordered Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to transform Paris from a city of a dense network of streets, overcrowded, dingy, dirty, riddled with disease and lacking an effective sewage system. What today makes Paris so distinctive, "the grand, wide boulevards that march in straight lines through the city, lined with bustling cafés and tempting patisseries" is Haussmann's creation.

"Conceived and executed in three phases, the plan involved the demolition of 19,730 historic buildings and the construction of 34,000 new ones. Old streets gave way to long, wide avenues characterised by rows of regularly aligned and generously proportioned neo-classical apartment blocks faced in creamy stone."

It also made it more difficult for the revolutionaries to set up barricades and made it easier for the military to move quickly to crush any uprisings with the wide boulevards. However the Franco-Prussian war that brought an end to the Second Republic and the rule of Napoleon III gave an opportunity for the communists to take hold of Paris and set up a commune that survived two months from March 1871 to May 1871 before the French Army crushed the communist project and restored order.

Barricade boulevard Voltaire and Richard-Lenoir1871

Tragically the horrors of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars that followed were largely forgotten and in 1914 the forces of nationalism, the breakdown of the balance of power arrangement set up in the Concert of Europe, and rising militarism plunged the world into a great war.  This destroyed the last vestiges of the conservative transnational network that prevented the rise of Bolshevism. Communism would arrive in Russia in 1917 and over the next century claim a 100 million lives and ruin countless more.

However, thanks to conservative statesmen in Europe the 19th century offered a space of peace and prosperity for seven decades that led to a great out pouring of art, technology, and also the remaking of Paris into the remarkable city that it is today. This would not have existed if the communists had triumphed in 1848 or 1871.

There are important lessons for statesmen to learn from this period of time for the 21st century.

The conservative case to save human rights from decline

"Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." - Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

“…Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world’s population and defending it for most of the rest.” — Margaret Thatcher, State Craft P. 249

 

Freedom House 2016 charts decade of decline in rights and freedoms

End of the Human Rights Consensus?
The nonviolent end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991 along with the end of totalitarian communism in Europe coincided with a decade long improvement in human rights and freedoms world wide. This trend over the past ten years has been in the opposite direction and is due to a number of factors, including the rise of China and Russia's return to authoritarianism after a brief democratic spring in the 1990s.

The War on Terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the March 11, 2004 attacks in Spain and the July 7, 2005 attacks in Great Britain led to set backs in human rights in Western countries responding to international terrorism.  However, the geopolitical map and the war on terror do not alone explain this worsening international environment for human rights.

There is a crisis of values reflected in the fragmentation of the international human rights consensus achieved in 1948. What is manifested now had its origins 26 years ago with Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.  The Iranian representative to the United Nations explained that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a "relativistic secular understanding of the Judeo Christian tradition." However the UN Human Rights Declaration as initially conceived was not relativistic but over time human rights mechanisms have engaged in a proliferation of rights that give that appearance creating a breakdown in the 1948 consensus. Sadly, on the human rights front the practitioners of Islam have not been the only ones alienated but so too have many Catholics.

Human Rights in Decline: the decade long crisis

2016 marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations Human Rights Council and also coincides with the tenth consecutive year that human rights are in decline world wide. The United Nations bureaucracy has gotten a lot wrong that has contributed to this worsening situation. The UN Human Rights Council has been described as having been turned into Frankenstein's monster.

Although a contributing factor, the international decline in human rights cannot be laid solely at the feet of the United Nations. The cause goes to the abandonment of the foundations of human rights thought. First principles have been compromised and ignored in the service of expediency. For example, taking a human life can never be a right because human beings have a right to life. Taking a life is at best a necessary evil done in self-defense to save one's own life. The right to an abortion is a contradiction in conflict with universally recognized human rights.

 

The Left's take over of human rights discourse over the past decades to advance its own agenda has benefited it but at the expense of the pre-existing international human rights consensus. For example, Amnesty International's campaign beginning in 2007 to conflate the right to an abortion with its worldwide campaign to stop violence against women alienated many Catholic supporters, and has been described as anti-Catholic. Catholic bishops, who had been members of Amnesty International, had to resign over the abortion issue because the human rights group had become an abortion lobby group. Catholics generally have been encouraged to boycott the organization. Independent Catholic News reported:

Cardinal Martino, who served as the Holy See's permanent observer at the United Nations, says that this change of position is part of the "pro-death" agenda in modern culture. The cardinal said that Amnesty International's decision means Catholics and Catholic organizations should no longer financially support the group. "The promotion of abortion opens the door to the slippery slope of evil and death, where human rights are taken away from the most innocent and vulnerable children of God," he said. "I believe that, if in fact Amnesty International persists in this course of action, individuals and Catholic organizations must withdraw their support."

Furthermore Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to life, and this is not accidental. This is because this human rights document drafted and signed on December 10, 1948 was not a compromise between liberalism and socialism but lobbied for and drafted by Christian Democrats with the active support of the Catholic Church and all the world's great faith traditions.

Jacques Maritain

Catholic roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Pope John Paul II recalled the Roman Catholic Church's role in 1991 in the Papal Encyclical Centesimus Annus published on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:

...[A]fter the Second World War, and in reaction to its horrors, there arose a more lively sense of human rights, which found recognition in a number of International Documents⁵² and, one might say, in the drawing up of a new "right of nations", to which the Holy See has constantly contributed. The focal point of this evolution has been the United Nations Organization.

One of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher who was a profound Catholic and anti-modernist inspired by Christian humanism:

There is but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him: humanism but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the incarnation.

The formation of the United Nations was an opportunity for Latin Americans to push for international human rights standards. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was the first international human rights instrument signed into existence in Bogota, Colombia on May 2, 1948 eight months prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948 where Latin Americans played a major and crucial role, among them the Cuban delegation. The first draft of the Declaration was fashioned from various models collected by the UN Secretariat among them "a model based on a Cuban-sponsored proposal at the San Francisco conference, a proposed first draft offered by the Chilean delegation, and the earlier Panamanian draft."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is heavily informed and influenced by Catholic social doctrine found in the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. The Catholic Church in its social teaching rejects both liberalism and communism embracing a defense of the dignity of human beings grounded in its own metaphysical vision of personhood.

The holistic approach to human rights that embraces both civil/political and social/economic rights was not found in a compromise between the liberal Anglosphere and the socialist Soviet sphere but was the initiative of Catholic thinkers, states and the Holy See that shaped this important document that was embraced by the major faiths around the world that shared its common truths achieving a unanimous human rights consensus with that document.

Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas

The debate on personhood
Human rights, as an idea, have a conservative pedigree that stretches back to the Middle Ages and to the Catholic Church. The first time in human history that a universal concept of human rights in which they are applied to all living beings on the planet emerged out of a debate concerning the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 16th century. The modern language of human rights emerges out of the public debate surrounding the treatment of Native Americans  in the first years of the Spanish conquest and led King Charles V to organize a debate between the Catholic Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas and the humanist attorney Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 in which the personhood of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their ability to govern themselves was recognized as briefly outlined in the following quote by Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas:

“All the races of the world are men, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the entire human race is one.” 

Although relatively unknown in the English language Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), the founder of the “School of Salamanca,” arrived at the University of Salamanca and was elected the prime chair of theology there in 1526, the University itself had been founded in 1218. Following the debate between De Las Casas and de Sepúlveda, King Charles V would side with neither but followed de Vitoria's council which recognized the humanity of the indigenous people and their right to their own property. The Salamanca School and Bishop De Las Casas would leave a profound mark on Latin American thought and human rights discourse. Despite this history some academics claim that only liberals can have a conception of universal human rights.

The debate on personhood rages today over the unborn and in order to justify abortion claims a difference between human life and moral personhood. Not treating human life and moral personhood as interchangeable opens up the debate not only to abortion but also infanticide because very young babies, according to Oxford University medical ethicists, and some philosophers do not achieve the status of moral personhood.  established through modern philosophical inquiry. This is a slippery slope long rejected by the Catholic Church.

The proliferation of rights, this includes abortion rights are paradoxically undermining fundamental human rights to life, liberty and private property. Meanwhile progressives demonize conservatives, and traditional religious institutions for not joining their "human rights" bandwagon that fractures human identity, cheapens human dignity and undermines human rights while claiming to celebrate them.

Meanwhile history demonstrates that conservative forces led the drive to limit the absolute power of the sovereign in the 13th Century. Remember that on June 15, 1215 forty barons pressured King John into affixing his seal on The Great Charter (Magna Carta in Latin) at a field in Runnymede, England. It was the British aristocracy that initiated this profound change. This document placed the sovereign under the rule of law and established this principle among the English speaking peoples.  730 years later after the catastrophe of WW2 Conservatives and Christian Democrats sought to advance regional and international human rights structures with the aim of strengthening the protection of human rights in Latin America, Europe and Internationally.

Conservative roots of the European Union's Human Rights System

 Dr. Marco Duranti's new book The Conservative Human Rights Revolution:  European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention will be available on December 1, 2016, but the description that is already available points to the key role conservatives, Winston Churchill among them, played in bringing about the EU's human rights system.

"The Conservative Human Rights Revolution radically reinterprets the origins of the European human rights system, arguing that its conservative inventors envisioned the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) not only as an instrument to contain communism and fascism in continental Europe, but to allow them to pursue a controversial political agenda at home and abroad. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court on Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that conservatives believed violated their basic liberties."

The Modernist rewrite of human rights history

This history is often overlooked with a preference in modern human rights circles given to documents from the Enlightenment associated with the French Revolution which would be associated with the Left. For example "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," also known as the "Declaration of Human and Civic Rights" adopted on August 26, 1789 which is a product of the French Revolution as is the even more egalitarian document produced in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the Constitution of Year I. Article 1 of the 1789 declaration reads:

"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good." 

Nonetheless, the fruits of these documents did not offer much in the way of protections or safe guards for French citizens who were subjected to the French Revolution's terror. The French Revolution born of enlightenment liberalism, and a rejection of the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church, gave Europe its first modern genocide of peasants in which men, women, and children of The Vendee were systematically exterminated, and the end result was the rise of the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte and a world war that took three million lives.

Edmund Burke by James Watson © National Portrait Gallery, London

Failure of the Abstract predicted by the first modern conservative

Edmund Burke was one of the few who foresaw as early as 1790 in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published less than a year into the French Revolution, foresaw where the follies of enlightenment liberalism and its abstractions would end in wholesale slaughter, tyranny and war. 

Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator combined with a concept of man's moral equality has deep roots in the Christian tradition which incidentally is where the very language and concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.  Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a Christian moral vision of the universe combined with respect for tradition and a knowledge of history. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace ,man has freedom but it is not absolute:

As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct.

Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature and its contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely both free and equal. Edmund Burke and modern conservatives believe that "full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is unattainable and a dangerous fiction. The same ideas rooted in Christendom that motivated de Vitoria in 1550 in Spain drove Burke's vision 240 years later in Great Britain: the intrinsic dignity of man.

The trouble with absolute equality

First, to permit absolute freedom is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own devices develop hierarchies naturally. Secondly, to enforce absolute equality requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The end result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at its disposal making slaves of the majority. 

This is what happened in the French Revolution and reached its apex with Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794 with his observation that he applied in governance: "The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." It is a contradiction in the same way that combining absolute freedom and equality as revolutionary goals are in contradiction and doomed to failure. Robespierre was only applying the logic of enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau who wrote of "forcing men to be free."

Descendants of Robespierre confronting and infiltrating human rights institutions today

The communist regime in Cuba has played an active role at the United Nations and in the Americas to undermine human rights standards and institutions. Sadly, it has had some successes in undermining international free speech standards and next month may see a long term objective realized with the crippling of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.  The Castro regime's allies in the region: Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have refused to fund the world's oldest human rights system. Bolivia and Ecuador have called for the elimination of the human rights body.

However the Stalinists of old and the new "Socialists of the 21st Century" who divided humanity along class lines have not had as great an impact as the newest generations of the Left that instead of appealing to a common humanity has further fractured and divided people by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability.  The great religions are now to be restricted to the private sphere and any questions that they may raise about the new divisions can be dismissed as "belief-based bigotry."

Civil and political rights and social and economic rights may all be in decline but repressive regimes can pay lip service to the above six areas and improve their ranking while still denying all humans within their territory their civil, political, social and economic rights.

Ireland's Pro-Life stance criticized by the UNHRC in contradiction with the UDHR

The UN Human Rights Committee in March of 2016 criticized Ireland's pro-life laws, but at the same contradicted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its pro-life clause under Article 3. Both Catholicism (1.27 billion) and Islam (1.6 billion) which make up 2.87 billion believers hold strong bioethical considerations about abortion that are also shared with Orthodox Judaism. Post-Christian societies in Western Countries have legalized abortion with varying levels of restrictions with the United States having some of the most extreme pro-abortion laws when compared to Western Europe.

British Section of Amnesty International and its objectives in 1962

Restoring the dynamic tension to the human rights conversation

In 1961 Amnesty International was founded by Peter Benenson and consisted of a board of trustees that included all the major British political parties: Labour, Conservative, Liberal and religions: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Jewish and Humanist.  

If human rights are to regain their relevance and end its worldwide decline then all parties (and this includes religions) must be invited to the table and not censored beforehand because it does not serve a particular political agenda. Furthermore the right to life, enshrined in both Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 1 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man should apply to all, at all stages of life. Competing rights claims need to be weighed and measured carefully, but recognizing the transcendent importance of the person. 

Finally, human rights defenders instead of focusing on what divides us by race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and religion should seek to recognize our common humanity with a focus on the dignity of the person and the right to life.

Conservatives need to embrace their human rights legacy and reject attempts by intellectual adversaries who claim that there is only a "liberal conception of human rights." There is a conservative tradition of human rights that stretches back centuries and has a far better track record of success than their liberal enlightenment and revolutionary counterparts. This is because Conservatism respects the past, and informed by it looks to how its actions today will impact future generations.

This is why Conservatism is best positioned to rebuild the international human rights consensus in 2016 that the Left has wrought asunder with its abstract utopian projects.