Celemajor, Danielle --- "Beyond the "God Delusion": Towards a complex engagement of religion and human rights." [2007] HRightsDef 12; (2007) 16(2) Human Rights Defender 2

• Beyond the “God Delusion”: Towards a complex engagement of religion and human rights.

Beyond the “God Delusion”: Towards a complex engagement of religion and human rights.

Danielle Celermajer

This century has seen the extraordinary rise of a pair of (mutually hostile) movements whose principal concern is the place of religion in the public sphere. On one side we have witnessed the very obvious rise of stridently public religion, and the call for a more prominent role for religious norms, voices and world views in the construction of public policy; on the other, there is the vehement rejection of religion as a force in public life, and the publication of a growing list of extremely popular (and populist) books by prominent public intellectuals damning religion as the greatest force of social violence and oppression in our times. Given that one of the key disagreements in this dispute concerns what types of foundational and regulatory norms are legitimate in contemporary societies and what types should be struck out, human rights, even when not explicitly mentioned, are deeply implicated throughout.

To a cool observer (assuming it is possible to remain cool in the midst of the swarming invective), what stands out in this debate is the lack of sophistication in most of the public argumentation on both sides. Richard Dworkin, leading the front guard of the charge against religion, feels no compunction nor any need for empirical data, when he declares that no one who adheres to Islam, Judaism or Christianity could possibly feel wonder at the living embodied universe because all such religious adherents only value an elsewhere after-life. And the representatives of Evangelical Christianity in Andrew Denton’s God on My Side seem to see no reason that their argument that their direct experience of the Christian God is more legitimate than the direct experience that Muslims have of their God ‘because it just is’, may fail to convince the impartial bystander. Lacking on both sides is the type of sophisticated dialogue between reason and faith that one can find in religious and scientific or secular political texts from Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas, Barth and Heschel to Locke, Paul Davies, Martin Luther King Jn and Abdullah An-Na’im.

This lack of complexity is not just to the intellectual detriment of the debate (though to its benefit as a commercial product), but, more pressingly, anathema to the resolution or even negotiation of the real conflicts that do exist between worldviews and normative frames. From its modern inception (the framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the field of human rights has tended to take a pragmatic approach to foundational differences, as captured by Jacques Maritain, a member of the UNESCO committee established to explore the different philosophical and religious foundations of human rights. Maritain once famously remarked, ‘Yes, we agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why’.[1] Similarly, it has attempted a capacious approach to interpretive difference, hoping that the ‘margin of appreciation’ in different national or cultural interpretations of broadly expressed rights would nevertheless fulfil the essential objectives of the human rights ideal.

Perhaps this approach seemed viable in 1948, when the nations there were more thoroughly united by their shared experience of the post-Shoah moment and the exhilaration of their vision. As Isaiah Berlin put it, in the post holocaust moment, what sustained people’s commitment to a moral law was not reason (as it once had in Kant), but horror.[2] But 60 years later, Maritain’s statement is evidently false, on a number of counts. First, we do not all agree about the rights, particularly those concerning the status and treatment of women and children. Second, we increasingly do ask why, and we have a great deal to say about those foundational differences. And third, the answer to the ‘why’ question that has captured the popular imagination is that the greatest impediment to the adoption of the full set of universal human rights is religious belief.

At the same time, now walking over to the other side, one cannot avoid the fact that nearly 60 years of human rights, including the formal adoption of human rights principles, the ratification of human rights treaties and even the enactment of domestic human rights laws, has not produced the type of deeply embedded human rights culture that the visionaries of the system hoped it would. Even in the most selfavowedly secular states, where publicly endorsed religious norms do not stand in the way of official deference to human rights standards, we have not seen the deep adoption of human rights as a nonnegotiable lens through which all public policy must pass. This has been all too graphically evidenced in the ease with which states that hold themselves as beacons of liberal democracy have traded off even non-derogable rights, like protection from torture (let alone freedom of speech and association) in the post 9/11 context (and of course also before that, though mostly ‘offshore’ under the guise of Cold War politics and in a less explicit manner).

Evidently human rights standards have not yet attached themselves to human beings with sufficient tenacity to hold up to the challenges of pragmatism. After all, adhering to the norm against torture, until you really want to torture someone, or permitting free speech until that speech actually challenges your values, is hardly testament to the effective action of the human rights norms. One could only reliably claim evidence of their independent action where their presence brought about genuine forbearance of the proscribed (and on other grounds attractive) behaviours. Certainly, there are a range of legitimate interpretations for why this deep embodiment has not been achieved, including the simple fact that 60 years of rights internationalism is a relatively short time against the history of the Westphalian system and associated realism, and beyond that deep cultural differences. Nevertheless, the pressing question is, ‘what would it take for human rights to become an absolute standard?’ or, to put it otherwise, ‘what do we need beyond a framework of laws and formal institutions, for human rights to be deeply integrated into our individual and collective normative systems?’

The answers to these questions place human rights and religion in a far more complex relationship than the simple opposition that populist creeds would suggest. Undoubtedly, many authoritative interpretations of religious texts and prominent religious doctrines prescribe norms that directly contravene human rights standards, particularly those relating to women. As these conflicts form one of the major thematic areas of contemporary human rights literature, I will not treat them in depth here, other than to make a pragmatic observation. Irrespective how externally located human rights activists view the overall legitimacy of the religious systems in question, the most effective way to ensure the long-term success of the rights struggles of women who themselves identify with a religion that prescribes norms inimical to their access to basic rights is to support their intrinsic critiques. Certainly, they should have viable exit strategies, should they wish to take this route, but for those who do not, the role of the outsider must be to support them to create new spaces within their own religion to articulate alternative interpretations consistent with the full enjoyment of their rights. Jewish women’s groups in Israel (for example the Schechter Institute Center for Women in Jewish Law) and Muslim women’s groups in Indonesia (such as Muslimat NU) provide powerful illustrations of this type of strategy of intrinsic engagement, where women speak as Jews and Muslims for a legitimate reading of their religion that inscribes women’s voices and thereby their interests. Their work defies the stereotype that religious doctrine is essentially and necessarily static and demonstrates the productive possibilities of what we might think of as a normative permaculture across religious and human rights frameworks.

Albeit the most obvious face of the relationship, the conflict between the substantive prescriptions of religions and human rights exposes only part of what is available to us when we bring these two fields into a discursive relationship. To start to give outline to the less obvious dimension, one might distinguish the substantive content of normative systems from the form in which those normative systems become part of human experience. Returning to my earlier observation that we have not embodied human rights norms, one might ask whether the processes that religions have traditionally adopted to bring about an embodied normative commitment, or a deep social integration of values, might not be a model that an overly rationalistic human rights canon would do well to emulate.

Writing in this vein, Albert Einstein observed that while clear thinking plays a critical role in forming ethical judgments, ‘those convictions which are necessary and determinant of our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid scientific way’. Rather, he argued,‘to make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of an individual, seems to me to the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man’.[3] In so invoking religion, Einstein of course had a very particular conception in mind, in which God was not conceived as an anthropomorphic source of fear or reward and in which the religious experience itself precluded the formation of dogma (he called it cosmic religious feeling). Beyond this important qualification, however, what he was pointing to was a particular quality of the relationship that has to hold between human beings and a set of norms or practices for them to be, ‘as the air which he breathes’.⁴

Einstein was not the first leader of modernist rational thought to struggle with this problem. Indeed, those of us who associate Adam Smith with the creation of the free market and its rampant individualism might be surprised to turn to the pages of his ethical treatises, where he struggled with the problem of how to create moral sentiment in a post traditionalist society in which ascription to any norm, including respect for others, had to pass before the tribunal of the individual mind.[5] Smith, like Einstein, understood the importance of finding a way in which the modernist enterprise of liberating individuals from dogmatic (religious) systems could remain consistent with their experiencing a commitment beyond their individual self. More directly, the great French sociologist (and descendent of a line of Rabbis) Emile Durkheim,[6] despite his call for a scientific approach to society, recognised that it was through religions that societies integrated and embodied social norms. True, this formal observation tells us nothing about the content of those norms, which as we know may include prescriptions for cruelty and systematic violation of certain classes of humans. But it does tell us something about what it takes to bring human beings to internalise any norms to the extent that they will trump selfinterest, as we are required to do in the case of human rights.

Religious ritual, for example, including the use of music, symbolic speech and traditional (‘mythic’) stories, so easily scorned if assessed by rationalist standards, plays a powerful role in transforming external norms (as rules) into felt and embodied standards of conduct. Assessed with a hostile eye, such ‘non-rational’ processes may be classified as brainwashing. However, assessed with a more pragmatic eye informed by the latest neuroscience on the primacy of emotion in our thinking processes, they are intelligent means of making the abstract concrete and immediate to consciousness. Indeed, moving back into the field of human rights, we would do well to notice that many advocates have recognized that legal frameworks alone are insufficient to change hearts and minds, and are increasingly turning to precisely these types of processes. Thus for example, narratives of violation and redemption through rights and even collective rituals like Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and collective forms of repentance have taken their place along ‘naming and shaming’ and legal ascription in the human rights toolkit. Of course, a thoroughgoing understanding of the power of such processes must include an awareness of their potential for abuse and the degeneration so well described by Weber whereby a primary experience, even as lofty and initially universal as Einstein’s cosmic religious feeling, becomes institutionalised and material for the dynamics of power.

Critically, this engagement with what I have loosely termed the non-rational integrative processes of religion in no way implies the type of human rights idolatry and associated loss of agency of which Ignatieff warned.[7] Indeed, the idea that one might need to compromise the freedom and responsibility of the individual to better strengthen her ascription to human rights is oxymoronic. The challenge then for human rights is to find a way through this apparent dichotomy between affirming the free and responsible individual and ensuring commitment to acting according to a set of norms, irrespective of personal desire. To do this, human rights as religion must, I suggest, cut through the dichotomy of the free agent and the agent embedded in responsibility to treat others in a certain way. As Einstein put it: ‘Free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind’.[8]

Danielle Celermajer is the Director of the Bachelor of Global Studies, University of Sydney. She received her PhD with distinction from Columbia University and directed a project on Religion and Human Rights at the Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University. She is also a former director of policy in the indigenous rights policy unit of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

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[1] Jacque Maritain, ‘Introduction’ in UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and

Interpretations: a symposium (1949) 9.

[2] Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, (1991) 204.

[3] Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (Sonja Bargmann trans) (1954) 41-42 [trans of

Ideen und Meinungen].

[4] Ibid 43.

[5] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (D D Raphael and A L Macfie

(eds)) (1976).

[6] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Carol Cosman trans)

(2001) [trans of Les Formes Elémentaires de la Vie Religieuse].

[7] Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001).

[8] Einstein, above n 3, 43.