[Part
1 is the previous post, the one for February 2016. I usually post once a month
at the end of the month. I am posting earlier this time, so it will follow soon
after Part 1.]
Sometimes
the news throws up reports on the most diverse subjects, which can lead us to
make the oddest connections. Along with a debate about reparations, recent news
items have told us about the detection of gravitational waves, confirming part
of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It has produced a lot of
excitement. For one thing, there is a hope that new technological devices will
ensue. Whenever we discover anything in the west, the first thing scientists
start thinking about is how this will give us more domination and control over
nature.
But
there is more. In response to one person’s query as to what good is this, one
scientist, or perhaps it was a journalist who writes on science, responded that
one might as well ask what good is Beethoven or Bach. There is a beauty to
scientific theories about the universe that is worth pursuing for its own sake.
Yes, there is. I agree. But I wonder why we never say that about humanitarian
ideas.
There
is an incredible beauty in the idea that an attack on humanity anywhere is an
attack on humanity everywhere. But how many people really believe that? We
consider it deeply problematic, a very big pain in the ass, to defend human
rights everywhere. There is the danger, the economic costs, diplomatic considerations.
Too much of an emphasis on human rights will interfere with material progress
which always comes first. Human rights are something that can be put on the
backburner. Humanitarian ideals are nothing like Beethoven or Bach. Great music
doesn’t make us feel guilty the way our failures in humanitarianism do. We
don’t celebrate humanitarians of the past the way we celebrate Bach or Einstein.
We would rather forget.
(In
what follows, all emphases in quotations from old authors are original to these
authors.)
In
the late 17th century, John Locke wrote that when an “Aggressor … unjustly invades another Man’s Right,
[he] can … never come to have a Right
over the Conquered …” He compares such unjust rulers to robbers and
pirates. An unjust conqueror is like a robber who gains title to a man’s estate
by holding a dagger to his throat. “The Injury and the Crime is equal, whether
committed by the wearer of a Crown, or some petty Villain. The Title of the
Offender, and the Number of his Followers, make no difference in the Offence,
unless it be to aggravate it.” Think of what Locke is saying: Not only does
might or status not make right, but it makes for less right and magnifies the
crime.
(How
Locke was rewritten by scholars to make him into a supporter of colonialism and
the dispossession of native peoples is too long a story to go into here. For
the moment, it is enough to say that their chief method has been to erase all
that he said in defense of the native rights of all peoples.)
Locke
went further. He argued that even in a just war, when a nation has all the
justice on its side you can imagine, such justice does not give the conqueror
the right to take away all the land from the conquered nation. The vanquished,
especially the women and children, have a right to live and a right to inherit
their fathers’ possessions. “But the Conquered, or their Children, have no
Court, no Arbitrator on Earth to appeal to. Then they may appeal [to heaven] … and repeat their Appeal, till they recovered the native Right of their Ancestors …
If it be objected, this would cause endless trouble; I answer, No more than
Justice does, where she lies open to all that appeal to her.” For Locke, this
is absolutely true in an unjust war, but even just wars cannot undo the right
to inherit and have enough land for survival.
Saxe
Bannister, Attorney General in New South Wales in the mid-1820s and later
active in the Aborigines’ Protection Society, put it most succinctly: “rights
are never forgotten.” There is the right to reparations in a nutshell. It is as
beautiful a humanitarian insight as the idea that an attack on humanity
anywhere is an attack on humanity everywhere.
Granville
Sharp was one of the earliest British abolitionists. He defended many a slave
in England in the late 18th century and was finally successful in
getting a judge to decide that slavery in England was illegal (the exact
interpretation of the judge’s decision was in dispute, but he was popularly
understood to have banned slavery on English home soil). Sharp was deeply aware
that the rights of Englishmen were entwined with rights for all humans: “the
spirit and equity,” for example, of trial by jury (denied to slaves) would be
“entirely lost, if we partially confine that justice to ourselves alone, when
we have it in our power to extend it to others” (this point was framed in a
rhetorical question). “The natural right
of all mankind must principally justify our insisting upon this necessary
privilege in favour of ourselves in particular … we certainly undermine the
equitable force and reason of those laws, by which we ourselves are protected …” if we do not extend them to all men.
It
was this concern for human rights that carried over to the movement to help
Aborigines who were losing their land without compensation. Saxe Bannister
pointed out that the Parliamentary leaders pushing for the emancipation of
slaves had always had colonial Aborigines, or free coloreds, in their minds as
well. Sharp himself had made a connection between the causes of slaves and
Aborigines. To make Aborigines out to be savages was, like enslavement, to
divest them of their humanity, an expression used by Sharp. Sharp had argued
that slavery turned human beings into property and that this was a divestment of
their humanity. He insisted that no human being can ever be divested of his
fundamental human nature and the rights that go with it.
The
most important thing to remember about Sharp’s brand of humanitarianism is that
he did not just want to free the slaves—he wanted to free them for the right
reasons and that included the idea of universal human rights. His ideas, like
those of Bannister and Locke, were as beautiful as anything in physics and
mathematics.
Twice
Sharp tells us that slavery is “destructive of the human species.” (Darwin would
say almost the exact opposite when it came to exterminating Aborigines; he
believed their disappearance would improve the human race; see below.) Sharp’s
statement seems to be based on his belief that the oppression of one part of
society, if unchecked, will spread to other parts, particularly to the common
people. He notes that the free Negroes, Mulattoes, and Indians in the colonies
suffer oppressive measures as a result of the way slaves are treated. There is
implied in this a holistic view of human society. The whole binds all the parts
together so that injustice cannot be confined to one part; whatever wrongs are
done to one will spread to other parts of the whole. Sharp saw connections
where racists and slaveholders saw disconnections.
Darwin
was more apt to see disconnections. He affirmed connections between humans in
the ancient past, but he also believed evolution had created such diversity of
character that the end result in our time was that the human races were
markedly different in moral and intellectual nature. To one correspondent,
Darwin wrote, “It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when
high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the
Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in
consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in
rank.” Rank was what counted for Darwin, which is why he depicted lower races as
pulling down the human race as a whole. Getting rid of certain human races, not
reparations, was what Darwin envisioned for the future.
Sharp
saw it differently. Injustice is what pulled humanity down and giving justice
to a despised group could only pull humanity up. As Locke had said, there is no
time limit on calling for injustice to be rectified. All human beings are
entitled to rights (which never go away, as Bannister had emphasized), so much
so that, in Sharp’s view, the denial of rights to any one group would have devastating
consequences on all other human beings. He was a holistic thinker. Would he
have approved of reparations? I think so. He would have understood that lifting
up a people as a counter-measure to the injustices they had suffered would have
beneficial results for everyone else. Reparations fit his general way of
thinking.
There
is a beauty in all this that we would do well to remember. Rights are never
forgotten and can never be abandoned. As long as there are descendants to
remember these things. That is as beautiful as a gravitational wave, isn’t it?
To the ones I have mentioned here, many other forgotten names could be added,
like Charles Napier, J. Langfield Ward, and Georg Gerland. Napier had argued
how destructive an obsession with national wealth is and Gerland asked us to
remember that indigenous people had not rejected civilization, rather
civilization had rejected the indigenous.
They
all asked us to remember that the line between civilized and savage runs
through every human society, and should never be used as a marker to
distinguish between cultures. Every society has the capacity to sink back into
savagery, as Gerland said, and the so-called savage cultures give us high
examples of humanity.
Unfortunately,
we have chosen not to remember the humanitarians who taught us these lessons. We
do not honor their names the way we honor the names of scientists who enhanced
the power of western civilization. We’ve brushed them aside. We’ve
dis-remembered them. We don’t value what they stood for. Reparations here would
mean remembering what they thought was important and remembering that we have rejected
their offerings. It’s that double memory that twists us up inside. We don’t
know how to face what our neglect has done to them.
Whatever
the merit and benefits of financial reparations, the ultimate reparations are
memories. The reparations of remembering history accurately is what we need
more than anything else. Whether the future holds promise or gives us an abyss
depends on how we remember the past. It is the most dangerous kind of
reparation because part of this is remembering how bad we have been at the
task of memorializing humanitarians who tried so hard to give us something
better. We have erased them from history. If we have any heart at all, we should do our utmost to reverse that.
©
2016 Leon Zitzer
