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Inventing the Novel and Human Rights: What Happens When the Image of God Reads Compelling Fiction

Where did the belief in universal human rights come from?

Why did western societies ever begin to write documents proclaiming that “all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”?

What was the original spark of humanitarian instinct that eventually gave rise to a document like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The Judeao-Christian belief that all people are created as the Image of God certainly had an important role to play. But many “Christian” societies have embraced this biblical doctrine without any practical implementation towards eliminating torture, injustice, or discrimination.

So how did the broad-based, societal belief in establishing “human rights” for everyone equally as a matter of law spring into life?

Professor Lynn Hunt teaches modern European history, specializing in the French Revolution, at UCLA. She has written a fascinating book called Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007) where she argues that the impetus towards universal human rights arose with the creation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.

It is difficult today for us to imagine a time when the fictional novel was a new invention, a new form of literature. It is also difficult to understand the novel’s wild popularity among the masses.

Almost everyone who could read consumed them whole. And many who could not read had someone read the latest novel to them.

One of the major social benefits of this craze was the rise in empathy for others, especially others who were not like you, others whom the reader did not know personally, first hand.

An important question this book raises for me concerns the possible connection between American xenophobia, and our hard-heartedness towards warfare and the suffering of “foreigners” and the decline in American literacy.

Nearly 1/3 of American’s did not read a single book last year. Only 20% read

for pleasure on a daily basis. When we do read, it is on average for 17 minutes per day.

Below is an excerpt from Inventing Human Rights (emphasis mine):

(Novels) drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters, who were by definition unknown to the reader personally. Readers empathized with the characters, especially their heroine or hero, thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself. Through the fictional exchange of letters [the epistolary form of novel was especially popular] taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and political order. . . Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative. Can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of “the rights of man”?

. . . Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women. As a consequence, they came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence. The equality of souls in heaven is not the same thing as equal rights here on earth. Before the eighteenth century, Christians readily accepted the former without granting the latter.

 

Professor Hunt’s observations raise troubling questions about the demise of literacy and the liberal arts in American education.

I fear that the increasing turn towards “professionalization” as opposed to cultural literacy in education will pave the way for a harsher, more xenophobic, aggressive, inhumane vision of the world for American society.

But, then, maybe we are already there…

Listen to Sensible Voices Address the Israel-Palestine Bloodshed

I just finished participating in another political action campaign with Jewish Voice for Peace focused on the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Below is a collection of reasonable testimonies from both Jewish and Palestinian young people addressing this tragedy of non-stop violence.

Please check it out:

 

 

Trump Said It Out Loud: Take Syria’s Oil

I hope that no one still imagines that the US has military forces in Syria because we want to bring the people democracy.

The real story in such foreign interventions is always about American hegemony, American power, American exploitation of other nations’ resources.

That simple fact has always been apparent in Syria, but now it is undeniable.

The Washington Post recently published a major story detailing America’s permanent occupation of Syria’s oil fields. The article, written by Liz Sly, is titled “America’s Hidden War in Syria.”

Below is an excerpt:

U.S. troops will now stay in Syria
indefinitely, controlling a third of the
country and facing peril on many fronts.

RAQQA, Syria — This ruined, fearful city was once the Islamic State’s capital, the showcase of its caliphate and a magnet for foreign fighters from around the globe.

Now it lies at the heart of the United States’ newest commitment to a Middle East war.

The commitment is small, a few thousand troops who were first sent to Syria three years ago to help the Syrian Kurds fight the Islamic State. President Trump indicated in March that the troops would be brought home once the battle is won, and the latest military push to eject the group from its final pocket of territory recently got underway.

In September, however, the administration switched course, saying the troops will stay in Syria pending an overall settlement to the Syrian war and with a new mission: to act as a bulwark against Iran’s expanding influence. 

That decision puts U.S. troops in overall control, perhaps indefinitely, of an area comprising nearly a third of Syria, a vast expanse of mostly desert terrain roughly the size of Louisiana.

The Pentagon does not say how many troops are there. Officially, they number 503, but earlier this year an official let slip that the true number may be closer to 4,000. Most are Special Operations forces, and their footprint is light. Their vehicles and convoys rumble by from time to time along the empty desert roads, but it is rare to see U.S. soldiers in towns and cities.

The new mission raises new questions, about the role they will play and whether their presence will risk becoming a magnet for regional conflict and insurgency.

Read the entire article here.

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, was a Tunisian intellectual who grew

FRANCE – JULY 02: Albert Memmi, author, at home in Paris, France on July 02, 2004. (Photo by Marc GANTIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

up in his native land under French colonialism. He would eventually become a philosophy professor in Paris and write a best-selling autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt.

In 1956, he wrote a fascinating book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he insightfully describes the lasting effects of colonization on both those who conquer a foreign land, as well as those who are conquered.

The folks who study the history of colonization sometimes say that colonization is not an event but a structure. In other words, the people with the power build a social system intended to protect their power.

That colonial system does not come down until everyone, both the colonizers and the colonized together, decide that the old power structure must end.

Both Israel and the United States are colonial powers. Memmi’s analysis offers a penetrating description of both societies.

Memmi describes modern Israeli society to a T.

I believe he also sheds light on the inner resources of those Americans who embrace the ideologies of White Supremacy, American Exceptionalism and Nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism.

And what about the American urge to control foreign governments and their economies around the world?

Below is a short excerpt for your consideration:

Accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper claims his place and, if need be, will defend it by every means at his disposal. This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns…to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained…He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.

How? How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurpers to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time…

With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great…

He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres…The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized…

Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.

What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?…The human relationships have arisen from the severest exploitation, founded on inequality and contempt, guaranteed by police authoritarianism. There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism…

It is no more surprising that colonial fascism is not easily limited to the colony. Cancer wants only to spread. The colonialist can only support oppressive and reactionary or, at least, conservative governments. He tends towards that which will maintain the current status of his homeland, or rather that which will more positively assure the framework of oppression.

Israel Mows Gaza’s Grass, Again

The Jerusalem Post reported in 2014 on the Israeli military policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza.

Of course, no one living in Gaza has an actual lawn. Instead, this is Israel’s not-so-clever euphemism for its periodic military attacks against the human beings living in Gaza.

Yes, the Israeli military actually thinks it’s clever to describe the way they periodically mow down innocent Palestinian civilians as a public service in lawn care.

Ha ha…

Mowing Gaza’s grass accomplishes several goals for Israel.

First, as I explain in my book Like Birds in a Cage, regular Israeli airstrikes and bombings, causing mayhem, death, and destruction is intended to remind the Palestinian people of who their Master is.

Thus, mowing the grass gives Israel yet another opportunity to sear the Palestinian conscience, to quote the military’s own description of this policy goal.

Like random electrical shocks administered to a caged dog, the Palestinians are supposed to surrender their will, abandon all resistance, and lapse into a state of learned helplessness.

Fortunately, however, the Palestinian people are refusing to learn Israel’s intended lesson.

Here is the sequence of events for the most recent exercise in Israel’s deadly conscience searing:

It began on August 1st when Israeli commandos captured a leader of the rebel organization called Islamic Jihad (IJ) who was living in the West Bank.

Several days later Israel followed up on that raid by launching an airstrike on Gaza in order to assassinate another IJ leader in his home. He was killed with several others.

Then Israel announced that it was launching a “preemptive strike” against Gaza in response to intelligence reports detailing IJ’s plans to use heavy artillery against Israel. Of course, as usual, Israel never provided any details about this supposed intelligence. The world is expected to simply take Israel’s word at face value.

What followed was another merciless blood-letting.

At last count, as best I can discover, hundreds of Gazans have been injured, approximately 65 people were killed, 15 of them being children. The total damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure has yet to be determined.

The IJ forces launched almost 1,000 rockets against Israel. Yet, Israel did not suffer a single casualty. Some of these rockets did not even make it outside of Gaza, landing short and killing Palestinians instead.

These statistics tell us everything we need to know about the grotesque asymmetry characteristic of this “conflict.” A nuclear power is using state-of-the-art weaponry to mow down people living under military occupation whose weapons are like children’s toys in comparison.

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the (imaginary) heavy artillery that IJ was supposedly preparing to fire against Israel. Such rockets never made an appearance among the 1,000-or-so homemade IJ missiles that traced their wobbly, white streaks erratically across the Gazan sky this past week.

So, there you have it. The entire Israel-Palestine situation in a nut shell.

Israel continues its military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank, and they continue to get away with it.

Israel mows down hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, and gets away with it. Again, Israel will not suffer a single negative consequence from the outside world.

Palestinians make a feeble attempt to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, and they are vilified by Israel and its allies.

Which all raises a vital question: Whose conscience is being seared by this perpetual savagery?

 

Israel’s Settler Colonialism Continues at a Steady Pace

(I will write a post about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza later today.)

Israel is a settler-colonial state, much like the USA, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.

One of the defining goals of every settler-colonial state is the elimination of the native. Israel has created a massive state apparatus that works to accomplish this goal, whether through annexing Palestinian territory, building separation walls, home demolitions, zoning restrictions, or travel restrictions, to name only a few.

Continuing efforts to erase both the history and the contemporary existence of the Palestinian people appears, again, in the videos below.

I could post multiple videos like these every week, but I choose to limit them in order to cover a wider range of topics. However, the historical erasure of any group of human beings is always a story deserving of our attention.

Imagine that This Young Woman is Your Daughter. Why is This Still Happening?

Brianna Grier should not have been threatened, much less killed by rough policemen with no regard for her safety.

This latest tragedy is another good argument in favor of Defunding the Police, NOW.

Yes, I know that “Defund” is a terrible name for the movement. But it’s not about taking all funding away from local police. Instead, it is about reallocating a portion of local police budgets to social services.

Services that could more effectively handle situations like Brianna’s

Why must American’s resort to calling the police when a family member has a mental health crisis?

Why do the police treat mentally ill people like criminals?

Why do these policemen have so little regard for the well-being of a young African-American woman?

Why must they drag her across the ground, put her into the back of a patrol car without a seatbelt, and then neglect to close the car door?

Mental illness is not a crime.

And this is negligent homicide, at the very least.

The History of Abortion Access in America is More Complicated than Justice Alito Imagines

Justice Samuel Alito composed the now famous ruling that recently overturned Roe vs. Wade. An important line of argument in that ruling was Alito’s assertion that abortion access did not have a long, established history in this country.

I am not an American historian, but then neither is Justice Alito.

I do know that this particular line of argument has been heavily criticized since its publication. PBS News recently offered a fascinating story covering this “complicated history” in early America.

Gideon Levy: “Hey, Israel. Let’s Become a Normal Country”

As Israeli citizens are suffering voting burn-out due to their fractious, unstable parliamentary system of government, the journalist Gideon Levy urges his nation to become “a normal country.”

In light of Russia’s recent threats to evict the Jewish Agency from Russian society, many are wondering, “What’s so bad about the Jewish Agency? Is this more antisemitism from Putin?”

Good questions. Why is Putin doing this? And what would it mean for Israel to become “normal”?

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

Check out Levy’s editorial below. It may surprise you (all emphasis is mine):

To be a normal country – that, too, is an option. We could start, for example, with a normal immigration policy, as is customary in any normal country. Railing against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his intention to put a stop to Israel’s subversive activities against his country – intentions that are immeasurably justified – demonstrate that the path toward normality is still long and arduous. As long as Israel continues to hold the mentality that “we are allowed to do anything” and that “we’re not like other countries,” the path toward normality will be endlessly longer.

And here’s more proof that there’s no difference between one Israeli government and the next: An issue that is untouchable no matter what government is in power is the sanctity of Israel’s immigration policy. And if the Law of Return [a law granting all Jews everywhere in the world automatic citizenship] is accorded primacy among laws, immigration policy is the last of the issues that would be debated.

In seeking to shut down the operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel in his country, Putin has sought to put an end to a foreign country’s intervention in Russia’s domestic affairs. It’s not difficult to guess what would have happened if Warsaw had openly attempted to have emissaries from the Polish establishment stationed in Israel to encourage former Polish Jews and their descendants to return to Poland. But when it comes to Israel’s efforts, it’s all right.

Putin will clearly have to back down on his demand, because the Jewish establishment is stronger, but we don’t need Putin to ask not only by what right but for what purpose Israel is pursuing its activities there. Why does Israel have to meddle in other countries in an attempt to recruit, to coax, bribe or convince Jews, half-Jews or quarter-Jews to immigrate here?

What is the purpose of this entire bloated network of emissaries around the world? What’s the purpose of all those ridiculous Birthright and Masa programs when it’s clear that there’s no more room here?

Israel is a country bursting at the seams, but it still wants more and more immigrants. Its passion for aliyah is insatiable – in a country that already has a population of 9.5 million living on an extremely narrow strip of land. The Jews of the world should therefore have been told: Come here only if you have no alternative. It’s crowded here, even in the sea, and there’s not a parking spot to be had.

Jews are secure and prospering almost everywhere in the world. Israel is less secure than anywhere else, but Jews are being called upon to come and save themselves here of all places, in this crowded and troubled land. And the problem isn’t only that it’s out of space, since Israel can always conquer additional land. The problem is also in the justification for its immigration policy.
It is necessarily based on a racist outlook. It was right in its time. One could understand and even admire the unceasing efforts to bring large numbers of Jews here to build a country here – and to rescue them from the horrors in their countries of origin. But both of these efforts have long been completed.

The country was established and has become a world power and at the present, Jews aren’t facing horrors anywhere in the world. The flags should have been folded up and the second phase of Zionism – which never happened – should have been initiated. And that involves making Israel a normal country.

A normal country has an immigration policy based on its needs and principles. Israel’s immigration policy needs to take the needs and rights of all of its citizens into account. For example, saving relatives in distress – in Ethiopia and Ukraine, as well as in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.

Consider the name Birthright. Israel is encouraging young Americans to visit the country on a propaganda trip, in the company of armed guards to demonstrate the dangers, to coax them to immigrate here solely based on their origin. And sometimes they’ve even been required to undergo DNA testing to verify that they’re Jewish.

But what about the natives of the country who have no birthright? Why wasn’t an elderly Palestinian woman from Haifa living in exile in Syria not permitted to return to the city of her birth in her old age when a civil war was raging in Syria? Find one convincing reason. And why doesn’t her brother, an Israeli citizen, have the standing to save her? Jeremy from New York and Leonid from Kyiv can come here to live but not Sa’adia from Yarmouk.

It’s a Jewish state. So be it, but why entirely Jewish? Why only Jewish? And why Jewish by force? How is it Jewish if half of its subjects, those under Israel’s authority, aren’t Jewish? And what would happen if we would dismantle all the moldy and fossilized aliyah institutions?

Israel would begin turning into a normal country. That’s all.

More Evidence For the Practical Importance of Critical Race Theory

Colin Gordon is a history professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in the history and long-term effects of American public policy.

Professor Colin Gordon

Professor Gordon recently wrote a highly informative article for Dissent Magazine which asks the question, “Who Segregated America?”

In this article he demonstrates the pernicious role played by private business interests in pioneering the highly discriminatory methods that would eventually be used by public, government policies to permanently entrench racial segregation through America’s neighborhoods.

Here is one more example of why an understanding of American racism and its dissection though tools like Critical Race Theory are so important to our educational system.

Frankly, it is impossible to understand either our history or our current racial predicament without it.

Below is an excerpt of “Who Segregated America?”:

Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.

Recent scholarship and reporting on racial disparities in the United States have emphasized the role of public policy—especially federal policy—in the creation of what the 1968 Kerner Commission famously dubbed “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This is especially true of housing policy. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) skewers the stark exclusion of African-American veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) offers a damning synthesis on how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) embraced Jim Crow. More recently, the digitization of the infamous “residential security” redlining maps prepared by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s has spurred academic interest in the connections between the HOLC’s bluntly racial assessments and contemporary disparities.

This condemnation of federal policy is certainly warranted. Even the constraints of the New Deal coalition (in which the Democratic majority was, as Katznelson observes, a “strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa”) cannot excuse the FHA’s slavish deference to racial prejudice in private realty. One can and should expect more of a public agency, wielding billions in housing subsidies in one hand and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause in the other, than a set of underwriting guidelines that “could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws,” as housing activist Charles Abrams observed in 1955.

But is it true, as Rothstein’s subtitle suggests, that “government segregated America”? Not really. As new work on the scope of private racial restrictions underscores, racial segregation in American cities (especially Northern and border cities) was largely accomplished by private interests and private action long before the FHA spent a dime or the HOLC opened its first bottle of red ink.

Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) “wholly of the Caucasian Race.” The result was a sort of pointillist apartheid, filled in parcel by parcel, block by block, and subdivision by subdivision, on a scale sufficient to quarantine existing pockets of African-American residency and mark new developments as largely off limits. . .

(Observe in the following graphic how “Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) ‘wholly of the Caucasian Race.'” In other words, private racial regulators orchestrated the creation of black ghettos and white suburbs with all the damaging consequences.)

. . . More to the point, the FHA and other federal housing policies were always—and remain—little more than a poorly regulated trough for private housing interests. They exist not to secure homeownership but to sustain the residential construction and home finance industries with direct subsidies, socialized risk, and tax breaks. In that role, they have always parroted the goals, motives, and prejudices of private interests and deferred to their assessment of what boosted—or threatened—the value of private property.

The segregation of the American city was conceived, accomplished, and justified largely by private action in response to the demographic upheaval of the Great Migration. Federal housing policies unconscionably doubled down on both segregation and its assumptions, but the damage was already done.

Read the entire article here.