Posts Tagged ‘Human Rights’
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men”*…
Your correspondent is headed into a particularly busy period of travel/work, so (Roughly) Daily will be more roughly than daily for next few days. Regular service should resume on September 20…
Grim, but important…
Legal protections for children in the United States and in every individual state fall short of international children’s rights standards, Human Rights Watch said [in a report released this week]. Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states. As the only UN member state that has failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the US falls far below internationally adopted standards.
One year after the release of a scorecard that measures US compliance with key international child rights standards, 11 states have enacted reforms that improve their rankings. Absent federal ratification and federal laws regarding many of the issues the convention addresses, jurisdiction is left to individual states. As a result, the protection and advancement of child rights varies from state to state…
While only seven states score higher than a “D” grade, four states shed their “F” grade, three moved up to a “C,” and several significantly improved their rankings. Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, and West Virginia showed improvement over the last year.
The policy changes that improved states’ grades were most frequently in the areas of banning sentencing children to life without parole, raising the minimum age of prosecuting children in the juvenile system, and limiting or prohibiting child marriage. Progress was limited on banning corporal punishment. On child labor, some states moved to roll back child labor protections…
The updated scorecard shows improvement, but many states still fail children: “No US State Meets Child Rights Standards,” from @hrw.
Related:
* Frederick Douglass
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As we protect our progeny, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that the League of Nations passed the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (AKA The Geneva Declaration), a historic document drafted by Eglantyne Jebb that recognized and affirmed for the first time the existence of rights specific to children and the responsibility of adults towards children.
The U.S. was not a member of the League. But in 1959 the Declaration was adopted in an extended form by the United Nations.
“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.”*…
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem, Patrick Nunn argues– they are scientific records…
In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.
To help with the reconnaissance, Steel engaged guides from the local Klamath peoples, who had occupied the area for countless generations. During their work together, Steel noted that they never once looked at the lake itself, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’ – a sign that the Klamath regarded Crater Lake as a powerful place where a great cataclysm once happened and might happen again. For, as Klamath stories tell, buried deep beneath the lake waters is the spirit of Llao, a demon who lived within the volcano that once towered above Crater Lake. In a past age, Llao terrorised the Klamath by showering them with hot rocks and shaking the ground on which they lived. This continued until Llao was confronted by the benevolent spirit Skell who pulled the volcano down on the demon and created Crater Lake above.
What sounded to Steel like myth is more than just a story. It is a memory of an eruption that caused a volcano to collapse and form a giant caldera that, as many do, filled with freshwater. The eruption occurred 7,700 years ago, but the Klamath had preserved its story and even sustained associated protocols, such as not looking directly at the lake. Though they did not read nor write when Steel worked with them in the late 19th century, the Klamath people knew a story about an event that had occurred more than 7 millennia earlier, a story carried across perhaps 300 generations by word of mouth.
Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing…
Knowledge is where we find it: “Memories within myth,” from @PatrickNunn3 in @aeonmag.
* Stanley Kunitz
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As we respect our elders, we might spare a thought for Alfred Métraux; he died on this date in 1963. An anthropologist, ethnographer, and human rights leader, he published landmark studies of South American Indians, Haitian voodoo, and the ancient cultures of Easter Island. His work in South America was instrumental in illuminating the the brilliance of South American Indian cultures; he taught the world the reality of voodoo, and he solved the riddle of the Easter Island monoliths (the Moai).
Later in his career, Métraux worked with the UN, where he participated in the framing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, as director of the Dept. of Social Sciences at UNESCO, he presided over a series of studies which resulted in a series of publications demonstrating the absence of scientific foundation for theories of racial superiority; the 1951 UNESCO Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences enshrined these findings.
“Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor”*…
It can seem, in this chaotic world-moment, that Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is having a day. Nathan Gardels introduces a new series of essays in Noema that examine the prospects for rise and fall in our time…
“The intelligible unit of historical study,” Arnold Toynbee famously wrote, is neither the nation-state nor mankind as a whole, but civilizations that grew out of societies that evolved toward dominance of their “known world,” or stalled in isolation and fell into obscurity, depending on challenges to which they rose in response or that defeated them.
Writing his “Study of History” in the mid-20th century, he counted some 22 such civilizations that had arisen over the last 6,000 years, from the Mayan to Hindic to Sinic and Hellenic among many others. Each saw its foundation in a religious or cosmological outlook that shaped its internal cohesion through the form of the life of a society, its style of life, moral taste, form of government and spirit of laws.
For Toynbee, as the political scientist Robert Loevy has put it, “often one nation-state is the most powerful leader in the Civilization and comes to dominate it and symbolize it. After a lengthy period of domination, the Civilization falls, the world goes into a state of low-level organization, and humanity waits for the next Civilization to emerge and the cycle to begin anew.” Inevitably, as Toynbee saw it, creative elites become complacent in their success and fail to meet new challenges, both internally and from the outside.
Oswald Spengler, another philosopher of history most known for his book, “The Decline of the West”, similarly argued that the dominance of a civilization always diminished as the creative impulse that propelled its rise waned, overcome by “critical impulses” that destroyed the internal cohesion that sustained it.
These reflections are obviously relevant today as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China push back against the liberal world order led by the United States that has dominated the “known world” for the last eight decades following the West’s four-century rise.
Since they frame their challenge as “civilizational states” reasserting their historical identities anew, the question arises whether that challenge will defeat the West or serve to revitalize it by compelling a fresh creative response that both renews its internal cohesion and resists the hegemony of others.
Over the next weeks, Noema will address these issues in a running symposium of authors from West and East…
Clashes and cross-pollination: “The Cycle Of Civilizations,” a series eminently worth following in @NoemaMag.
* Arnold Toynbee
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As we work out world order, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that President Abraham Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude (except as punishment for a crime).
On this date in 1960, the Greensboro Sit-Ins began. Four freshman at North Carolina A&T— Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond, the “Greensboro Four,” as they came to be known– took seats at the lunch counter at the “Whites only” lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworths in downtown Greensboro. Followers of Martin Luther King, Jr., theirs was a non-violent protest– the Greensboro sit-ins grew (on February 4, more than 300 people took part) and lasted until July 25. On that date, after nearly $200,000 in losses ($1.8 million in 2021 dollars), and a reduction in salary for not meeting sales goals, store manager Clarence Harris asked four black employees, Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones, and Charles Bess, to change out of their work clothes and order a meal at the counter. They were, quietly, the first to be served at a Woolworth lunch counter. Most stores were soon desegregated.
The International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro contains the lunch counter, except for several seats which the museum donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016 and a four-seat portion of the lunch counter acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1993, displayed in the National Museum of American History.
“The future, said Herzen, was the offspring of accident and willfulness. There was no libretto or destination, and there was always as much in front as behind”*…
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in, and admiring of, plurality. Plurality—a condition of society in which people who hold widely different beliefs and are committed to quite different values nevertheless find some way to live in relative peace with one another—is to be distinguished from pluralism, which may be described as a conviction that a society in which people pursue a great diversity of ends is intrinsically superior to a more unified society. That I don’t believe. I think that our society would be better off if we were all united by a deeply shared set of convictions—my convictions, as it happens. (Imagine that!) But I would want such singleness of vision to be freely chosen, which will obviously never happen. So in default of my ideal, I say: Better plurality than tyranny, and better a tyranny presided over by others than a tyranny presided over by me.
From this point of view, the most zealous on the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right have something fundamental in common: They never ask the question, “Am I fit to rule others?” I see this self-blindness not only in electoral politics but also in intra-religious and academic disputes. They take it for granted that the rightness of their convictions makes them fit: that the justice of a cause can make a perfectly straight thing out of the crooked timber of their humanity. To be sure, I continue to say, better a tyranny presided over by others than a tyranny presided over by me; but I also say, better that none of those zealots ever achieve the power they lust for—because their very confidence in their right to rule is the most absolute disqualification for rule that I can imagine. This Alexander Herzen understood.
The central figure in Tom Stoppard’s great dramatic trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002) is Herzen (1812–70), the first Russian socialist. From exile in England, Herzen published The Bell, which the great American critic Dwight Macdonald, the editor of an English-language edition of Herzen’s memoirs, called “perhaps the most effective muckraking magazine in radical history.”…
What distinguishes Stoppard’s Herzen—which I think is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the real Herzen— from Marx and Chernyshevsky is simply that his thought is more historical than theirs. Both of them believed themselves to be deeply historical thinkers, but they had, in their different ways, settled on a complete and wholly enclosed understanding of the point that history is coming to, the point at which it will effectively conclude. They shared a sense of the telos, the goal, or end, of history...
Herzen… didn’t know where history was going or how it would get there. He understands himself to be in the midst of a great procession, one of many both before and after him to take up the cause of justice and freedom. History is plurality, even among those who share a commitment, a cause.
This is Stoppard’s image of the true scholar and the true activist alike. In Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, Septimus Hodge consoles his pupil Lady Thomasina Coverly when she cries out in grief for “all the lost plays of the Athenians”: “We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short.” And Stoppard’s Herzen, near the end of this magnificent trilogy, finds the same consolation and expresses it with some of the same words, but even more concisely and beautifully: “The idea will not perish. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. I can hear their childish voices on the hill.”…
Why the great Russian thinker refused to pick up the axe to advance his cause: “Alexander Herzen and the Plural World.” From Alan Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and proprietor of a consistently-interesting newsletter, Snakes and Ladders.
* Tom Stoppard, in an essay on Alexander Herzen
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As we ponder plurality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).
“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”, 1787 medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood for the British anti-slavery campaign
“It takes no compromise to give people their rights…it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom.”*…
ONE, Inc., was one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States. It was founded in Los Angeles in 1952 with money and leadership from U.S. groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, as well as Swiss magazine Der Kreis. That same year, a 7.2 earthquake shook Southern California along the White Wolf Fault, and the Emmys were awarded to shows made across the U.S. for the first time (before that, the awards just went to L.A. studios). Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz hosted the show from the Cocoanut Grove Lounge. The following year Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which said gays and lesbians were perverts, criminals, mentally ill, and must be blocked from any kind of federal employment. So much was hopeful, but at times everything felt broken and hopeless too. The digital archive of ONE, the monthly magazine published by ONE, Inc., reflects the contradictions of the time. It’s a record of endurance, legal and emotional labor, new and inherited trauma, tenderness, and joy.
The magazine was mailed internationally in unmarked brown envelopes. For safety and longevity, ONE’s all-gender board of editors often used pen names, and always depended on other jobs for food and rent. Even so, within a few months of the first ONE, the FBI identified everyone and wrote their employers, calling all staff “deviants” and “security risks” in a middle-school-style attempt to destroy health and security. Luckily, the employers largely ignored the notices, which surprised the FBI so much they shifted public attention elsewhere, for a while…
More at “ONE: The First Gay Magazine in the United States.”
Shortly after the organization’s founding, in January of 1953, the first issue of ONE Magazine was produced. ONE Magazine remained a staple of ONE, Inc., published every month and read across the nation. ONE, Inc., was the “first national, legally sanctioned organization dedicated to the promulgation of information on homosexuality,” and ONE Magazine was core to that mission. The subscriber count of the magazine peaked at around 5000, although as with many homosexual publications in that era, copies moving from person to person made up a great deal of their readership that went uncounted…
From the introduction to ONE Archives at USC Libraries, where one can browse the publication.
Remembering that Playboy debuted in the same year (1953) as ONE, your correspondent will give Somerset Maugham the last word:
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror…
* Harvey Milk
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As we love and let love, we might recall that it was on this this date in 1598 that The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationer’s Register. The copyright regimen was strict in Elizabeth’s time, as is now. But back then, copyright was literally that, the right to make a (first) copy: the Queen, concerned with sedition and determined to keep a tight rein on any and all published material in her realm, had decreed that no work could be printed in England without a license from the Stationer.
Shakespeare had written the play sometime between 1596 and 1598 (when a performance is mentioned by Francis Meres). It wasn’t actually printed until 1600– in the First Quarto– by which time (the title page suggests) it had been performed “divers times.”
If you prick us, do we not bleed? – The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1
Title page from the First Quarto (source)
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