A study of human rights

I was recently chatting with a young lady—a Barnard junior, I think—when we got to the inevitable question of field of study, whereupon she told me that she was concentrating in “human rights.” Perplexed, I asked her what precisely constituted a “human rights” degree. She said something about an interdisciplinary focus on social justice, defense of minorities, and basic standards of living. While all this may sound nice, human rights is considerably more complex than bullet points, and the decision to package it up and market it as a concentration reveals some interesting academic prejudices.

At Columbia and Barnard, as at most colleges, human rights is the topic de rigueur for our generation; a brief look at Spectator will turn up literally hundreds of mentions of the catchphrase in articles and opinion pieces. One cannot be strictly against human rights, because they are the loftiest aspiration of man. Just as one cannot disdain puppies or root for the Redskins, it is just too depressing a thought to imagine people who actively wish others miserable lives, which is the seeming counterpoint to a world without human rights. To cement this ethos, Columbia has established the “Institute for the Study of Human Rights,” offering an undergraduate degree in the subject to complement “Human Rights Studies” with our friends across Broadway.

The problem with this type of department is that it lends itself so easily to rabid politicization while being a subject area that is remarkably ill-defined. Students interested in the program immediately see a sinister image of a chain-link fence at Guantanamo Bay on the prospectus website, ominously suggesting that detained terrorists are probably being denied their human rights. This is, naturally, a political statement of the first order, but one that goes largely uncontested and emblematizes the dominant departmental perspective. The course offerings reveal many classes with somewhat extremist positions, mostly having to do with the poor, gays, women, and various ethnic groups. Yet cobbled alongside them are courses about politics of the Cold War and World War II. One could, I suppose, stretch the bounds of imagination to include practically anything under the heading of human rights studies, but this lack of overarching connective tissue leaves the actual focus of the studies vague. What many courses do share, however, is a framework to protest the travails of the oppressed. No doubt there are legitimate grievances, but they are almost entirely viewed through a monolithically critical lens that allows for little dissent.

The fundamental premise of human rights, for example, basically goes unchallenged. It is, as I noted before, near politically impossible to oppose the concept of universal rights. In almost all other academic fields, though, there is a vigorous debate about the nature and scope of that intellectual inquiry. This constant struggle crystallizes the thinking of teachers and helps to ensure that the department remains self-aware, minimizing the possibility of complacency. No such struggle really exists in the human rights domain, and this potentially undermines the whole project.

In terms of politicization, the activist zeal to provide for clean water, universal health care, and subsidized trips to Disneyland (rights to leisure and holidays are Article 24 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights) has charged the rhetoric and thinking about rights so that they usually carry vaguely anti-Western or anti-traditionalist undercurrents. The notion of social justice is championed, emphasizing an almost limitless laundry list of natural, basic rights that inhere in everyone because they took the trouble to be born. Since these things don’t exist yet, there must be some nefarious project that targets the underprivileged, who cannot be naturally unlucky or have less skill or be socially challenged, but instead must be the deliberate subjects of a patriarchal, bigoted, anti-environment old boy’s club that actively seeks to destroy their livelihoods or chance at mobility. The old boys, I’m afraid to say, probably don’t spend their waking hours plotting to eliminate the spotted moth.

Social justice and human rights may then be a pleasant formulation, but they’re hard to pin down. Plato spends a rather long, complex book trying to get to justice, to say nothing of socializing it globally. But perhaps at its root, the human rights degree suffers most fundamentally from a misconception that if people were suddenly granted a panoply of rights—themselves imprecise and ever-shifting in the progressive “evolution” of mankind—the world would turn to sunshine and roses. Human rights are attractive given the oppression framework under which they are presented, but total parity of persons is neither natural nor human. We all retain some fundamental dignity, and rights, of course, are important, but to see it politicized and broadened beyond recognition cheapens what should lie at the base of us all.

Stephen Wu is a Columbia College sophomore. The Remnant runs alternate Wednesdays.