values

Gordon Brown has put up some revealing archive films on the Downing Street website. If we had any illusions that we currently had a Labour Party prime minister ensconced in Downing Street, possessing even an inkling of labour sympathies, a brief look at his selection of noteworthy films should disillusion us:

First on the list (most recently posted) is Anthony Eden (Con.) trying to put a noble gloss on British involvement in Suez:

We have stepped in because the United Nations couldn't do so in time. If the United Nations will take over this police action, we shall welcome them... [but] until there are United Nations forces there, ready to take over, we and the French must go on with the job, until the job is done.

more on this...

Measuring others according to moral standards becomes tormenting when (as is often the case) people you love and respect do things you cannot understand and would judge harshly if you had done them yourself. So can we avoid judging them (harshly), should we avoid judging them at all, or ought we to judge them just as we judge ourselves?

Suppose I judge the behaviour of the super-rich to be selfish and damaging to the structure of society, to the state of human rights around the world, to the potential for improvement and change, and to the system of predominant values. Then I suppose I have to judge friends or relations in that way too, if they approximate, or head towards the realm of the super-rich. There seem to be few other options.

Here are some possible let-outs:

1. Reverse my judgement

I could try to stop making the judgement at all - by trying to persuade myself to think as they do - that is (in this case), to believe that the super-rich have no negative impact on all those things; and that if individuals were to change their behaviour the world would not get better, but worse (or only stay the same). If I became able to persuade myself of all of that, presumably the judgement would cease to apply to myself (hypothetically) as well. In which case I could go and get as rich as I wished; could stop feeling guilty as I walked past homeless people in the street; could consider myself generous if I shared any part of my worldly goods with others; and could stop worrying that my hourly income might exceed the daily (monthly? annual?) income of people in other parts of the world.

I suspect that is the easiest path to take - I mean in terms of getting rid of the guilt and anger that can otherwise come to dominate one's life; and in terms of feeling better about oneself and feeling better about others. But it depends (in this case) on altering one's view of -

a) economics
b) personal responsibility (and guilt)
c) (I think) human nature.

So I need to look at all those 3 at some point...

Apart from that, and if I can't quite come to share their point of view on a), b) and c), or when it comes to other questions - how else do I react?

Perhaps I could isolate the 'judgement' so that it only applies to myself. For myself, it might be shaming to be super-rich, might 'feel' wrong, perhaps it might even be wrong: could it still be 'right' for others, or at least none of my business whether it is right or wrong?

Those are 2 different positions:

2. Different standards

'It is wrong for me but could be right for others'. In other words, different standards may apply to me - for example, because I am a different person, have different expectations and different possibilities for action. So according to this view: I cannot make a judgement on someone else's behaviour (because I don't know which standards to use)

This position is very suspect, although in a weak sense it is obviously true. As long as we make the standards general enough and put the bar high enough - for example: 'Torture is wrong', or even 'Deceit for personal gain is wrong' - then there is no earthly reason why they should not apply to everyone, as much as they apply to me. In fact there needs to be a very good reason why they should not apply to some particular person.

3. None of my business

'It is wrong for me, but I am in no position to judge whether it is right or wrong for others - because I cannot understand their point of view, because I am not them, and because it is not my role (right? responsibility?) to judge others.'

This is a cop-out: why is it not my role? It is obvious, again, if we take a universal standard, such as the case of torture, that on this issue, it is irrelevant why someone behaved in such a way: the act is still wrong. We do not need any further information in order to decide whether a torturer did the right thing or not (except, possibly, whether they can be said to have been forced to do it).

This non-committal stance has 2 close relations:

4. Judging the act but not the person

'What x did was wrong, very damaging, should never have been done... but I pass no judgement on x him/herself. The act was wrong but I make no claims about x, although s/he carried out the act deliberately and knowingly.'

Another cop-out - with the proviso that we should obviously be very careful about passing 'judgement' on people, and these should almost never be judgements extending beyond the concrete act, the specific instance on the basis of which they were drawn up. So, for example, we might say that x has a violent streak, as evidenced by the fact that s/he appeared to derive some satisfaction from applying torture on several occasions; but we would not want to say that x is bound always to be violent in all his/her activities and interrelations with other people (let alone that s/he is out-and-out evil).

5. Turning a blind eye

'It is wrong for me and may be wrong - or right - for others, but I am not going to make that judgement. I could make the judgement, quite justifiably, but I am not obliged to. I can shut my eyes to that issue (for example, in order to retain x as a friend, in order to keep my job, or in order not to stick my neck out and be judged for judging).'

This is my favoured position in cases of non-judging - the only one I think is really honest, and not too cowardly (as long as it is not applied universally). Perhaps, then, one could even apply that sort of reasoning towards oneself:

6. Never passing judgement

'I am not going to judge myself or others: what will be, will be; we do what we can and should not torment ourselves that we could not do otherwise. I shall not look at whether I or anyone else might have been able to act differently, and to different effect.'

This clearly goes too far, and is anyway disingenuous. I don't believe there are really people prepared to give up completely the moral discourse - which is what I think it amounts to.

The middle 3 positions seem to be common among the HRE-ers, to a lesser extent the last two as well. My suspicion is that in fact, those who are unwilling to look at other people's behaviour from a moral standpoint are nearly always doing so on according to the 5th position. In other words, although HRE-ers (and others) tend to hide behind positions 2 and 3, I think that what they are really doing is deliberately turning a blind eye (often in order not to stick their necks out, lose their jobs or - heaven forbid - appear to be moralistic and superior).

Position 5 is fine, and almost inevitable in certain cases - in fact I see it as the only hope of retaining our sanity and friends in a complex and corrupted world. But I wish people would be clear that they are refusing to make a judgement not because they think that moral standards cannot be applied to others, nor because they do not feel they ought to engage in moral evaluation - but because they want to retain friends, keep their jobs or not be seen as being judgemental. It is a personal and pragmatic choice, and not a moralistic one.

In fact, if you subscribe to the human rights faith, only Nice people do Nasty things. There are no non-Nice people.

That is not meant (for once) to be a dig at the HRE (or the human rights) community. Really. If you believe in human rights, then it only makes sense if every individual, whatever they do or have done, is still fundamentally human; still has fundamentally human emotions, reactions, desires, regrets, intentions, hopes, fears, and little bursts of irritation, admiration, inspiration and frustration; still tries to do good for his or her immediate circle; and possibly tries to Do Good in a wider sense as well.

'Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.' So said someone who, in trying to do what he thought was right, did one of the nastiest things imaginable, with horrendous and irreparable consequences. And actually – I even believe he had persuaded himself it was the right thing to do. Certainly a lot of people I know (and respect) thought it was the 'right' thing to do at the time.

But where does all that get us? If everyone is Nice, and everyone tries to do what they think is right - and I think I believe that as well – and yet we end up with crimes against humanity, not to speak of lesser crimes: how should we react? Do we just shrug our shoulders and reckon that what will be, will be? Do we aim to be tolerant and see the humanity in the doers of Nastiness? Do we draw the line anywhere – and if so, where?

The safe answer is to say that we condemn anything - but nothing else - that violates human rights. And the fashionable answer is that we don't condemn the person, merely the act: we aim to understand the person, to give him or her a second chance, to be tolerant.

In theory, that is a noble answer. Maybe - in theory it is the 'right' answer. But there are problems:

1. 'Human rights' is a relatively arbitrary line (which anyway shifts). It is OK for pragmatic purposes to use this line (and essential in matters of international politics) but it does not advance the ethical argument. It merely gives us a line in the sand which we can use to hide behind (excuse the mixed metaphors). Don't we want to be braver than that, and think about where we would like it to be? Someone has 'decided' where it is at the moment, after all. We shall look pretty silly when it changes.

2. Where the human rights line is at the moment is almost bound to be inadequate - too far back - because it has been agreed primarily by pragmatist governments at a level, and in such a way, that it is far enough removed from normal practice as to be relatively harmless. To see that, you only have to look at the state of the world today and the things that still fall on the 'right' side of the human rights line (for the purposes of governments, anyway) - homelessness, lack of health care, control orders.

3. More to the point for the purposes of this question: where the human rights line is at the moment is inadequate as a guide to human behaviour because it is not intended to be a guide to human behaviour. It is intended to be a guide for governmental behaviour. We use it as a 'guide' for human behaviour because the ethical system that underlies it is sympathetic (and noble) to us. But the ethical system is both richer and stricter (I think) than the legal system it gave birth to. It must be.

1 - 3 above are about where the line should be, where it is now and what it is intended for. The hardest question - and the question HRE needs to address - is what we do in the realm that human rights is not intended for: in the realm of personal attitudes. Human rights are about behaviour, which may be a consequence of 'nasty' (or nice) attitudes. The realm that is troubling is precisely the realm of those attitudes.

2 more things, just to note:

1. I remember being surprised when I first started working in Russia that human rights activists were often at each others' throats. It seemed that if there was ever a group of people who should work together, who should be able to swallow (and tolerate) their differences - it ought to be human rights activists. I wondered - and wonder - whether HR activists (not only Russian ones) are actually some of the least 'tolerant' people; and I wonder if that is a coincidence. It is hard to be tolerant when you spend your working and resting hours looking at mutilated bodies or photographs of them, reading or listening to endless accounts of yet more brutal, sadistic, and inhumane acts.

2. I wonder if intolerance in HR activists is not only a fairly natural reaction to the world they tend to see, but also a necessary quality for the work they try to do. Tolerating torture doesn't get you very far in trying to put an end to it.

And then I wonder... whether the human rights and the human rights education communities need to be, should be so very far apart that what is valued in one community is despised in the other.

Sometimes this world just seems too hard to understand. Too endlessly unjust. Too systematically, unceasingly unjust. Too endlessly rewarding of injustice.

Too hard to bear.

What would one want? For the unjust to suffer what they wreak on others? For Blair to have his children's limbs ripped off in front of his eyes? For Bush to watch his wife give birth to a deformed foetus, irradiated from single ghoulish eye to outsized toes with uranium shot from foreign tanks?

Of course not. But to see Blair given the first standing ovation Parliament has ever given a Prime Minister; to see the sycophantic press pack fall over themselves to write his ‘legacy’, his place in history next to Churchill and Lord Nelson; and to see him - this is what grates - in the role of ‘peacemaker’ in the Middle East, after all he has done to make war and wreak havoc there and all he has done to prolong and intensify the suffering of those who were only trying to lead their lives until he came along – that really grates.

And somehow, it grates even more, the thought that he might succeed. That through his bullying, duplicitous ways, backed up by US dollars or the threat of their withdrawal, backed up by the press pack who want only to shine in his glow, and backed up by British-made weapons hanging over the heads of anyone who dares to defy his line of ‘peace’ – he may just push through a compromise.

Why does that grate most of all? It shouldn’t: surely peace at any price is better than no peace. If a pushing, shoving, duplicitous and ambitious warmonger is the best way to ensure it – and I even wonder if it may be – then why complain.

The trouble is that then one wonders what on earth it’s really all about. Why on earth promote these gentle, caring, harm-free values if they only get you stamped on. Or shot up with uranium from a foreign tank.

More reflections on not judging and HRE

I think we don't stop communicating to send a message (or not only, and not necessarily), but more often because we reach a point where the communication has broken down - for whatever reason. It may be because communication has become difficult, disagreeable or pointless, more trouble than it's worth. It may be that wounds need mending, and communicating doesn't help that (for the moment); it may be that the gulf of understanding appears to be too large to cross; or that shared goals or values appear less obviously shared than once they did. Or it may be all of those - or other combinations.

One point I meant to raise by the post was that I believe people who 'refuse' to pass a judgement on dishonest or disreputable acts are nearly always doing so for pragmatic reasons. And yet - as you know - in the HRE community, the reasons given are more 'noble' sounding: 'we ought not to judge others', 'people deserve to be given a second chance', 'it is not for me to judge'. I think that is (often) disingenuous, and sometimes cowardly. So I wanted to say that there is an inconsistency between, on the one hand, our being willing (or being unable not) to judge our own acts according to certain moral standards; and on the other hand, being 'unwilling' to judge other peoples' acts by the same standards.

As far as that disagreement goes - a disagreement that I have with the HRE community - I can be 'tolerant': it is the sort of disagreement that I shall continue to argue about within the community (in so far as it lets me in), and shall continue to try to break down, because I think that the attitude is neither honest nor useful (always) in the field of HRE. But I am myself troubled by where the balance should be, and do not think it is always clear-cut whether we should take position 5 (turning a blind eye) or whether we should measure something against our own personal moral standards.

Then there's another disagreement that I have with (a particular!) HRE community (as you also know!), and where I do think that the line is pretty clear-cut. That disagreement is to do with whether a particular form of behaviour, an act of deliberate deceit for personal gain, continuously and strenuously denied, with damaging consequences for others, by someone in a position of trust and authority - by someone who even professes to be teaching others about values - whether that form of behaviour is indeed the sort that one should pass over, tut-tut a bit, but nothing more, forgive and forget, turn a blind eye. This disagreement is much more difficult to 'tolerate' - partly because I feel strongly that it isn't all of those things; partly because I feel disappointed that it was all of those things for those with whom I was supposed to be sharing values; and partly because as a result of that fundamental disagreement, I have ended up outside the community.

There are various possible (psychological) reactions to being 'rejected' by a community (or rejecting a community yourself?). But one of the most natural reactions must be to put up a defence: the community doesn't play by my rules, doesn't even agree with my rules, so I want no part of it. I want to be in a community which does share my values and priorities, so I shall look elsewhere.

So please, don't see it as a punishing act: see it as an act of complete incomprehension, disappointment and disillusionment; and for those reasons a breakdown in communication. Breakdowns in communication are difficult to bear for both sides of the divide.