Editor’s Note:  The following message outlining the emergence and expansion of human rights was delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship recently by lay member, Arthur Maier.  Maier’s message seems prescient, given that local leaders will be meeting next week to consider how to lift up compassion as an even greater priority in our community.  Maier, now retired, served for many years at the managing editor of the Vero Beach Press Journal.

ARTHUR MAIER 

I don’t know if this thought has ever troubled you, but I have always been bothered by the notion that all this business about respecting the rights of others and treating your neighbor as yourself doesn’t seem to be in accordance with the way Mother Nature REALLY operates. 

Didn’t Charles Darwin tell us that Nature goes by the rule of the survival of the fittest, which doesn’t seem to mean that you step back and let the other guy have the choicest cut of beefsteak.

So why all this talk about human rights?  If human beings really want to survive, isn’t it better to call the other guy’s bluff, stand up to him, and get all the choice cuts of meat for yourself, along with the reservations at the best hotels? Isn’t that the only way for the strong to survive?  Didn’t George H.W. Bush teach us that nobody likes a wimp?  You’ve gotta be macho, you’ve gotta back the winning team, you’ve gotta end up in the best seats in the house.

But wait a minute.  This macho thing hasn’t worked very well for George W. Bush, has it?  He owned his own baseball team, he landed a plane on an aircraft carrier, and he stuck to his guns in the war against terrorism.  He even got us into a long war with Iraq, citing reasons for doing it that have not proven true.  Despite all this macho posing, since he ended his term in office, not even Republican office seekers seem to want to make appearances with him.

Well, I have a theory about that mysterious discrepancy between being the fittest to survive and respecting the rights of others.  According to this theory, concern for human rights is made possible through a very sophisticated expanding of the scope of the human brain. This kind of enhancement does not occur in many animals.  It is true that it does occur in the chimpanzee’s brain as well as in the human brain, but to a much less advanced stage of development.

Some scientists call this capability in humans, “social intelligence.”  Among other things, it has a survival value, because it enables humans to live in peace with more of their fellow human beings.  And it does occurs to some degree in almost everybody.

However, scientists have drawn on some of the few people in whom it does not occur, in order to demonstrate its existence in all the others

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, demonstrated this by studying a group of people afflicted with the ailment known as “autism.”

Autism does not automatically produce a low IQ.  Some autistic folks can be very brilliant.  But they consistently find it impossible to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.

Baron-Cohen looked through magazines to find pictures of people with particularly expressive faces.  He then cut a strip from the magazines to show only the eyes of the people in these pictures, who were undergoing various emotions.  He showed these pictures to autistic people and asked them to tell him what the people in the picture were feeling, based only on the appearance of their eyes.  The autistic people in most cases could not tell.

On the other hand, ordinary people, or even people with considerably lower IQs than the autistic people, could tell what the people were feeling to a much greater extent.

The experiment demonstrated that under normal circumstances humans do have a natural social intelligence – they can see through the eyes of other people – they can empathize with them.

But now we come to another significant point.  This ability to see through the eyes of another, a sensibility which can naturally lead to the recognition of human rights, has not  – down through the ages – been as completely realized as it is today.

The ancient Greeks, although they had brilliant intellectuals among them, weren’t all that concerned with the fates of ordinary people.  The plays the Greek playwrights wrote were about kings, not about common people.  Unless you were a member of royalty. a champion athlete or a priest, you were not considered important enough to be featured in the plays. In the Greece of that day, the plight of common people didn’t evoke much sympathy.

And the same with the Egyptians and Romans. Remember how the Egyptians used multitudes of slaves to build a pyramid in which to bury just one king.  Not long after that, the Romans set prisoners to killing each other for the entertainment of the populace.  What we sometimes forget is that these slaves were, to some degree, white people – not the black people whom we usually relate to slavery.

Even the slavery practices in the United States included a holdover remnant of enslaving white people.  We had indentured servants, who included white people who paid for their passage here from Europe by working for their sponsors a period of time as virtual slaves.

But things have obviously changed since then.  What brought about this change?

Well, I was surprised in researching this subject.  Some scientists believe that what laid the basis for mankind’s current fine-tuning of his ability to truly sympathize with the sufferings of others was that wonderful thing that happened in Mainz, Germany, in about 1456 – the printing of the first book produced with moveable type, the Gutenberg Bible.  Notice, now, that I said “laid the basis,” NOT “brought it about.”

Once widespread printing became possible, Martin Luther’s new Protestantism encouraged ordinary people to learn to read.  At first it was mostly the Bible that people read, and certainly that alone may have led to some further contemplation of ethical matters.  But it wasn’t just the Bible that really brought about a universal awakening to the importance of ordinary human beings.

After all, the stories of the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, were often about cruelty and slavery.  More to the point, as is mentioned in a recently published book entitled, “Inventing Human Rights,” by Lynn Hunt, the fact that Jesus Christ had died a cruel death in expiation for our sins often evoked the un-Christ-like idea that suffering was an acceptable way to pay the price for our sins.

For example, in France, (and now, I’m afraid, our story gets a bit gruesome) a person convicted of murder or highway robbery was tortured by a cruel method called “breaking on the wheel” to obtain a confession before he was allowed to die..

I give this as just one example of the horrors imposed on people convicted of various violations of the law.  The reasoning behind this idea was, given the beliefs of the day, perfectly logical. The belief was that it was far better for one to suffer on Earth for one’s sins than to suffer the far worse eternal torments of hell that were threatened in the Bible.

But then something happened that gave people the insight to recognize these things for the outrages they were. This something, says Hunt, was the first publication of an entirely new kind of book, a kind that had never been published before.  This was the type of book now known as the “novel,” a fictional account of the lives of human beings. Hunt cites one such book in particular, a book entitled, “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,” by Samuel Richardson.

“Pamela” took the form of a series of letters from a poor servant girl, named Pamela, to her mother.  Pamela was serving in the employ of a certain “Mr. B.”  In her letters, Pamela, a girl brought up with a family background in the practice of virtue, told of how her employer had made numerous attempts to destroy that virtue.  Pamela suffered under her employer’s advances, but her moral upbringing protected her from the odious Mr. B, and she did not yield to the man’s evil lust.

The denouement, which from a modern point of view may seem rather comic, came when Mr. B., exhausted from his unsuccessful efforts at seduction, finally recognized Pamela’s virtue and proposed marriage to her.  Pamela accepted, and the happy pair were married.

Although nowadays we may laugh at this happy ending as being rather naïve, Pamela’s story was widely accepted then as the triumph of the morality of the ordinary person, and it went into some 15 printings in England, some printings in the British colonies in America, plus translations in many other countries.

What this novel did was make it clear that people of low or ordinary estate had feelings, too, and could suffer.  The following words came from a contemporary of the novel named Mr. Hill: “The book was the soul of religion, good breeding, discretion, good nature, wit, fancy, fine thought and morality.  I have done nothing but read it to others.”

Other novels spread to all parts of the western world.  The novel “Tom Brown’s School Days” did for virtuous males what “Pamela” did for virtuous females.

The author of “Inventing Human Rights” has this to say about the effect of novels: “Novels made middle class people and even servants like Pamela the equal and even the better of rich men like Mr. B.  Novels made readers get a feeling of equality and empathy through passionate involvement with the narrative. “

The subject of the majority of the early novels was plain people wanting independence. Think about the novel “Robinson Crusoe,” by Daniel Defoe. Published in 1775, it was a best seller in the American colonies. The American subjects of Great Britain understandably found inspiration in a novel about a man breaking away from British civilization and making it on his own.

Speaking of the American colonies, it was also in the colonies that Thomas Jefferson wrote his half brother-in-law a list of best reading matter  – and in it he declared that novels were more valuable than history books for what he called “moral emulation.”

And then it was this same Thomas Jefferson who not long thereafter wrote the Declaration of Independence.  In it he wrote, you will recall, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Declaration of Independence stood as the first well-known instance of the idea that human rights, first introduced through novels, were worthy of being included in a statement of governmental policy.  The Declaration did not make human rights into law, you’ll notice, but it sure pushed them directly into the face of a British government that was refusing a little group of steadfast Americans their own human rights.  In those days, the words “Tea Party,” meant defending rights, not losing them.

It remained for the French Revolutionaries to turn the first, limited, group of human rights into law.  In 1790, after lengthy haggling, the French Revolutionary Laws on family practices were passed.  This bill eased French laws allowing fathers to have complete control over their daughters, stopped allowing parents to have their own children jailed without hearings, and abolished complete inheritance rights previously given exclusively to the first-born male child.

And then the United States got back into the act.  In 1791, the states ratified the American Bill of Rights.  The Constitution had been ratified much earlier, but it was the Bill of Rights that finally put many of the brave ambitions of the Declaration of Independence into law.  They prevented government from using many of its previous unfair practices to take advantage of its citizens.

So I lay before you an admittedly brief history of human rights, Arising naturally out of the development of the human psyche, the idea of human rights has over the ages become more and more a part of our intellectual and political heritage.  Spreading human rights to everyone turns out to be an evolutionary step forward, because it helps human beings live successfully in larger and larger groups with fellow human beings.

As Unitarian Universalists, many of us are determined that these human rights shall continue to broaden over the years.  It is true that the rights have sometimes been allowed to weaken, and this is especially true during times of war, but then, during the intervening peaceful years, they invariably gain even more strength. I am sure I reflect the ambitions of all of you here in the determination that human rights will continue to develop, until they lead to where they are certainly aimed – at a world where everyone can live in peace and harmony.