The Idea of Human Rights

...Such poets range from the Swiss priest, Thomas Immoos, who has spent his entire adult life in Japan ("Lord, have mercy on us!/Have mercy on your children in the firestorm of Nagasaki...

...In The Idea of Human Rights, Perry's aim is even more ambitious: Instead of arguing simply that religious beliefs merit serious attention from theorists, his claim here is that the very idea of human rights--the idea, as he puts it, "that certain things ought not to be done to any human being and certain other things ought to be done for every human being'--simply makes no sense outside a religious framework...

...That to which political philosophers are especially susceptible we might call Laputa syndrome, after Swift's description in Gulliver's Travels of a floating island whose residents are so absorbed by abstract speculations that they barely acknowledge the world around them...

...Not all of the poets wrote in a devotional mode...

...Most of the usual suspects--Dante, Milton, P6guy, Hopkins, etc.--are here...

...Wittgenstein once asked how immortality solves the mystery of our lives: would not eternal life, he noted, be as much a riddle as our present life...

...Only a religious view, he says, explains how all men and women are, because created by God, members of one family...

...The editors go back to early patristic auLawrence S. Cunningham thors like Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria, provide a fair selection from the Syriac patristic tradition whose theology is almost always done in poetry and hymns, through the medievals like Dante and Jacopone da Todi to the early modern and into the modern period...

...I think, though, the issue is more complex than he allows...

...Certainly there are elements of non-Western and alternative medicine traditions which are sympathetic to a more limited medicine...

...I could not read the versions of Jesus proposed by the various scholars (some connected to the ballyhoo of the "Jesus Seminar" ) without agreeing with Luke Timothy Johnson's critique that the "Questers" are the left Commonweal 2 8 September 25, 1998...

...This is an immensely interesting argument, especially timely now as moral theorists are turning more attention to the importance of personal relationships as a locus of moral responsibilities, but its ambit may be limited...

...But what makes this collection so intriguing is how it introduces us to unfamiliar poets from unexpected places...

...Given the traditional schism between a rights-based morality and a consequentialist one, Perry's goal is enormously ambitious, and his discussion here is rich and stimulating...

...I was much struck, for example, by a simple poem, brilliant in its artistic conceit, by the surrealist poet and social critic Jacques Pr6vert...

...Many philosophers, for example, regard the very question of life's meaning as rather obscure...

...Since then the national government and the provinces have continued to tweak the program, but its five underlying principles of portability, comprehensiveness, access, universality, and public administration have remained untouched...

...The editors organized this book according to the chronology of the Gospels, anchoring each incident, as they say, with poems that most literally follow the text of the Bible...

...This wide spectrum includes Korean, Japanese, Latin American, and even Muslim poets from the Middle East...

...The question of whether rights must be understood in absolute terms proves more recalcitrant, and more fruitful...

...Though powerful, this argument is open to important objections...

...In the end, Canadians can boast of lower per capita costs than the United States, higher satisfaction ratings, equal or superior public-health outcomes, and, of course, universal coverage...

...is a prophetic critique of political and social corruption...

...This malady threatens all political theorists who, in striving to articulate principles rationally persuasive to all, proceed from an idea of the person that intentionally abstracts from any particularities that might block agreement to those principles...

...Mark Tully's text derives from a fourpart series he did for BBC television on the search for the authentic meaning of Jesus...

...Perhaps some think this question confused, the answer self-evident...

...Tully is obviously well-edFour Faces: A Journey in Search of Jesus the Divine, the Jew, the Rebel, the Sage by Mark Tully Ulysses Press, $15, 237 pp...

...Absent the sort of attitude change for which False Hopes calls--one that will allow us to change our expectations and name our priorities--it is a distinct possibility...

...Delivery systems consist largely of private providers, and financing and administration is a combination of federal and provincial responsibility...

...Need they say more than that such acts deeply and without justification harm human wellbeing, and that it's self-evident one ought not do them...

...What is true of the visual arts is equally true of the belletristic tradition...

...This wonderful anthology of poetry inspired by Jesus and his life demonstrates both the polysemic nature of Jesus as he is understood in the tradition and the ways in which his life has been read throughout the centuries by people of various cultures...

...I loved this book...

...ucated, passionate about his topics, and a probing inquirer...

...and a timely topic...

...thus Sarah Cleghorn's final quatrain of a poem on the trial of Jesus: "Ah, let no local him refuse/Comrade Jesus has paid his dues./Whatever other be debarred/Comrade Jesus has his red card...

...But while Perry has not convinced me of the two major claims that bookend this volume, I am not sure he is wrong...

...The self-professedly broad arc of Callahan's aspirations make for a good balance against the puffery that passes for reform these days in Washington...

...However, its underlying story--that broad-reaching activist public policy for the public good can be achieved--bears repeating...

...As a tract, Universal Health Care has the cheerleader tones and one-sided naCre one would expect...

...This anthology also has a nice balance between the contemporary and the past...

...Sanders...

...Notice how this approach elegantly resolves the moral philosopher's thorny problem of motivation: Everyone has a reason to treat others well because such concern is part of any good life...

...We hear Richard Horsley on Jesus as rebel and of the reductionist theories of John Dominic Crossan...

...But nonreligious defenders of human rights can make the same reply when Perry asks on what grounds they claim that rape, torture, and murder are things that ought not be done to other people...

...Those readers who want a short book (excluding notes, the text runs about one hundred pages) that introduces them to several critical issues surrounding the idea of human rights will find this book extremely rewarding...

...Ultimately, again, I'm not convinced Perry is right...

...Laputa syndrome has struck when the individuals who populate the world of political philosophy have become so denuded that they forfeit any genuine connection to the real people whose conflicts the theorists aim to resolve...

...In fact, the traditions of communal solidarity which made global health budgets and universal access realizable in those countries would appear to make them more amenable to the concepts of limits and sustainability that Callahan promotes...

...Christopher F. Koller is the chief executive officer of Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, an HMO focusing on publicly insured populations, in Providence...

...The Armstrongs do their best responsibly to debunk the traditional criticisms of the system--long queues, government bureaucracy, heavy taxes, and dissatisfied providers...

...Further, such inclusion may potentially attenuate the close relationships I do have: though our emotional resources are probably larger than we know, they may not be limitless...

...In forestalling the objection that he has simply begged the question, Perry says quickly that one could just as well replace the idea of being sacred with being inviolable, or having inherent worth...

...For those poets who are unknown to us, the full bibliographies in the credits provide further resources to discover...

...He spends time in the Holy Land in the company of the Dominican Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a formidable scholar, as well as Rabbi David Rosen and Duke University's E.P...

...E3 David McCabe teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Colgate University...

...an urbane host...

...I suspect that Perry connects the idea of human rights to the sacred because he believes that only a religious framework can give our lives meaning...

...Jesus the Sage is constructed through both a meditation on early monasticism in Egypt (and the inevitable nexus with gnosticism) and a theory, made popular by a British scholar, that Jesus was like an ancient Cynic wandering teacher...

...Anyone who has considered the idea more thoroughly will also benefit from Perry's powerfiJ1 arguments...

...One also wonders if Callahan paints with too broad a brush and fails to acknowledge differing cultural attitudes that might make a sustainable medicine more likely...

...He takes us to India (where he was born and raised) to speak with Christians there, and this allows him to draw some intelligent parallels between Christianity and Hinduism through conversation with Ursula King, an Indologist who is a Christian...

...However, there is no end to those who wish to provide us a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth...

...For Perry will later assert that the idea of human rights does not impose any absolute constraints on what one may do to others, and that such rights may always in theory be outweighed by other concerns...

...It was written as he rides a bus through his native city: "I look at the sky and I look at you/child of a beggarmother, Christ of Calcutta...

...On some interpretations, the idea of human rights creates absolute prohibitions on what may be done to human beings-for example, it makes it always wrong to torture an innocent person, even if necessary to save millions more...

...About the only principle to which Perry appears willing to declare absolute allegiance is, "Always treat another human being lovingly," and even there it's hard to see how one could honor that in torturing another...

...This brief collection of essays summarizes the implementation of universal health insurance in Canada and then catalogues the Canadian system's virtues...

...It does, however, also leave one wondering what interim steps can be taken toward his promised land...

...Who could not be struck by the tercet of the Bengali poet Nirenda Chakrabart...

...The absolutist interpretation of rights claims may serve most importantly as a means by which human beings assert their independence from the vagaries of a fickle world, as an expression of our moral sovereignty in the face of unpredictable circumstances...

...to the young Nigerian poet Funso Avejina whose poetic sequence "And so it came to pass...

...Perry is surely right that without caring relationships with family and friends, an individual leads an impoverished life, but that's because such goods as companionship, love, and deep trust can be achieved only in such relationships...

...If I already have such relationships, however, it's not clear what I lose by failing to include all people in the world within the circle of my concern...

...He writes of the Last Supper: "They are at table/they eat not/Nor touch their plates/and their plates stand straight up/Behind their heads...

...Perry argues, in the first chapter, that the idea of human rights amounts to a claim that all human beings are sacred and that no nonreligious account can adequately account for the sacred...

...Although he spends considerable time differentiating between rights-based health systems such as that of the United States and solidarity-based health systems such as those found in Europe, Callahan concludes that all are in equal trouble...

...Universal hospital insurance was established in Canada in 1957 and physician insurance came nine years later...

...In countering this absolutist view, then, Perry must show that such acts might be not only morally permissible, but also consistent with the idea of human rights...

...At any rate, it is a wonderful read, full of new poems (at least, new to me) as well as welcoming the old poems which, once, everyone with any Catholic culture would have known at least in passing...

...Jesus, of course, is also a person social activists could use to strike out at middle-class religion...

...And it may be, though I'm unsure, that we can assert this independence only by committing ourselves to certain absolute principles...

...It is poems like that, written from an angle that is not Western and with a vocabulary that is unexpected, that please so much...

...At the foundational level that Perry stresses, a similar question can be asked: How, exactly, does the fact that God created us give our lives a meaning they otherwise lack...

...And just as a good life for anyone involves appropriate degrees of concern for one's family, the truth of creation reveals that a good life involves similar concern for all human beings...

...That's a fine achievement for such a slim book...

...Will we all be done in by a plethora of Viagras and gene therapies, the burdens of an aging society, and our own furious needs...

...Commonweal 2 7 September 25, 1998 ~ aybe he looked indeed/ much as Rembrandt envisioned him" wrote the late lamented Denise Levertov, but, in fact, we will never know...

...This is a book to browse or, for the preacher, to mine...

...He is particularly concerned with political philosophers who undervalue the claims of religion, a failing all the more vexing given that these theorists often rely on moral presuppositions which are, for many men and women, inseparable from their religious beliefs...

...The good news about this book is that it is immensely readable, and even moving in places...

...The book reflects the excellent BBC format for documentaries of this sort: lots of scenic travel...

...For Hugh and Pat Armstrong, both of Carleton University in Ottawa, who co-authored Universal Health Care, the answer is crystal clear: Head North...

...The less good news is that the highly suppositious theories of the various scholars do not add up to a coherent whole...

...In fact, however, Perry offers another, more suggestive argument for the dependence of human rights on religion...

...Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry edited by Robert Arwan, George Dardess, and Peggy Rosenthal Oxford University Press, $35, 595 pp...

...interviews with various experts...

...On its face, this seems hard to square with the notion of inviolability...

...The first two objections are easily, if not all that interestingly, disposed of: rights talk need not be insensitive to the importance of other ideals, nor is the denial that there are significant interests shared by all human beings at all plausible...

...These are among the deepest questions in moral philosophy, and Perry forces us to confront the fact that certain views about rights that many of us take for granted (that they can be understood in a secular sense, or that they establish absolute protections) are open to serious objections...

...Nor does "having Commonweal 2 6 September25, 1998 inherent worth" seem adequate as a gloss on the sacred, for--to use one of Perry's examples----one could argue that the pleasure of scratching an itch has inherent worth, but that hardly makes it sacred...

...It also provides the opportunity to spend some time grumbling about the omission of one's favorite poems...

...LEANING ON RELIGION David McCabe ll occupations have their hazards...

...After arguing for the essentially religious grounding of the idea of human rights, Perry defends the idea against three objections: that it ignores other important ideals (including responsibilities and communal goods), that it is incoherent because there are no interests common to all human beings, and that the absolute nature of rights is unreasonable...

...Michael Perry, who holds a distinguished chair in law at Wake Forest, has long waged a persuasive campaign against Laputa syndrome...

...They also admit a few faults: cost inflation, and lack of drug coverage primarily...

...And only if our lives have meaning can one finally justify the existence of moral obligations toward others...