Upendra Baxi, Keynote Address: Does Life Indeed Begin at Sixty? Revisiting the Udhr as a "single Garment of Destiny" in a Hyperglobalizing World

• Citation: Vol. 23 No. 1
• Publication year: 2009

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

DOES LIFE INDEED BEGIN AT SIXTY? REVISITING THE UDHR AS A "SINGLE GARMENT OF DESTINY" IN A HYPERGLOBALIZING WORLD

Upendra Baxi^*

I

Allow me at the outset to express my warmest appreciation of the courage, craft, and conviction with which Danielle Goldstone and her colleagues at the Emory International Law Review and other students, have imagined and implemented this celebration of the 60th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

As generations pass, charismatic truths of the UDHR become routine, legalized, and juridicalized. And perhaps at no time in its long history were the values and norms of the UDHR under such crises as now. It is at this juncture, then, that the dedication of the best and brightest in the contemporary young generation becomes a resource for the politics of hope. And this is the reason why I wish to applaud with you all this morning this extraordinary conference put together so beautifully by the students of the Emory Law School.

It is a great honor to be invited to this Conference. The honor is enhanced for me because I share this deliberative platform with Nobel Laureates Shirin Ebadi and President Jimmy Carter; and it is further heightened by the reunion with Dean David Partlett and Professor Abdullahi An-Na'im and his eminent colleagues.

Emory Law School and Emory University, a domicile of choice for some of the finest scholars in the United States, have notably nurtured a deeply pluralist understanding of human rights in the contemporary world, especially engaging the difficult focus on religious laws and traditions. As we all know, this endeavor invites the fashioning of collective ability for sustained contemplative and dialogic regard for the complexity and contradiction of the relations between religious and human rights values.

I have long wished to visit this distinguished site, which has contributed so enormously to cultures of human rights learning and education. Impertinently perhaps, I construe your invitation as according me the privilege of being an honorary citizen of this republic of learning. Thank you for this, indeed. In return, besides some scattered remarks I offer here, I pledge my best effort in assisting the enunciation of the Emory Declaration on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Emory Declaration).

President Jimmy Carter has richly suggested ways to commemorate the UDHR as a founding text for our collective aspirations toward a just world order. Shirin Ebadi has poignantly addressed specific histories and future itineraries of women's rights as human rights. Both these presentations suggest the importance not just of human rights reason but also of human rights passion. May I here offer some thoughts concerning the distinction between instrumental and sentimental reason, as a marker of our current predicament ushered in by the UDHR and its rather fecund normative and institutional progeny?

II

I wish to begin this presentation recalling the gifted text of Martin Luther King, Jr.-Letter from Birmingham Jail.¹Dr. King wrote that for long years, "I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every [African-American] with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'"²

The struggle for human rights in his time, as also in ours, lies in converting this long "wait," his "never," into a rallying point for "now." Dr. King understood what the great German poet Schiller wrote: "The minutes thou neglectest, as they fade / Are given back by no eternity."³

Dr. King also wrote about the very idea and ideal of a community of human rights sentiment when he said: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."⁴Weaving a common fabric of destiny for all humans is what human rights are all about.

"Network of mutuality" is a theme that everyone may celebrate, including (and perhaps especially) those who practice violent social exclusion. In his own time, Martin Luther King Jr. pursued the vocation of dismantling "American apartheid." He was labeled as an extremist. Initially discomfited, Dr. King soon began to draw ethical strength in the companionship of archetypal extremists such as Jesus of Nazareth, Saint Paul, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson. In particular, he recalled the words of the prophet Amos: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."⁵

Dr. King's lifework remains precious for us today, amidst the meltdown and bailout of what, following Karl Marx, Claus Offe presented to us as the very logic of "disorganized [global] capitalism."⁶The naysayers to contemporary economic globalization are often labeled by market fundamentalists as extremists. At some point in human history, a more honorable term was reserved for those who sacrificed their lives in acts of protest against structural political injustices. That term was "martyrs." Weaving a "single garment of destiny" is an enterprise that remains insensible outside memories of acts of martyrdom. For me, this occasion also remains an act of pilgrimage. Visiting the King Center, I believe, renews our faith in struggles for emancipation and justice. Put another way, it reminds us of the truth of the maxim "justice is struggle."

This is scarcely an occasion to ponder the complex and contradictory relationships between human rights and human justice. Even so, perhaps a few sundry observations may still be warranted. First, the classical forms of old social movements (the anti-slavery movement, the working class movement, and the movement for equal voting rights for women, for example) assisted the birthing of contemporary human rights values, standards, and norms. These were grounded on claims to justice in some fecund ways that fully birthed what we now know as "human rights." Second, much the same may be said concerning anti-colonial struggles, which contested and made fully incoherent the so-called Eurocentric notion, crudely summated as the Divine Right to Empires. Third, the imagery of a socialist Utopia severely interrogated the bourgeois birthmarks of modern human rights, exemplified by ownership over means of production via the categories of human freedom to own property and enter into contractual arrangements. Fourth, this in turn led to foment a critique of some horrendously perpetrated practices of the existing socialist state formations. Fifth, some new social movements-via different languages, logics, and paralogics-now very differently interrogate the ways and habits of contemporary globalization, ordering an organized amnesia of past historical wrongs. All this at least suggests an elementary global social fact: the languages of contemporary human rights entail a further conversation about the justice of human rights. Both Dr. King and Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar addressed the problematic relationships between human rights and human justice.⁷I may only hope that the Emory Declaration continues onward bolstered by its activist and epistemic inheritance, equally resisting in that process the practices of assassination of collective memory of crusades against human law and human injustice.

With them, those involved in de-globalizing activities and movements ought surely to recall that human rights histories are made of passionate attachments to just causes; their definitions of just causes and the ways to attain them are always initially branded as "unreason." I can do no better here than to recall (as a budding Pauline student) Dr. King's invocation of St. Paul's momentous utterance: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."⁸

Bearing the marks of pain of the other inside you, being witness to the other's sufferings, and having courage to struggle for justice is what the sentimental reason of human rights stands for. Liable to be condemned as unreason, from the perspectives of the reason of state, it was the same unreason of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar (the Aristotle of Indian

Dalits, as I fondly name him) and Dr. King, and their million followers, that brought down the edifices of apartheid; and Aung San Suu Kyi remains a living embodiment of hope against military rule-and not just for the Burmese people. Incidentally, this way of lumping together these illustrious names is also to suggest ways in which a future historiography of human rights may stand...