Auden and human rights

on the distinction between human beings and people

On Wednesday evening I was in Swansea to hear Rowan Williams deliver his Reith lecture on religious liberty. I don’t think I am betraying any secrets when I say ahead of transmission that he thinks the question’s complicated and freedom of worship is a good thing.

This view of things makes clashing convictions into a moral problem. If you accept his argument that religious liberties come from fundamental convictions about who we are and what are our purposes on earth, and that these are not to be decided by majority opinion, there are some disagreements which are impossible to resolve except by force. This is a problem faced head on by Alasdair MacIntyre (“I’d have hanged Heidegger”, he once said). It is much more difficult for progressives and idealistically benevolent people like Rowan.

A theological disagreement on the walls of Nicaea during the first crusade

I blame the Jews. The problem of religious liberty only arises when you have a concept of humanity derived from monotheism and theirs is the ancestor of all modern monotheisms. In a world with many Gods, there are also many forms of humanity. The clashes between them are political and practical, but they don’t raise any ethical difficulties, any more than slavery seemed an ethical problem to Aristotle. Only in a world with one God is there one humanity, and so the possibility of universal human rights. If there is no one God there is no one humanity and so no rights inherent in every human being. This position is put very clearly in Auden’s remarkably difficult poem about Western Christianity, *Memorial for the City*.

This starts, The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open onto Homer’s world, not ours. Homer’s world, as the second stanza makes clear, is one in which in which power is the only law, and the only real crime the loss of power, even though that may be inevitable. In Homer's world, which is also the world of “objectivity”,

One enjoys glory, one endures shame;

He may, she must. There is no one to blame.

This is by definition a human attitude — at least as human as Amnesty’s view of human rights.

When Caesar hamstrings 15,000 captives and sends them back across the Rhine to beg for their living, this is not a moral problem for either party. He could do it, so he did. It is a moral problem for Christians and post-Christians, because we have fallen into the consciousness of sin. As Auden says

Our grief is not Greek: As we bury our dead

We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear,

That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity

Neither ourselves nor our city;

Whoever the searchlights catch, whatever the loudspeakers blare,

We are not to despair.

The poem was published in 1949 but it is dedicated to Charles Williams, who died in 1945 and it bears the marks of that year, when Auden was part of an American intelligence operation examining the terror-bombed cities of West Germany. The country that he had known and where he’d loved and fucked before the war was now divided under military occupation between the Western and the Soviet zones. He writes of the present as a time

Among the ruins of the post-Vergilian City

Where our past is a chaos of graves and the barbed wire stretches ahead

Into our future till it is lost to sight

…

Across the square,

Between the burnt-out Law Courts and Police Headquarters

Past the cathedral far too damaged to repair,

Around the Grand Hotel patched up to hold reporters,

Near huts of some Emergency Committee,

The barbed wire runs through the abolished City.

Part of the answer is that most Westerners, most of the time, have not fallen very far into this Christian or post-Christian consciousness. They have not, so to say, been baptised by full immersion in it. They only wash their faces in the notion of human rights, and wipe it away when it suits them. It seems morally fitting to a majority of English voters that refugees should drown if they come here to take what’s ours; it’s not morally troubling to a much larger majority that hundreds of thousands of Africans should die in the eastern Congo if this makes our smartphones cheaper and our hybrid cars more virtuous. Even the arguments for defending Ukraine are pitched in terms of self-interest. No voices now are raised for the Tibetans or the Uighurs.

I don’t think these attitudes are racist in the 19th century sense: they don’t depend on elaborate theories about human capacity. Caesar was not a racist like that either. They go deeper than racism. They simply answer the question “What do we owe the powerless?” with “Nothing”.

The question is not whether strangers are human — it is whether they are people. “Human” is a biological category. “People” is a moral one. (That’s one reason why arguments over abortion and “human life” are so sterile). With people, we have a reciprocal relationship over time. This means, among other things, that other people are never completely powerless. They might always get back at us in some way, and this reflection moderates our behaviour, for good and sometimes for evil.

Humans, on the other hand, die all the time and that’s just a fact which doesn’t matter except to those directly involved. The eyes of the crow and the camera record that

Gods behave, men die,

Both feel in their own small way but

[Earth] alone is seriously there”.

The parable of the Good Samaritan, as well as the acts of the apostles, are meant to show a universalist message which supersedes the particularism of the Jews. To what extent that is historically true I don’t know. I suspect that much of what was taken by later Christians to be original to Jesus was a fairly mainstream attitude among the Pharisees of his time. This doesn’t really affect the argument, which is that the Christians, while believing that everyone should offered the chance of conversion, still made a sharp distinction between the people who accepted and the pagans who had not.

“The slaughter of the Turks in the Temple” Illustration from a contemporary history of the Crusades.

The difficulty for Christians, then, is to suppose that all humans are actually people. Historically this has not been easy or even often attempted, especially when the others are heretics or heathen. But it is still more difficult, I think for humanists. They lack the stories which can bring the demand to life and anchor it in history. And the stories that they have depend on an underlying narrative of progress, which is less and less believed.

Like all universalist creeds, humanism creates an existential distinction between universalists — who are people — and the rest, who are merely human. At one extreme of this line of thought are the long-termists, to whom it would not matter if most of humanity were annihilated tomorrow if that led to a future, however distant, on which there were more happy people than than the one which would result if we all stayed on the planet in miserable, starved overcrowding. For obvious reasons, this is a form of humanism which appeals most to the extremely rich, who can hope to escape in the spaceships, as well as to their court jesters and praise singers.

In the end there is no universalism that is not also divisive. Between those who believe in certain human rights and those who do not, the argument cannot be settled, and the conflict can only be resolved by force.