This blog is about inequality, people, politics, cultures, development, the United Nations, economics, double standards, resistance, alternatives and hopefully much more. What appears here is inspired by working and living in countries like Haiti, South Africa, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece and Timor Leste and by traveling to a few other places.
I have to admit to having had all the chances life could almost offer me, being where I come from, in contrast to the majority of the people I have been meeting in most of these countries (excluding Europe) – many with whom I developed real genuine friendships. Institutions and our economic thinking make us believe that people deserve what and where they are in life. I do not agree with this. The concept of human development as developed by Amartya Sen echoes therefore a moral sentiment to me, in that it does not define development by economic growth but by the extent to which people are able to make choices in their lives. Development as freedom.
The title humanversusrights refers indeed to human rights, the construction of state morality and the idea that rights are western invention. Today human rights have an all-encompassing intent: establishing freedom for the individual vis-à-vis state power and creating economic and social progress within countries. The promotion, protection and fulfillment of political and in particular economic rights seems to fall short of providing for these aspirations however. In so many places the concept of human(ity) on the one hand and political and economic rights on the other hand have almost become or have been for so long each other’s antipode.
To quote from Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two concepts of liberty’ (1958): “It is true that to offer political rights, or safeguards, against intervention by the state, to men who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed and diseased is to mock their condition …”.
Jonas
Hello Jonas,
I visited Haiti in the mid-1970′s, only for a few days. It seems like a dream, now. I went with my first husband. I was barely more than a kid (about 22). He had made reservations at L’Habitation Leclerc. I recall feeling shame as we drove through Port au Prince, where people in the street were trying to sell mangoes (my impression), and yet we drove through a locked gate into a bizarre, opulent world. Guards with Uzi’s stood watch along the stone wall, while guests ate lobster salad poolside and dined in Le Salon Noir each evening. Mornings brought a lilting invitation (delivered to the villas), “Banana daiquiri?” I remember lots of gorgeous tropical flowers. I still don’t know how my first husband discovered L’Habitation Leclerc or why he wanted to go there. Years later, I still feel like a stupid kid for simply trailing along.