Why universal human rights aren't universal

Jean Piaget (1896-1980). A renowned Swiss psychologist, he argued that moral development is linked to cognitive development.

Are intelligence and morality interlinked? This was what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget concluded from his studies of child development. With increasing age, children develop not only intellectually but also morally, growing out of infantile self-centredness and into adult decentered-ness:

According to Piaget, moral development — the ability to judge ethical problems in an impartial and unbiased way — relies on prior cognitive development. Indeed, cognitive and moral development are structurally similar. In both is acquired a well-founded, reasonable structure. As Jean Piaget (1948/1932, p. 404) stated: "Parallelism exists between moral and intellectual development: ... Logic is the morality of thought just as morality is the logic of action." And this parallelism is based on the cognitive nature of morality, e.g. to behave ethically one has to take the perspective of third parties. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 32)

This view has become popular and is even central to much of present-day thinking. If people are better educated, they will presumably become not only smarter but also more empathic and, thus, more considerate of their fellow humans. This view, as popular as it is, doesn't seem quite true. Many of us have known people who are intelligent and yet lacking in empathy. We call them psychopaths. Usually, they're explained away as aberrations. They're sick, aren't they? In reality, the line between 'normal' and 'psychopath' is arbitrary—like most mental traits, the capacity for empathy is distributed continuously along a bell curve. Lots of seemingly normal people have little empathy.

Nor does Piaget's view seem true if we look farther afield. Many moral systems attach little importance to empathy. Indeed, of all the world religions, Christianity seems unique in advocating the moral duty not only to help others but also to feel their pain, even when they aren't fellow Christians. Yes, most Christians fail to meet this standard of universal selflessness, but other religions don't set the bar so high. 

Indeed, the ideal of universal selflessness isn’t at all universal. It developed essentially within a single cultural context, the Christian world:

In Judaism and Christianity, "God created man in his own image" (Gen1:27 ESV). Humans being the image of God, "God-likeness", implies treating humans in a respectful way. Of course, at first blush, history reveals large discrepancies between the message of Christianity and the actual behavior of Christians. However, this does not mean that such behavior was consistent with the Christian message, and in many cases it was criticized by prominent Christians at the time. The Christian message had a corrective function. For instance, the inhumane treatment of American Indians by Spanish colonists was criticized by the Dominican priest Bartholomé de Las Casas (as mentioned above). The abolitionist movement was organized by Protestants and led by the Evangelical Christian William Wilberforce. The horrors of war were mitigated by charities such as the Red Cross, which was founded by the evangelical Christian, Henry Dunant. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 34)

The Muslim world imported as many slaves as did the Christian world, yet a Muslim abolitionist movement never arose, and the trade was ultimately abolished worldwide through the intervention of Christian nations, particularly Great Britain. Today, the slave trade has left no legacy of guilt among Muslims, while it definitely has in those nations that strove to bring it to an end.

This apparent paradox has led Heiner Rindermann—a well-known psychologist in HBD circles—to challenge the Piagetian idea that moral development is linked to intellectual development. These two mental traits are distinct and have followed their own trajectories in different moral traditions.

To prove his point, he teamed up with sociologist Noah Carl to study how respect for human rights is related, cross-culturally, to cognitive ability and religion. They found a stronger relationship with religion than with cognitive ability. Specifically, the percentage of Christians in a society had a stronger positive impact (r = .62) on respect for human rights (Rindermann and Carl 2018) than did educational level (r = .54) or cognitive ability (r = .50 to .51).

One can quibble about the methodology. The study defines human rights largely as the right to make choices on one's own, regardless of existing social norms. Freedom of religion, for instance, is defined as the freedom not only to practice one's religion but also to convert to another. As the authors themselves note, this is not a legitimate freedom in much of the world, unless one is converting to the majority religion. Freedom doesn’t mean that a minority is free to become the majority.

Nonetheless, there does seem to be a correlation between Christianity and respect for human rights as long as we define the latter, at least in part, as maximization of personal choice and autonomy. 

Is Christianity confounded with European ancestry?

Correlation isn't causation. Couldn't Christianity be a proxy for "European-ness"? Indeed, most Christians are at least partly of European ancestry, and even more live in societies founded and still largely run by people of European origin.

To control for this confounding factor, one could compare Christian and non-Christian societies within a region where European ancestry is minimal. Sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind. Even in South Africa, the European minority is down to the single digits.

Rindermann and Carl (2018, p. 60) did make that comparison:

Within sub-Saharan Africa [...] the percentage of Christians is still positively (but weakly) related to human rights (r = .10; N = 48), and the percentage of Muslims is still negatively (but weakly) related to human rights (r = -.12).

Those correlations are indeed weak. Moreover, the one between Christianity and respect for human rights is largely due to the relatively stable societies of southern Africa, i.e., South Africa itself, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Those societies enjoy a judicial and administrative legacy that may not last much longer, given recent events and the example of Zimbabwe.

To be honest, I feel little in common with fellow Christians like Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe. Ironically, both of them have a better claim to being Christian than I do, since I refused to be confirmed after attending my confirmation classes.

Is European ancestry confounded with a genetically influenced trait?

If European ancestry is a confounding factor, could it be a proxy for some unknown genetically influenced trait? Rindermann and Carl tried to answer this question by estimating the average "skin brightness" of each country.

Skin brightness is more highly correlated with human rights than is cranial capacity (r = .25 vs. .18). Of course, skin color itself is unlikely to exert any effect; it constitutes a marker for evolutionary pressures that may be associated with culture. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 53)

This is, I suspect, a reference to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and his belief that humans had to become more intelligent as they spread into harsher northern climates: "those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization" Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, Section 92.

Rindermann and Carl seem to be assuming that European skin became white solely as an adaptation to the northern natural environment. They also seem to be assuming that moral development is linked to cognitive development—the very hypothesis they want to test.

A better genetic marker would be the long allele for the 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter gene. It's less frequent in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures, the latter being the cultures of western and northern Europe—the same cultures that value so much the rights of the individual (Chiao and Blizinsky 2010). In a study of American toddlers, carriers of the short allele were more likely to imitate the way other people behaved (Schroeder et al. 2016).

The study provides additional evidence for the view that Christianity, in itself, doesn't explain why Europeans, and especially northwest Europeans, see all individuals as being endowed with the same rights. Of the three branches of Christianity, Protestantism has the strongest correlation with respect for human rights (r = .48), followed by Catholicism (r = .42), and finally Orthodoxy (r = -.07) (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 52). This suggests that Christianity changed as its geocenter progressively moved from the Middle East to southern Europe and then to northwest Europe, along the way becoming more focused on the individual and on individual responsibility. 

Within Christianity, Protestantism stresses conscience, individual guilt, internal control, autonomy and self-responsibility (Weber, 2008/1904). All these traits are conducive for liberty, the rule of law, democracy and human rights (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 34)

[...] in Protestant countries, trust is higher, corruption is lower and levels of social and economic freedom are higher (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Harrison, 2013). People tend to be more self-controlled, having internalized social rules, meaning that harsh and violent control by the state is not needed. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 37)

The two authors are aware of the Hajnal Line and its relationship to a suite of psychological and behavioral traits. In societies north and west of a line running approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long shown a certain pattern:

- men and women marry relatively late

- many people never marry

- children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households

- households often have non-kin members

This is the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP). Everyone is single for at least part of adulthood, many stay single their entire lives, and a significant proportion of households have members not belonging to the immediate family or even to kin. In short, an individual is less fettered by the bonds of kinship even within his or her household (Frost 2017).

This led to late marriage, high rates of childlessness (of about half of the cohort), more rights for women, and large investments in education. Going further than Hajnal himself did, it arguably also enhanced delay of gratification, self-control (especially of sexuality), conscientiousness, frugality, industry and cognitive ability. The causes of this marriage pattern can be traced to Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions, to the interests of the church, and to the interests of landlords and guilds. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 39)

The above view is also the one held by *hbd chick, i.e., the WEMP developed after the introduction of Christianity and was, at least in part, a consequence of medieval Christian practices and institutions. Yet there is good evidence for the existence of the WEMP as early as ninth-century France and fragmentary evidence even earlier (Frost 2017). I have argued that the arrow of causality points in the other direction: a pre-existing mindset in northwest Europe was carried over into Christianity, much like the Christmas tree and other pagan traditions. Later, as the center of Christendom moved west and north, this mindset gained importance within Western Christianity and pushed it more and more toward the idea of individual salvation and an individual relationship with God. 

The northwest European mindset is characterized essentially by four interrelated mental traits:

Independent social orientation - independence of the self from others, including stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness. 

Universal rule adherence - capacity to obey universal and absolute moral rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and expelled.

Affective empathy - capacity to experience the emotional states of other people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. Help is conditional on the other person being judged morally worthy.

Guilt proneness - capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule adherence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.

Conclusion

Are universal human rights truly universal? If we look at cultures across space and time, we find that the notion of human rights was nonexistent in most cultures and historical periods. Not until the 18th and 19th centuries did some countries codify this notion in law, although it clearly has antecedents that go farther back, at least to the formulation of canon law by the Catholic Church and perhaps farther. Northwest Europeans seem to have long been predisposed to think in terms of individual rights and universal moral rules.

Since the early 19th century, we in the West have tried to impose these rights on the entire world, initially through the suppression of the slave trade and then through the efforts of missionaries and colonial authorities to ban certain practices, like the custom of sati in India. Such efforts became an integral part of Western imperialism and "the white man's burden."

Although this burden has since been taken up by truly international bodies, like the U.N., the notion of universal human rights still reflects a Western view of people as atomized individuals who mainly seek to maximize their wealth, happiness, and personal autonomy. This is not how most humans view the purpose of existence. For that matter, this view was not originally held by northwest Europeans, whose understanding of moral universalism has steadily radicalized and expanded in scope over time.

References

Chiao, J.Y. and Blizinsky, K.D. (2010). Culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277: 529-537.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1681/529.short

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Rindermann, H. and N. Carl. (2018). Human rights: Why countries differ, Comparative Sociology 17: 29-69.

Schopenhauer, A. (1974)[1851]. Parerga and Paralipomena, English translation by E. F. J. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2 volumes.

Schroeder, K.B., Asherson, P., Blake, P.R., Fenstermacher, S.K., and Saudino, K.J. (2016). Variant at serotonin transporter gene predicts increased imitation in toddlers: relevance to the human capacity for cumulative culture. Biology Letters 12(4).

http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4881356

The end of Indian summer

 

Antifas, Switzerland (Wikicommons). Today, antifas are becoming an extrajudicial police, just as human rights commissions are becoming a parallel justice system.

 

Until three years ago, Canada’s human rights commissions had the power to prosecute and convict individuals for "hate speech." This power was taken away after two high-profile cases: one against the magazine Maclean's for printing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's book America Alone; and the other against the journalist Ezra Levant for publishing Denmark’s satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Both cases were eventually dismissed, largely because the accused were well known and popular. As Mark Steyn observed:

[...] they didn't like the heat they were getting under this case. Life was chugging along just fine, chastising non-entities nobody had ever heard about, piling up a lot of cockamamie jurisprudence that inverts the principles of common law, and nobody paid any attention to it. Once they got the glare of publicity from the Maclean's case, the kangaroos decided to jump for the exit. I've grown tired of the number of Canadian members of Parliament who've said to me over the last best part of a year now, "Oh, well of course I fully support you, I'm fully behind you, but I'd just be grateful if you didn't mention my name in public.” (Brean, 2008)

Despite the dismissals, both cases had a chilling effect on Canadian journalism. Maclean's made this point in a news release:

Though gratified by the decision, Maclean's continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience. (Maclean's, 2008)

This situation had come about gradually in Canada. At first, human rights commissions fought discrimination only in employment and housing, and there was strong resistance to prosecution of people simply for their ideas. This situation changed from the 1970s onward. Human rights took the place in society that formerly belonged to religion, and human rights advocates acquired the immunity from criticism that formerly belonged to the clergy. Discrimination was no longer wrong in certain cases and under certain circumstances. It became evil, and people who condoned it in any form and for any reason were likewise evil.

This view of reality progressively transformed human rights commissions. On the one hand, they were given an ever longer list of groups to protect. On the other, their scope of action grew larger, expanding to include not only the job and housing markets but also the marketplace of ideas. Their power increased until they became a parallel justice system, the key difference being that they denied the accused certain rights that had long existed in traditional courts of law, particularly the presumption of innocence and the right to know one’s accuser. All of this was made possible by section 13 of the Human Rights Act (1977):

Section 13 ostensibly banned hate speech on the Internet and left it up to the quasi-judicial human rights commission to determine what qualified as "hate speech." But, unlike a court, there was no presumption of innocence of those accused of hate speech by the commission. Instead, those accused had to prove their innocence. (Akin, 2013)

In 2012, the House of Commons repealed section 13. The ensuing three years brought a return to normal and a dissipation of the chill that had descended on Canadian journalists and writers.

Today, our Indian summer is coming to an end. In Alberta, the human rights commission is pushing to see how far it can go, and Ezra Levant is again being prosecuted:

This October I will be prosecuted for one charge of being "publicly discourteous or disrespectful to a Commissioner or Tribunal Chair of the Alberta Human Rights Commission" and two charges that my "public comments regarding the Alberta Human Rights Commission were inappropriate and unbecoming and that such conduct is deserving of sanction."

Because last year I wrote a newspaper editorial calling Alberta's human rights commission "crazy". (Levant, 2015)

Last month in Quebec, the government passed a bill that greatly expands the powers of its human rights commission to prosecute "hate."

Bill 59, introduced by Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard's Liberal government, would make it illegal to promote hate speech in Quebec, without defining what hate speech is. Despite this, it would expand the definition of hate speech to include "political convictions" for any speech deemed by Quebec's human rights bureaucracy to promote "fear of the other", an absurdly vague term which could easily lead to prosecutorial abuses.

Bill 59 would empower Quebec's human rights commission to investigate anonymous complaints, or to launch investigations on its own, without any complaint, culminating in charges before Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal. The tribunal would be able to impose fines of up to $10,000 for first offenders, $20,000 for repeat offenders. Those found to have violated the legislation would be named and shamed on a publicly accessible list of offenders, maintained by the government. (Editorial, 2015)

The new law also casts a wider net by defining two forms of complicity in hate speech, direct and indirect:

Engaging in or disseminating the types of speech described in section 1 is prohibited.

Acting in such a manner as to cause such types of speech to be engaged in or disseminated is also prohibited. (Gouvernement du Québec, 2015)

"Hate speech" is supposedly defined in section 1 of Bill 59, but this section merely repeats the same term:

The Act applies to hate speech and speech inciting violence that are engaged in or disseminated publicly and that target a group of people sharing a characteristic identified as prohibited grounds for discrimination under section 10 of the Charter of human rights and freedoms (chapter C-12).(Gouvernement du Québec, 2015)

 

In short, "hate speech" will be defined by the Quebec Human Rights Commission, the only limitation being that the speech must target a protected group.

How did this piece of legislation come to be? It had been sold to the public as a means to fight Islamist terrorism and, as such, gained the support of many people, including right-wing politicians who thought its “ant-hate” language was just window dressing to make it more palatable. In its final form, however, there are no references at all to Islamism or terrorism. As columnist Joanne Marcotte points out:

Nowhere in the bill is this goal mentioned. It doesn't seem that this is the intention of the Liberal Party, which is perhaps more concerned about a supposedly Islamophobic current of opinion than about the pressure that radical religious fundamentalists are exerting on our values of individual freedom.

Indeed, no mention of the following words appear in the bill: fundamentalism, fundamentalist, radicalism, radicalization, terrorism, religious (as in "religious fundamentalism").

So it isn't surprising that only two groups to date have supported the bill: The Canadian Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Montreal. (Marcotte, 2015)

As Joanne Marcotte notes ironically, this bill was pushed through by a center-right government that claims to believe in individual freedom. Even more ironically, the strongest support for the new law comes from the far left. A demonstration in Montreal against Bill 59 was broken up by a hundred antifas. The police were there but not one antifa was arrested (Kamel, 2015).

This is a growing trend in Western countries: a strange alliance between center-right regimes and far-left antifas. For all intents and purposes, the latter are becoming an extrajudicial police, just as human rights commissions are becoming a parallel justice system. 

Conclusion

After a brief lull, a new offensive has begun against "hate speech" in Canada. Quebec is leading the way with legislation that is not only punitive but also broadly-worded. Hate speech is whatever the human rights commission considers to be hate speech.

Outside Quebec, existing laws are likewise being interpreted more punitively and more broadly, as seen in the prosecution of Ezra Levant for "disrespectful" speech. This trend may lead to new legislation in other provinces and perhaps at the federal level, especially if the Liberal Party takes power on October 19.

Although the Liberal Party of Canada is legally distinct from the Liberal Party of Quebec, the two work together and cater to the same clientele. The major difference is that the former defines itself as center-left and the latter as center-right. In practice, the difference is trivial, "left" and "right" referring more and more to the same ideology. Today, the left pushes for cultural globalism (multiculturalism, antiracism), while the right pushes for economic globalism (outsourcing to low-wage countries, insourcing of low-wage labor).

Quebec's Bill 59 may thus become a template for federal legislation. The Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, has in fact promised to amend the Human Rights Act while not spelling out his plans, other than to say he will recognize transgendered individuals as a protected group.

So will I be packing my bags and going south of the border? No, I love my country too much and, frankly, I don’t envy Americans. The U.S. doesn’t have anti-hate laws because it doesn’t need them. Most Americans have fully internalized the antiracist ethos and can be counted on to be willing partners in their own dispossession.

The situation is different in Canada, especially in Quebec: the new ethos is more recent, has a weaker hold on people, and cannot be counted on “to do its job.” This is why we have legislation like Bill 59. It’s a sign of weakness, not of strength.

References 

Akin, D. (2013). Hate speech provision in Human Rights Act struck down, The Toronto Sun, June 26.

http://www.torontosun.com/2013/06/26/hate-speech-provision-in-human-rights-act-struck-down

Brean, J. (2008). Maclean's wins third round of hate fight, National Post, October 11 

Editorial (2015). Quebec's Bill 59 attacks free speech, The Toronto Sun, September 4

http://www.torontosun.com/2015/09/04/quebecs-bill-59-attacks-free-speech 

Gouvernement du Québec (2015). Bill no. 59: An Act to enact the Act to prevent and combat hate speech and speech inciting violence and to amend various legislative provisions to better protect individuals, Assemblée Nationale du Québec.
http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets-loi/projet-loi-59-41-1.html

Kamel, Z. (2015). Blows exchanged between anti-Bill 59 and anti-fascist demos. No arrests made despite physical altercations, The Link, September 28

http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/blows-exchanged-between-anti-bill-59-and-anti-fascist-demos 

Levant, E. (2015). I'm being prosecuted for calling human rights commissions "crazy," Stand with Ezra

http://www.standwithezra.ca/?utm_campaign=mrg_before_july&utm_medium=email&utm_source=standwithezra 

Maclean's. (2008). Maclean's responds to recent decision from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, June 26, News Release

http://archive.newswire.ca/fr/story/210185/maclean-s-responds-to-recent-decision-from-the-canadian-human-rights-commission 

Marcotte, J. (2015). Projet de loi 59: liberticide, dangereux, inutile, Le Huffington Post, September 21

http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/joanne-marcotte/projet-loi-59-liberticide-dangereux-propos-haineux-liberte-expression_b_8159532.html