That came to mind reading Anat Biletzki's piece in the NYTimes in a column called The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. Her essay is the subject of this week’s forum discussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center. Biletzki is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy at Quinnipiac University and professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and from 2001 to 2006 she was chairperson of B’Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Those "rights" are those of Arabs; Jews are virtually ignored except to be castigated, maligned and attacked.
When I read "The Stone", my first thought was Anat is referring to the stones the Arabs, young and old, men and women, throw at we Jewish residents in the region of Judea and Samaria. Then, when I saw the word "sacred", I thought of the Even Shtiya, the stone on the Temple Mount, another peice of territory that the Arabs have appropriated for themselves and have been desecrating and working hard to destroy any Jewish connection to that site.
B'tselem is a far left-wing, nigh post-Zionist fringe group with a lot of European money that seeks to suibvert democracy as Murdoch subverts journalism and politics in the UK. Financial leverage gives her, along with her degree and academic position, and her comrades-in-strife, an advantage but it doesn't make them just.
For her, Jews have no "rights" in Judea and Samaria. Jewish history is invalidated. International legality of Jews therein is ignored and belittled.
And so, that Hebrew phrase, "philosophia b'grush", being a philosopher for a penny, assumes an additional metaphorical meaning.
A long extract from the piece (it is philosphy after all):
in a recent book, “The Idea of Human Rights,” Michael Perry is unequivocal about the worthlessness of the secular bunch: “[T]here is, finally, no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious.” Think of conspicuous elements in the vocabulary of human rights, the notions of “dignity,” “inviolable,” “end in himself” and the like. Although we try to give them meaning and standing without a turn to religious essence, these terms hold no secular water according to thinkers like Perry. There can be no human dignity, no inviolable person, no end in herself, without the supposition of the human as sacred, and therefore as a godly creation.Ah, Anat. Are those lands "occupied"? What does secular law say? What does secular history recount? And if the Arabs act out of fanatic religious motivation, against Jews per se, against women who they oppress and kill for reasons of "honor", are you with them depsite your religious/cultural heritage?
There is, however, no philosophically robust reason to accept this claim...dignity and inviolability certainly do not need to be tied down to the sacred.
Aristotelian virtue and natural justice or the Kantian categorical imperative (arising from reason, of course) offer philosophical bases for morality at large. Theories of human needs, human interests and human agency provide analytical foundations for the idea of human rights...Why do we care, or why should we care, if the practice of human rights is born of religious or secular motivation?
Take a look at how we work on the ground, so to speak; look at how we do human rights, for example, in Israel-Palestine. When Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, squats in the mud trying to stop soldiers who have come to set a blockade around a village or fights settlers who have come to uproot olive trees (as he has done so often, in villages like Yanoun and Jamain and Biddu, in the last decade) along with me (from B’Tselem — the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or a group of secular kids from Anarchists Against the Wall, or people from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions — and he does this on a Friday afternoon, knowing full well that he might be courting religious transgression should the Sabbath arrive — does it matter that his reasons for doing so spring from his faith while the anarchists’ derive from their secular political worldview and B’Tselem’s and ICAHD’s from secular international human rights law? The end-product, the human rights activity, is similar, even identical; but the reason, the intention, the motivation for it are distinctly different. Does that matter?
... religious authority must vacate the arena of human rights...religion, even when indirectly in the service of human rights, is not really working for human rights. Although there is recognition of the human as sacred, it is not the concept of rights that propels the religious person...
The question, we have seen, is what functions as the source of moral authority, assuming that “human rights” are morally based. Hilary Putnam, in “Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life,” says it beautifully: “Every human being should experience him/herself as commanded to be available to the neediness, the suffering, the vulnerability of the other person.” But notice Putnam’s terminology: “commanded.” Who commands us? The question boils down to who or what is the source of moral authority, God or the human being, religion or ethics? I want to say that that makes a great difference. And I want to ask: If we — the religious person and the secular person — end up engaging in the same activity and also, more so, do it by thinking of ourselves as available to another’s neediness, why does it make a difference?
...when we disagree — about abortion, about capital punishment, about settling occupied lands — that the religious authority must vacate the arena of human rights.
You note:
Had God’s angel failed to call out — “Abraham! Abraham!” — Abraham would have slain Isaac.
But, the point is, he didn't. He stayed the hand of Abraham.
She continues:
...Let me, then, make explicit the definition of religion at the root of my unrest: Religion is a system of myth and ritual; it is a communal system of propositional attitudes — beliefs, hopes, fears, desires — that are related to superhuman agents...For some, the physics that runs the natural world and the ethics that provide for our moral sense are seen to be more ordinary than religious experience. I, on the other hand, can think of nothing more awe inspiring than humanity and its fragility and its resilience.
So, in her negativism, she assumes a superiority that cannot even be justified by secular values but she desires to portray an inferior rights claim for Jews while disregarding the claims of Islam and Arab nationalism.
Anat, ah. It is all politics.
P.S. I got two comments in there at the NYT wed site.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/the-sacred-and-the-humane/?permid=14#comment14
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/the-sacred-and-the-humane/?permid=21#comment21
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