Ladeer&Co.

500 thousand years ago when we hunted elephants for dinner, there was as much Human Rights (hereinafter as “HR”) as predators swallowed their preys. During Biblical time, “an eye for an eye” was a fair standard, while Jesus and the great Chinese thinker Mencius pioneered the “general love” which dictated the same amount of universal love toward all mankind. In other words, I would just die for you as I would die for my mother; I would do onto others as I would want to be done onto me. Therefore the importance of so-called Human Rights is a rather recent philosophy I must say. (Certainly an emperor or a king would be far more concerned about supremacy and totalitarianism…)

But at those earlier time (let’s say pre-industrial), human values were relative low compared to now. (And let’s not say it was undervalued then, because it might be overvalued now.) High infant mortality rate and troubling diseases caused mankind succumb to fate. Slavery, servitude, sacrifice, class, child labor, were largely overlooked; the ability to breathe, to live on, to survive, was in itself precious and mystical. Without dental hygiene, clean water, pesticide and oven gloves, who really paid attention to “child safety seat on the horse cartridge” or “reasonable work load for a 12 years old” or “the emotional health of the 4th wife” when the daily life were considerably more stressed?

Then thousands of years later when technology enabled the building of clock, water mill, steam engine, and every other belts and whistles within Monticello, surely the time seemed to ripe for entertaining the equality of man. Oh no no no, the man of the year and the writer of the most valuable piece of American history himself, kept a shack-full of slaves as a “necessary evil,” as the man on the nickel aptly put.

I am not sure the exact wording, but I am sure he went something to the tone of “all men are created equal.” Let’s not argue the irony of the definition of “a man” and “three fifth of a man” later in the section in regard to voting right, I think we all agree that the issue of HR is not clear cut. It was never clear cut to greatest thinkers, founders of our nation, could it be clear cut to you and me?

A very prestigious professor of my MBA program once said, at the last mesmerizing lecture he gave us, that the idea of all man are created equal was both brave and questionable. Is it true? He wasn’t sure. What he was sure, half-jokingly, was that all men are all distributed in a bell shape curve! That’s the statistical truth of the year, isn’t it?

I think any guiding philosophy, or any moral value, is transient, is modernly tangential to its time. Every period of human civilization requires a set of rules to govern its peace and ensure its common welfare. May it be slavery that does the job (that’s otherwise undoable), may it be polygamy that took care the need (of widows as a result of most men dying from warring), now we have found the shiny term Human Rights for you and me to uphold. We need this term as much as we need freedom, democracy, or whatever belief, because we all need something to hold on, to put our faith in, to abide to, in order to sustain our national identity, in order to justify our international campaign, in order to leave something to our posterity.

What Human Rights really entails, is really a semantic that is up to you and me, and our children, and their children to define and modify.

(originally published on my private blog on January 30th, 2008.)