One of the challenges to nation-building that is not discussed widely enough is, ironically, the focus of the United Nations and other institutions of the modern state system on “human rights”. Because of the universal adoption of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and its adoption into national statutory binding laws with nary a mention of “human duties”, a situation has been fostered where individuals are simply driven to exercise those rights. Upon being pressed, they may concede that each “right” implies a correlative “duty”, but the latter is lost in the shuffle.
However, even the most cursory reflection on the reality of human rights suggests this imbalance creates an untenable situation. For instance, unless rights of citizens are backed up by a duty of the state to enforce them, they are simply aspirational. And if the state does fulfil its duty to enforce the rights of its citizens – say to insist the forces of law and order ensure citizens are not subject to violent assaults by other citizens – do not citizens have a duty to pay their taxes so the forces of law and order can be compensated?
At one time, almost all societies via the “religions” they practised – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism and African religions – focused on the duties of individuals rather than their rights. But in the West at least, this led to great abuses when the ruling strata used their “might” to ensure the duties only flowed upwards. While in theory, the feudal lords might have a duty to their serfs, who was going to apply sanctions on the former if they lapsed? The struggle for “rights” was therefore launched within the “Enlightenment” to correct this state of affairs first as movements for reform in the 17th Century in Europe and then via revolutions at the end of the 18th.
But the emphasis on duties did not just disappear immediately: in fact, they were used to inculcate the new privileging of individual “human rights”. For instance, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 – stressing “life, liberty and fraternity” has its counterpart in the 1795 Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen of 1795. It noted pertinently: “The maintenance of society requires that those who compose it should both know and fulfil their duties.” But with the passage of time, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and henceforth, the “Rights of Man” held centre stage.
The flaw in the argument for individual rights lies in eliding the fact that man is not a solitary being but a social one. And the exigencies of that existence demand the necessary reciprocity of expectations to coordinate the activities of the collectivity for its survival be sustained through corresponding rights and duties. The right to drive one’s car on the road implied the duty to drive on one mutually agreed side, so that anarchy does not become the norm. But, unfortunately, even though the individual right to accumulate at the expense of the collective has led to an ever-widening gap between “the haves and the have-nots”, the duty that is implicit in distributive justice even in the welfare state has not offered a vocabulary to make duty as fundamental as rights.
Of recent, the reintroduction of “duties” of man is coming from an unexpected quarter: environmentalism. Part and parcel of the post-Enlightenment insistence on the “rights of man” was man’s “dominion” over the earth and his right to “exploit” it as he saw fit. While there were early reactions against such thinking, notably among the 19th Century Romantics, they were dismissed as “idealists”. But with the earth facing a catastrophic climatic disaster, there is now a growing awareness that man also has a duty towards his environment.
We have to transpose that global concern to our local Guyanese circumstance. We each have to be our brother’s keeper or we all face disaster.
