Welcome To Unholy Histories

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Cobson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeline Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life.

Andrew Copson 0:43

One grounded in shared dignity, freedom, and cooperation across borders. At the heart of that vision from the start were humanist thinkers and activists, from H. G. Wells, whose rights of man helped inspire the movement, to Julian Huxley, the first Director General of UNESCO, an organization founded on humanist ideas of reason, education, and universalism. This episode traces the ideas that shaped the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a landmark document born from devastation, but guided and inspired by hope in our common humanity. We're going to look at how the Universal Declaration came to be, why it still matters, and what challenges lie ahead for the universal ideals that it enshrines. To help us, we're joined by Bill Cook, historian, senior editor of Free Inquiry, and author of, amongst many other titles, A Wealth of Insights, Humanist Thought Since the Enlightenment, and H. G. Wells and the 21st Century. And Francesca Klug, who's a human rights scholar and writer, whose books include Values for a Godless Age and a Magna Carta for all humanity. And Francesca is a visiting professor at the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights. Welcome both.

Bill Cooke on Why H.G. Wells Matter

Andrew Copson 1:50

To start with, perhaps you could just both tell us a little about your work and what drew you first into these very important fundamental subjects. Bill?

Bill Cooke 1:58

Well, my most recently on HG Wells was motivated because he's being written out of the history. He's just being ignored. I see Nigel Bigger's recent book on what's wrong with rights doesn't even mention Wells at all. So that just annoyed me because it seems to be doing a disservice to the history and to Wells' contribution. So it was a question of putting right some historical prejudices that have built up, particularly about Wells over the last few decades, and to try and give him a place in history again.

Andrew Copson 2:36

Did you feel that the whole history of that liberal network at the turn of the century and early 20th century was just being erased deliberately or through ignorance or through malice, I guess is my question.

Bill Cooke 2:45

A bit of both, because Wells managed to offend all the modernists in terms of novelists, and most of the people who've been writing about Wells have been in literary scholars and literary theoreticians and so on. And so because he's offended them there, and his novels have suffered a decline in influence, then his non-fiction has suffered as well by default. And that's been the problem. So it's a question of trying to see that I don't really care whether his novels are particularly well read or within satisfactory within the modernist canon. What interests me is the increasingly relevant value of his nonfiction and the way that he put this together for the non-specialist. I think that's really worth rediscovering in the 21st century.

Francesca Klug on the UDHR

Andrew Copson 3:36

And Francesca, you come into this from a pure human rights angle. What brought you into the human rights bill?

Francesca Klug 3:41

Well, first of all, can I just reassure Bill that in my book Magna Carta for Humanity, which is on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, tracing their roots, I do give H. G. Wells a significant shout out. But I came into this the way a lot of people do when they're young through a concern for social justice. I was an activist and an advocate before I was an academic. But when I worked at Liberty, formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties, I came across the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And that feels an absurd statement because I really should have come across the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a child at school, as far as I'm concerned. And I was so struck by it, by the depth of thinking, the amount of hope, the amount of inspiration, the vision, something which a lot of people comment that we seem to lack today, just about everywhere, at a time when it is almost the last thing you would think they'd be devoting their energies to when the whole world was in ruins. So I wanted to understand more about it. Hence I got into human rights scholarship and also was involved in the practical application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the European Convention on Human Rights, and indeed on designing the Human Rights Act, which brought the European Convention on Human Rights into our law.

Andrew Copson 5:06

So you've done quite a lot in the field of human rights, I think it's fair to say.

Francesca Klug 5:09

A reasonable amount. Can I just add there's also a biographical personal element for me, which people often don't bring in as to why they're attracted to a particular area of working life, and that is my own history of my grandparents who were all refugee migrants, and I was brought up very conscious that I wouldn't have been born had they not come here. Indeed, one of my grandfathers came over on a boat, it was probably a large one rather than a small one, but he stowed away in order to flee persecution for Jewish boys in Tsarist Russia, just before the revolution. And so I identify very much with the global and humanist elements of the project for human rights.

What The UDHR Actually Is

Andrew Copson 5:53

Well, let's start then there with the Universal Declaration, because perhaps for listeners less familiar, we can start with you, Francesca, just sketching out for us what exactly is the Universal Declaration and why was it such a landmark moment as you've described that it was.

Francesca Klug 6:06

Well, it was the first attempt at what they conceived to be and talked about a global or international Bill of Rights. Because of course, Enlightenment Bills of Rights, most famously the French and American Bills of Rights. But what there hadn't been was any attempt to universalise the idea of rights. In the Enlightenment era, they often talked about the rights of quote man, and they thought that would be good enough, but it clearly didn't include women, very explicitly excluded, particularly minority groups, including black people in America and Jews initially in France. And so there was a sense that this was a brand new enterprise. In terms of its concept, and you may want to ask me more about the actual practical way it ever came about, it was developed by the delegates of the fledgling UN, which was just over 50 countries at the time, much smaller than now, because of course the whole of sub-Saharan Africa was still colonized at the end of the war. But it was very much in the context of the slaughter and atrocities of the war that these delegates from which represented every country in the fledgling UN, but had five or six core drafters, they were trying to think about what it is we needed to learn from the horrors they just experienced, and whether it would be possible to craft a bill of rights for the whole of humankind. And after two years of deliberation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was their product and it was passed consensually. No country voted against, but there were five abstentions. Quite an interesting motley crowd, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Soviet Union, and five Soviet satellite states. Out of that has come all the modern international human rights treaties, including very relevant for current debates, the European Convention on Human Rights. And all these treaties mention the Universal Declaration in their preamble and explicitly express that they are seeking to enforce the rights in that 1948 declaration, which was 77 years old yesterday.

Madeleine Goodall 8:17

Happy birthday, UDHL.

Francesca Klug 8:19

I'm not quite that, thankfully, but I will take it on behalf of the UDHR.

Andrew Copson 8:23

Bill,

Forgotten Humanist Roots Of Rights

Andrew Copson 8:24

when we think about some of the humanist voices and organizations that were involved in, I think we know about the humanist involvement in international efforts for peace and cooperation in the late 19th and early 20th century. But human rights thinking or human rights-like thinking was quite a keynote of humanist ethical thought at the time. So can you tell us who were some of the main individuals or organizations that were involved, as it were, in helping to create the culture that gave rise to this idea of a universal declaration?

Bill Cooke 8:53

A.C. Wills, of course, but the person that he looked to was Sherry. Percy Shelley's Declaration of Rights at the very beginning of the 19th century. And that has had, again, a forgotten and unrecognized influence through 19th century and 20th century thinkers. I strongly suspect that when Wells brought his Rights of Man together in 1940, he had Shelley's declaration in mind at the time.

Andrew Copson 9:24

Tell us a little bit about that then in 1940. So if Shelley and the people around Shelley inspired so much humanist thought, especially give a nice romantic element to humanist thought in the 19th century, but what is that initiative that you mentioned just then in 1940 that H. Wells was involved in?

Bill Cooke 9:38

Well, Wells, of course, had been familiar, had worked with the government in the first war, and was deeply dissatisfied with the way that the Britain and the Allied forces made their case for the war against Germany. And it was done in terms of war aims rather than an ideal that we are fighting for. So what he wanted to do in the second war was not to restrict the conversation to war aims, what we want to get out of this, what extra bits of territory or reparations or whatever we think are our rights. But why are we fighting this war? Why is Nazism wrong? Why are the liberty, why are the ideals of Western democracy and humanism worth fighting for? And that had just been assumed and taken for granted. And so Wells got together this committee of prominent people. Baroness Wootton sang he was the chairman of it, but most people recognize that Wells was the one who was doing most of the work. And he puts together a 10-point rights of man. He also commented, by the way, on the problems of talking about man. He, right at the beginning of the 20th century, he complained about the infelicities of the English language that mean that when we talk about man, we mean woman as well. He was one of the few first people to actually specifically comment about that. And he returned to that time and time again. And again, when he speaks about the right of man now. So he was the one who saw the need for putting up a flag of why we're fighting Nazism, why Nazism is wrong, and why more than just a utilitarian set of war aims, this is why we are fighting. This is why we feel the need to go through the privations of the years ahead. Remember, he's writing this at the end of 1939. Neville Chamberlain isn't is still Prime Minister. It's unclear the war will even carry on for very long. And that maybe even Britain will do some abject Munich II type surrender. So he was very much a voice crying in the wilderness at this time.

Wells And The Open Conspiracy

Madeleine Goodall 11:54

Just thinking for anybody who doesn't know H. G. Wells full stop for anything, not everybody will necessarily be aware of him as a writer, never mind a kind of human rights thinker, writer, advocate, all of the above. So I'm just wondering, where did this come from for Wells? Because the 1940 declaration, he died in 46, didn't he? So he it's quite towards the end of his life. So what had life been up to then? How did he get to this point?

Bill Cooke 12:26

Well, we know Wells because of his um scientific romances and science fiction as now called The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds and so on. But after that, he wrote more social fiction, didn't he? Things like Tono Bungay. But after the First World War, that's when he wrote the outline of history, and then followed up by a short history of the world. And that remains the best-selling historical work of the 20th century. Professional historians hate him to this day because of his success. AJP Taylor said, even though he sneered at what Wells was about, he acknowledged that Wells' Outline of History was the most important book that he wrote, and that Taylor read as a very young man. So it was after the First World War and the mess that we made of the Treaty of Versailles and the universal peace, so-called, after that, that Wells felt the need for bringing together a series of ideas that could unite people to work toward a better future for the whole planet. And he really did mean the whole planet. He was one of the very first to think out to not be Eurocentric. The outline of history is the first non-Eurocentric world history that's been written. So in he has whole chapters on India and China. In the short history of the world, he mentions the ruins of Zimbabwe. So he's wanting to bring an idea of a common humanity, which is the idea that Julian Huxley took up and ran with more later on. And he tried various ideas to make this work. The open conspiracy was an idea of the early 1930s, rather like the 99% movements that we had at the beginning of the 21st century.

Andrew Copson 14:17

Let's say a little bit about the open conspiracy, because again, that'll be something that people aren't familiar with. So this was a call that HGL's put out to other liberals and humanists, mostly humanists, who were leading various progressive cause. And he was basically saying, let's all work together in an open conspiracy to make a freer, better world.

Bill Cooke 14:35

Yes. He was suspicious of people being told what to do by finger-wagging elites in the way that we would understand that in the 21st century. He retains, even though he was fundamentally a pessimist and a Schopenhaurian, he retained a confidence that people, when informed with proper knowledge and proper ideas and a big picture account of things, could make the right sorts of decisions. And so the Rights of Man that he wrote in 1940 correctly toward the end of his career was his desperate attempt to try and bring together this idea of an open conspiracy in the idea of an outline of history that could project a better piece at the end of the Second World War than had been the case at the end of the First World War.

Francesca Klug 15:26

And it was incredibly influential. I mean, it's amazing how much we don't know about it now, but it was translated into 30 languages, with thousands of copies published, which is a lot in those days. And of course, it influenced his good friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of America, with his famous four essential freedoms. Freedom of speech and worship and from want and fear, because H. G. Wells included economic and social rights in his rights of man, which again was another innovation. And as you said, Bill, you know, the following year the protection of human rights was included as an official war aim, which was astonishing, really, and perhaps lacking now in many contexts we can think of.

Bill Cooke 16:09

Yes,

Drafting The Declaration Against The Odds

Bill Cooke 16:10

I think Eleanor Roosevelt is the absolutely vital conduit here because Wells knew the Roosevelt family. He had a standing invitation to visit the White House when he was in the United States, which he made full use of as well was Wells's want. And you're right, the Atlantic Charter and the four freedoms that were FDR's initiative to set the tone for the war. I think it's very hard to see that Wells wasn't a significant influence in those, let alone the development later on of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Francesca Klug 16:49

Well, I think the assumption is that he was. However, it was still a very big struggle to get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be drafted. People shouldn't think it was all done and dusted. Of course, Franklin de Ruosebelt was dead by then. The UN Charter, as initially drafted as in the famous San Francisco Conference, didn't include any references to human rights. NGOs had to lobby to have the references added. There were about seven in the end. And even then, there was no commitment to draft an international bill of rights, as they called it. That was a subsequent struggle after the UN was founded. But eventually the UN Human Rights Commission was established. When I say eventually, this is all a fairly short period. But it felt to the NGOs and the lawyers who'd lobbied, some of whom had lost many relatives in the war. It felt like a very long struggle to them because they kept being knocked back. But in the end, the UN Commission met and it deliberated for two years, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the result.

Bill Cooke 17:52

And as I said, I think Eleanor Roosevelt's role there was absolutely pivotal.

Francesca Klug 17:56

Who was chair of the Human Rights Commission, which drafted the bill. But there were five main drafters, it should be said.

Andrew Copson 18:02

Tell us a bit more about them, Francesca, and also tell us a bit, elaborate a bit more about the challenges that were faced in the drafting.

Francesca Klug 18:08

People have made different claims for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And one is, and you could assume this from our conversation so far, that it was basically an extension of enlightenment values exported to the world. But it really wasn't as straightforward as that. There was a lot of debate when it was being drafted. The delegates took it so seriously that I think half the time they forgot they were delegates of particular states. For example, the Soviet delegates were amazingly engaged and very interesting. But then, of course, they were instructed to abstain. But the challenges really revolve around what it was they were trying to do. So there were some of the drafters, and I would include Eleanor, as you said, she was a humanist. P. C. Chang, the famous Chinese Confucian, I think described himself or was described as a Confucian humanist. Right, yeah. Very much wanted to develop the Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom, tolerance, secularism, rationality. But other drafters, and in particular, Dr. Charles Malik, who was a Lebanese Christian, and René Cassin, who was a kind of secular Jew, but nevertheless very influenced by his Jewish heritage, very much saw this as a moral document, which actually Eleanor came to agree with. But in the process, they very much wanted to make the point that the human rights derive from God, or more specifically, from biblical text, that human beings are born in the image of God, that famous biblical statement, or love thy neighbour as thyself, or in the what's called the Old Testament, you respect the strangers because we were strangers once. I think that's in their 36 times. They wanted to make the point that these ideas were part of the mix in developing the UDHR. And I think it is more honest to describe the UDHR as an incredible alchemy of ideas and philosophies that arrived at a common consensus, that you didn't need to put in or write God or nature, which, by the way, the Enlightenment Bills of Rights, ironically, did summons. The American Declaration of Independence talks about the Creator, the French Assembly talked about God. You know, they avoided it. There was a vote on an amendment to add a reference to God, and it was lost. They didn't talk about natural rights. The consensus they came to, through their alchemy of faiths and belief systems and national origins and indeed experiences, was to say that our common humanity, or as the preamble at the very beginning puts it, of common human family that we're all in, is enough to justify the idea of fundamental rights. And fundamental rights are about human flourishing, about what it takes to live a life. And that has to include, as H. G. Wells had said, economic, social, and even cultural rights. And this was extraordinarily ambitious, you could say revolutionary for its day.

Andrew Copson 21:11

The other

Pragmatic Focus On Dignity And Conscience

Andrew Copson 21:12

thing that strikes me always about the preamble, which is interesting in light of the what you've described as the sort of the fact that it's an overlapping of values from various different cultures and traditions. The other thing that always strikes me about the preamble is how practical it is. It said, because all these bad things have happened, this is why we need this declaration. So it doesn't quite circumvent the idea of where all this really comes from and are there natural rise and everything else. But it's really clear that this is the alternative to the terrible things we've seen. That pragmatic dimension is really strong, I think.

Francesca Klug 21:40

I think that's absolutely right. I think people often say human rights are so abstract. It came out of something extremely real. It was an attempt to do it to deal with about as real a situation as you could imagine, which was international conflict. And the first ever nuclear bomb had just gone off, and they were now getting all the stories of. Of what we've now come to call the Holocaust. That was the conflagration, the barbarous acts which have enraged the conscience of mankind. That's in the preamble. And I think it's very important, by the way, to just focus for a second on the use of this word conscience. Because this was one of the biggest distinguishers between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Enlightenment idea of rights that had gone before it. I mean, you have to understand everything in its historical context, don't you? But emphasizing reason and science was, of course, the big enlightenment achievement of its time. But for the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the emphasis on reason and science hadn't all turned out that well. And they wanted to add a new concept into the mix, which was conscience. And their argument was that human beings have the capacity to reason and they also have the capacity to empathize. And one without the other can lead to very bad results. And so that was their big addition, and is the route to the term dignity, which is scattered throughout the Universal Declaration, which indeed is one of the routes to economic, social, and cultural rights. You can't live a dignified life if you don't have the wherewithal to live.

Bill Cooke 23:10

This was a feature of Wells's rights, too. He was very conscious of the fact that people need to read and need access to knowledge and education. Reason isn't just some natural thing that we all have and use intelligently and impartially. It can easily be manipulated. Wells is not a rationalist in that pejorative, almost caricature sense at all. And so he was very anxious at all times that people have open access to education and that criticism be one of the crucial components of any free society. And the enjoyment of rights involves educated use of criticism of one another in a civilised way.

Madeleine Goodall 23:55

And it's interesting because the that the creation document or the founding document of UNESCO talks about how war is created in the minds of men. And so peace has to be created in the minds of men as well. And it's very rooted, isn't it? And that exact idea, the education, knowledge, and then, as Francesca says, allied with the compassion, the imagination that we get also through those things, the understanding of each other and a more universal sense of that human family all comes in together.

Bill Cooke 24:30

Yeah, Julian Huxley tended to downplay the influence that Wells had on him. But I think it's not unreasonable to see an influence of Wells from the time they worked together in with the science of life, statements like that when Huxley was in charge of UNESCO.

Andrew Copson 24:49

I think anyone who has read H. G. Wells' Charter of Scientific Fellowship can't deny the enormous influence that it had on Julian Hux's thinking. It's just it's it might as well be the UNESCO Charter, and the words are all the concepts are there, the words are there.

The Groundbreaking Concept of Universalism

Andrew Copson 25:04

I wanted to ask a question about universalism. It seems obvious because obviously it's right there in the title of the document, but this is we shouldn't skip it over. This is a really big deal. This is a really big claim. And we were talked about, and I think it's also one of the areas where the humanist element is more obvious. One of the things H. G. Wells said, as we were talking about earlier, was that he said, you know, people of all races throughout time, all over the world, have all contributed to our understanding of the universe. You know, he wrote a universal history. This is, and he meant it. I mean, like a lot of ethical thought before then, specifically, I'm biased, but specifically a lot of religious thought before then had set talked about universalism, but usually in the way of saying, like, everyone has the equal right to convert to our religion or to see the truth or to be treated equally in some way within the context of our idea about it. Whereas this is an idea of universalism that is, it's really genuine. It's saying everyone is different, everyone should have freedom of expression, everyone has the freedom to shed their own life and so on. And I just wondered how big, you know, for me, that's still incredibly there's plenty of people in the world who don't really believe in that, who don't really buy that, who don't really accept universalism. For me, it's a really big challenging thing, which, like Francesca said, we should be taught at school. I mean, it's a it's a big ethical concept. I just wonder how controversial it was at the time. Some of those states who abstained, for example, or who later on had objections to aspects of the Universal Declaration, this was uh was this an idea that at the time was seen as just lip service, or was it striking and important and as big an idea as it seems to me it was?

Francesca Klug 26:41

It's probably the most controversial idea, but that's only once people started to think about what it would mean in practice. Because, as you say, it's a term that very easily banded about. And clearly within the Enlightenment era, people meant very different things about it and said some dreadful things in the name of universalism. I love the way you put it, Andrew. Everyone has an equal right to convert to my religion. I love that. There were some very material discussions about universalism, not least when I think it was the Egyptians who proposed an amendment to ensure that the declaration in Article II, when it said it applies to everyone everywhere, explicitly says, including those living in colonized territories, because so much of the world was, of course, still under imperial rule. And guess who opposed that? Anyone got a guess? Well, you shouldn't be able to guess who had the biggest empire in the world. So Britain, of course, no, well, this but the Soviet Union had abstention up their sleeves anyway. So um uh Britain objected. Britain, who had made us a lot of lectures about how we were the font of all democracy, and indeed why you didn't need this amendment, because of course it applies to everyone, specifically a bit like men, of course, applies to women as well. It was that kind of tenor of debate. But they lost the vote, and it does explicitly say, which is a tremendously important thing in its time, that it implied, it applied to everywhere. And indeed, in the 1970s, when the other two arms of the International Bill of Rights had been drafted and ratified, which is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights, which, unlike the Universal Declaration, are drafted as legal documents. They don't have a court, unlike the ECHR, but they are, if you like, quasi-judicially enforced through a UN committee. They included the right to self-determination, and that's a very disputed human right, but nevertheless, it came out of Article II of the Universal Declaration, which insisted that everyone everywhere, named where everywhere was, were subject to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it inspired many African in particular states to argue that their call for independence was in the name of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which every state in the country had accepted. On the other hand, an attempt at a minorities clause, and this might interest you, Bill, I could do another quiz. Guess who was most against the minorities bill? And I'm talking now among the five main drafters. Well, it was Eleanor Roosevelt, I'm afraid, because they were worried, of course, an effect of a de facto apartheid existed in the southern states of America, and they were very worried, and it may not have been her personally, but in the end they were delegates, although half the time they forgot they were, that she opposed a minorities clause and there wasn't a minorities charter coming out of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for many years until many years later. But on the other hand, the modern notion of anti-discrimination, although it doesn't mention every group, and that is poor, but nevertheless, the modern formulation that, say, President Trump is so opposed and trying to demolish now of anti-discrimination, and you mention different categories of protected groups, comes from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To my knowledge, there was never anything like that written before the 1948 Universal Declaration.

Bill Cooke 30:18

Yeah, Wells had a sort of an interesting trajectory with the count when it comes to Universalist thinking, because in his younger days, he was still looking at the British Empire as a possible conduit by which more genuinely international thought and progress could be had. He relatively quickly jettisoned that idea and saw that the empire couldn't do that in any proper sense because otherwise he would have the same sort of hypocrisies and double meanings that you've just mentioned in other contexts. So he started getting more slightly metaphysical about his universalism and seeing it in terms of us as a species. And this is the other interesting point about Wells, he mentioned anthropogenic climate change and the threat therefrom in 1931. I've not found an earlier mention of the human threat of anthropogenic climate change than that. So that's roughly when David Acker was born. So he was thinking in terms of universalism, in terms of the species. And the older he got, the more anxious he was to subjugate individual ego to the ongoing thing of the idea of the species. Think about each individual as the that little bit of the lava flow that flows along, but very soon cools and becomes part of the bedrock and is superseded later on by more lava that carries on. Each human should think of themselves as that one tiny little spark in a lava flow of the species, and that we need to be able to work toward the progress of the species with that level of disinterestedness and sense of our own complete unimportance in that process.

Francesca Klug 32:18

That's very interesting. I want to do one postscript, if I may, on the question you asked us, Sandra, about universalism. And that is that part of what's what's unique and what brought took us forward with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is this alchemy I've referred to. And both the critics of the UDHR from the say global south and its defenders, often in the West, do assume that it's fundamentally a Western document. But just as that amendment came that I described relating to colonized territories, came from an Egyptian delegate, so another amendment, which on this occasion failed to basically insert the word woman more thoroughly. I think woman's mentioned once in the UDHR, more thoroughly in the document instead of mankind, came from an Indian female delegate. And so it scotched this notion that all progressive thought comes from the West, which I think was one of the less enlightened legacies of the Enlightenment. It isn't true, it never has been true. And the UDHR kind of demonstrated it in real time.

Bill Cooke 33:24

Ah, and H. G. Wells understood that as well. And I don't think he was particularly successful at doing this in his own Rights of Man document, but he did make a point. For instance, he wrote to Chayne Weitzman to try and get his sense of how his Rights of Man document could be written in a way that was satisfactory to Jewish thinking anti-Zionists in particular. He wrote to his friend Ganguli, Dr. Ganguly, a nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, to get an Indian perspective, and a Chinese man. So he made a specific point of trying to have his Rights of Man documents approachable to a non-Western. I don't think he succeeded particularly, but that doesn't matter particularly. He made a serious attempt to do that. Wells did make an attempt, unsuccessful, probably it has to be said, but he did at least understand the problem. Gathering opinions from non-Western thinkers to give a genuinely international, transnational flavour to his rights of man. So he wrote to Chayne Weitzmann for a Jewish view, to Ganguli for an Indian view, to Xiong for a Chinese view, in a genuine attempt to transnationalise his rights of man document.

Francesca Klug 34:42

That's very interesting. I didn't know that.

Andrew Copson 34:44

Yeah, I think that's a fair point. It's less obvious in the Sankey Rights of Man document in 1940. It's much more obvious in the scientific fellowship work of Wells that he's taught that he has a really earnest view of the human species as one family in the language of the Declaration and the world as a world. And, you know, talks about all human beings being inheritors of the global heritage of human culture, for example, which can sound a bit canting, but I think he meant it. And I think he wasn't just sort of the British imperialist speaking, obviously.

Bill Cooke 35:17

He did me this. He did me his. And he's fiddled with the Rights of Man document right throughout the war until 1944. So several of his wartime books have slightly updated, amended, fiddled with variations of the document. So he was constantly dissatisfied with it and trying to improve it and see what he could do in light of criticism

Timeliness and Enduring Influence of the Declaration

Bill Cooke 35:40

of it.

Andrew Copson 35:40

And I think this is interesting when you think about the the history of the Universal Declaration, because as we've said, and as Francesca said in particular, it you had to have a devastating catastrophic war for this document to come about. But you also, it couldn't have been written in the 1700s, because you also had to have a sense of the world and a post-Darwinian sense of human beings as actually all the same kind of thing. There are no such thing as races in separate. There is humanity is one thing. And I think that that that's part of it of its of the background humanist intellectual conditions for this document, too, even though it is also, like you say, Francesco, an alchemy of global traditions that overlap. It's hard to imagine a document like this being produced before the 19th century and everything the 19th century bought in terms of allowing universalism to be a real concept that people of all different traditions could understand from their different backgrounds and support and really believe in.

Francesca Klug 36:37

Of course, apartheid South Africa was getting underway at the very moment that the Declaration was born. And uh, you know, South Africa, as I said, abstained, not quite sure why it only abstained. But Nelson Mandela wrote very movingly later on how, in spite of that, and I think he could have taken the contrary view, he said he and others took hope from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that they were not alone, and that they were involved in a struggle for humanity, not just for themselves. And the Freedom Charter, the famous ANC Freedom Charter, African National Congress Freedom Charter, is actually modelled on the Universal Declaration.

Andrew Copson 37:15

As we come to the end of our time together, maybe that's something we can look at. I'm gonna ask uh you both about the influence of the Declaration today, but also how it could be even more influential. I could continue to inform, let's be hopeful, as well. I mean, we'll also all want to, under this bit of our time together, I guess, we'll also want to discuss just the horrendous situations that we currently are living through. Not worse than the situations that the people who drafted the declaration lived through, let's be honest about that, but still difficult situations. What's been the influence of the Universal Declaration over the decades so far, and where are the challenges today? If we start with Francesca, and then again, maybe after that, Bill could talk to us a little bit about what uh humanist ideas we could use to shape those understandings of rights and freedoms today. But Francesca, where has where has it taken us and where are we now? And what are the challenges?

Francesca Klug 38:06

Well, if you like, the challenge that was most left unresolved from the outset was between the idea of national sovereignty and the idea of universalism. There was a sort of unspoken but not addressed contradiction between the whole, the UN Charter itself, which of course emphasized national sovereignty and the right to national sovereignty, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, although it requires states to actually uphold, you know, it is states that enforce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, theoretically, or at least the rights that have come out of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nevertheless has inbuilt into it an accountability of national state to a higher value system, which then gets reproduced in law to the international covenants that I mentioned, that became the other two legs of the International Bill of Rights and regional human rights treaties that are literally come out of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and acknowledge that in their preamble, like the European Convention on Human Rights. And this tension between national sovereignty and the acceptance that states should be accountable to a higher law when the chips are down and life and liberty are at stake, so not in everyday life, is one that not only wasn't resolved, but is now to coin a phrase trumping everything else. And we, of course, we have now had the rebirth and reassertion of the idea that it is up to states not only to defend their own national interests, but to do really whatever they like, to define whether they're at war with a country or not, to kill as many civilians in a war as they feel necessary, to just ignore international conventions, the states have signed, like the Refugee Convention and completely rewrite the law. And we're in a state where the whole international human rights order, in my view, is tottering on the edge. I think this would shock Eleanor Roosevelt and her fellow drafters that so soon, just 77 years after the drafting of the Universal Declaration, and just 75 years after the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights, we would have not the rest of the world, ironically, but the West, who were seen as the champions of this approach and are sometimes accused of global imperialism, cultural imperialism as a result of it, are the ones turning their back most explicitly from it. Not every Western state, of course not, but it's like a contagion at the moment. And so I think the greatest challenge is its survival, frankly, and all the rest is detail. And of course, the British Humanist Association could hold the torch for these values, but it has to do so, if I may humbly suggest, in the spirit in which it was drafted, which is one of humanity, which does recognize other traditions, other ways of arriving at the same point, and recognises commonality and pluralism at the same time, i.e., we are together because we're different, and because we're different, we can come together and recognize what we have in common whilst respecting our difference. And with that spirit, I think the British Humanist Humanist Association worldwide has a major leadership role at this time.

Andrew Copson 41:22

Thank you. Challenge accepted. Bill, what are your reflections on how humanist ideas can continue to we've all got to sign up now to Francesca's marching orders?

Bill Cooke 41:33

There are two areas, I suppose, that worry me. The first of all is the idea of rights being inalienable. This was another mistake that Wells made in the 11th item that he added onto his Bill of Rights. I think Jeremy Bentham is right that inalienable rights is nonsense upon stilts. Rights are a legal machination that we agree on. And so it becomes problematic to argue that rights are inalienable because it requires then some sort of metaphysical or even worse, supernatural justification for it that has no place, certainly in the humanist way of thinking, but I can't see it having a place in the 21st century way of thinking that's going to be in any way contributing toward a unified field. The other problem that worries me about it is that the rights discourse presupposes an amplitude of resources. And I think in the 21st century we can't presuppose that anymore. We need to go back as well so often did to Schopenhauer, who talked about rights as it's saying, it's a negative idea. The content is a mere negation. So everybody has the right to do anything that does not injure another. Now, that's a platitude that we add into rights all the time, but few of us are taking the consequences of that as seriously as we need to in a time when the struggle for resources is becoming more dire. Even basic resources like water, let alone things that we dig out of the ground. We don't have, you see, my supposition at the moment is that we do not have the resources to support a standard of living that the West is enjoying at the moment, which is why the non-Western world, the global South, is justifiably resentful and is not particularly interested in us wagging our fingers on matters of rights. So therefore, taking very seriously the idea that having a right insofar as it does not injure others is something that's going to need to be comprehensively rethought. I think humanists could take a leading role in this. Some way of looking at the Millennium Development Goals. And their success of the sustainable development goals, seeing what's a justifiable right in the West and how that will then impact on, say, island states like Tuvalu or cities like Shanghai that could be underwater in 20 years' time if we continue to consume resources in the way that we so blithely think is a given. So, Nigel Bigger, one of the sensible things he has said in his book is we're in a stage of rights fundamentalism at the moment, where we demand self-righteously our rights and look to be very angry at anybody who we perceive is threatening them.

Francesca Klug 44:41

If I may say so, you've Bill, if I can put it like this, strayed a very long way now from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is anything but what you've just described, but is this much more debate within the Enlightenment. And that's why I've been trying humbly to make this distinction. As much as H.G. Wells you could see as a bridge between these two approaches, they are very different from each other, even if one was inspired, even if the later one was inspired by the earlier one. In with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as I said earlier, there's no sense of inalienable rights written into it that you're born with. This is an argument that this is what we need for human flourishing, to end wars, to end the destruction of one group of human beings by another. It's an argument. You can either buy it or you don't have to buy it. But it wasn't an impractical argument. So written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written into it, in the way it wasn't written into the, in the same way, into the Enlightenment Bills of Rights, is the phrase, duties to the community, without which the development of the human personality is impossible. And this was actually René Cassa who wrote that particular article. There was debate around it, but it was strongly supported. In other words, we are social beings, is written into the idea of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We don't survive unless we support each other, and that means our rights can't be absolute. The very last thing it means is right to absolutism. And when the economic, social and cultural rights instrument was developed as one, as a second and third leg of the Bill of Rights that I talked about, the International Bill of Rights, it talks about subject to resources, that these are rights that have to be progressively realized. So all your thinking, Bill, that you're rightly suggesting now was actually built into these treaties. But what we're facing is an onslaught who that daily misinforms or confuses what these treaties were about. They survived 77 years because there was a lot of good sense written into them. Of course, the world we're looking at is full of human rights abuses, not to mention the environmental and economic catastrophes that you've just outlined so well, Bill. But the idea, and I think human beings do need ideas in order to know where they're going. The ideas, I think, are actually have actually stood the test of time. It's a question of whether you agree with them or not. And the enemies of them will distort them and reframe them as much as they can possibly get away with. And that's why I think a podcast like this is so valuable, because there are times when you just need to restate them.

Bill Cooke 47:12

I couldn't agree more. It's not a question of jettisoning the rights at all. It's a question of thinking about them more openly in the sense of rights and the obligation to the others, which is the bit that's not got the sort of coverage that it needs, and where a humanist's contribution could be valuable, I think.

Francesca Klug 47:31

Absolutely. We agree. We've gone from controversy to agreement within three minutes. How about

Favourites From Humanist History

Francesca Klug 47:37

that?

Andrew Copson 47:37

We all knew we didn't have much time. I think we all know that on this topic we could speak for hours, and there are dozens of people from the history of this that we haven't even mentioned. You can uh tell us shortly about where we can find out more about both of your work. But first of all, Maddie is going to ask you a question that we've asked every guest on this podcast so far, and which um you get we were given no warning of absolutely at all. So your answers will be completely from the heart.

Madeleine Goodall 48:02

Exactly. And I'll completely fairly ask you Stuart in 30 seconds to preserve time. So without further ado, do you have a favourite humanist or atheist from history that you could briefly share with us? We'll start with Bill.

Bill Cooke 48:18

Mine's the humanist, Trinity, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Joseph McCabe.

Andrew Copson 48:26

Joseph McCabe's a good one. We haven't had him yet, actually. Well, people will have to get Googling on that and look up some of his old books, yeah.

Madeleine Goodall 48:32

Or read Bill's book indeed on uh on Joseph McCabe. Francesca?

Francesca Klug 48:37

I'd have to say Andrew Cobson, but I think he would object to being described. I had a feeling it was like that. So I have a reserve in my head, and that's Gloria Steinem, the uh famous second wave feminist who was such an influence for me when I was a teenager and young woman, and she won the humanist award of the year, apparently in America in 2012. She did. So my award goes to her.

Andrew Copson 49:02

But you know she is still alive, I think, isn't she?

Francesca Klug 49:04

She is still alive, she absolutely is still alive. Yeah. Making history. Exactly.

Andrew Copson 49:10

Making history.

Francesca Klug 49:11

Andrew.

Andrew Copson 49:12

Wonderful. Just like Andrew. Yes. I often where people often say to me, Ashley, you remind me of Gloria Steiner. No one ever. It's always a first. So both of you now, where can listeners who will want to do this after they've heard you here find out more about your work? Bill, I guess that they need to just Google your name and look for some of the books. Yep, that's the best way to do it. And Francesca, do you have a website that people can look for? Are you also being Googled on bookshops?

Francesca Klug 49:40

There is a website. If you go into my name at LSC, there's my book, my latest book. And all good libraries. And I hope still some bookshops.

Andrew Copson 49:50

Exactly. Both of you have written some exceptionally interesting books that people should be reading. So I hope that people will Google you, go into their library, audiobook, books, go into their bookshop and do the same. It just remains for us to thank you very much for being guests on our podcast today. Thank you very much.

Francesca Klug 50:08

Thanks for having us.

Where To Learn More And Support

Andrew Copson 50:10

Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanist UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanist UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanists UK. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.

Madeleine Goodall 50:33

And you can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heritage.humanist.uk