Human rights: Food for a needed break-to-carry-on thought  ‘paradigms and HR’ (2)

Human Rights Reader 512

The difficulty has not been in floating new ideas, but in escaping the old ones that pervade every corner of our minds (John Meynard Keynes)

12. We live in a world that continues to live by old truths that nobody believed-in to begin with. Irrationally held truths are indeed more harmful than reason. (Thomas Henry Huxley) But we also live in a world still in need of some old truths that, these days, nobody has wanted to believe in.

13. The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status-quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are (just outdated) ideas at all. (Jacob M. Appel)

14. Many of the embedded arguments sound like St Thomas’s proofs of the existence of God; they are absolutely compelling ...if you are already a believer. (They will also provide people who are already convinced with new arguments).

15. So, then, there are these ‘paradigm cleaners’ that try to adapt the dominant model. But their efforts are tantamount to a facelift rather than a revolution --the latter being how, historically, paradigms are replaced. Or, if you want, there are these ‘scholars’: Should they not be devising ways to challenge the dominance of established paradigm authorities and guardians? --Yes, but are they? No, because the ruling paradigm actually shields scientists from the need to consider much intrusive moral issues as equity, equality, justice and human rights (HR).

At the center of paradigms are conceptual frameworks

16. A conceptual framework is a weak theory or a pre-theory indicating the most important entities of a problem and their likely causal relationships. So is the HR framework. Paradigm shifts include a change of the overall conceptual framework so as to better help understand the means by which ‘factors’ become ‘causes’ in a hierarchy of causes (immediate, underlying and basic or structural). So does the HR framework. This confirms to us that a conceptual framework is not a perception; it is a scientific tool. It is not the truth, but the closest to it we have.* So is the HR framework. It describes, but does not necessarily explain. So is not the HR framework, because it does explain.

*: As somebody said facetiously, a conceptual framework represents different ways to touch your nose.

All the above warrants considering a host of warning signs for us

17. First, beware!, knowledge in itself (or a new conceptual framework…) does not transform reality; it is essential that it be linked to a set of organized activities. The dialectical unity of knowledge and action must be an essential aspect of what we do --not part of the sciences, but of the ideology of the enquirer/practitioner.** As for the research that generates the knowledge, applied research is always, and by logical necessity, based on both moral and political values. (Gunnar Myrdal)

**: Holding strong ethical values is actually a mockery where the question of action is never even raised. (Robert Scholes)

18. Warning: If the system that causes all the signs and symptoms that come with poverty is not fixed, small victories in health, nutrition, education (or any other sector) are just deceiving us.*** [Note that there are no elements in the conservative ruling paradigm that can help us solve malnutrition. (Urban Jonsson)].The neoliberal paradigm succeeds in fragmenting social reality into these sectors allowing a collection of partial small victories to be hailed as success --alas with absolutely no sustainability.

***: It seems the ruling paradigm departs from the given that poverty is there to stay by an act of God. (Alan Berg)

19. Warning: Do not be taken in by those that smoothly smuggle-in the old dogma that economic growth is the engine of disparity reduction. (Can I provide you with half a ton of academic evidence to that effect?).

20. Warning: When so many talk Left but walk Right, do not be fooled: We must unmask the false prophets who ride the now fashionable HR-based approach.

21. Warning: The reigning paradigm is always riddled with ideology. The ideology of the model itself denies the seminal role of politics, power and structural determinants.

22. Warning: Is what we need to apply old-recipes-for-a-new-world? (Not in my view; quite on the contrary, what we need is a principled HR position maintained with conviction in the face of any old or new challenges).

Bottom line

23. As said, imposing a new paradigm means death to the old one. But to start, we cannot but initiate our work within the ruling paradigm. This does not mean we give up the effort to replace it…

24. One cannot organize a society with a truly emancipatory HR program if one is not decided, from the very beginning --that is from the formulation of the program itself-- to overcome the paradigmatic obstacles one stumbles upon on the road. (Franz Fanon)

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

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Postscript/Marginalia (not only playing with words)

-Is it the Right to Property or the impropriety of the right to property…?

-The force of illegitimacy gives force its legitimacy. (Abino Gomez, Poemas Hegelianos)