THE TANDEM PROJECT
UNITED NATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS,
FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR BELIEF
CULTURE & RELIGION OR BELIEF
Issue: Culture as Sacred:
Perspective on the Relationship of Culture to Religion or Belief
For: United Nations, Governments, Religions or Beliefs,
Academia, NGOs, Media, Civil Society
Review: Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil: A Division of
Macmillan Publishing, 1975. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) won the Pulitzer Prize
for General Nonfiction for “The Denial of Death.” He was a distinguished social theorist and a
popular teacher of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Culture has been described as the total
traits of a given people passed on from generation to generation. The major
outcomes of the Alliance of Civilizations Madrid Forum (see Word Document
attached) calls for cross-cultural dialogue between governments and
inter-cultural and inter-faith dialogue between youth. UN Secretary-General Ban
Ki-Moon has called for constructive dialogue among individuals, among
communities, among cultures, among and between nations.
So what can we add to understanding the meaning of
culture in preparation for these important dialogues? Ernest Becker has said it
is important “to be clear about this: culture itself is sacred,
since it is the ‘religion’ that assures in
some way the perpetuation of its members… Culture is in
this sense ‘supernatural,’ and all systematizations of culture have in the end
the same goal: to raise people above nature, to assure them that in some ways
their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.” Excerpts from
Becker’s book Escape from Evil may add a new dimension of the importance of culture on religion or
belief; a dimension significant to the serious dialogues about to take place
under the auspices of the Alliance of Civilizations.
Extracts from Escape from Evil are highlighted in bold on the second page
Objective: Build understanding and support for
Article 18, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights –Everyone
shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion - and the
1981 UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. Encourage the United Nations,
Governments, Religions or Beliefs, Academia, NGOs, Media and Civil Society to
use these international human rights standards as essential for long-term solutions to conflicts based on religion or
belief.
Challenge: In 1968 the United Nations deferred work on an
International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Religious
Intolerance, because of its apparent complexity and sensitivity. In the
twenty-first century, a dramatic increase of intolerance and discrimination on
grounds of religion or belief is motivating a worldwide search to find
solutions to these problems. This is a challenge calling for enhanced dialogue
by States and others; including consideration of an International Convention on
Freedom of Religion or Belief for protection of and accountability by all
religions or beliefs. The tensions in today’s world inspire a question such as:
Response: Is it the appropriate moment to
reinitiate the drafting of a legally binding international convention on
freedom of religion or belief? Law making of this nature requires a minimum
consensus and an environment that appeals to reason rather than emotions. At
the same time we are on a learning curve as the various dimensions of the
Declaration are being explored. Many academics have produced voluminous books
on these questions but more ground has to be prepared before setting up of a UN
working group on drafting a convention. In my opinion, we should not try to
rush the elaboration of a Convention on Freedom of Religion or Belief,
especially not in times of high tensions and unpreparedness. - UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief,
Option: After forty years this may be the time,
however complex and sensitive, to consider a new Working Group to draft a
United Nations Convention on Freedom of Religion or Belief. United Nations
Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, at the UN backed Alliance of Civilizations Forum
in January 2008 addressed the urgency of the moment; “Never in our lifetime has
there been a more desperate need for constructive
and committed dialogue, among individuals, among communities, among cultures,
among and between nations.” This includes establishing genuine dialogue within
and among all kinds of religion or belief, ranging from religious
fundamentalism to secular dogmatism.
Concept: Separation of Religion or Belief and State – SOROBAS. The starting point for this dialogue is the First
Preamble to the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable
rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice
and peace in the world. It suggests
States recalling their history, culture and constitution adopt fair and equal
human rights protection for all religions or beliefs as described in General
Comment 22 on Article 18, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
UN Human Rights Committee,
Extracts: Extracts are presented under the Eight Articles of
the 1981 U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. Examples of extracts are presented
prior to an Issues Statement for each Review.
4. 1 All States shall take
effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of
religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights
and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social
and cultural life.
4.1.5: Cultural Life
*The Tandem Project has made the following excerpts
in “Escape from Evil,” Gender neutral. Where Becker uses “mankind,” we use
neutral phrases like “humanity” or “people.” It in no way detracts from the
author’s intent to refer to culture as sacred.
“When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really
experienced was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his Confession:
This is humanities age-old dilemma in the face of death:
it is the meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance; what a person
really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with
insignificance. People want to know that their life has somehow
counted, if not for themselves, than at least in a larger scheme of things,
that is has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything
once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some
way. Or, if there is to be a ‘final’ tally of the scurrying of people on earth
– a ‘judgment day’- then this trace of one’s life must enter that tally and put
on record who one was and that what one did was significant.
We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms
is the basic motive for what is most distinctive about people – namely,
religion. As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, ‘not
so much from…fear of natural death as of final destruction.’ But it is culture
itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it
appears purely religious or not. It is very important for students of humanity
to be clear about this: culture itself is sacred, since it is
the ‘religion’ that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. For a
long time students of society liked to think in terms of ‘sacred’ versus
‘profane’ aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction
with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no
basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of people.
As soon as you have symbols you have artificial
self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given
meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture
is in this sense ‘supernatural,’ and all systematizations of culture have in
the end the same goal: to raise people above nature, to assure them that in
some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things
count.
Now we can get to the point of this brief Introduction
and see where it has all been leading. The reader has surely already seen the
rub, and objected in their own mind that the symbolic denial of mortality is a
figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood organisms, that if persons seek
to avoid evil and assure their eternal prosperity, they are living a fantasy
for which there is no scientific evidence so far.
To which I would add that this would be alright if
the fantasy were a harmless one. The fact is that self-transcendence via
culture does not give people a simple straightforward solution to the problem
of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression
(as I have argued in a previous book). What people have done is to shift the
fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very
triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since people must now hold for dear
life onto the self-transcending meanings of society in which they live, onto
the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind,
a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.
And this anxiety is precisely what spills over
into the affairs of people. In seeking to avoid evil, people are responsible
for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by
exercising their digestive tracts. It is people’s ingenuity, rather than their
animal nature, that has given fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This
is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to show
exactly how this comes about, how humanities impossible hopes and desires have
heaped evil in the world.” - Introduction: The Human
Condition; Between Appetite and Ingenuity, Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil.
“Persons have to keep from going mad by biting off
small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some
satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the
narrowest and most unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them. From this
point of view the main problem for human beings has to be expressed in the
following paradox; Men and women must have a fetish
in order to survive and to have ‘normal mental health.’ But this shrinkage of
vision that permits them to survive also at the same time prevents them from
having the overall understanding they need to plan for and control the effects
of their shrinkage of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through
all reflective people…Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks
revealing to persons how their self-esteem was built; on the powers of others
in order to deny their own death…Life imagines its own significance and strains
to justify its beliefs. It is as though the life force itself needed illusion
in order to further itself. Logically, then, the ideal creativity for humans
would strain toward the ‘grandest illusion.” - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil -Chapter Ten – Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society?
ISSUE STATEMENT: This is a distinguished scholar’s unique perspective on
the root causes of human evil for consideration by inter-cultural,
inter-religious dialogue. Dialogue to be genuine is open to many perspectives
and points of view on the root sources of conflict both cultural and religious.
As faith-based religions have their own genesis on the causes of human
conflicts, so the Enlightenment sciences have methods of inquiry in such
disciplines as depth-psychology and evolutionary biology. Dialogue to be
helpful must be tolerant of differing opinions, respectful and not defaming of
others. As the UN Secretary General has said, never in his lifetime has there
been a greater need for constructive and committed dialogue.
Inter-religious-inter-belief dialogue should start by acknowledging the UN by
law, under Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, protects against all forms of intolerance and discrimination for theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not
to profess any religion or belief.
Ernest Becker in his Conclusion to Escape from Evil said, “If I wanted to give in weakly to the
most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific
body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general
theory of human unhappiness.” Becker as a scholar approached the study of human
evil from anthropology, sociology and social psychology, without understanding
there is a world-human rights body. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights is not a utopian fantasy; it is a reality, a foundation of the highest
ethical principles adopted by the United Nations, a deliberative body made up
of the world’s great nations. With will and creativity, as Becker may have said
to “strain toward the greatest illusion,” the United Nations will move forward
with practical long-term solutions to conflicts
based on culture and religion or belief.
______________________________________________________________________________
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The Tandem Project: a non-profit, non-governmental
organization established in 1986 to build understanding and respect for
diversity of religion or belief, and prevent discrimination in matters relating
to freedom of religion or belief. The Tandem Project has sponsored multiple
conferences, curricula, reference materials and programs on Article 18 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – Everyone shall have the
right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion - and the 1981 United
Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.
The Tandem Project
initiative was launched in 1986 as the result of a co-founder representing the World
Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA) at a 1984 United Nations
Geneva Seminar, Encouragement of Understanding, Tolerance and Respect in Matters Relating to Freedom of
Religion or Belief, called by the UN Secretariat on ways to
implement the 1981 UN Declaration. In 1986, The Tandem Project organized the
first NGO International Conference on the 1981 UN Declaration.
The Tandem Project Executive Director: Michael M. Roan, mroan@tandemproject.com.
Documents Attached:
CULTURE & RELIGION OR BELIEF
RACE & RELIGION OR BELIEF
ALLIANCE OF CIVILIZATIONS - GOVERNMENTS & YOUTH DIALOGUE INITIATIVES
The Tandem Project is a UN NGO in
Special Consultative Status with the
Economic and Social Council of
the United Nations
WORD DOCUMENT ATTACHED