​The Persistence of Dignity

Dr. Bill Knott, December 11, 2023

There is something in the human heart that must have anniversaries. Our world is hard-wired to the concept of time—passing time, fleeting time. Anniversaries emerge from our collective need to slow down the rush of time, to stop, to savor, to laugh, to weep over days that were—and are—deeply significant to us.

It may be the anniversary of our birth that moves us to a kind of self-affirmation we just can’t summon in other parts of the year: “I exist. I am a year older. My time has meaning.”

It may be the anniversary of a covenant we have formed—a marriage, for instance—whose solemn vows bear repetition under the strain of aging, and children, and health concerns, and economic stress. “I married you on this day. I will not forget my promises.”

We celebrate the anniversaries of the great holidays of our annual voyage around the sun, whether from our faith or our citizenship in a given nation. Holidays are a way to hold onrushing time in our hand and savor the memory of joy shared with a family. We savor a moment when we gave ourselves to God, or gave our loyalty to our country.

And anniversaries are also essential to remember the griefs and tragedies that always attend human life. On this day, perhaps 3 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 50 years ago, we stood beside an open grave and wept for what it seems can never be recovered.

So when we come to the anniversary of a document so pivotal to our experience of the modern world as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is to be expected that there will be moments of remembering with joy, as well as moments when we recall the struggles, the pain, the collective tragedies of nations, that made such a document necessary.

Though there may be some at this conference today who were alive in December 1948, chances are that none here today were old enough to remember with any clarity that day when the nations of the world summoned their collective will. Few will recall from personal memory the day when the United Nations affirmed essential characteristics of what it means to be a human being, with all the dignity and rights that come with being human.

It will seem strange to many of us that the single word—dignity—created such controversy when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted in the spring of 1948. Today, “dignity” is an essential component of almost every document an international body either contemplates or creates. And we should note—and celebrate—that the crucial word “dignity” appears no less than five times in the English draft of the original Declaration.

It isn’t there by accident—as a token of some collective desire for self-affirmation or communal self-congratulation. “Dignity” has always been a hard-won word; a word that must be sought; a word that must be struggled for; a word that challenges both those who love human freedom and those who fear human freedom to look deep into their ways of framing the world.

And though the memory of the struggle for the inclusion of the word “dignity” in the text of the UDHR has largely faded from our awareness, it was the source of difficult and even bitter controversy among some of those charged with drafting this document we celebrate today.

Historians tell us that there was very little opposition when Hansa Mehta, a member of the Commission on Human Rights charged with preparing the final draft of the UDHR, recommended that the document ought to say, “All human beings are created equal” instead of the original’s assertion that “All men are created equal.” But no such unanimity emerged when the word “dignity” was under consideration.

A key member of the Commission on Human Rights, Charles Theodore Te Water of South Africa, loudly and vigorously protested the inclusion of the word “dignity” in the final text. Te Water repeatedly asserted, as one historian recalls, that “dignity has no universal standard and that it was not a right.”

As repugnant as Te Water’s assertion seems to many of us today, he argued for very practical and pragmatic reasons. He feared, as the representatives of all despotic systems come to fear, that asserting the essential dignity of all human beings would undermine the moral legitimacy of the new South African government just voted into office that very month. In the very month that the Commission was preparing its final draft, the National Party, headed by D. F. Malan, had achieved a breakthrough majority in the South African parliament. And the National Party quickly began laying the formal and legal structure of the system of racial segregation that the world came to abhor as apartheid.

Charles Theodore Te Water wasn’t arguing against dignity in some theoretical or philosophical vacuum. He was opposing the inclusion of the word “dignity” because the cause he supported and the government he represented was beginning the most systematic and full-on assault on human dignity that the world would experience in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War.

Let us say it. In one sense, Te Water was correct: that single word “dignity” would undermine the moral legitimacy of a government that codified and implemented a comprehensive attack on the essential dignity of all human beings. From the moment that the National Party’s implementation of apartheid began, the drumbeat, the thunder, of both internal and external criticism of the South African regime began that ultimately caused it to be dismantled 45 years later.

When dignity was being debated by Te Water, Stephen Biko was just two years old. But in his short life of just 31 years, Stephen Biko would teach both his nation and the world about the resilience of dignity as the correct descriptor of what it means to be human. His martyrdom at the hands of the South African secret police in 1977 outraged the world, and began to undermine the racist superstructure that would ultimately collapse in just 17 years. Stephen Biko helped the modern world define “dignity.”

When dignity was being opposed in the drafting Commission on Human Rights in 1948, Desmond Tutu was just 17 years old. His personal experience of the fundamentally unjust and morally bankrupt system of apartheid fueled within him a passion that all the world came to know. I can testify as an avid consumer of international news all my life: you could not go 48 hours during the newscasts of the 1980s without hearing of this fearless archbishop. He gathered the international consensus against the South African government and hurled it with such moral force that the pillars that had once seemed immovable began to crack, to fracture, and to topple. Desmond Tutu helped the modern world define “dignity.”

Alan Paton, the celebrated author of Cry, the Beloved Country, was 45 when the government under which he lived stripped away the legal dignity of persons of color. Paton’s book, though a work of fiction, so aptly captured the world’s moral outrage at the disappearance of dignity that the South African government was forever deprived of the moral legitimacy with which it tried to cover its abhorrent behaviors. When I first read Cry, the Beloved Country as a 15-year old from a White family in a majority White nation, I was shaken, and then stirred, and then moved because of the clarity of Alan Paton’s moral vision. Alan Paton helped me, and he helped the modern world define the word “dignity.”

And Nelson Mandela—Madiba—Nelson Mandela was just 30 when the National Party of his homeland declared that he and all other persons of color would always be second-class citizens. Their privileges of employment, travel, residence, and citizenship would now be sublimated to a minority that built a fortified police state to enshrine its racist dogma.

Mandela would go on to become the most celebrated political prisoner of the 20^th century: for 27 years, his very presence on Robben Island, in Pollsmoor Prison, in Victor Verser Prison, would deprive the South African government of both the esteem and the resources it needed to suppress millions of its own citizens.

And when on that May morning in 1994, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the president of the country that had so viciously denied his dignity, a billion people—almost 20 percent of the world’s population—watched the event live. Surely Nelson Mandela helped the modern world define the word “dignity.”

I have focused on just one incident and just one nation’s experience with wrestling over that deceptively simple word “dignity.” But there are so many examples—so many examples and illustrations—in the last 75 years of persons who have helped the modern world invest that word “dignity” with meaning, with moral clarity, with passion, and with commitment.

You could begin with Mahatma Gandhi, whose life was tragically ended by a religious extremist in the very year that the UDHR was adopted.

You might recall the courageous work of Eleanor Roosevelt, without whom the UDHR almost certainly would never have found international support.

You could point to the human liberation movements that have transfigured the globe since 1948—the liberation of former colonies throughout Africa and Asia, both by negotiation and by the application of force.

In my own nation, you can’t tell the story of the recovery of human dignity without invoking the names of Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, and Maya Angelou.

You could point to the secular saints and martyrs who testified to human dignity in the notorious show trials of the Communist era.

You could evoke the righteous deeds of Rigoberta Menchu for indigenous people in Guatemala, and Mother Teresa among the dispossessed of Kolkata, and most recently, of Narges Mohammadi of Iran, for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran.

You shouldn’t miss persons like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel whose ferocious insistence that human beings have essential dignity ultimately toppled the totalitarian systems that deprived billions of people of the equality and dignity with which they were created.

And who can forget—who dares forget—the dignity of one lone student—standing in front of a line of military tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989—testifying that there is in the human story an essential dignity which no government, no army, no legal system, and no prison camp can ever eradicate.

Seventy-five years ago yesterday, the nations of the world came together in an unusual and even momentary consensus to affirm what they couldn’t deny: that dignity is an essential, undeniable, ineradicable component of what it means to be human.

We frequently light candles on anniversaries, both to recall those who didn’t reach this day, and in anticipation of all who will come after us. Perhaps they also will come to know some measure of freedom and dignity because of the words the world adopted three quarters of a century ago.

As we remember, we grieve for all of those who had to suffer, those who had to struggle, and all of those who died between then and now in this perpetual battle to preserve the meaning of dignity.

And we remember—we remember all of those whom the world doesn’t name—the teachers, and the clergy, and the diplomats, and the legislators, and the judges, and the citizens who day by day, vote by vote, bill by bill, judgment by judgment, classroom by classroom, and sermon by sermon build up the moral meaning of this Declaration in our hands.

This anniversary is not only ours—it is theirs: it belongs to all of them. And to all of us.

The UNequal World Conference is organized annually by Dr. Nelu Burcea, the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s representative to the United Nations, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the network of embassies and advocacy groups that work to protect religious freedoms on an international scale. More than 50 internationally-accredited scholars and leaders presented at this year’s two-day event. To learn more about the UNequal World Conference, go to https://unequal.world. To access an online copy of the new book, Shaping a World of Freedoms: 75 Years of Legacy and Impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Right, go to https://unequal.world/books. Abstracts of the 2023 Conference will be available at www.irla.org in mid-January 2024.