I am constantly questioning and assessing the role of human rights discourse, particularly in the legal field, and whether it can really make a difference to people on the ground. I think it's important that I remain acutely aware of the discord that can emerge between legal cases and people's actual lives.
I am attempting to think of ways to approach my desire to improve human relations and to reduce suffering that will really have an impact on individuals. With my literature background, I am looking at the creative projects used to promote human rights...
Today I have been reading Richard Rorty who writes:
"In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen...as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves... ....This process...is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for [other] genres..., especially, the novel. Fiction...gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended....gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have...replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress."
I have put more of Rorty's work on the bottom RHS of this blog, under 'quotations from books/articles I'm currently reading.'
I am attempting to think of ways to approach my desire to improve human relations and to reduce suffering that will really have an impact on individuals. With my literature background, I am looking at the creative projects used to promote human rights...
Today I have been reading Richard Rorty who writes:
"In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen...as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves... ....This process...is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for [other] genres..., especially, the novel. Fiction...gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended....gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have...replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress."
I have put more of Rorty's work on the bottom RHS of this blog, under 'quotations from books/articles I'm currently reading.'
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