First Things RSS Feed - Mary Ann Glendon

The G20 Gets Religion

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 06:00:00 -0500

This month in Bali, Indonesia, the G20 Summit held its first annual Religion Forum, the “R20.” On November 2 and 3, over four hundred Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders and scholars gathered to discuss how religion can function as a source of global solutions, rather than problems, in the twenty-first century. The G20's decision to acknowledge the role of religion in geopolitical deliberations was refreshing, as international policy discussions tend to focus on how the world's religions cause division rather than on how they can contribute to healthy societies.

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Renewing Human Rights

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

When Eleanor Roosevelt and a small group of people gathered at the behest of the U.N. in early 1947 to draft the world’s first “international bill of rights,” they cannot have had very high hopes for their endeavor. The world was awash in colonial oppression, discrimination, poverty, and conflict. Though the Great Powers had just ended a war that saw unimaginable violations of human dignity, the Allies were reluctant to establish any system that threatened their national sovereignty. The idea of “human rights” barely existed in the public imagination, and had almost no role in international law; it had only recently gained currency as a phrase among scholars and policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America. The idea that some rights could be universal—applicable across all the world’s different societies—was controversial.

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Reclaim Human Rights

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Longtime readers of First Things may recall that the April 1998 issue featured a nuanced statement “ On Human Rights ” by the Ramsey Colloquium, a diverse group of Christian and Jewish scholars led by Richard John Neuhaus. The group’s aim was to provide the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) with “a more secure grounding in religious, philosophical, and moral reason” at a moment when that document was under attack from several directions. While acknowledging that rights discourse is often misused, the Ramsey group noted its roots “in our shared history” and affirmed its value as “the most available discourse for cross-cultural deliberation about the dignity of the human person.” They affirmed that it “makes possible a truly universal dialogue about our common human future.”

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The Bearable Lightness of Dignity

Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It’s hard to imagine a decent politics that doesn’t depend on the notion of the dignity of the human person. It’s unfortunately also hard to specify how to anchor that notion in something beyond our earnest moral intuitions. As the bioethicist Adam Schulman poses the question: “Is dignity a useful concept, or is it a mere slogan that camouflages unconvincing arguments and unarticulated biases?” The question has implications far beyond the field of bioethics. Indeed, it has haunted the entire modern human rights project ever since the drafters of the UN Charter chose to begin that historic document with a profession of the member nations’ “faith” in “freedom and human rights” and in “the dignity and worth of the human person.” That act of faith in the wake of a war marked by unprecedented atrocities struck political realists of the day as astonishingly naive. Nevertheless, the concept of human dignity was made central to the scores of new constitutions and rights declarations that were adopted in the late twentieth century.

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God and Mrs. Roosevelt

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In her 1958 autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt described an occasion in the early days of the U.N. Human Rights Commission when she invited three key players to her Washington Square apartment for tea. The guests that afternoon were the commission’s two leading intellectuals, Charles Malik of Lebanon and China’s Peng-chun Chang, along with John Humphrey, the Canadian director of the U.N.’s Human Rights Division.

“As we settled down over the teacups,” the former First Lady recalled, “one of them made a remark with philosophical implications, and a heated discussion ensued.”

By Roosevelt’s account, Dr. Chang was “a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality.” Malik responded to the remark by an extended reference to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The conversation became, as Roosevelt recalled, “so lofty” that she couldn’t even follow along.

“So I simply filled the teacups again,” Roosevelt wrote, “and sat back to be entertained by the talk of these learned gentlemen.”

None of the guests on that occasion would have taken this archly modest account at face value. They were already familiar with her style of chairmanship, in which she did, indeed, “sit back” and let everyone have his or her say—all the while studying how to steer the discussion toward her desired outcome.

In this way Eleanor Roosevelt herself contributed to the odd tendency of some political historians to underestimate her importance. She had been raised in an ethos where women were schooled to be self-effacing. Later, shrewd political actor that she was, she was not above feigning naivete when it suited her purposes.

Perhaps this is why, in the early 1990s, when I began researching Eleanor Roosevelt’s role as chair of the U.N.’s first Human Rights Commission, I found that key aspects of Roosevelt’s life and work had been ignored or underrated by historians and biographers. Although Roosevelt herself regarded her work on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as her single greatest public achievement, diplomatic historians and writers on foreign policy had given short shrift to her role. Even her biographers had not treated her U.N. work in any detail. In fact, most biographies left off with her departure from the White House after the death of her husband in the spring of 1945.

It also struck me as curious that most contributors to the voluminous Roosevelt literature had overlooked the connection between Eleanor Roosevelt’s achievements and the high-minded Protestant Christianity that was so much a part of her public and private persona. One notable exception was Jean Bethke Elshtain’s 1986 essay on “Eleanor Roosevelt as Activist and Thinker,” in which Elshtain pondered why that dimension of Roosevelt’s life had been so frequently ignored—and why feminist thinkers had shown little interest in the ideas of a woman who undeniably had wielded great political influence.

The truth is that few American women have been so admired at home and abroad as Eleanor Roosevelt, and few have left behind such a distinguished record of public service. Her political activities, her zeal for social reform, her empathy for the disadvantaged, her family relationships and friendships have been detailed in scores of books and articles and dramatized on stage and on film. At her death in 1962, the New York Times described her as “more involved in the minds and hearts and aspirations of people than any other First Lady in history” and as “one of the most esteemed women in the world.”

It is in that strange dichotomy—between the public, confident heroine and the shy, retiring observer—that Roosevelt reveals herself at her most mysterious, and most powerful.

Roosevelt regularly hosted small social gatherings for colleagues, believing that personal connections could help to reduce professional tensions. She had brought Chang and Malik together in the hope, as she put it, “that our work might be advanced by an informal atmosphere.”

What she did not mention in her autobiography, but what the U.N. record shows, is that bickering between Chang and Malik, who had emerged as intellectual leaders on the commission, was threatening to become a problem. In such cases it was not her style to take people to the woodshed; instead, she invited them to tea. Although the arguments between the two never completely ceased, Roosevelt did succeed in getting them to work together effectively on the all-important drafting committee.

By the time she assumed the chair of the Human Rights Commission in 1947, Roosevelt had perfected her own, very effective mode of leadership. In so doing, as Elshtain insightfully pointed out, she had subtly transformed the social definition of a lady.

“For Roosevelt,” Elshtain wrote, “being a lady and being tough was no contradiction in terms”none at all”and her explicit fusing of the two turned older understandings inside out.” Roosevelt’s close friend and biographer Joseph Lash reported that she was particularly fond of a passage from a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét in which he described the mistress of a plantation as a woman who was able

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Cicero Superstar

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

More rare than athletes who have played both baseball and football in the major leagues are individuals who have achieved great distinction in both politics and philosophy, the vocations that Aristotle deemed most choiceworthy. Marcus Tullius Cicero, however, would hold a place of honor on any list of political and philosophical superstars. If he had never risen to eminence as a Roman orator, senator, and consul, he still would be remembered for his contributions to the great Greco-Roman synthesis at the base of Western civilization. And if he had never written on philosophy, he still would be honored for his courageous efforts to preserve the rule of law in the last years of the Roman Republic.

Cicero shared Aristotle’s view that statesmanship and the pursuit of knowledge were the highest callings for those who have the talent to pursue them. But he parted company with the author of the Politics on which was the superior choice. A true Roman, he never lost his desire for public honor and never relinquished his conviction that a life of public service was “the course that has always been followed by the best men.”

No philosophical discourse is so fine, he maintained, “that it deserves to be set above the public law and customs of a well-ordered state.” Following Aristotle, he held that moral excellence is a matter of practice, but it seemed evident to him that its most important field of practice was in the government of the state. Philosophers, he said, spin theories about justice, decency, restraint, and fortitude, but statesmen are the ones who must actually set the conditions to foster the virtues that are necessary to a well-functioning polity. “There can be no doubt,” he maintained, “that the statesman’s life is more admirable and more illustrious, even though some people think that a life passed quietly in the study of the highest arts is happier.”

Cicero’s ideal statesman was the man whose actions are illuminated by philosophy, by which he meant mainly ethics and political theory. The best statesman of all, at least for Rome, would be someone steeped in the city’s history, someone who combined civilized values with “intimate knowledge of Roman institutions and traditions and the theoretical knowledge for which we are indebted to the Greeks.” In other words, someone like Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Although philosophy, as he told his son, was “indispensable to everyone who proposes to have a good career,” it was always, for Cicero, a handmaiden to politics. Even philosophers, he said, have an obligation to concern themselves with public affairs, not only out of civic duty, but also for the sake of philosophy itself, which requires certain conditions to flourish.

In times when he was excluded from political life or overcome with personal sorrow, Cicero plunged into his philosophical studies with prodigious energy. On those occasions, he could not help casting a glance down the path not taken. “Now that power has passed to three uncontrolled individuals,” he wrote to his friend Atticus during the Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, “I am eager to devote all my attention to philosophy. I only wish I had done it from the outset.” And in his dialogue De Republica , the main protagonist muses, “Of what value, pray, is your human glory, which can barely last for a tiny part of a single year? If you wish to look higher . . . you will not put yourself at the mercy of the masses’ gossip nor measure your long-term destiny by the rewards you get from men. Goodness herself must draw you on by her own enticements to true glory . . . . In no case does a person’s reputation last for ever; it fades with the death of the speakers, and vanishes as posterity forgets.”

For an ambitious young man whose birth did not guarantee him entry into the circles of power, and who was not inclined toward a military career, the path to eminence lay through law and oratory. And the law courts were a proving ground. Cicero was the precocious firstborn son of a prosperous landowner in the country town of Arpinum, some seventy miles southeast of Rome. The family belonged to the class of equites , well-to-do farmers and merchants who increasingly aspired to political influence in the capital. According to Plutarch, young Marcus Tullius acquired a reputation for cleverness as soon as he began to have lessons”so much so that the fathers of other boys visited the school to hear him recite. When he was old enough to pursue higher studies, his father had sufficient wealth and connections to place the gifted boy with the best teachers in Rome.

There Cicero studied rhetoric, philosophy, and law. Rome was a bustling city of about four hundred thousand inhabitants and was full of distractions for a young man. But Cicero’s poor digestion discouraged excesses of food and drink, and, although he exercised for the sake of his health, he took no interest in games and sports. As for the company of courtesans, he wrote to a friend in later years that, “as you know, even in my youth, I was not attracted by this sort of thing.” What did excite his imagination was the idea of a life filled with honors. He took his motto from a line in the Iliad in which Glaucus recalls his father’s urging, “Always to be the best and far to excel all others.” By all accounts, however, young Cicero could not be called a nerd. He had a gift for friendship and was, according to Plutarch, “by natural temper very much disposed to mirth and pleasantry.”

Like many a law student today, he complained about the long hours he had to spend on material that often was less than interesting. What he preferred was visiting the law courts, where crowds flocked to see performances by the great orators of the day. He embarked on his own career as a lawyer in his mid-twenties. He enjoyed considerable success despite severe attacks of stage fright and a pedantic tendency that earned him the nicknames of “the Greek” and “the scholar.” Around this time”the date is uncertain”he married Terentia, a wealthy Roman woman whose dowry and family connections greatly aided his efforts to break into politics. Just when he seemed well advanced on his chosen path, however, his health broke down under the stress he had imposed on himself. As he later recounted:

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The Greatest Grassroots Movement of Our Times

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:46:00 -0400

When I received a letter from Dr. Wanda Franz telling me about the “Proudly Pro-Life Award,” I was, quite simply, overcome with emotion. There is no honor or award that could mean more to me than one from my fellow members of what my friend the late Richard John Neuhaus always called “the greatest grassroots movement of our times.” At the same time, I can’t help but be humbled at the thought of the great men and women to whom you have given this honor in the past.

And so I know you will understand when I say that I would like to accept this award not just for whatever I have been able to contribute to our common cause, but in memory of the many persons who have sustained me on what would otherwise have been at times a lonely journey.

Evenings like tonight evoke so many memories”of friends here and departed, of struggles won and lost. Evenings like this remind us that we are blessed to be surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses.”

After more than three decades of involvement in pro-life activities, I wish I could say that I thought the threats to respect for human life were diminishing. But one lesson we’ve learned is: Do not underestimate the power of the culture of death. We’ve learned that what was unimaginable one day can become reality the next. Today, pressures for euthanasia are building; developments in biomedicine are occurring with such speed that they have outpaced reflection on their moral implications; experiments on human embryos are fostering a mentality that treats the lives of the weak as means to the ends of the strong; and the freedoms of religion and conscience are coming under increasing threat.

Thirty years ago, who could have imagined such a thing as partial-birth abortion! When I ask myself why so many people have been slow to realize how easily today’s atrocity can become tomorrow’s routine, one answer I come up with is that it was due in part to a failure to realize something very important about choice, namely that choices last.

Each time we make policy on abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic experimentation, we are changing the moral ecology of our country. We are either helping to build the culture of life or cooperating with the culture of death. It hasn’t helped that the elite media, the powerful foundations, the sex industry, and the vast profit-making abortion industry have done their best to disguise the truth of what was happening.

But what makes the pro-life movement “the greatest grassroots movement of our times” is that it has steadily marched forward without support from the wealthy and powerful. It has moved ahead thanks to dedicated women and men”from all walks of life”who have never ceased to witness to the truth, day in and day out.

The recent Pew Foundation report that support for abortion is declining is one of many signs that our efforts are bearing fruit. We are winning the battle for hearts and minds”not as quickly as we would have wished”but we are winning. We will never give up, and we will prevail.

One of the main reasons for our slow but steady progress, I believe, is the success of the pro-life movement in demonstrating by word and deed that our position on protection of the unborn is inseparable from our dedication to compassion and assistance for women who are so often the second victims of abortion.

Unlike the movement that calls itself pro-choice, the prolife movement has thought deeply about choice. We know that choices last: We know that individual choices make us into a certain of person; and we know that collective choices make us into a certain kind of society.

Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University, delivered this address upon receiving the 2009 Proudly Pro-Life Award from the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund on October 6, 2009 in New York.

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Declining Notre Dame: A Letter from Mary Ann Glendon

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:32:44 -0400

April 27, 2009
The Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
President
University of Notre Dame

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Declining Notre Dame: A Letter from Mary Ann Glendon

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

April 27, 2009

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Plato as Statesman

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As Max Weber observed in Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation— and as borne out by his own unsuccessful forays into political life—the qualities that make a first-rate political or social theorist are not the same as those required for success as a statesman. For every Cicero or Edmund Burke, there are many more like Weber, Tocqueville, and Plato, whose longings for influence in public affairs were largely unfulfilled.

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