'Hijacking human rights': What stands in the way of a better world
'None of us, no matter how accomplished, is on top of the world,' Akhavan warns in final lecture
CBC Massey Lecture 5: The Spirit of Human Rights
After watching world leaders, bigwig CEOs and pop stars schmooze over drinks at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Payam Akhavan wondered just how these elites were actually "improving the state of the world."
After all, that's the motto he saw emblazoned on a banner at the forum.
- Listen to the first lecture about Akhavan's exile from Iran, the second lecture about his work in Bosnia, the third lecture on the Rwandan genocide and the fourth lecture about 9/11's impact
Instead, in a star-studded sea of personalities, Akhavan found "a decided lack of humility."
"The idea that was absent at Davos was how the rich and famous could help change the same neo-liberal order that had allowed them to amass obscene fortunes to the exclusion of the 99 per cent," Akhavan said, who is this year's Massey lecturer.
He goes on to argue that the rich and famous are "hijacking human rights for their own purposes."
"While self-righteous elites point accusatory fingers from thirty thousand feet, the extremists have tapped into public rage and alienation with considerable success."
Akhavan, a human rights lawyer and McGill professor, saw those qualities in Ahmed Qasim al-Khateb, a young suicide bomber whom he met in an Iraqi prison.
"He spoke with unwavering confidence about his sacred mission," said Akhavan, who was in Iraq to examine ISIS atrocities and try to find ways to bring about justice.
"A train-wreck of shame, humiliation and trauma, Ahmed had nothing to lose. In joining ISIS, he had suddenly found an identity, an illusion of power." But he also revealed to Akhavan that he missed his mother and wanted to go to school.
It's a problem in Canada, too
It's just one of the examples of the collapse of "basic human dignity" that Akhavan gives in his final lecture, recorded last month in Toronto.
And we're not immune.
Akhavan concludes the series by bringing up the plight of Canada's Indigenous people. As an immigrant to Canada, he pictured the country as a "human rights paradise." Discovering our troubled Indigenous history made him rethink that.
"If we want to move beyond feel-good platitudes, if we want something better than cynical despair, we need a brutally honest conversation about the greed, hypocrisy, corruption and arrogance that has brought us to this difficult place," he said.
"None of us, no matter how accomplished, is on top of the world; we are all a part of it, every single one of us."
Key quotes in Akhavan's fifth and final lecture
- "It seemed utterly foolish for people to think that somehow the unholy trinity of the mega-rich, political opportunists, and fashionable entertainers would do the right thing; that they would act with selflessness to achieve meaningful change. Compassion kitsch by the one per cent was surely not the way to build a better world."
- "Just as we worship the secular sacred, just as we celebrate our inherent dignity, we also indulge in the crass materialism and self-absorption of our consumerist culture. The glorification of greed breeds apathy to the suffering of others; it breeds both cultural and structural violence. It is fundamentally incompatible with the spiritual reality that the depths of our humanity can only be discovered through altruism. The light of our soul is best mirrored in how we help the suffering, not in how much we consume."
Payam Akhavan's CBC Massey Lectures will be rebroadcast August 2018.
- August 1: Lecture 1 - The Knowledge of Suffering (recorded in Whitehorse)
- August 8: Lecture 2 - In Pursuit of Global Justice (recorded in Vancouver)
- August 15: Lecture 3 - The Will to Intervene (recorded in Montreal)
- August 22: Lecture 4 - The Oneness of Humankind (recorded in St. John's)
- August 29: Lecture 5 - The Spirit of Human Rights (recorded in Toronto)
|The lectures are also published in book form by House of Anansi.