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Title: What We Know
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: June 1, 2005
Language: en
Topics: language, human rights
Source: Retrieved on 11th September 2021 from https://bostonreview.net/chomsky-what-we-know

Noam Chomsky

What We Know

Thirty-five years ago I agreed, in a weak moment, to give a talk with

the title “Language and Freedom.” When the time came to think about it,

I realized that I might have something to say about language and about

freedom, but the word “and” was posing a serious problem. There is a

possible strand that connects language and freedom, and there is an

interesting history of speculation about it, but in substance it is

pretty thin. The same problem extends to my topic here, “universality in

language and human rights.” There are useful things to say about

universality in language and about universality in human rights, but

that troublesome connective raises difficulties.

The only way to proceed, as far as I can see, is to say a few words

about universality in language, and in human rights, with barely a hint

about the possible connections, a problem still very much on the horizon

of inquiry.

To begin with, what about universality in language? The most productive

way to approach the problem, I think, is within the framework of what

has been called “the biolinguistic perspective,” an approach to language

that treats the capacity to acquire and use language as an aspect of

human biology. This approach began to take shape in the early 1950s,

much influenced by recent developments in mathematics and biology, and

interacted productively with a more general shift of perspective in the

study of mental faculties, commonly called “the cognitive revolution.”

It would be more accurate, I think, to describe it as a second cognitive

revolution, reviving and extending important insights and contributions

of the cognitive revolution of the 17^(th) and 18^(th) centuries, which

had regrettably been forgotten, and—despite some interesting historical

research on rationalist and Romantic theories of language and mind—are

still little known.

In the 1950s, the study of language and mind was commonly considered

part of the behavioral sciences. As the term indicates, the object of

inquiry was taken to be behavior, and in linguistics, also its products:

texts, perhaps a corpus elicited from native informants. Linguistic

theory consisted of procedures of analysis, primarily segmentation and

classification, guided by limited assumptions about structural

properties and their arrangement. The prominent American theoretician

Martin Joos hardly exaggerated in a 1955 exposition when he identified

the “decisive direction” for the study of language as the decision that

language can be “described without any preexistent scheme of what a

language must be.” Prevailing approaches in the behavioral sciences were

generally similar. No one, of course, literally believed in the

incoherent notion of a “blank slate.” But it was common to suppose that

apart from some initial delimitation of elementary properties detected

in the environment (a “quality space,” in W.V. Quine’s highly

influential framework, which assumed an innate human ability to detect

colors, say, and order them as more or less similar), undifferentiated

learning mechanisms of some kind account for what organisms know and do,

humans included.

The biolinguistic approach took as its object of inquiry not behavior

and its products but rather the internal cognitive systems, including

computational mechanisms, that enter into action and interpretation—and,

at a deeper level, the basis in our biological nature for the growth and

development of these internal systems. The goal was to discover what

Juan Huarte, in the 16^(th) century, described as the essential property

of human intelligence: the capacity of the human mind to “engender

within itself, by its own power, the principles on which knowledge

rests”—ideas that were developed in important ways in the years that

followed.

For language, “the principles on which knowledge rests” are those of the

attained state of the language faculty, an internalized language

distinct from the culturally specific symbolic systems (English,

Spanish, Guarani) to which the term “language” is applied in informal

usage. The knowledge that rests on these internal principles covers a

wide range, from sound to structure to meaning. In even the most

elementary cases, what is known is quite intricate. To take a word that

interested British empiricists, consider the word river, a “common

notion,” in 17^(th)-century terms, part of our innate knowledge. Thomas

Hobbes suggested that rivers are mentally individuated by place of

origin. But while there is some truth to the observation, it is not

fully accurate and only scratches the surface of our intuitive

understanding of the concept. Thus, the Charles River would remain very

same river under quite extreme changes, and would not be a river at all

under very slight changes. It would remain the Charles River if its

course were reversed (as Stalin planned to do with the Volga), if it

were divided into separate streams that converged in some new place, if

any H20 that happened to be in it were replaced by chemicals from an

upstream manufacturing plant. On the other hand, it would no longer be a

river at all if it were directed between fixed boundaries and used for

shipping freight (in which case it would be a canal, not a river) or if

its surface were hardened by some near-undetectable physical change, a

line were painted down the middle, and it came to be used for driving to

Boston (in which case it would be a highway).

As we proceed, we find much more intricate properties, varying in

complex ways with mentally constructed circumstances, no matter how

simple the words we investigate. Such commonplace facts undermine an

approach to reference—more accurately, the act of referring, using words

to talk about things and events in the world—that is based on some

mystical and fixed word-object relation. Insights about these matters

were developed from Aristotle through British empiricism, but most have

been lost. Even the most elementary human concepts appear to be entirely

different from anything found in animal symbolic or communicative

behavior, a significant problem for evolutionary theory, one of several.

Problems mount very rapidly when we move from words to expressions

formed from them. What human beings know is remarkably intricate and

subtle.

One essential task of inquiry is to determine the principles on which

such knowledge rests for the widest variety of possible human languages.

A deeper problem is to discover what Huarte called “the power to

engender” these principles of internal language: in current terms, the

virtually uniform biological endowment that constitutes the human

language faculty and enables the acquisition of the range of internal

languages. The power to engender an internal language is the topic of

“universal grammar,” adapting a traditional term to a new context. The

universal properties of language captured by universal grammar

constitute, in effect, the genetic component of the language faculty.

A significant insight of the first cognitive revolution was that

properties of the world that are informally called mental may involve

unbounded capacities of a finite organ, the “infinite use of finite

means,” in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s phrase. In a rather similar vein, Hume

had recognized that our moral judgments are unbounded in scope, and must

be founded on general principles that are part of our nature though they

are beyond our “original instincts.” That observation poses Huarte’s

problem in a different domain, where we might find part of the thin

thread that links the search for cognitive and moral universals.

By mid-20^(th) century, it had become possible to face such problems in

more substantive ways than before. By then, there was a clear

understanding, from the study of recursive functions, of finite

generative systems with unbounded scope—which could be readily adapted

to the reframing and investigation of some of the traditional questions

that had necessarily been left obscure—though only some, it is important

to stress. Humboldt referred to the infinite use of language, quite a

different matter from the unbounded scope of the finite means that

characterizes language, where a finite set of elements yields a

potentially infinite array of discrete expressions: discrete, because

there are six-word sentences and seven-word sentences, but no 6.2 word

sentences; infinite because there is no longest sentence (append “I

think that” to the start of any sentence). Another influential factor in

the renewal of the cognitive revolution was the work of ethologists,

then just coming to be more widely known, with their concern for “the

innate working hypotheses present in subhuman organisms” (Nikolaas

Tinbergen) and the “human a priori” (Konrad Lorenz), which should have

much the same character. That framework too could be adapted to the

study of human cognitive organs (for example, the language faculty) and

their genetically determined nature, which constructs experience and

guides the general path of development, as in other aspects of growth of

organisms, including the human visual, circulatory, and digestive

systems, among others.

Meanwhile, efforts to sharpen and refine the procedural approaches of

structural linguistics ran into serious difficulties, revealing what

appear to be intrinsic inadequacies in their capacity to account for the

scope of human language, and the complex and subtle knowledge of

speakers. It became increasingly clear that even the simplest elements

of language—and surely more complex ones—do not have the

“beads-on-a-string” property that is required for approaches based on

segmentation and classification. Rather, they relate much more

indirectly to phonetic form. Their nature and properties are fixed

within the internal language, the computational system that determines

the unbounded range of expressions. These expressions, in turn, can be

regarded as “instructions” to other systems that are used for mental

operations, as well as for the production and interpretation of external

signals. In the behavioral sciences more generally, closer study of the

postulated mechanisms of learning also revealed fundamental

inadequacies, and soon questions were arising within the disciplines

about whether even their core concepts could be sustained.

The natural conclusion seemed to be that the internal language attained

by a competent speaker—the integrated system of rules and principles

from which the expressions of the language can be derived—has roughly

the character of a scientific theory. The child must somehow select the

internal language from the flux of experience. The problem is similar to

what Charles Sanders Peirce, in his inquiries into the nature of

scientific discovery, had called abduction. And as in the case of the

sciences, the task is impossible without what Peirce called a “limit on

admissible hypotheses” that permits only certain theories to be

entertained, but not infinitely many others compatible with relevant

data. In the language case, it appeared that universal grammar must

impose a format for rule systems that is sufficiently restrictive so

that candidate languages considered and tested against the linguistic

data available to the child are “scattered,” and only a small number can

even be considered in the course of language acquisition. It follows

that the format must be highly articulated, and specific to language.

The most challenging theoretical problem in linguistics was that of

discovering the principles of universal grammar, which determine the

choice of hypotheses, the accessible internal languages.

At the same time, it was also recognized that for language, as for other

biological organs, a still more challenging problem lies on the horizon:

to discover the laws that determine possible successful mutation and the

nature of complex organisms. Investigation of such factors seemed too

remote to merit much attention, though even some of the earliest work

was implicitly guided by such concerns, which bear quite directly on

universality in language: insofar as these factors enter into growth and

development, less is attributed to universal grammar as a

language-specific property—and, incidentally, the study of evolution of

language becomes more feasible, for obvious reasons.

By the early 1980s, a substantial shift of perspective within

linguistics reframed the basic questions considerably, abandoning

entirely the format conception of linguistic theory in favor of an

approach that sought to limit attainable internal languages to a finite

set, aside from lexical choices. As a research program, this shift has

been highly successful, yielding an explosion of empirical inquiry into

a wide range of typologically varied languages, posing new theoretical

questions that could scarcely have been formulated before, often

providing at least partial answers as well, while also revitalizing

related areas of language acquisition and processing. Another

consequence was that the shift of perspective removed some basic

conceptual barriers to the serious inquiry into deeper principles in

growth and development of language. In this revised “principles and

parameters” conception, language acquisition is dissociated from the

fixed principles of universal grammar, and does not compel the

conclusion that the format provided by the innate language faculty must

be highly articulated and specific to it, so as to restrict the space of

admissible hypotheses. That opens new paths to studying universality in

language.

It had been recognized from the origins of modern biology that general

aspects of structure and development constrain the growth of organisms

and their evolution. By now such constraints have been adduced for a

wide range of problems of development and evolution, from cell division

to optimization of structure and function of cortical networks.

Assuming that language has the same general properties of other

biological systems, we should, therefore, be seeking three factors that

shape the growth of language in the individual:

Genetic factors, the topic of universal grammar. These interpret part

of the environment as linguistic experience and determine the general

course of development to the languages attained.

Experience, which permits variation within a fairly narrow range.

Principles not specific to the faculty of language, including

principles of efficient computation, which would be expected to be of

particular significance for systems such as language, determining the

general character of attainable languages.

At this point we have to move on to more technical discussion than is

possible here, but I think it is fair to say that in recent years there

has been considerable progress in moving toward principled explanation

in terms of third-factor considerations, considerably sharpening the

question of the specific properties that determine the nature of

language—in one form or another, the core problem of the study of

language since its origins millennia ago, and now taking quite new

forms.

With each step toward principled explanation in these terms, we gain a

clearer grasp of the universals of language. It should be kept in mind,

however, that any such progress still leaves unresolved problems that

have been raised for hundreds of years. Among these are the mysterious

problems of the creative and coherent ordinary use of language, a core

problem of Cartesian science.

We are now moving to domains of will and choice and judgment, and the

thin strands that may connect what seems within the range of scientific

inquiry to essential problems of human life, in particular vexed

questions about universal human rights. One possible way to draw

connections is by proceeding along the lines of Hume’s remarks that I

mentioned earlier: his observation that the unbounded range of moral

judgments—like the unbounded range of linguistic knowledge—must be

founded on general principles that are part of our nature though they

lie beyond our “original instincts,” which elsewhere he took to include

the “species of natural instincts” on which knowledge and belief are

grounded.

In recent years, there has been intriguing work in moral philosophy and

experimental cognitive science that carries these ideas forward,

investigating what seem to be deep-seated moral intuitions that often

have a very surprising character, in invented cases, and that suggest

the operation of internal principles well beyond anything that could be

explained by training and conditioning. To illustrate, I will take a

real example that carries us directly to the issue of universality of

human rights.

In 1991, the chief economist of the World Bank wrote an internal memo on

pollution, in which he demonstrated that the bank should be encouraging

migration of polluting industries to the poorest countries. The reason

is that “measurement of the costs of health impairing pollution depends

on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality,” so it

is rational for “health impairing pollution” to be sent to the poorest

countries, where mortality is higher and wages are lowest. Other factors

lead to the same conclusion, for example, the fact that “aesthetic

pollution concerns” are more “welfare enhancing” among the rich. He

pointed out, accurately, that the logic of his memo is “impeccable,” and

any “moral reasons” or “social concerns” that might be adduced “could be

turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank

proposal for liberalization,” so they presumably cannot be relevant.

The memo was leaked and elicited a storm of protest, typified by the

reaction of Brazil’s secretary of the environment, who wrote him a

letter saying that “your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally

insane.” The secretary was fired, while the author of the memo became

treasury secretary under President Clinton and is now the president of

Harvard University.

The reaction led to evasions and denials that we can ignore. What is

relevant here is the virtual unanimity of the moral judgment that the

reasoning is insane, even if logical. That merits a closer look, now

turning to the modern history of human-rights doctrines.

The standard codification of human rights in the modern period is the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), adopted in December 1948 by

almost all nations, at least in principle. The UD reflected a very broad

crosscultural consensus. All of its components were given equal status,

including “anti-torture rights,” socioeconomic rights, and others, such

as those enumerated in Article 25:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health

and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,

housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to

security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood,

old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

These provisions have been reaffirmed in enabling conventions of the UN

General Assembly and international agreements on the right to

development, in almost the same words.

It seems reasonably clear that this formulation of universal human

rights rejects the impeccable logic of the chief economist of the World

Bank, if not as insane then at least as profoundly immoral—which was, in

fact, the virtually universal judgment, at least as far as it was

publicly expressed.

The word “virtually” must not be overlooked. As is well known, Western

culture condemns some nations as “relativists,” who interpret the UD

selectively, rejecting components they do not like. There has been great

indignation about “Asian relativists,” or the unspeakable communists,

who descend to this degraded practice. Less noticed is that one of the

leaders of the relativist camp is also the leader of the self-designated

“enlightened states,” the world’s most powerful state. We see examples

almost daily, though “see” is perhaps the wrong word, since we see them

without noticing them.

To illustrate, let’s go back to March 1. There were lead stories in the

press about the release of the State Department’s annual report on human

rights around the world. The spokesperson at the news conference was

Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for global affairs. She

affirmed that “promoting human rights is not just an element of our

foreign policy; it is the bedrock of our policy and our foremost

concern.” But there is a bit more to the story. Dobriansky was the

deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian

affairs in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and

in that capacity she sought to dispel what she called “myths” about

human rights, the most salient being the myth that so-called “‘economic

and social rights’ constitute human rights.” She denounced the efforts

to obfuscate human-rights discourse by introducing these spurious

rights—which are entrenched in the UD and formulated through U.S.

initiative, but which the U.S. government explicitly rejects, and

increasingly the entire West rejects, within the framework of the

neoliberal doctrines on which the chief economist of the World Bank was

relying.

I should stress that it is the U.S. government that rejects these

provisions of the UD. The population strongly disagrees. One current

illustration is the federal budget that was recently announced, along

with a study of public reactions to it carried out by the world’s most

prestigious institution for study of public opinion. The public calls

for sharp cuts in military spending along with sharply increased social

spending: education, medical research, job training, conservation and

renewable energy, as well as increased spending for the UN and economic

and humanitarian aid, and the reversal of President Bush’s tax cuts for

the wealthy. Government policy is dramatically the opposite in every

respect. Studies of public opinion, which regularly demonstrate this

sharp divide, are rarely even reported, so the public is not only

removed from the arena of policy formation, but is also kept unaware of

public opinion.

There is much international concern about the “twin deficits” of the

United States, the trade and budget deficits. Closely related is a third

deficit: the growing democratic deficit, not just in the United States

but in the West generally. It is little discussed because it is welcomed

by wealth and power, which have every reason to want the public largely

removed from policy choices and implementation, a matter that should be

of considerable concern, quite apart from its relation to the

universality of human rights.

It is unfair to focus on Dobriansky. Her position is standard. UN

Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick described the socioeconomic provisions of

the UD as “a letter to Santa Claus ... Neither nature, experience, nor

probability informs these lists of ‘entitlements,’ which are subject to

no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.”

Essentially the same view was expressed in 1990 by the U.S.

representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Ambassador Morris

Abram, explaining Washington’s unilateral veto of the UN resolution on

the “right to development,” which virtually repeated the socioeconomic

provisions of the UD. These are not rights, Abram informed the

Commission. They yield conclusions that “seem preposterous.” Such ideas

are “little more than an empty vessel into which vague hopes and

inchoate expectations can be poured,” and even a “dangerous incitement.”

The fundamental error of the alleged “right to development” is that it

presupposes that Article 25 of the UD actually means what it clearly

says, and is not a mere “letter to Santa Claus.”

Recently, Condoleezza Rice praised Jeane Kirkpatrick as an exemplary

model when she announced the appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to

the United Nations. Bolton has been clear and forthright in expressing

his attitude toward the United Nations: “There is no United Nations,” he

said. “When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow.

When it suits our interests to do so, we will do so. When it does not

suit our interests, we will not.” That position is at the extreme of a

rather narrow elite consensus, which is opposed by the overwhelming

majority of the public. Public support for the UN is so strong that a

majority even thinks that the United States should give up the Security

Council veto and accept majority decisions. But again, the democratic

deficit prevails.

The principle of universality arises in other connections too. One

instructive example occupied the World Court for several years. After

the 1999 bombing of Serbia, a group of international lawyers presented

the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia with

charges against NATO, relying on documentation by the major human-rights

organizations and admissions by the NATO command. The prosecutors

refused to consider the matter, in violation of tribunal rules, stating

that they relied on NATO’s good faith. Yugoslavia then took the matter

to the World Court. The United States alone withdrew from the

proceedings. The reason was that Yugoslavia had invoked the Genocide

Convention, which the United States had signed after 40 years, but with

a reservation that it does not apply to the United States. Apparently,

Washington retains the unilateral right to carry out genocide. The

court, correctly, agreed with this argument, and the United States was

excused.

That has happened before, in ways that are highly relevant today. John

Negroponte was recently appointed as the first director of intelligence.

Like Bolton, he has credentials for the position. In the 1980s, during

the first reign of the current incumbents in Washington or their

mentors, he was ambassador to Honduras, where he presided over the

world’s largest CIA station, not because Honduras is so important on the

world stage, but because he was supervising the camps in which the

American-run terror army was trained and armed for the war against

Nicaragua—which was no small matter. If Nicaragua had adopted our norms,

it would have responded by terror attacks within the United States, in

self-defense; in this case, authentic self-defense. Instead, Nicaragua

pursued the peaceful means required by international law. It brought the

U.S. attack to the World Court. Nicaragua’s case was presented by the

Harvard law professor Abram Chayes. The court bent over backward to

accommodate Washington, even though it refused to appear. The court

eliminated a large part of the case that Chayes presented, because when

the United States had accepted World Court jurisdiction in 1946, it

entered a reservation excluding the United States from multilateral

treaties, notably the UN Charter, which bans the unauthorized use of

force as criminal—the “supreme international crime,” in the words of the

Nuremberg Tribunal.

The Court therefore kept to bilateral United States–Nicaragua treaties

and customary international law, but even on those narrow grounds it

charged Washington with “unlawful use of force” (in lay terms,

international terrorism), and ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay

substantial reparations, which would go far beyond overcoming the debts

that are strangling the country, accrued during the American war. The

Security Council affirmed the court’s judgment in two resolutions vetoed

by the United States, which immediately escalated the attack, leaving

the country utterly wrecked, with a death toll that in per capita terms

would be 2.5 million if it had happened in the United States, more than

all American deaths in all wars in its history. The country has so

declined that 60 percent of children under age two are suffering from

severe malnutrition, with probable brain damage. All of this is deep in

the memory hole in the elite intellectual culture. So deep that we can

read editorials the last few days puzzling about “anti-American

attitudes” in Nicaragua after the “failed revolution.”

There are several relevant conclusions to be drawn from this case. One

is that it is another illustration of Washington’s self-exemption from

international law, including humanitarian law based on universal

principles of human rights, one with very grim human consequences. The

example also reveals again the self-exemption of the elite intellectual

culture from responsibility for our crimes, a conclusion reinforced by

the reaction to the fact that Washington has just appointed to the post

of the world’s leading anti-terrorism czar a person who qualifies rather

well as a condemned international terrorist for his critical role in

major atrocities. Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or weep.

The United States has refused to ratify most of the enabling conventions

that were passed by the General Assembly to implement the UD. More

accurately, it has accepted none of them, to my knowledge, because the

few cases of ratification are accompanied by reservations that exclude

the United States. That includes the anti-torture conventions that have

stirred up a good deal of recent debate. There was an important article

on the matter in the journal of the American Academy of Arts and

Sciences by the distinguished constitutional law specialist Sanford

Levinson. Joining most others, he condemned the Bush administration’s

Justice Department, including the recently appointed attorney general,

for having articulated “a view of presidential authority that is all too

close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own

Führer”—referring to Carl Schmitt, the leading German philosopher of law

during the Nazi period, whom Levinson describes as “the true éminence

grise of the [Bush] administration.” Levinson nevertheless offers some

defense of the Justice Department’s authorization of torture. He points

out that when the Senate ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and

Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, it “offered

what one might call a more ‘interrogator-friendly’ definition of torture

than that adopted by the UN negotiators.” And the unilateral American

definition does go some way toward permitting the practices that have

recently enraged the world, and much commentary here.

It is depressingly easy to continue, but I will end with one last

observation about the current scene. A few months ago I took part in a

meeting at Hope Church in downtown Boston called by CRISPAZ,

commemorating the 25^(th) anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop

Oscar Romero of El Salvador, a “voice for the voiceless,” murdered by

security forces backed by the United States. Romero was assassinated

while performing mass, shortly after sending President Carter an

eloquent letter pleading with him not to send aid to the brutal military

junta in El Salvador, which “will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and

the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has

often been for respect for their most basic human rights.” State terror

increased, with constant and decisive American support. The hideous

decade ended with the murder of six leading Latin American

intellectuals, who were also Jesuit priests, by an elite battalion armed

and trained by the United States that had already compiled a shocking

record of atrocities, targeting mostly the usual victims: peasants,

working people, priests and lay workers, anyone connected even loosely

to “the people’s organizations fighting to defend their most fundamental

human rights.”

CRISPAZ was one of the mostly church-based organizations formed after

the Romero assassination to support those fighting to defend their most

fundamental human rights. Their actions broke entirely new paths in many

centuries of Western violence: by living with the victims, helping them,

hoping that a white face might protect them from the wrath of the

American-backed state terrorist forces.

I had the privilege of sharing the platform with Mirna Perla, a

Salvadoran supreme-court justice who is also the widow of Herbert

Anaya—once the leading human rights activist in El Salvador—and who is

attempting to continue his work under terrible conditions. Anaya was

imprisoned and tortured by the American-imposed government, then

assassinated by the same hands that murdered the archbishop and the

leading Jesuit intellectuals, along with tens of thousands of the usual

victims.

In a society that valued its freedom, it would be unnecessary to recount

any of this, because it would be taught in the schools and well known to

everyone, and we would be commemorating the 25^(th) anniversary of the

assassination of archbishop, and the 15^(th) anniversary of the

assassination of the Jesuit intellectuals, who were also “voices for the

voiceless.” And we would be reacting the same way to the continuing

atrocities by military forces armed and trained by Washington—for

example, in Colombia, for many years the leading human-rights violator

in the hemisphere and through those years the leading recipient of U.S.

military aid and training, a more general correlation well established

in scholarship. Last year, Colombia apparently maintained its record of

killing more labor activists than rest of world combined. A few months

ago, the military reportedly broke into the most important of the towns

that had declared themselves zones of peace and murdered one of its

founders and others, including young children—I happened to have met

this leader not long ago, on a visit arranged by Father Javier Giraldo,

the courageous priest who heads the church-based Justice and Peace

Center, himself targeted for assassination and withdrawn from the

country by the Jesuit order,though he insisted on returning to his

human-rights work.

Again, all of this would should be too familiar even to mention. But

little is known outside the circles of people like CRISPAZ, who are

authentically devoted to defending universal human rights.

I mention these few examples so that we remember that we are not merely

engaged in seminars on abstract principles, or discussing remote

cultures that we do not comprehend. We are speaking of ourselves and the

moral and intellectual values of the communities in which we live. And

if we do not like what we see when we look into the mirror, we have

ample opportunity to do something about it.