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| A guest professor at universities in Norway, France, the United States, Japan, Israel, Australia, and Costa Rica, Evelin Lindner holds dual doctorates in social medicine and social psychology. She has traveled to Rwanda, Somalia, Israel, and Palestine to learn more about conflict and reconciliation. This interview was conducted by telephone about a month after her program for SIETAR. |
A contemporary definition of humiliation is based on the human rights ideal of equal dignity for all. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, states, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." In this context, humiliation is the enforced lowering of any person or group by a subjugation process damaging their dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed in a situation where your expectations to be respected as equal in dignity are thwarted. . . . Ranking people into higher and lesser beings is obsolete and represents humiliation. In Japan – as elsewhere – this idea represents a new moral framework. Until recently (and in many regions still today) it was regarded as natural or divinely ordained that some people were born as lesser beings. Women, for example, were often defined this way. Today, women who are treated as lesser beings feel humiliated. Ethnic minorities, like the Ainu in Japan, are often humiliated. Today we find the old order lingering and often colliding with the new order.
Ohta Kyoji, Chief Curator of the Osaka Human Rights Museum in Japan, highlighted how the idea of impurity and pollution is often linked to discrimination (personal communication, 7th February 2005). In many parts of the world, people doing "cleaning" work (even so-called "spiritual cleaning"), are perceived as being "polluted" by the "dirt" they handle and are thus excluded from society. In old times this was accepted. However, from a human rights perspective such practices are unacceptable.
The human rights movement has given people a chance to express feelings of humiliation that weren't present before and redefines all relationships, both macro and micro, as part of a large, transformational process. Switching from normative frameworks that condone ranking to a new framework which makes ranking illegitimate is like switching from right-hand driving to left-hand driving. The two strategies cannot coexist without lots of accidents and confusion. However, this is precisely the current situation in the world: we aren't managing the human rights transition well. . . . Only by understanding the nature of the transformation better, carrying it out more efficiently, and organizing ourselves in ways that actualize human rights more can we ameliorate this.
Basically, there are two ways out of feelings of humiliation. One way is the Hitler way out of it. Another way is the Mandela way out of it. There is no automaticity that humiliation leads to violence or extremism.