Page - 44 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:1

44 | www.limina-graz.eu were pressed by socialist nations as prior to any concern for political rights. The second of these was cultural rights (the right of indigenous peoples to cultural integrity), pressed by minority groups in decolonized nations. These two “generations” of rights did not gain universal approval in the United Nations Assembly. Particularly economic rights came to be champi- oned by poor countries outside the Western ambit. One of the things that these debates about human rights reveal is that there was no shared vision of humanity from which instantiations of criteria could be deduced. The political rights of the 1948 Declaration reflected a democratic ideal which—laudable in itself—was really based on a European Enlightenment anthropology that posits individual human dignity and an attendant set of political rights. The basis for positing these rights was not articulated; it was simply assumed. To be sure, such a view had historical roots in Christian anthropology, with its assertion that humans have dig- nity because they were created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26– 27). This dignity was framed in a story of creation that said all humanity de- rived from a single source (Gen 1–2) but that human beings had then divid- ed through their hubris and other failings. But in the philo sophical debates with the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, those Scriptural warrants were discounted by Enlightenment thinkers, who wished to posit their approach on the basis of Reason alone. Postcolonial thinking has further undermined this Enlightenment dis- course by pointing out how the cult of Reason was not carried through in a consistent manner. This was most evident in how “the Other” was being encountered in Europe’s colonial adventures. The lectures in geography of both Immanuel Kant and George Friedrich Hegel can only be read with a certain revulsion today as Africans and Asians were disparaged as being “primitive” and “without reason.” “Reason” obviously became a much more freighted term than the philosophers might have imagined. Explanations for Otherness were accounted for by using a temporal scheme, as Johannes Fabian already pointed out many years ago (Fabian 1983). The peoples outside Europe represented “earlier” stages of development than that of their colonizers. They needed to “develop” to reach the “advanced” stage of Europe through a “mission civilsatrice.” It is not surprising that a countercurrent developed that emphasized “space/place” over “time” as a robert J. schreiter | Globalization and Plural theologies The Declaration was based on European Enlightenment anthropology, not on a shared vision of humanity.