But there are limits to what even knowledge can accomplish, as any psychologist will tell you. Knowledge alone is not enough to redeem life from folly and to save men from despair. If it ever was, it is no longer valid to assume that learning’s supreme glory is in the safeguarding of humanity, the dispelling of prejudice, and the achieving of those moral values that are said to have inspired men of other ages. Perhaps I am deeply pessimistic, but I simply cannot believe that if only people knew enough of the what, the why and the how, all would be right with the world. Knowledge does not ensure moral behavior; it all too willingly puts itself at the service of despotism and inhumanity. I suppose that what is lacking in our modern learning and among our modern learned is a sense that morality is the product of human experience—that it comes, anciently out of a wisdom we have forgotten, from a realization of the character of human life.

Certainly the moralistic approach to human relations in general and to race relations in particular in America has failed so consistently that one mentions this approach with embarrassment and reluctance. It is considered namby-pamby, pusillanimous, Uncle-Tomish. Few, even of the ministers of the gospel, appeal to nobility and virtue and goodness any more, except as these qualities seem disingenuously to be connected with “practical concerns.” We no longer think of great men as being great in those virtuous qualities to which former and simpler ages subscribed. Those moral excellencies—love, honor, truth—seem to many ordinary people “a long way removed from our normal affairs.” Great men today are “practical-minded,” “realistic” and “public-spirited,” and none of these attributes, I take it, is necessarily virtuous. To be trite about it, any one of them can cover a multitude of evils. The realistic attitude has been the excuse for innumerable travesties of human rights; in the name of public spirit heinous crimes have been committed against the dignity of man; and too many politicians and diplomats have made practical-mindedness the inviolable sanction for the suppression of the worthy ambitions of the powerless.

It must be, for instance, the operation of these qualities that is leading to the continuing farce that American men are making of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are making a farce of both its purpose and its content. Everyone knows—or certainly everyone should know—what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is. It is a document so clearly and simply expressive of what is in the hearts and minds of the men of the masses that, indeed, a man of the masses might easily have written it. In 1946, the representatives of eighteen national governments—members of the United Nations—began work on the framing of a statement that would, as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “establish standards for human rights and freedom the world over,” so that the recognition of these rights and freedoms “might become one of the corner-stones on which peace could eventually be based.” Two years later the Commission on Human Rights presented its declaration to the General Assembly of the United Nations. Forty-eight governments voted to accept it. What they voted to accept is stated in the preamble:

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people....

“Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom....”

This was fine and hopeful, and, indeed, the more so that the Declaration was born of the Charter of the United Nations. The Charter is no blueprint for an abstract world. It sets a premium on maturity, of course; but also it sets a premium on respect for reality.

After the General Assembly’s acceptance, to make the Universal Declaration law there remained only the act of ratification by each participating government. It was at this point that a hitch developed. Perhaps the State Department had dismissed, even at its inception, the work of the Commission on Human Rights as unimportant. Perhaps the State Department was so concerned with the “practical and immediate” problems of the cold war that it simply forgot the Declaration for two years, and forgot, too, that the United States had taken the lead in securing the General Assembly’s adoption of a resolution embodying the Declaration. Perhaps there were petty and selfish political considerations. Perhaps there was bald hypocrisy in the whole thing. I cannot give cause. I can only declare that when, in 1950, after what seemed an unnecessarily long delay, the matter of ratification by the United States came up, the State Department demurred.

At first it demurred over the inclusion of Articles 22–27 of the Declaration. But since most of these articles embody principles which are already written into United States law or supported by immemorial custom, the State Department’s objection to them seemed inexplicable. As Rayford Logan, a member of the United States National Commission for UNESCO, pointed out at the time, there is nothing revolutionary to American principles in the statement that “Everyone... has a right to social security,” or in the statement that “Everyone has a right to education,” or in the statement that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health.” No. The objection seemed to be to Article 23:

“(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work....” (Italics mine.)

Once the Declaration was ratified, these clauses would have necessitated the establishment of a law no different in intent from the proposed F.E.P.C. But this is not the point that Mr. Edward W. Barrett, of the State Department, made in stating the objection to acceptance of the entire declaration. “Whereas,” he wrote, “a maximum degree of agreement exists (outside the Iron Curtain) on political and civil rights, there is no general agreement on economic and social rights. The laws and practices of the members of the United Nations differ widely on those rights as set forth in the Declaration.”

It does not particularly matter, I suppose, that this amounts to saying that the United Nations had not agreed on what they obviously had agreed on; nor that no clear and sharp distinction (such as Mr. Barrett’s letter implies) can be drawn between political and civil rights on the one hand and economic and social rights on the other.

It does not particularly matter because the State Department gave even grosser expression to the “realistic” point of view that, to paraphrase, democracy is based on compromises in which big ends are surrendered to small goals. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

“(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family....” (Italics mine.)

Could it be that this provision was in Mr. Barrett’s mind when he wrote: “Neither the Executive Branch nor the Congress would desire that our Government should ratify a convention which contains obligations that our Government and our people are unwilling or unable to honor.”?

There is a deep sickness in the American mind and spirit, and it threatens to infect democracy itself and render it impotent as an ideal. But not only this; the sickness also threatens to make democracy ineffective as an instrument through which the individual can realize his highest self and in co-operation with other selves give zest, richness and meaning to human endeavor. For democracy is two things. It is a political instrument: it is an ideal. As an ideal, the notion of the world as a vast arena, where purposeless and inexplicable forces play, and where inevitable fate renders the mind and the spirit of the individual helpless, dissolves before it. As an ideal, it is in raw conflict with sterile determinism and fatalism. It assumes that the only source of human happiness or misery is human beings themselves, and its very dogma proclaims that co-operative endeavor is the way to human happiness. And this is sensible, for we know—and we know it scientifically—that co-operation is the law of life. When men co-operate, they and their enterprises prosper; peace reigns. This is not humanistic nonsense. Authorized to speak the considered opinion of a group of renowned scientific scholars of the Committee of Experts on Race Problems of UNESCO, Ashley Montagu declared: “Man’s inherent drives toward co-operation need but to be cultivated and intelligently handled for this world to be turned into a Paradise on earth—when all men will, at last, live by the rule it is their nature to live by—the Golden Rule to love your neighbor as yourself.” (Italics mine.)