Human rights with a future : cultural and counter-cultural aspects from an Eastern Christian viewpoint

Abstract

The concept of "rights offuture generations" may seem to be fully incompatible with the Christian east, often depicted as all lost in wonder with little interest for the pressing concerns of the immediate. So the present paper tries to cull disparate elements from an eastern Christian viewpoint to show the concept's possible roots in the east itself or, at least, its applicability to it. Given the methodological need to restrict ourselves to a few but central examples, the paper limits itself to a period in which interest in social justice became dominant and was related, positively or negatively, to the Christian outlook. In a first part, 1. Pravda, truth-justice, or the Questfor Justice, the brute awakening of independent thinking, or philosophy, in a Russia where serfs were freed only in 1861 is seen to coincide with the desire to attain social status overseas and emancipation at home, with the result that the conceptual tools to promote the cause of social justice are refined but remain open to criticism. This theoretical framework receives a concrete test in a comparison between Vissarion Belinskij and Nikolaj Fedorov, a comparison that shows elements of pluralism, namely: 2. A two-way future orientation: the filture of future generations and the foture of past generations. Though this struggle was at first carried out mainly by baptized Christians, different concepts of what social progress is and of what being a Christian means led to a head-on clash between two great Russian thinkers, Konstantin Leontiev and Vladimir Soloviev, towards the end of the last century; this forms the theme of the third section, 3. Social Justice and Eschatology in the Crucible. Finally, a fourth part, 4. Dialogue between Unequals, or the Scramble for the Future, tries to work. out some of the epistemological implications of this particular search for social justice in the future, especially in view of the collapse of an atheistic experiment which lasted seventy years and which came crashing down under the weight of its own untruthfulness, but from under whose rubble some of the most penetrating cries for future emancipation have become history.