Over the last year or so, I decided to focus a bit more on academic opportunities.
I have attempted to become a better professor at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), helped start a non-profit focused on increasing academic involvement with government (ATARC), and this semester signed up for two graduate courses at the University of Maryland College Park in, of any things, Government and Political Science.
One of the two graduate classes I am taking focuses on Political Institutions in the US, the other focuses on Political Theory relating to human rights. It is the latter I wanted to talk about in this post.
We have spent much of the semester talking about the intellectual basis for human rights and how to achieve common understandings across different cultures. This requires establishing a basis for the approach as well as a methodology for proving its validity. Neither of these is very easy to accomplish, which is one of the reasons there is such a lack of agreement in this area around the world (let alone in the US; heck, let alone among the students in the class I am in).
This last week, we discussed one approach of proof called Narrative Theory, which I am sure I cannot do justice to in this brief summary. The basic premise relating to the class focus is the use of what is in effect storytelling to make (prove) an approach to human rights. We started this last week with a discussion of natural rights, which were a key idea for the founders of the US and provided much of the basis for the Declaration of Independence. Proving the existence and/or content of these natural rights without just appealing to a religious basis (which itself does not achieve universal agreement) did not seem possible to achieve.
The proposed solution was to use narratives, stories, to illustrate what natural rights are and the results of having or not having them. The goal thus would be to prove the value of natural rights and how societies are better off when they are integrated into the society.
The use of storytelling resonated with me a great deal. I have talked with my in-the-entertainment-business older daughter for years about the power of storytelling and the almost obsessive need of people to tell stories. There was a powerful documentary I saw with Ellen called Cave of Forgotten Dreams directed by Werner Herzog, which discussed the Chauvet Cave in France. In that cave were wonderful cave drawings created over 30,000 years ago. Most amazing it was possible to tell which painting came from a particular individual who left their palm print below each painting that the individual had drawn.
This need to tell stories is all around us: in books, in the Bible, in movies and TV, on the Internet, in theatres, and on and on. I could make the case that one of the key characteristics of being a person is the need, and capability, of telling stories. It is why authoritarian governments attempt to prevent storytelling freedom, and perhaps, closer to the subject of the class, why we need to pay particular attention to those who for one reason or another are not able to tell their own story whether because of disability or circumstance.
In a different way, I have remarked many times how, in my opinion at least, anyone who is a senior person within an organization is fundamentally a storyteller. How they act, what they emphasize, what they wear, how they treat other people, all combine into a narrative which impacts the individuals around them. Smart people in leadership positions realize this fact and use it. The quintessential example is President Lincoln who used storytelling as a tool to make serious points.
As Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …”. And thus my need to tell stories in these posts.