Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Human Rights: A Trilogy

By Judith Blau and Alberto Moncada

Any nation's peoples share a world view that helps them make sense of their history, of the present, and a world view that is more or less consistent with national social, political, and economic institutions. In the United States, the central value in that world view has been individualism, helping Americans make sense of key chapters in American history: the early entrepreneurial settlers (who Weber described as the embodying the spirit of capitalism), the immigrant experience, the settling of the frontier, and, most importantly, capitalism. Of course there is much in American history that does not exemplify this key value of individualism, but the way that rights have been defined in America, as civil and political rights, are purely individualistic and are at odds with the understanding of human rights elsewhere in the world.

A thesis that links the three books in the trilogy on human rights is that human rights as a logic and set of practices is sweeping the globe, embraced by people everywhere, but Americans are slow to comprehend what human rights are because Americans interpret the world in terms of individual rights, not rights they share with others. In the first volume of the trilogy, Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Tradition we highlight how American liberalism is key to what is often called, 'American exceptionalism' (or roguishness) and clarify what human rights are--as a world view, as international law, embedded in civil society, and as a broad social movement. We also give examples of how people elsewhere are interpreting human rights.

Human rights made their dramatic formal appearance on the world stage in 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then in subsequent international human rights treaties (none of which have been ratified by the US without a statement that they do not apply in the US!) As countries gained their independence from colonial powers, they often adopted human rights provisions in their Constitutions. More recently, in response to the voracious forces of globalization, nearly all countries that did not have such provisions revised their constitutions to include them. The second volume of the trilogy, Justice in the United States: Human Rights and the US Constitution provides many examples of constitutions and clarifies how the US Constitution could be revised to include human rights.

There are many factors playing a role in what is called, the 'worldwide human rights revolution,' and human rights are playing a increasingly important role in development, protection of indigenous people, international approaches to housing, restoration of peasants' lands, micro-credit, and environmental sustainability projects. Humanitarian law is an important branch of human rights and a major milestone has been the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Social movements, including the World Social Forum, the international peasants movement, landless movements, are propelled by demands for human rights. We argued that there are now two logics--that of human rights and that of neoliberalism capitalism. The welfare of the world's people is at stake. The third volume of the trilogy, Freedoms and Solidarities:In Pursuit of Human Rights  discusses these as opposing logics. In this volume we also more deeply explore the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism and human rights by drawing on the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and contemporary philosophers.

Judith Blau is professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and president of the US chapter of Sociologists without Borders. She is the author of Architects and Firms, The Shape of Culture, Social Contracts and Economic Markets, and Race in the Schools, editor of The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, and co-editor, with Keri Iyall Smith, of The Public Sociologies Reader. She has published over 75 articles in scholarly journals, and was the president of the Southern Sociological Society. Judith Blau's webpage is: http://www.unc.edu/~jrblau/

Alberto Moncada is president of Sociologists without Borders/Sociólogos Sin Fronteras and Vice-President of UNESCO-Valencia. He has degrees in law, sociology, and education, and is the author of over 30 books in Spanish, including three on Hispanics in the U. S. 

The Greatest Humanitarian since Gandhi: A Memorial to Albert Ellis

By Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

Ross H. Miller, Ph.D., Senior Editor of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, has asked if I would write a memorial to Dr. Albert Ellis, who died on Tuesday at the age of 93. Dr. Miller expressed hope that my memories of him might be comforting to other travelers of life. It is with sadness, humility, and honor that I recount a part of my personal history that was deeply touched by this quiet hero.

This past spring, Rowman published my book, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness.  Albert Ellis wrote the preface, and my dedication read, “to my friend and mentor, Albert Ellis, who has supported, taught, and inspired me in countless ways.”  These words are meager alongside the magnitude of this man’s gift to humanity. I am here speaking of the psychological revolution he started in the 1950’s, which changed the face of contemporary psychology forever.  Standing firm against the currents of the strongly entrenched Freudian tradition, it was his unique brand of psychotherapy known as Rational-Emotive Behavior therapy (REBT) that redirected psychology from a lengthy psychoanalytic process delving into unconscious motivation arising from past, traumatic experiences to a relatively short-term therapy focusing on thinking and doing in the here-and-now.

In fact, a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association ranked Albert Ellis above Sigmund Freud as the second most influential psychologist in history. Carl Rogers came in first, and Freud Third.

In memoriam to Albert Ellis, The New York Times had the following to say:

"Irreverent, charismatic, he was called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy. In popular Friday evening seminars that ran for decades, he counseled, prodded, provoked and entertained groups of 100 or more students, psychologists and others looking for answers, often lacing his comments with obscenities for effect."

Yet, speaking of Albert Ellis in these terms fails to capture the depths of humanity behind his stage presence. What I will always cherish in this man is his predilection for kindness; his genuineness in caring for the plights of others, the manner in which he resonated emotionally with others during their hardest times. What the New York Times failed to mention (among other things) was that the book he was working on (and unfortunately never completed) before his death was a book on the emotion of love.

I came to know Albert Ellis during a difficult time in my life after my father’s death. My father had suffered a lethal heart attack at the age of 60. At the moment of his heart attack, the phone failed to work (due to a phone line that was not operational). My mother had to run next door to call 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, my father had passed.

I was 28 at the time, nearing the end of a one-year, post-doctoral fellowship, and I was confronting a very bleak job market in the field of academic philosophy. Yet I continued to work, publish, and eventually found a permanent job in academia. Emotionally I was numb. Having never stopped to grieve, I had not given myself an opportunity to curse the universe, damn the phone company, and unleash the fury that simmered inside me.  I was functionally robotic for about seven years.

After my father’s death, I began to formulate an approach to behavioral and emotional problems that used logic and philosophy to correct irrational thinking (a form of REBT now known as Logic-Based Therapy). At the time, I was unaware of the work of Albert Ellis, which antedated my own by about three decades. At the prompting of my wife, Gale S. Cohen, a mental health counselor, I began to study Ellis’ theory. Its keynote was the Stoic principle that it isn’t the events in our lives that upset us, but rather the irrational ideas we generate about these events.

Albert Ellis had systematically cataloged the same irrational ideas I was using to disturb myself. As a philosopher, I was trained to think rationally and logically, and ironically it was my demand to think rationally that kept me in a state of emotional turmoil. Dr. Ellis taught that people primarily cause their own emotional and behavioral disturbances by demanding perfection in a universe that is far less than perfect. In refusing to recognize that philosophers too are fallible, irrational creatures, I prevented myself from working through my anger.

However, once I gave myself permission to be human, I became angry at the universe. I damned the universe over the death of my father, and demanded that such awful things never happen, at least to me. Once I had given myself the opportunity to vent these irrational beliefs, I was in a position to expose and work them through. In this way, utilizing the cognitive behavioral tools of REBT, I was able to rescue myself from the abyss of unhappiness.

I first met Albert Ellis about two decades ago when I enrolled in his REBT certification program and trained under him. Remarkably prolific, having written over eighty books, he was always there to inspire me in my work, read and offer commentary on what I had written, and to promptly answer my queries. He was both mentor and friend. After the death of my father, when I was confused and uncertain about my future, Albert Ellis was there for me as he was for the millions of people who have profited from his incredibly effective self-help books.

In 1959, Dr. Ellis founded the Albert Ellis Institute in Manhattan to advance his theory of REBT. He lived frugally upstairs from the Institute, took a salary of $12,000 per year, donated most of his book royalties to the Institute, and even purchased the building on its behalf. It is therefore sadly ironic that, in 2005, some of the individuals he had mentored and brought to the Institute cancelled his celebrated Friday Night Workshops and ousted him from the Board.  However, Dr. Ellis filed suit against the Institute and, in 2006, the New York Supreme Court reinstated him. The Court argued that the alleged reasons for removing him from the board without notice were “disingenuous."

This past spring, I visited him as he lay ill, in a weakened condition in a New York nursing facility, with his devoted wife, Debbie Ellis, by his side.  I held his hand, he looked into my eyes, and eventually he fell asleep holding my hand.

For me, the world now has an indelibly empty place without him; yet it is so much the better for his having been in it. I mourn his death, but not in the same way I mourned the death of my father. I know well what he would tell me about such destructive, self-defeating ideation. And his legacy lives on.  Albert Ellis didn’t leave biological children, but he has nurtured disciples who have formed an REBT Network dedicated to carrying on his life’s work.

The New York Times compared him to Lenny Bruce. But there is another comparison that better captures the essense of this incredibly kind man. In 2004, in the off Broadway play, Trumbo, starring Paul Newman, Albert Ellis was heralded as "the greatest humanitarian since Gandhi." This is just how he deserves to be remembered.

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., is executive co-director and co-founder of the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy; professor and chair at the Indian River College; editor-in-chief and founder of The International Journal of Applied Philosophy and The International Journal of Philosophical Practice.

 

Afrocentrism’s Nineteenth-Century Roots

By Jacqueline Bacon                  

As my experience as a historian and critic of the press has taught me repeatedly, the so-called "mainstream" media frequently misunderstand and misrepresent African-American culture and history. A recent example is the claim by some in the press that Barack Obama's membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ, which espouses an Afrocentric view of history and Christianity, is somehow cause for concern or criticism. Clearly implied is the subtext that Afrocentrism--which, defined broadly, represents an intellectual approach to history that emphasizes the central contributions of African peoples to world civilizations and attempts to correct Eurocentric perspectives which have ignored the origins of inventions and philosophical developments in Africa--is somehow beyond the cultural pale, "too radical," undertheorized, or faddish.

These mischaracterizations are easily disproved by returning to various historical texts written by African Americans, from the eighteenth century to the present, which demonstrate that what we now call Afrocentrism is part of a longstanding, well-established, and philosophically rich tradition. Consider, for example, Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, published in New York from 1827 to 1829 and distributed nationally and internationally. Editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, as well as various contributors to the newspaper, offered readers an Afrocentric historical perspective. Articles published in Freedom's Journal explored the origins of various arts, agriculture and other sciences, and formal education in ancient Egypt; argued that the denial of the Africanness of the ancient Egyptians was incorrect and motivated by racism; and located the establishment of the first major city, government, and police force in Ethiopia.

Offerings such as an excerpt from the work of Haitian scholar Pomp?e Valentin, Baron de Vastey, which Russwurm reprinted in Freedom's Journal in 1829, argued that the revered Greek and Roman civilizations, valued as the originators of "Western" philosophy, were built on African foundations and indebted to Africa for their major tenets and innovations; the Greeks, in fact, "were in a state of the grossest ignorance and barbarity . . . till civilized by colonies from Egypt." The Judeo-Christian tradition, too, was traced back to Africa in Freedom's Journal; articles explored Moses' education in Egypt and noted the vibrancy of the early church in Africa.

Given this rich historical context, it is inaccurate and unfortunate that Afrocentrism is repeatedly represented in contemporary media as threatening, un-American, and incompatible with Christianity. Freedom's Journal's readers were devoted Christians, deeply committed to the United States, and dedicated to pushing the nation to live up to its (unrealized) democratic ideals. They also affirmed the value and resonance of the perspective that we now call Afrocentrism in their views of history and in their faith. Far from being divisive, this perspective may be the key to national and international reconciliation, part of a global reevaluation of the past that will help us make a future not of oppression and exploitation but of liberation and affirmation.

Jacqueline Bacon, a writer and scholar, is the author of Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. You can also visit her website at http://www.jacquelinebacon.com.

Aging Parents, Aging Children is a Gold Award Winner in the 16th annual National Mature Media Awards Program

Aging Parents, Aging Children: How to Stay Sane and Survive by Miriam Aronson and Marcella Bakur Weiner received a Gold Award in Media/Book category in the 16th annual National Mature Media Awards Program. This program is presented by the Mature Market Resource Center. Nearly 1,000 entries were judged by a distinguished panel of mature market experts from across the United States for overall excellence of design, content, creativity, and relevance to the senior market.
Congratulations to the authors and to all involved in producing this wonderful book!

Philanthropy and Your Friendly Neighborhood Supermarket

By Joel J. Orosz

“BECOME A SUPERMARKET MANAGER IN JUST SIX MONTHS!” The block letters of this notice, tacked up on a bulletin board at Grand Valley State University, recently caught my eye. A well-known national grocery chain was willing to train anyone who could dedicate half a year of their lives to learning this trade. It struck me as a reasonable proposition—a modern supermarket is a complicated business—but it also struck me as sad, because I teach at The Grantmaking School of Grand Valley State University, and it occurred to me that it takes six months longer to learn how to run a grocery store than to learn how to run an international charitable foundation.

Of course, that really isn’t true—learning how to make grants, how to manage a giving program, how nurture social change, how to affect public policy, and how to work with a foundation’s board of trustees is a tough education for those forced to learn on the job—but in the world of philanthropy, we have always pretended that smart people, with experience in other fields, can just waltz in and make a grantmaking foundation hum. On rare occasions, someone like John Gardner will come along, and pull the bunny out of the hat. Far more often, smart people make a hash out of the charitable program that they are totally unprepared to lead, and many conclude otherwise brilliant careers with the taste of ashes in their mouths.

I have been writing about good practices in grantmaking for seven years, and teaching in The Grantmaking School for three years. During that span, I have talked with literally hundreds of people who provide leadership to foundations as CEOs, members of boards of trustees, program directors, and program officers, and the comment I hear over and over again is: I wish I had known this when I started out in foundation work. Indeed. And now I add this thought to their sentiment:  I wish that charitable foundation boards were as serious about training their key employees as grocery chains’ boards are about training theirs.

Joel J. Oros is former Executive Assistant to the CEO, and Program Director in Philanthropy and Volunteerism at the W.K. Kellog Foundation. In 2004 he founded The Grantmaking School, the first university-based training program for grantmaking professionals located at Grand Valley State University. His book, Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—and How to Outfox Them (AltaMira Press, Sept. 2007), is now available for preorder.

RLPG Sweeps Design Awards

The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group swept the Commercial Publishers Illustrated Cover category at the 2007 Washington Book Publishers Design and Effectiveness Awards, taking home first, second, and third places! Congratulations to the publishers, printers, designers, project managers, authors, and editors!

First Place

Ninety Miles:Cuban Journeys in the Age of Castro (Rowman & Littlefield)

Designer: Piper Wallis

Second Place

No Time Outs: What It's Really Like to Be a Sportswriter Today (Taylor Trade)

Designer: Piper Wallis

Third Place (three way tie)

A Concise History of Nazi Germany (Rowman & Littlefield)

Designer: Jen Huppert

 

A Moth to the Flame: The Life of the Sufi Poet Rumi (Rowman & Littlefield)

Designer: Jen Huppert

A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Rowman & Littlefield)

Designer: Piper Wallis

The Khmer Rouge Trials Are About to Begin

By Benny Widyono

On June 13, 2007, it was announced in Phnom Penh that the long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials are ready to start. Thus ended 27 years of international amnesia over bringing to justice the leaders of the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which during its reign from April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, caused the deaths—through mass murder, starvation and forced labor—of 1.7 million to 3 million Cambodians, or a fourth to a third of the country’s population.

During its rule, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot abolished private property, personal possessions, money, leisure, socializing, marriage (except in cadre-approved cases), religion, and all personal liberties. Cambodia became one giant concentration camp consisting of totalitarian rural communes. The day the Khmer Rouge took power, they evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh and other cities in 24 hours, including infirm hospital patients whom family members had to push out of town in their beds, some trailing intravenous tubing and bags. In the countryside, people slaved and starved to grow rice that went to China and hauled buckets of earth to build dams without engineers or technicians.

This hideous regime finally was ousted by Vietnamese forces next door with the help of a Cambodian rebel force on January 7, 1979. Why then did it take so long before the Khmer Rouge leaders, many of them already dead or dying to be brought to justice? The answer lies in political maneuverings by the major powers, in which Cambodia became the victim of the Cold War struggle for hegemony in Southeast Asia.

In January 1979, a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), was proclaimed, which soon gained control over 90 percent of the country and more of its population. However, the United States, still smarting from its defeat by Vietnam in 1975, together with China, incredibly spearheaded a resolution in the United Nations year after year to continue to accord the Khmer Rouge leaders who had carried out such horrendous crimes the right to represent Cambodia in the UN throughout the 1980s. In the field, the PRK was treated like a pariah state and denied economic aid while the Khmer Rouge camped in the jungles were given political, economic, and even military assistance. As a result, a civil war ensued between the PRK and the Khmer Rouge and its allies, newly founded resistance groups representing the royalists and an anti-communist faction, in which hundreds of thousands more Cambodians lost their lives.

In August 1979, the PRK did try the Khmer Rouge leaders in a People’s Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned its top leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary to death in absentia. The West ignored this trial. Obviously the possibility of putting the Khmer Rouge on trial was not high on their agenda. U.S. and Chinese backing for the Khmer Rouge kept Cambodian politics in turmoil and prevented the pursuit of justice for the mass tragedy.

The stalemate was only broken when the Paris Peace Agreements on Cambodia were signed on October 23, 1991, and the United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia (UNTAC) was created and entrusted with holding elections in Cambodia. However, the solution was flawed as the agreements continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as one of the four legitimate legal entities in Cambodia. It was left to the new government of Cambodia established after the UN-sponsored elections to formally approach the United Nations on June 21, 1997, for assistance in holding a Khmer Rouge trial. The next year saw the end of the civil war with the dismantling of the remaining political and military structures of the Khmer Rouge.

In 2001 the Cambodian National Assembly passed a law to create a court to try serious crimes committed during the 1975–1979 Khmer Rouge regime. This court is called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea (Extraordinary Chambers or ECCC). An agreement with the UN was reached in June 2003 detailing how the international community will assist and participate in the Extraordinary Chambers. The ECCC is an unusual experiment in transitional justice. At one level, it marks a milestone in Cambodia’s tortured experience of violence and suffering as it will finally bring the culprits to justice. At the international level, the ECCC is the latest in a series of tribunals starting with Nuremberg and culminating with the International Criminal Court. It is a Cambodian court with international participation, a novel experiment. One thing is clear. The ECCC will have a major impact on both Cambodia and the future of international justice.

 There will be five judges, three Cambodian and two UN-appointed international judges. Four of the judges must agree, thus ensuring that at least one international judge participates in any decision, according to the so-called super-majority principle. During the past six months, local and international legal officials struggled to find ways to incorporate international law into proceedings that fall under Cambodian jurisdiction. Finally, in June 2007, they have settled their differences. The tribunal is expected to last for three years with trials starting in late 2007 or early 2008. In 2007, the only Khmer Rouge leader in jail is Kang Khech Ieu (alias Duch), the notorious director of the S21 prison and torture chamber. Senior leaders Pol Pot and Ta Mok have died while others, including Ieng Sary, who was pardoned by the king in 1996 for his death sentence at the PRK tribunal in 1979, are living in Cambodia as free citizens. Even though many Khmer Rouge leaders will not face trial, the process is important to finally bring justice, reconciliation, and peace of mind to all Cambodians who survived Khmer Rouge rule and to educate the new generations regarding Cambodia’s traumatic past.

Benny Widyono, a member of the UN transitional authority and a personal envoy to the UN secretary general, is the author of Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations (October 2007), which tells the inside story of the complex battle for Cambodia.

Health Care and SiCKO

Say what you will about Michael Moore and his controversial movies, but his newest, “SiCKO” is going to get a lot of people talking. Health care reform is shaping up to be a major issue in the coming presidential elections, with Senators Obama and Edwards preaching universal health care and Sen. Clinton reworking her past health care reform attempts. What “SiCKO” will do is help expand the idea of serious health care reform past DC political junkies and into the mainstream.

Do we really have the worst health care system in the western world, as Michael Moore would have us believe? Is major change in our current system even possible? If you’re interested in learning more about the issues raised in “SiCKO”, Health Care Half-Truths: Too Many Myths, Not Enough Reality is a great comprehensive overview. Written by the provost of the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine and a Health Policy Analyst at UVA, reading this thoroughly researched book will ensure that your opinions on health care reform are informed by more than just one source.

One aspect of corruption in our medical care that was left out of “SiCKO” is the coalition of pharmaceutical companies and doctors at the expense of medical ethics. Hooked: How Medicine’s Dependence on the Pharmaceutical Industry Undermines Professional Ethics addresses just that. Doctors get all kinds of perks from the pharmaceutical industry, from pens to baseball tickets to attention and ego-stroking. All of this gets in the way of doctors making decisions that are good for the patient, including the case of the woman who was on nine medications from the American doctor and was able to cut back to five after getting care overseas.

This is an open forum, and we welcome discussion on this and any other issues posted in this blog. Have you read the books and disagree with their points? Do you know more about the benefits/drawbacks of our current health care system? Comment below!

On School Violence

By Elizabeth Berger, M.D., author of Raising Kids with Character

Headlines reporting school violence strike fear into parents and all of our citizens—as well they should. It cannot reassure us to hear that the dramatic assaults which reach national media significance represent the tip of the iceberg, signaling much more pervasive and commonplace problems in our nation’s schools. To respond appropriately to school violence demands that we analyze not only the bizarre and infamous incidents which draw our attention on the news, but also the everyday threats to our children’s safety that give rise to them.

Like most social problems (divorce, drug abuse, crime), school violence has several aspects and a comprehensive approach to solving it will require action on many fronts at once. Perhaps most immediately urgent is the easy availability of guns in our communities. Americans have much higher rates of homicide and suicide BY FIREARMS than other industrialized nations—but the same rates by other means. If we wish to slash these terrible statistics, the most effective means would be to rid ourselves of guns. 

Schools themselves, meanwhile, may gain some traction on the pervasive problem of weapons in the schoolyard through metal detectors, police presence, the installation of alarms, and other measures to “secure” an insecure population. These stop-gap measures may help somewhat. The emotional health of our students is another important and neglected opportunity for intervention, through programs which identify and respond to youngsters presenting academic failure, drug and alcohol use, gang participation, bullying, and other personal crises. To accomplish this, the active involvement of families, youth development agencies, local police, health care providers, religious organizations, and other community structures will be the key to constructive change. 

It is not the make-believe violence in children’s fantasy and amusements (comic books, videos, and television) that inspires violence in schools but the real violence that saturates our actual lives. This is the “bad influence” which we must address. We will see our young people protected from harm only when we truly dedicate ourselves to providing nonviolent solutions to eternal human conflicts which are currently reflected in domestic battery, community assaults, and warfare. This is a more daunting challenge than scanning the lyrics to popular songs and denouncing their author, to be sure, but far closer to the heart of our mission as adults if our genuine aim is to provide a safe and wholesome world for the next generation.

Dr. Elizabeth Berger is a child psychiatrist with thirty years' experience treating children and addressing the needs of families as a policy-advocate.