Chapter One - Human Rights Across Borders: Oikeiôsis and the Ethics of Sanctuary

Summary

Wars, crime and famine, among other circumstances, have driven millions to leave home and seek shelter among strangers. The situation worsens daily. This chapter examines strategies for restoring enduring empathy and an accompanying willingness to extend human rights across borders. It seeks to explain why giving sanctuary (a place of refuge and safety) is a human imperative. In seeking and offering sanctuary, we manifest, acknowledge and strengthen our sense of shared humanity and affirm life as a value. Providing and seeking refuge, furthermore, entail the recognition that human rights extend beyond the narrow scope of national boundaries. As such, sanctuary relies on a degree of empathy that reaches beyond perceived “in groups” to include all human beings. Conversely, the denial of sanctuary dehumanizes refugees and transforms an enriching resource into a threat to prosperity. That is not accidental. Where we dehumanize, we eradicate empathy. Where we fear, we strike to destroy. Is it possible, then, to have human rights for those among us forced to emigrate as refugees? Have human rights become through alienating practices only citizen rights? Outside the law of a given land, what protects and supports life? To address these questions, this chapter will discuss two myths and two affirmations that express powerful reasons to proffer refuge and extend empathy, not only toward human beings but also toward all living beings and toward the earth.

Two Myths

In Western civilization, two myths of shared origins have sought to explain and awaken among human beings a sense of kinship and community: Plato's audacious invention characterized by Socrates as a noble lie (Republic, 414b–e) and the creation stories in Genesis, 1:26-27; 2:7-8 and 2:19-25. Consider the latter first. In Genesis (1:26-27) the god creates all living things, the human to the god's image and likeness. As kin sharing a divine origin, all life commands respect and appreciation. The story, however, gives to the human dominion over the others. With dominion came hierarchical distinctions that dispelled from human emotion most fellow feeling toward other life forms. Once privilege-based dichotomies enter reasoning, alterity is deemed harmful to filial relations among living beings. The importance of biodiversity for providing stability and enriching the environment becomes blurred in anthropocentric policies that ignore extinction and endanger the variability of species. Failure to relate to living things, to experience oikeiôsis among living organisms, fractures relations among humans.