In tracking the interrelated but different processes that attend the circulation of stories in ethical/aesthetic contexts as opposed to legal/juridical ones, we want to unsettle widely circulating presumptions and beliefs about the efficacy of human rights campaigns and about the universal application of human rights instrumentalities and protocols. Our case studies, from South Africa to China, demonstrate that claims for justice and reconciliation are often best addressed through alternative frameworks, protocols and constellations of forces in private and public domains. Personal narration functions as one such alternative forum, existing alongside the legalistic and juridically oriented mechanisms of redress. Our attention to the interconnectedness between personal narration as it interpenetrates within and often challenges legal frameworks and universal rights principles enables us to expose many personal, moral and legal uncertainties that arise when different universes of meaning are brought into play within the globalised human rights project. The case studies detail various strategies that survivors and their communities have adopted to address them.

Our approach to narrative demonstrates how particular story forms, mutating across dispersed global locations and in the midst of local densities of meanings and materialities, challenge the normative stances of victims, perpetrators and beneficiaries, opening up the ambiguities of each subject position and each history of injury and harm. Through detailed attention to micro, as opposed to macro, forms of political and cultural engagement, the study exposes the fault lines that attend the legacies of the postwar human rights project. Our book critically reframes legal debates, prompting new conversations about every aspect of the three fundamental terms: ‘universal’, ‘human’ and ‘rights’.

Kay Schaffer, Adelaide, SA, Sidonie Smith, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Savage times

Dear Editor,

Generalising some charges I brought against religion (ABR, February 2006), J.J. Haldane claims that ‘any group identity may become “an instrument of narcissistic assertion and aggression”‘ (ABR, May 2006), that the charge of deceitfulness can as easily be laid against secular ideologies as religious ones, and that some of the malign psychological motivation I attribute to religion can be found in the ‘excesses of a political ideology or a version of depth psychology’. These variations on a tu quoque defence (‘Maybe us, but you too!’) show a misunderstanding of the charges.

Take the first claim. It is not true that any group identity can become an instrument of narcissistic aggression. Few group ideologies avouch their followers a privileged relation (unconsciously, an identification) to an omnipotent Being, cosmic importance, certainty on the big issues, and so on – the very conceptions that feed notions of grandeur, specialness, and the will to assert them. Most religions, on the other hand, like racial ideologies, do provide these exceptionally attractive ideological frameworks for the projection and satisfaction of the more primitive and pernicious of narcissistic (and other psychological) needs. It is of the nature of (most) religious ideologies and the psycho-social forces with which they are internally related to generate the sorts of aggression, deceitfulness etc. that my essay noticed. It is also worth noting how frequently the apparent violent exceptions (Haldane mentions political ideologies) involve an infusion of racial or religious elements. Haldane’s response obscures this distinction.

Haldane seems to believe that the gravamen of the psychological claims about religion’s attractiveness is that it is comforting. But that is only a small part of the story. The more telling point concerns the extraordinary resemblance or affinity between particular religious ideas and certain unconscious fantasies. This correspondence might provoke an empirically minded philosopher to consider whether a causal relationship is in view, and to reach for Occam’s razor. Not so Haldane: first, because he thinks that the psychological science underpinning the claims is merely a ‘just-so story’ (like the one about Darwinian evolution) on which he has a superior, theological vantage; and second, because, as he rightly points out, the truth of a proposition is independent of how one comes to believe it; and Haldane believes that there are convincing arguments, a ‘non-psychological case’, for the truth of religious beliefs. I, of course, accept the distinction. But the arguments Haldane has in mind seem to me so conspicuously weak that the fact that they are accepted by intelligent people with some grasp of the scientific perspective itself calls for psychological explanation. Unfortunately, there is no short way to proceed beyond this point.

I am grateful to John Jenkins and J.S. Gregory. I agree with Gregory ‘that our Western liberal right of dissent ... is closely tied up with our particular religious tradition’, and respect the case for according it a cheer; yet I hesitate to join him in chorus. On my reading, the aftermath of the Reformation merely restored what Christianity had earlier destroyed. Early Christianity crushed most of ancient thought, and the religious and intellectual tolerance of the Graeco-Roman world. Its institutionalisation of descending political power retarded the growth of political and ideological pluralism for more than a millennium. The associations between monotheistic religions and political and intellectual freedoms have been relatively brief, precarious, and patchy, and seem again to be equivocal in our savage times.

Tamas Pataki, St Kilda West, Vic.

Kerry Leves replies to Michael Sariban

Dear Editor,

Yes, I did ‘travel in India’ (Letters, ABR, April 2006), but not – perhaps contrary to rumour – in the seventeenth century. My objection (Letters, ABR , February 2006) to Michael Sariban’s review of Yve Louis’ The Yellow Dress was triggered by his use of the phrase ‘an exercise in archaism’ to dismiss her poem ‘The Green Hood’ (ABR, November 2005). Why I bothered to make this objection public was because, to me, the writing of that poem is precisely ‘fresh, imaginative and engaging’, to quote Sariban’s criteria back at him. My logic may be ‘dubious’, but I don’t think it was entirely ‘fatuous’ to point out that any work of imagination that uses an historical mise en scène can be made to seem second-rate through a reviewer’s employment of the phrase ‘an exercise in archaism’ – and no other phrase – to describe it. One doesn’t need to do an in-depth study of the Moguls in India (I haven’t) to enjoy Yve Louis’ poem. That was the topic of my letter. The rest, if you’ll excuse me, is history.

Kerry Leves, Katoomba, NSW

Mixed blessings

Dear Editor,

I have read Rachel Buchanan’s review of Mixed Blessings (ABR, May 2006). Deborah Lee, the author of this book, is a friend of mine and is an amazing lady who has provided a loving, temporary home for numerous babies and toddlers over the years. Some of these children have been abused; some of the babies are drug addicted and cry non-stop. While the rest of us are thinking about doing something to help, Deborah is out there doing it. It is true to say that she loves babies and is truly happy when she has one to look after – it is also true to say that she is lucky enough financially to be able to devote the time and care that these babies need and to pamper them by buying them beautiful clothes. However, to write a review that only focuses on these aspects is to denigrate Deborah’s work. There was no mention in Buchanan’s review of the annual charity work that Deborah does for homeless people or of the countless heartaches she has experienced when she has to hand over a baby back to its family knowing that the history of abuse will be repeated.

In writing Mixed Blessings, Deborah did not want to portray herself as a saint – she wanted to write a ‘warts and all’ account of her experiences as a foster mother in the hope that it would encourage more people to become foster parents for the right reasons. It is a pity that Buchanan’s review did not demonstrate the same attitude to balance and has probably dissuaded the very people who could become foster parents from reading this book.

Julieanne McCartney, Balgowlah Heights, NSW