Learned something interesting today: the UN's 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child asserts that every child shall be entitled from his birth to a name (Principle 3). I'd really like to know who came up with this, and what their reasoning was. Principle 3 goes on to say and a nationality, a more practical and actionable matter; but they're quite different things.
Discussing this over dinner with my dear friends J and A (J had read about it in a book about Hannah Arendt, in connection with Arendt's claim that the most fundamental right is the "right to have rights"), we decided that this is very deep. A name makes you a member of a community, a society, just as a number (the KZs were probably in the back of the writer's mind) does the opposite. But then things got (interestingly but frustratingly) complex. What of children called by different names in different parts of a divided society or family? What of those who don't like their given names? And what of names, like the Japanese, Ichiro/Taro 一郎, Jiro 二郎 or 次郎, Saburo 三郎, etc., which are essentially just numbers (1, 2 or next, 3, etc.)? A name may assure you of a social location (at least on paper) but by itself isn't enough to ensure you social respect, let alone autonomy...
What led to this discussion, by the way, was my observation that Rick Warren's question to the presidential candidates "At what point does a baby get human rights?" wasn't just a pro-life formulation but an odd invocation of "human rights," a concept not even a century old. (He just wanted the baby/human contrast, I suspect.)
