For a supersession on human rights rhetoric.
Arguments about rhetoric and human right tends to focus on the term “rights” and the ethical problems and contradictions inevitably involved in imposing particular Western post-Enlightenment conceptions of universal rights on all other cultures.
The tension arises because so much rhetoric about humans rights has been grounded in Liberalism, with its emphasis on atomistic models of individuality and self-determination. Western Liberalism is not the only possible source for rhetorics of human rights, as much award-winning RSA scholarship has shown, but it does tend to be both foundational and constraining when the issue of human rights comes up in both foreign and domestic policy. Specifically, the problem I want to pursue is that US liberalism frames human rights as a commodity that the US has and has always had in such abundance that the only policy issues are: 1) how much of it to export and to whom, and 2) to what extent do we force others to open their market to our commodity.
In this brief talk, I want to focus on that notion of rights as a commodity because I think it ends up disturbingly redefining human in US political rhetoric
It’s absurd to think that the US has an excessive crop of human rights, or that it ever has. Yet, that notion of the US serving as the model for how to do liberty has been part of American foreign policy and domestic rhetoric at least as far back as US adventures in imperialism in the late 19th century. Woodrow Wilson was far from the first President to advocate foreign military ventures on humanitarian grounds. Similarly, the notion that liberty and property have a causal relationship was the basis of policies as varied as the Dred Scott decision, voting rights, distribution of public lands, forced privatization of tribal lands, and many others.
At the same time, however, there was a rhetoric of human rights, more fundamental and essential than the rights gained by legal citizenship or owning property. What happened with the rise of Social Darwinism and its conflation with “the market” is that we increasingly came to see all human interactions as competitive and individualistic market interactions. As many others have pointed out, the natural consequence of the tendency to see all human interactions as essentially market interactions is to make everything a commodity. As such, everything has a price, and everything can be sold. Since the market is competitive, it’s possible for some people to have none of a good and others to have cornered the market on it.
If human rights are a commodity traded in a free market, then not everyone can afford them, and so some people aren’t human.
This tendency to assume that a “free” market version of capitalism and democracy are necessarily connected became almost hegemonic during the Cold War, during which time we were perfectly willing to ally ourselves with anti-democratic governments, as long as they were open to American capitalism; we were (with a few exceptions such as Israel and some Scandinavian countries) completely unwilling to ally ourselves with even mildly socialist governments, even if they were anti-USSR. Capitalism was more important than democracy.
This was the assumption that meant we rationalize authoritarian governments as “democracies in transition.” It’s also why, with the breakup of the USSR and Soviet bloc, the US was more interested in privatizing everything, even if that immediately led to extreme income inequality and the attendant violations of human rights, than we were in establishing democratic norms and protecting human rights.
One other factor that’s important for thinking about the current US failure to protect the human rights of its own inhabitants is the just world model, and its manifestation in toxic populism and prosperity gospel.
I’ll start with the second. The just world model is a cognitive bias that says that people get what we deserve in this world—that bad things only happen to bad people, who have brought it on somehow, and good things happen to good people. Prosperity gospel is one form of this fantasy, saying that God rewards people of sufficient faith with wealth and good health. Thus, wealth and good health are signs that a person is blessed and honored by God.
Crucial to toxic populism is an imagined binary of people: authentic v. fake. Toxic populism takes the liberal notion of universality of experience and turns it into a singularity of validity. While acknowledging difference, it posits that only the position, values, beliefs, experiences, policy agenda, and so on of one group (the “people”) are “real,” and, as I argued in a different paper yesterday, the fundamental human right is to be a member of that group, with that ideology.
Out-groups don’t have human rights because they aren’t really human. Difference is dehumanizing.
Further, since rights are a commodity, and wealthy people are blessed and honored by God, then wealth should give a person access to more rights; they should be able to have greater buying power in the rights market.
What all this means is that people are willing to tolerate extraordinary injustice because they see it as a kind of justice. They don’t see disparate treatment by police, or deliberately discriminatory voting or housing policies as violating rights, because they don’t think poor people, political opponents, or any other out-groups have rights.
So, what I’m arguing is that we disagree about what specific public policies do in terms of rights because we disagree about who counts as a human deserving of rights. Doug Cloud has argued for shifting our attention to the term “rhetoric” in the phrase human rights rhetoric, and I think that’s astute.
Trying to argue with people assuming that they share our understanding of the distinction between rights and privileges, or they understand humans in the same we do, guarantees that we’ll get nowhere. I’m not certain that having the arguments we need to have will get us very far very fast, but it’s worth a try.