Whose "Human Rights"?

This is from Talal Asad's book "Formation of the Secular" (2003). In it, he critically engages with the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum's 'Human Capabilities' approach to human rights.

Asad's critique problematizes the normative assumptions of (this version of) liberal "Human Rights" discourse, as well as dissects its political utility.

"The self-owning “human”

I said earlier that the Universal Declaration does not define “the human” in “human rights” other than (tautologically) as the subject of human rights that were once theorized as natural rights. But what kind of human does human rights recognize in practice?

Those who formulate and implement Western policies often assume that there is a natural fit between the legal culture of “human rights” and the wider culture of “Western norms.” This includes particular attitudes to the human body and to pain. In Chapter 3 I mentioned some post-Enlightenment views about measures of suffering that allowed imprisonment to be represented as humane as opposed to flogging. Here I want to pursue a slightly different point: attitudes to the body indicated by such moral preferences – why, for example, confinement, even solitary confinement, is an acceptable form of punishment while any punitive practice that directly impinges on the body is not.

High value is clearly given to the integrity of the body – which explains in part the particular horror in Euro-America at the widespread custom of female genital mutilation in some African regions. I say “in part” because there is no comparable sense of horror at the custom of male genital mutilation. The latter is, of course, a quite familiar practice in the Judeo-Christian West and the former is not. But there is more to it than that. There is the belief that female circumcision, unlike the male variety, interferes with the sexual pleasure of the women. The enjoyment of sexual intercourse is a valued part of being human; anything that interferes with that enjoyment is in some powerful sense inhuman. [31] It therefore becomes a matter of a human right and its violation. So there is here both an interference with the subject’s ability to experience “full” sexual pleasure. The human being owns his or her body and has the inalienable right to enjoy it.

In an impressive series of publications Martha Nussbaum has reopened the old question of human nature through the Aristotelian idea of human capabilities that she recognizes can also be linked to the concept of human rights. Her basic idea is that a list can be compiled of central human functional capabilities (for example, “Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing self-expressive works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth” [Nussabum, pp. 78-79]). The universal character of these capabilities, according to Nussbaum, can be found in the Rawlsian idea of “overlapping consensus,” which I have discussed briefly in connection with Taylor’s use of it in the Introduction. “By ‘overlapping consensus’ I mean what John Rawls means,” she writes, “that people may sign on to this conception, without accepting any particular metaphysical view of the world, any particular comprehensive or ethical view, or even any particular view of the person or of human nature.” And yet, Nussbaum’s idea of universal capabilities does express the emerging idea of “the human” in it. A subject possessing bodily integrity, able to freely express himself or herself, and entitled to choose for herself or himself what to believe and how to behave is not simply a “freestanding moral core of a political conception” to which people sign on. It is itself a thick account of what being human is – and one that underpins human rights.

As a view of human nature it follows that where these capabilities are not being exercised due to obstacles, their removal will allow humans either to exercise them spontaneously (and to rank them), or to freely choose not to do so. However, humans will have to be taught what good capabilities are and how to exercise them, and to be prevented from exercising vices that harm others. After all, humans are also capable of cruelty, greed, arrogance, treachery – indeed there is scarcely anything they are not capable of. So part from being able to identify vices and their harmful social effects, someone must have the power to identify “obstacles,” to remove them, and also to ensure – by force if necessary – that vices are not restored. That sovereign power is a human capability too, but not one that everyone may freely exercise simply on that account. When invested in the state, that juridical power becomes a precondition for the flourishing of human capabilities. According to Nussbaum, that state must, of course, be one committed to universal values. As such it would not only secure the same rights for all its citizens, but also their ability to experience the emotions of love, grief, justified anger – and even their ability to “use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way.” One difficulty here is that the secular state now becomes the definer of “the truly human,” and although Nussbaum attempts to distinguish between capability and functioning, assigning only the definition of the former to the state, it is not always possible to distinguish between them.

There are other well-known problems with this view that may be noted in passing. First, the ability to choose freely whether or not to exercise a capability sometimes encounters a contradiction: because certain choices are irrevocable, they themselves may constitute insurmountable obstacles to further choices (as an illiterate one cannot make an informed choice regarding literacy unless one has experienced it, but having become literate one cannot then change one’s mind). Second, it is a notorious fact that human capabilities – and the conditions in which they are realized – are subject to conflicting interpretations. When “human capabilities” are legally enshrined the business of interpreting them is the privilege of judicial authorities and technical experts, and politics proper is excluded. In brief, it becomes a matter of domination rather than negotiation.

Who - in a world of nation-states - has the authority to interpret and the power to promote the conditions that facilitate human rights, and "the human" they sustain? At a meeting two years ago the U.S. Trade Representative negotiating China's entry into the World Trade Organization causally observed in response to a journalist's question that "democratic political reform and greater adherence to human rights are certainly encouraged by an opening to the West and Western norms." What might these norms be when viewed as styles of life relating to specific kinds of subjectivity?

In a recent article on American global power, Ignacio Ramonet, chief editor of Le Monde Deiplomatique, recounts the scale of U.S. military, diplomatic, economic, and technological hegemony, and then goes on to ask why - given the liberal democratic ideology of equality and autonomy - there isn't more criticism of it? I quote his elegant answer in full:

"No doubt because US hegemony also embraces culture and ideology. It has long been the home of many fine, universally respected intellectuals and creative artists in every field, who are quite rightly admired by one and all. Its mastery extends to the symbolic level, lending it what Max Weber calls "charismatic domination". The US has taken control of the vocabulary, concepts and meaning of many fields. We have to formulate the problems it invents in the words it offers. [The article at Le Monde's website currently has the following sentence instead: "It obliges us to formulate problems of its own invention with the words it offers". Italics supplied by Asad. He also combined the paragraphs together.] It provides the codes to decipher enigmas it created in the first place. In fact, it has set up any number of research centres and think-tanks for this very purpose, employing thousands of analysts and experts. These eminent bodies produce reports on legal, social and economic issues with a perspective that supports the ideal of the free market, the world of business and the global economy. Their lavishly funded work attracts endless media attention and is broadcast the world over... Wielding the might of information and technology, the US thus establishes, with the passive complicity of the people it dominates, what may be seen as affable oppression or delightful despotism. And this is all the more effective as its control of the culture industries lets it capture our imagination. The US uses its admirable know-how to people our dreams with crowds of media heroes, Trojan horses despatched by their master to invade our brains. Only 1% of the films shown in the US are foreign productions, while Hollywood floods the world with its wares. And close behind come television series, cartoons, videos and comics, not to mention fashion, urban development and food. The faithful gather to worship the new icons in malls - temples raised to the glory of all forms of consumption. All over the world these centres of shopping fever promote the same way of life, in a whirl of logos, stars, songs, idols, brands, gadgets, posters and celebrations (like the extraordinary spread of Halloween in France). All this is accompanied by the seductive rhetoric of freedom of choice and consumer liberty, hammered home by obsessive, omnipresent advertising (annual advertising expenditure in the US exceeds $200bn) that has as much to do with symbols as with the goods themselves. Marketing has become so sophisticated that it aims to sell not just a brandname or social sign, but an identity. All based on the principle that having is being... The American empire has become a master of symbols and seduction. Offering unlimited leisure and endless distraction, its hypnotic charm enters our minds and instills ideas that were not ours. America no longer seeks our submission by force, but by incantation. It has no need to issue orders, for we have given our consent. No need for threats, as it bets on our thirst for pleasure."

I do not present this statement as decisive evidence of what is going on in the world. Its interest lies in the explanation it offers of how, by having "to formulate the problems [America] invents in the words [America] offers," global society adapts to a stronger, more modern language - in which the equal rights to pleasure can be articulated as America's project of secular redemption. [38] Ramonet's recognition that the desire to do as one pleases (to do what pleases one) evoked by marketing discourse is familiar enough - the normalization of consuming desires is a banal feature of contemporary capitalist society often noted by both supporters and critics. Familiar, too, is his suggestion that the human being assumed in modern market culture is an autonomous individual who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. For just as electoral democracy postulates the equivalence of citizens (each of whom counts as one and only one) within any given party, so market strategies assume the equivalence of buyers (each of whom counts as one) within any given niche. In both cases the choosing subject is a statistical object to be targeted, added to or separated from other individuals. It is this that explains the U.S. Trade Representative's claim that greater adherence to human rights is encouraged by the acquisition of "Western (that is, American) norms" in place of older ones, just as the opening up of free trade with the West and the blossoming of a market society will reinforce human rights.

My thought is not that this claim is arrogant, or otherwise morally tainted, but that it may be true. "Cultures" are indeed fragmented and interdependent, as critics never tire of reminding us. But cultures are also unequally displaced practices. Whether cultural displacement is a means of ensuring political domination or merely its effect, whether it is a necessary stage in the growth of universal humanity or an instance of cultural takeover, is not the point here. What I want to stress is that cultures may be conceived not only in visual terms ("clearly bounded," "interlaced," "fragmented," and so forth) but also in terms of the temporalities of power by which - rightly or wrongly - practices constituting particular forms of life are displaced, outlawed, and penalized, and by which conditions are created for the cultivation of different kinds of human. Resentment on the part of the weak about being treated cruelly by the powerful is generally a spontaneous human reaction, but learning to see certain practices as insupportable that were not previously viewed as such, and organizing social opposition to them, are steps in the reconstruction of the human.

In an interdependent modern world, "traditional cultures" do not spontaneously grow or develop into "modern cultures," People are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else, something that allows them to be redeemed. It may not be possible to stop this process; it may be a wonderful thing that the process takes place as it does because people really are redeemed through it. I do not argue for or against such directed changes here. I merely emphasize that they are not possible without the exercise of political power that often presents itself as a force for redeeming "humanity" from "traditional cultures." Or - and this comes down in the end to the same thing - as the force for reclaiming rights that belong inalienably to man in a state of nature.

In the seventeenth century, so John Pocock proposed, the self was beginning to be seen as contingent. The anxiety that that provoked was the context in which Locke's political appeal to natural rights acquired added plausibility. Legal discourses for defining the person gain added weight. In an essay on flexible capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, Richard Sennett has argued that the highly unstable conditions of work in America are making a coherent narrative of the self - and therefore realization of "character" - increasingly difficult. It is possible (although this is not Sennett's argument) that this new stage in the growing anxiety about the private self is not unconnected to the increasing insistence on the redemptive quality of human rights at a global level. When the secularist ideological order separating public politics from private belief is seen to crumble, the new terrain is occupied by a discourse of human rights taht can be taken as either sacred or profane. Canovan's appeal to myth to defend the liberal project of human rights (see Chapter 1), King's appeal to universal brotherhood and human dignity under God, the U.S. government's global project to free both belief and property, and Nussbaum's celebration of the capabilities of the sovereign human are all variations of this discourse."

(Talal Asad 2003: 148-155)

[31] "Martha Nussbaum cites "opportunities for sexual satisfaction" as an aspect of "Bodily Integrity," listed as one of the "central human functional capabilities" in her influential Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 78. The assumption that "opportunities for sexual satisfaction" can be clearly identified and legally protected is intriguing".

[38] "But as the post-9/11 "war on terrorism" demonstrates, the United States does not simply seduce its opponents with pleasure. It is prepared to use devastating force. The war against Afghanistan was presented by the American media not only as the pursuit of terrorists but as as the liberation of Afghan women..."

Note: Please see the book for all footnotes.