Redemption of the human

What assumptions of the human are involved in the languages of jus­tice attached to different traditions? Do some ideas fit more comfortably with secularism than others? I now turn to discourses of redemption that I think may give some sort of answer because it is built around the concept of sovereign action.

The U.S. government has been a major force behind the attempt to globalize human rights, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It

Redeeming the “Human“ Through Human Rights 141 has also been central to the development of the idea of the human implicit in rights discourse since the end of the Cold War. Yet inside the United States the human rights language has had comparatively little purchase. I now take up the case of a modern American who invoked human rights but failed to mobilize public opinion behind him in that endeavor.

In a famous speech criticizing the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, Malcolm X urges his fellow African Americans to resort to hu­man rights as a way of transcending the limitations of the American state. I quote at length the following passage with its powerful demotic style and its acute forensic intelligence. However, the transcendence Malcolm X seeks consists in a turn from the authority of one state to the collective au­thority of several other states—a fact indicating that one cannot escape from a world consisting of nation-states that are equal as sovereign entities but grossly unequal in power.

“We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.

On the other hand, the United Nations has a charter of human rights, and that, says Malcolm X, opens up an opportunity for liberation. “You may wonder,” he goes on, “why all of the atrocities that have been committed in Africa and in Hungary and in Latin America are brought be­fore the UN, and the Negro problem is never brought before the UN. This is part of the conspiracy. This old, tricky, blue-eyed liberal who is supposed to be your and my friend, supposed to be in our corner, supposed to be subsidizing our struggle, and supposed to be acting in the capacity of an adviser, never tells you anything about human rights. They keep you wrapped up in civil rights. And you spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor.” So what should be done?

“When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You

can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights. Civil-rights keeps you under his restric­tions, under his jurisdiction. Civil rights keeps you in his pocket. Civil rights means you are asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time anyone violates your human rights you can take them to the world court.

Needless to say, the civil rights struggle was never expanded to what Malcolm X called the level of human rights. I don’t want to dwell on the political reasons, both national and international, why this was so. I have quoted the passage at length because of its remarkable language. In it Mal­colm X does three things: First, he diagnoses a profound crisis of justice in race-based America and claims that it cannot be resolved by a purely do­mestic maneuver—that is, by the state’s formal extension of full citizenship to African Americans. Second, he defiantly asserts the humanity of African Americans quite independently of—in hostile opposition to—the Ameri­can state and its political culture. Third, he proposes that justice consists in the legal conviction of America in an international court; justice is a mat­ter of the law. This invocation of human rights by a black American citizen identifies America as the violator. The language of human rights invoked by him doesn’t make a moral appeal—at any rate, not to those who are de­clared to be the violators of rights—it declares a state of war and gives rea­sons why this war is necessary. It thus reaffirms the connection of rights discourse with war and revolution. After all, the English Bill of Rights of 1699 came out of the seventeenth-century civil war, the War of Indepen- ' dence produced the American Bill of Rights, the French Revolution gave

24.

Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights 143 birth to the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was a response to the destructive horrors of World War II. These bills and declarations not only came out of war, they carried the metaphor of warfare into the domain of social reform. And they sought to extend a specific legal culture beyond its original Euro-American location with the aim of emancipating the human individual throughout the world. Thus for Malcolm X the “human” is a subject born with certain inalienable rights, even though he or she often had to be freed through struggle in order to exercise those rights.

Hannah Arendt, writing at about the same time as Malcolm X gave his speech, observed that human rights depended essentially on being cit­izens of a nation-state: “The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very mo­ment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time con­fronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific re­lationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based—that he is created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the representative of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of natural law (in the French formula)—could have helped to find a solution to the problem.”^[95] Arendt might have noted, however, that sacredness in the modern secular state is at­tributed not to real living persons but precisely to “the human” conceptu­alized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature. Every real person who be­longs to a particular nation-state is always subject to its institutional violence—including the violence of its law,^[96] and liable to military con­scription that can result in his death.

Arendt is right, of course, in stressing the Centrality of the state for se­curing individuals their rights. And although she was talking about Euro­pean refugees immediately after the Second World War, her remarks are entirely applicable to African Americans. For it was precisely their human­ness that was invoked by Malcolm X, not their ethnic origin or religious identity, and not their long residence in particular states of the Union vir­tually since their founding. The political failure of Malcolm X’s use of the language of human rights should not be attributed to conspiracy. It can be explained by the fact that it ignored the power of the state in which he and other African Americans lived and turned to a collection of states that had neither the power nor the authority to intervene. The anomalous position of African Americans was that they were neither the bearers of national rights nor of human rights. Malcolm X had told his audience that "Hu­man rights are something you were born with.” However, African Ameri­cans were at once born American (with citizenship rights only in the United States), and they were human beings who happened to be black (to be a full human being in America one had to be white). One aspect of birth diminished the other, because citizenship and the status of being hu­man, although connected, are not identical. So human rights were ren­dered purely notional.

But if the language.of human rights made little impact, there were other languages in the United States in which social crises might be diag­nosed, the weak defended, and substantial reform called for. And other ways of defining “the human.”

An important language in the United States that overlaps in varying measure with rights language (not to be directly equated with human rights language) is its prophetic language. Unlike human rights discourse, American prophetic language not only draws its vocabulary and imagery from a particular scripture (the Old Testament), it is also deeply rooted in narratives of the founding of a particular nation (the American).

Redeeming the "Human“ Through Human Rights 145 Judeo-Christian origins but especially from a series of moral separations-— from English tyranny, Amerindian paganism, and the subhumanity of African slaves. The class of humans remains intact when the tyrant, the pa­gan, and the slave are excluded from it. However offensive it might be to» us today, the political definition on which that initial concept of the full human being was based is, in a sense, no less universal than others that succeeded it because it defines the class to which all who are “properly hu­man,” and only they, belong.

“In American political culture, the prophetic story of captivity, deliv­erance, and founding legacy, thus of decline from origins and redemption, has been especially important,” writes George Shulman. “Americans have retold this story to authorize claims about rights, inequality, membership, history, and their meaning.”^[97] So this language allows, even encourages, the identification of social crises and the condemnation of social injustice, both by those who occupy the ideological center of American liberalism and by those who stand outside it as its critics. But it does so in terms of a particular, excluding origin. It guarantees the promise of freedom that needs to be redeemed or warns of the decline and corruption that threaten that promise, but it always demands the redemption of subjects if they are to vindicate their human status and join the universe of free, equal, and sovereign individuals.

This is the language that the leadership of the civil rights move­ment in America deployed to great effect. It is the language that Martin Luther King used when he proclaimed that “now is the time to make real the promise of democracy” thereby attaining “the goal of America [which is] freedom.” Turning to fellow African Americans King declares: “Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America [because] the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.” And he goes on to pro­claim that “One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thus carrying our whole nation back to the great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and Declaration of Indepen-

i4persecution in all foreign countries (that is, excluding the United States), and prescrib­ing training in “religious freedom” for members of the U.S. Foreign Ser­vice, and so on.²⁹

The significant feature of this project is not that it promotes “Chris­tian values” but that it seeks to free people in this world, giving them the right to choose their religious beliefs, which in a secular world means everything that the modern state can afford to let go. And it is under­standable that America, as the leader of Judeo-Christian civilization, must carry out this secular task—to free belief as it frees property, that is, as an object that can be negotiated and exchanged without any legal obstacles. The American secular language of redemption, for all its particularity, now works as a force in the field of foreign relations to globalize human rights. For that language does, after all, draw on the idea that “freedom” and “America” are virtually interchangeable—that American political culture is (as the Bible says of the Chosen People) “a light unto the nations.” Hence “democracy,” “human rights,” and “being free” are integral to the univer­salizing moral project of the American nation-state—the project of hu­manizing the world—and an important part of the way very many Amer­icans see themselves in contrast to their “evil” opponents. On the other hand, Martin Luther King’s Christian discourse, being tied to the practice of nonviolence and eschewing the language of evil enemies, presupposes a readiness on the part of the civil rights activists in the South to suffer, a readiness that is not to be detected in the U.S, project of redeeming and humanizing the world. King extends the experience of pain—like Gandhi before him—from sympathy to compassion, and makes it relevant and ef­fective within a particular secular state.

29. The act has its American critics, of course, who point, among other things, to its clear Christian bias as well as its sponsorship by evangelical organiza­tions. The act was preceded in 1997 by an important report entided “United States Policies in Support of Religious Freedom: Focus on Christians,” which contained a foreword by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. This total preoccupation with the persecution of Christians (to the exclusion of Muslims, for instance) is strongly reflected in the media. But this' selectivity merely underlines that it is Americas narrative of redemption that is being applied globally.

Human rights are often declared to be a “universal ideal” in opposi­tion to “cultural relativism” and the latter regarded as little more than an excuse for condoning local cruelties. My discussion of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King is intended in part to show how closely intertwined the two languages—the culturally specific language of prophecy and the universalist language of human rights—have become in the global moral project of America. This needs to be stressed because pitting “relativism” against “universalism” is not, I think, helpful for understanding human rights. Of course everybody generally has an opinion about the customs and beliefs of other people (“other cultures”), regarding them as good, bad, or indifferent. But in my view that fact is less interesting than the question of the kind of violence (moral, legal, military) that judgments justify.