Happy new year everyone. Here's a present.
Refuting
West-Centric Narratives of Human Rights: A Three-Pronged Critique
Ai
Chaobang, Tokyo, 4 December 2012
CONTENTS
Overview
1)
Narratives of ESSENCE: the Universal Origins of Human Rights
a)
The "Right" Human Rights – Who Decides?
b)
Contributions to Human Rights
c)
Contributions Against Human Rights
d)
Strengths and Weaknesses
2)
Narratives of FORM: the Universal Establishment of Human Rights
a)
The Western Declaration of Human Rights?
b)
The Universal-Except-The-West Declaration of Human Rights?
c)
Resonance and Dissonance
3)
Narratives of RELEVANCE: the Universal Enemies of Human Rights
a)
Charybdis: The Whirlpool of Universal Human Wrongs
b)
Scylla: The Multi-headed Monster of Inhuman Diversity
c)
Through the Straits and Around the World: A Tool for Global Problems
Conclusion:
In It Together
Overview
Human rights are many things
simultaneously. What looks at first a simple concept is loaded with
highly contextualized theoretical, political, and normative agendas,
beliefs, aspirations, dreams and passions. In the wider story of
humanity, human rights have their own story which as any story, can
be told from multiple perspectives.
Some have dominated unduly. In
this paper I seek to comprehensively refute a set of influential
narrative forces in the human rights story: those which draw its
centre of gravity towards the "West".
I will argue that such Western-centric narratives, or indeed any
territorializing narratives regardless of who is at their centre,
are neither an accurate nor a helpful telling of the human rights
story. Rather, I will present that human rights are, and should be,
universal, and in so doing will overarch and consider some of the
major ongoing debates in human rights discourse.
That
discourse is enormous, and the territorializing narratives in
question occur throughout. We shall confront them on three levels:
1)
Narratives of essence:
of humanity's development of the human rights idea;
2)
Narratives of form:
of twentieth-century attempts to implement human rights in practice,
and the modern international human rights framework of laws and
norms; and
3)
Narratives of relevance:
of the place of human rights today in relation to diverse human
cultures, histories and problems.
At each level I aim to critically
assert the universality of human rights, as well as the inaccuracies
or dangers posed by elevating the story's Western characters above
others.
Throughout, we must bear in
mind the essential problem. Thomas Paine lamented in 1776 that
'Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long
expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger and England hath given
her warning to depart.'
He might as well have said that this morning. Every society,
today and in the past, has abused human beings in ways that any
meaningful concept of human rights must embody. Every society,
regardless of location or culture, has had its politically, socially,
economically, and/or spiritually pernicious orders, that in
innumerable ways have forsaken people within them or aggressed those
outside. Every society has had its descents into madness, and most
display an abysmal record in facing up to those disasters with
humility. Therefore, when this paper considers the human rights
contributions of any given society, this should not at all be taken
as an absolution of that society for whatever grievous treatment of
human beings it once authored or still does now.
This is nowhere a pure academic question, but an emotively-charged
core of political agendas and clashing superiority complexes. The
academic community and its human rights commentators, as humans too,
are not insulated from this, but are themselves affected by human
rights politics and value preferences, and affect these in turn by
their choices of how to regard them. We should note that disciplinary
academia as we know it, now globalized across the world, is itself a
constructed and politicized unit, itself of Western extraction, and
itself a culturally loaded tool of legitimating – or refusing
legitimation to – ideas and knowledge, according to rules not
necessarily objective in direction.
It is vital that in assessing global issues, we be actively conscious
of the norms and assumptions influencing us, and look past their
clout in academic politics so as not to unfairly exclude
contributions.
I take the trouble to state this
because in the politicized paradigm of international relations today,
any human rights discussion runs the risk of having all meaning
drained off into a competitive morass of ulterior agendas, where
participants divert attention from their abuses by stating "no,
you". As is really the overarching message in this paper, to
territorialize human rights is to play straight into this contest,
and turn a concept which was meant to help us escape that paradigm
into a rhetorical instrument that sinks us deeper in it – and
buries our efforts in shame.
Thus the argument I seek to make
here is as normative as empirical. Human
rights not only are
universal, but should
and must
be. Only then can they represent not our determination to persist
with self-interested conflict and mutual contempt, but a universal
will to overturn that order, to get past divisions which should never
have been dug, and to re-found our globalized world on a basis of
sincere responsibility and mutual care: to show, indeed, that
humanity can do better.
