Introduction: human rights and freedom

There is a powerful story about industrial modernity – a story about how humanity left the dark ages of the medieval period and, through the application of science, democracy and human rights, gave rise to a society within which citizens could be prosperous and free. This remains a central mythology of our times. Despite growing levels of social and economic inequality, the environmental crisis, 9/11, the financial crash and global racism the power of this story still holds. It is this story that enables people to feel optimistic about the future. Scientists will conquer problems of global warming, capitalism will provide prosperity and growth, the regressive attitudes of the past will disappear and citizens can think about how to get on in life. However, we live in a time when this mythology is beginning to fragment. There is mounting concern from a number of social movements and critical intellectuals that our human rights to peace are threatened by war, that the rights to an ecologically secure planet are not really compatible with the economic system, that racism persists and becomes reinvented over time and that capitalism makes a mockery of social and economic rights. If the voices expressing these concerns sometimes struggle to make themselves heard there are times like the financial crash, the protests against wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in debates about the ecological fragility of the planet when they become more prominent. The reason why human rights matter in this context is because they are at once part of the old story while providing a link to a different narrative about what is means to be human. At their heart human rights are about the right for all of humanity to live a dignified life. To be able to do this means to have access to certain protections against the violence of persons and institutions while living a life of freedom. Indeed it is noticeable that human rights are often called human freedoms. Without rights we cannot be free. However, my argument here is that human rights and freedoms are as much a matter for the imagination as they are concerned with legal criteria. In other words, how we understand human rights depends not only upon the story about modernity we find convincing (and as we shall see I think the official version is problematic at best) but is centrally related to how we understand humanity. If part of what human rights do is promote a new idea of the sacred in respect of the value of human life, then we should also be aware that these ideas have a certain cultural mutability. This means that if

human rights and freedom are closely associated we may need to reimagine both of these aspects in the twenty-first century. In order to do this, human rights and freedom will need to continue to be a matter of cultural struggle and disagreement. Here my argument is not only that the central mythology of modernity is misleading, but that it is destructive and harmful as well. We may assume that capitalist modernity will at some point be able to provide a safe and meaningful world for all of humanity, where our fundamental rights and freedoms are respected – but then how do we explain the human suffering and cruelty that seems to come in its wake? A cursory glance at the television news should be enough to challenge this assumption with everyday stories of war, global hunger, the humanitarian crisis promoted by refugees and migrants fleeing war and destitution, the devastation caused by austerity, a growing sense of anxiety concerning the ecological crisis and the racism implicit in the war on terror. Here the question becomes ‘how do we need to reimagine the rights and freedoms of humanity as we search for a better way of living?’ At this point in the argument we have to be clear that if the old reassuring story about modernity is falling apart then a different story has yet to fully come into being. If human rights are significant in that they provide a potential link to a new modernity then this story will inevitably be a lot more complex and messy than the old narrative. If human rights signify a shared normative framework then they will need to become part of an emergent worldview where many of the assumptions we took for granted are beginning to crumble. The struggle for freedom cannot mean exactly the same things now as it did during the Cold War or during the Russian revolution, but needs to be rethought and reinvented. This view does not mean that freedom is simply an empty signifier that can mean anything or that there are not important constants in thinking about freedom that can be linked to different traditions of thinking. The cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson (1991) has argued that the first people to dream of being free were women who were taken as slaves in Ancient Greece. This route was not open to men as slavery for them meant a form of social death. As Patterson (1991: 51) writes ‘freedom began its long journey in the Western consciousness as a woman’s value’. For men it was better to die than to become a slave due to the loss of honour this involved. A woman achieving freedom meant not being ruled by another and regaining personal autonomy. It was only later, when Greek philosophers began to link ideas of freedom to civic virtue, that it took on a more public meaning. Here freedom became linked to ideas of dialogue, the notion of the good and the idea that the unexamined life was not worth living. If these meanings remain with us then so do the stories and narratives that we tell about ourselves and the communities within which we live. Our ideas of freedom are not endlessly mutable, but have encountered a good deal of historical and cultural variability across time and place. If for liberals freedom has depended upon non-interference and the ability to choose between alternatives, then more communitarian-orientated scholars have wanted to point to the way freedom depends upon shared values and norms (Gray 1995; Taylor 1991). Additionally socialists and feminists have historically sought to understand the idea of

freedom less through atomised individualism, and more through situated ideas of autonomy and human relationships. Can we really be free if we are ‘coerced’ to live as a poorly paid wage labourer or subordinate partner? Freedom in this setting would be a society without hierarchical and oppressive social relationships where we could live simultaneously more democratic, co-operative and autonomous lives. However, if in the past those interested in emancipation sought to overthrow tyranny and replace it with a completely different society, it is not surprising that after the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century many of us feel more cautious today. How can we readdress the idea of human freedom without repeating many of the barbaric mistakes of the past? In addition, the other major transformation in our thinking is the growing awareness of the globally interconnected nature of our lives. If the freedom of the past was often imagined as belonging to atomised individuals this is no longer credible within our shared planetary society. Human rights and ideas of freedom can be said to be connected in different ways. There is a view of human rights (as we shall see) that remains connected to ‘negative’ views of freedom, that is we are free the extent to which we are not directly constrained or coerced. Such a view comes from the liberal tradition and continues to have a number of strengths. However, as Charles Taylor (1982) argues there are a plurality of political ways of understanding questions of human dignity (central to ideas of human rights) that seek to understand freedom less through the lack of external constraint and more through persons seeking to live without domination and negative ideologies that reinforce patterns of coercion. Such visions as Taylor recognises have been crucial historically to many liberation movements such as the labour movement, feminism and anti-colonial forms of struggle. These perspectives tend to suggest more ‘positive’ views of freedom in terms of different arguments about human autonomy and collectivity. This suggests that when discussing human rights we need to consider their historical evolution and inevitable contestation form a number of different ethical points of view. For example, George Orwell, who is often rightly remembered as a defender of intellectual freedom and liberty under the threat of totalitarianism, remains an interesting case in point. George Orwell’s most famous novels produced at the end of his life became seen in the context of the Cold War as holding out a beacon of hope resisting the state controlled nightmare of Communism. Orwell (1968a: 548) was especially concerned as to the kind of human being that would be developed in the ‘shrinking world’ of the 1940s. Orwell warned us that the extremist ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s were compatible with a withdrawal from the public sphere and political passivity. The intellectual class that might have been expected to defend questions of liberty had mostly given themselves over to power worship and was failing to fulfil their role as a dissenting class. These views were shared by others such as Czeslaw Milosz (1981: 11) who argued that Marxism in the 1930s and 1940s had captured the imaginations of a number of powerful intellectuals who became enchanted with a view that was related to ‘not mankind as it is, but as it should be’. What became abandoned by totalitarian ideas were ideas of individual

liberty for state programmes of human perfectibility. Within the imaginations of much Marxist thought, then, bourgeois ‘evil’ needed to be resisted and eradicated. This was a betrayal of an Enlightenment heritage that prized plurality, autonomy and humanism, that might be said to prize learning and individualism over more conformist accounts of humanity. These and very many other similar views persuaded many of the need to defend human rights as way of protecting the dignity of the individual. As we shall see, the idea of freedom as individual freedom is an important narrative within Western modernity that cannot be simply be dismissed out of hand. Such a view would suggest that human rights are significant the extent to which they protect a culture of individual liberty as opposed to attempts by the state to impose orthodoxy, homogeneity and conformity. However, as we shall see such views have their limits. The historian E.P. Thompson (who as we shall see is a major figure in this book) took great exception to the way that Orwell formulated these ideas. Thompson (1978), who like Orwell was an English socialist, argued that the problem was a specific view of human nature presumed by Cold War pessimism. Here socialism (and Marxism) is often accused of seeking to perfect human nature by using the state as a means of delivering the good society. For Thompson (1978) this view is deeply misleading as the actual view of many socialists is to struggle for a good society that gives expression to other human qualities (like sharing, co-operation and human responsibility) that are not given expression within a competitive and hierarchical social order. The problem was that, in the context of the Cold War, many intellectuals and political commentators utilised negative liberty as a way to shut down and permanently exclude other possibilities. Thompson (1978: 31) is explicitly critical of Orwell’s pessimistic views that in the 1960s were increasingly becoming challenged by ‘a new rebellious humanism’. This is not simply an important argument in terms of critical debates within English socialism, but can also be connected to the ways in which human rights are being reimagined by alter-globalisation activists today in terms of arguments related to the commons. Here Thompson is making two arguments that are important to this book. First, that how we understand the political possibilities of emancipatory ideas like human rights depends a great deal on how we understand the social and cultural context. Ideas of freedom and liberty can indeed be utilised by the powerful to close down other more radical notions perhaps bubbling under the surface. Second, that our understandings of political concepts like human rights remain connected not only to ideas of human freedom, but also to other human qualities as well. While Thompson was partially angered by Orwell’s attempts to characterise the Communists of the 1930s as totalitarian (Thompson himself had been a member of the Communist party) but also by his restrictive language and political negativity which narrowed the possibility for more libertarian socialist experiments within democracy and more autonomous ways of organising the work place and other social institutions. While human rights is often presented in such a way as seeking to dispel these arguments, a number of critical social movements have demonstrated more recently this does not need to be the case. Here we shall see that the meaning of freedom and its relationship to

issues related to questions of human rights is far from settled despite appearances to the contrary. If our understandings about freedom are being transformed, then what of human rights? There are a number of stories about human rights that have been incorporated into our culture that I find problematic. The first is a story that presents the idea of human rights as a global success story. This narrative asserts that the Enlightenment invented human rights which, along with democracy, eventually emerged out of a traditional culture built upon status, hierarchy and privilege. Democracy and human rights are now, in the twenty-first century, sweeping the world and find their main enemy in religious fundamentalism of various kinds. Here the democratic ‘West’ is positioned as the keeper of this flame and is only too happy to welcome other states into the human rights fold. This simplistic account is not only deeply misleading, but turns the story of human rights into a straightforward tale of the triumph of civilisation over barbarism. This narrative has certainly gained in prominence since the end of the Cold War when it was assumed that democracy and human rights triumphed over state repression. However, this did not prove to be the end of the story as after 9/11 the ‘free’ West has had to confront the emergence of terrorism and enemy authoritarian states. Since this period there has been a growing concern about the human rights abuses, abandoning of legal procedures and war that has come in its wake. There is an equally problematic set of assumptions which seeks to resist this story. This is a more critical tale whereby human rights are nothing but a set of false promises used to mask economic and political power. This converts the story of human rights into a form of disguised domination. Under the banner of human rights and democracy we invade your lands, annihilate local traditions and homogenise the world’s culture. The concept of human rights is intrinsically Western, hostile to cultural difference and largely helps to promote a market-friendly society based on consumerism. We might be forgiven for thinking that, according to this argument, we would be better off without human rights and legal standards altogether. Finally, there is the nationalist rejection of human rights that views it as an alien imposition, a product of elite intellectuals who are hostile to more organic and home grown cultural traditions. Human rights means a globalised world where everyone can form an opinion as to how we should live when it is none of their business. Politics is about the politics of the homeland with most ordinary people feeling a sense of intense loyalty and connection to the national flag. My argument is not that these stories about human rights have nothing to contribute, rather that they are all deeply limited. Cultural sociology in the global age from my point of view has a responsibility to offer more complex stories than these misleading narratives. The first story offers a form of legal determinism, suggesting that human rights is simply a matter of the law that develops along with democracy. Behind the second story lurks a form of economic determinism whereby human rights are dismissed as a set of bourgeois conventions and assumptions blocking the arrival of a more emancipated society. Finally, the third view offers a form of nationalist determinism which increasingly makes

little sense within a global and interconnected world. Missing in all these accounts is the idea that human rights struggles are caught up within broader understandings of culture. More of this later, but for now we need to recognise that human rights have come of age in the global era and become one of the main ways in which many contemporary citizens understand freedom. Today it is often assumed that we live in genuinely cosmopolitan societies where human rights are one of the principal means that we have of understanding ourselves, as Appiah (2006: xv) argues, as ‘many branches of a single family’. This has become easier to imagine in an increasingly compressed world of televisual and computer communication, tourism, cultural intermixing and global time-space compression. If with the end of the Cold War the 1990s became a time of considerable optimism in respect of human rights, it did so because of the increasingly possibilities for a shared global consciousness. However, as we shall see, the wars on terror, economic collapse and environmental threat are just some of the reasons why the story about human rights is likely to be more complex than simple human advancement. Indeed, while human rights remain an important locus of solidarity in the world today there is much that is missing from the comfortable language that simplistically ties human rights into an understanding of globalisation. Eric Lott (2006) and Chris Hedges (2010) argue that the benign liberal cosmopolitanism that connects globalisation and human rights is more problematic than it appears. After the end of the Cold War it was assumed that more humane forms of liberal governance would emerge; missing from this, however, were more critical understandings of corporate domination and control and the need to erase a critique of capitalism for a global ideology required for the functioning of capitalism. This perhaps goes too far, but at least suggests that we need to consider more culturally contested accounts of human rights. The problem with what I termed legal, economic and nationalist determinism is that they offer far too tidy forms of explanation and understanding. As E.P. Thompson (1994a: 219) once remarked, questions of culture are too significant to be relegated to ‘secondary’ forms of analysis behind more deterministic forms of explanation. Just as the story we tell about our identities is subject to change, so the one about human rights is no different. Culture matters in this respect as it helps to foster a shared imagination about the world in which we live. To talk of freedom and human rights as being intrinsically connected is not so much wrong as limited as we need to know more about the social and cultural contexts within which these claims are being made. Missing from this argument is an appreciation that the idea that human rights are bound up with what it means to be human. In considering the cultures of human rights we need to consider our shared ethical capacities. These cannot, of course, be finally nailed down, as within all societies there are cultural alternatives that are only partially repressed. The struggle for human rights and democracy across the world does not just take one form but is multiple and varied. Our understanding of human rights, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment might argue, spring out of a pure rationality, but also involve other qualities such as our shared ability to be compassionate, empathetic and co-operative. These

human qualities in the age of neoliberalism and market capitalism are often displaced and placed off limits. As Raymond Williams (1961) argues, ideas of community and solidarity with others is a difficult achievement in class-based societies built upon consumerism, competition and individualism. The capitalist spectacle that seeks to colonise the human imagination has its own version of utopia that seeks to down-grade or at least displace the quest for a more ‘humane’ world. As Susan Buck-Morss (2003: 103) argues, the ‘recognition that cultural domination as just important as, and perhaps even as the condition of possibility of, political and economic domination is a true “advance” in our thinking’. We need then to explore the complexity of the cultures of the present and the past in the hope that that can open up less settled understandings. In this respect, our understanding of human rights operates both inside and outside of the so-called ‘Western model’, able to hold neoliberal market capitalism to account, while simultaneously in other versions, being oddly complicit with its structures and assumptions. Human rights, in this respect, has a utopian significance holding out the prospect of a future, more humane world to come while at the same time being deeply implicated in the barbarism of the present. Here my argument is that human rights are too valuable to simply dismiss as being part of the dominant culture, but that we need to recognise that they are sometimes utilised as a way of insisting on the superiority of the West over other cultures, as a justification for aggression or indeed the imposition of certain normalised ideas about human development. In the new global struggle for hegemony, the idea of human rights seemingly legitimates the culture power of the West over ‘Other’ civilisations, but equally has become part of the way of imagining a more humane future built less upon domination and more from democracy, reciprocity with nature and our common humanity. Within our fractured and dangerous world critical thinking will need to draw upon ideas of human rights and not dismiss them as many different kinds of fundamentalists suppose that we do. If the idea of human rights is understood critically, it can be linked to understandings of humanity that can act as a critical resource in our shared future. Here I have adopted a form of critique that looks at human rights through a number of ethical languages all of which have much to contribute to our broader understanding. The meanings of freedom are dependent upon globally interconnected ideas and practices that cut across a number of binary oppositions that are regularly drawn upon by the media of mass communication. The idea of ‘our’ humanity versus the terrorist enemy – regularly traded upon by the state – is breached by less comfortable understandings related to Western militarism, double standards, global inequality and a civilisation on course to ecologically destroy the planet. Even if the idea of shared human rights has become part of our moral imagination, we may still try to shrug them off when it is convenient to do so, and struggle to understand the obligations they potentially place us under. This, again, is more a matter of shared forms of cultural understanding than simply being about legal procedures. There is indeed a way of understanding human rights as simply being the expression of the law and capitalist modernity that is captured by the role of expert

systems. However, it is notable not only that legal experts differ on these questions, but also that the idea of human rights has seeped into our culture in often quite complex ways. Here we need to take issue with a range of libertarian movements from Marxism to anarchism that imagine a future without the law and legal systems. Equally found wanting, however, is another set of arguments that simply equates ideas of human rights with a more emancipated future without looking at the different cultural expressions that can be interconnected to ideas of human rights. It is, then, to more ambivalent and less predictable frames of reference that this book ultimately seeks to investigate. How successful in this venture I am is for the reader to judge.