Human Rights And The Search For Community

Rhoda E. Howard-hassmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367319861
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973321
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Rhoda E. Howard argues that communities can exist in modern Western societies if they protect the whole spectrum of individual human rights, not only civil and political but also economic rights.

1 Human Rights and the Search for Community

Human Rights as Individual Rights

This book is an argument for the principle of universal, equal, and individual human rights. Human rights are rights that one holds merely by virtue of being human. All human beings hold all human rights equally, and no one can legitimately be denied enjoyment of a human right without a fair judicial decision. Only under very limited and prescribed conditions (such as criminal conviction or the necessities of state power in warfare) may an individual be deprived of any of her human rights. The concept of human rights renders status distinctions such as race, gender, and religion politically and legally irrelevant and demands equal treatment for all, regardless of whether they fulfill expected obligations to the community.

These are statements of law and principle, not of practice. Human rights are held in law by everyone, even though they may not be enjoyed by everyone in fact. Critics of human rights reject them both for reasons of principle and because human rights are not enjoyed in practice by all people. I acknowledge deficiencies in practice but nevertheless defend the principle.

I am a sociologist and make my argument for individual human rights from a sociological perspective. The state system of the twentieth century, and the powers all political rulers hold, impel defenses of the human rights of all citizens. Everyone is under the authority of a state; there are no individuals or peoples anywhere excused from that authority. Moreover, as I will argue in this book, contemporary ideals of the right of the individual to be treated respectfully, equally with all other citizens, and in a manner that guarantees her autonomy of action pervade not only Western liberal societies but increasingly most other societies. The sociological picture of late-twentieth-century society is one that demonstrates human demands for individual privacy and individual protections against the state, the society, and even the family.

Why should a sociological argument for human rights be necessary? The human rights of the individual are firmly entrenched in international law as encoded in various United Nations (UN) documents. They are also firmly ensconced as a basic principle of organized political and social life in the Western democratic world. The Cold War is over and the ideal of individual human rights is heralded throughout the former Soviet Bloc. Yet the principle of human rights is still not fully accepted.

This principle originated in Western liberal thought, as philosophers confronted both rising state power and the increasing individualization of citizens. Although economic, social, and cultural rights were added to the original liberal package of civil and political rights in the twentieth century, partly as a reaction to pressure from the Communist world, the core meaning of human rights remains liberal, with its focus on the equal and inalienable rights of the individual. States that nowadays protect human rights are perforce liberal societies, whether they exist in the West or elsewhere.¹ Liberalism as a philosophy or as a guide to law is not popular with political authoritarians, whether of right- or left-wing persuasion. Nor is it popular with those who believe that social groups of various kinds supersede the individual in importance.

There are five separate theoretical challenges in the 1990s to the UN principles of international human rights. One, which I call radical capitalism, denies the principle of economic rights. The other four are variants of communitarianism. I call these traditionalism, reactionary conservatism, left collectivism, and status radicalism.

The first challenge is the continued unwillingness of some liberals to accept the idea of economic rights. Some Western liberal thinkers reject the principle of economic rights as irrelevant and idealistic: Only civil and political rights are considered true human rights. Maurice Cranston argued, “Affirmations of [unattainable] economic and social rights … push … political and civil rights out of the realm of the morally compelling into the twilight world of Utopian aspirations,” thus diluting the principle of human rights.² Carnes Lord argued for the disestablishment of economic and social rights on two grounds: first, that governments can guarantee civil and political rights even when they cannot guarantee economic rights and second, that the priority of civil and political rights must be clearly established.³

Governments and economic actors also exhibit disquiet with the principle of economic rights. The move by states of the former Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe to establish a free-market economy is taken in some quarters as a complete vindication of capitalism and as evidence that the Soviet-style stress on economic rights is at best irrelevant, and at worst dangerous, to individuals’ overall freedom. The Soviet stress on economic rights was hypocritical, given its own abysmal record as a protector of such rights.⁴ It was also detrimental to the cause of civil and political rights, as Soviet rhetoric in the UN and elsewhere lent support to developmental dictatorships—those authoritarian governments that claimed that they violated civil and political rights in the cause of economic development. Nevertheless, the principle of economic rights still needs to be asserted, especially in Western countries that are not social democracies and in which citizens effectively cannot make claims to economic security as a matter of human rights.

In this book I concentrate on social behavior in North America (in both the United States and Canada) to illustrate my concern with capitalist culture’s rejection of economic rights.⁵ The extreme version of this rejection can be termed radical capitalism, the belief that the capitalist market in and of itself is sufficient to guarantee social justice as long as private property is protected, contracts are honored, and the rules of competition are fair. The human rights concerns of radical capitalists are narrow, confined to property rights and the civil and political rights needed to carry out one’s own affairs in peace. Philosophically, radical capitalists are liberal minimalists: They believe in only a very narrow set of the human rights that a liberal political regime should protect.

A behavioral manifestation of radical capitalism in North America is what I call social minimalism. Social minimalists accept certain principles of human rights wholeheartedly. They especially accept the principle of equality, and they encourage complete nondiscrimination and social mobility regardless of social status. But at the same time social minimalists eschew the principle of social obligation. They do not accept principles of responsibility to assist others to achieve material security, maintaining rather that everyone ought to be able to provide for her own security in a fair market system. North America is a class society and the poor suffer more violations of their human rights than the rich, regardless of other social statuses such as race or gender. Yet an ideology of social closure, based on the belief that anyone can rescue herself from poverty with enough effort, serves to exclude the poor from full enjoyment of human rights.

I will discuss social minimalism and social closure in Chapter 7. Before doing so, however, it will be necessary to dispose of the other four challenges to the ideal of human rights. These challenges emanate both from the Third World and from Western society, yet they overlap in their critique of the individualism inherent in human rights. All four are sodaily powerful belief systems that endanger the principle of human rights both internationally and in North America. All four exhibit different aspects of communitarianism.

The first of these four challenges is traditionalism, the contention that traditional societies should be permitted to violate human rights when those rights conflict with traditional rules for orderly social behavior. Traditionalists are particularly affronted by the idea that human rights should be universal and equal for all and frequently express a preference for group rather than individual rights. Traditionalists argue that their societies fully protect human rights within the confines of the group and, moreover, that traditional societies are more likely to protect economic rights than Western (capitalist) societies. This challenge is located within the international debate on the meaning of individual rights and articulated inter alia by scholars purporting to present uniform “African” and “Muslim” perspectives on human rights.

In the Western world, the traditionalist critique resonates with the second communitarian perspective, which I call reactionary conservatism. This perspective is concerned by what it views as the excesses of contemporary freedom, such as women’s liberation, gay (homosexual and lesbian) rights, and the supposed breakdown of the family. Reactionary conservatives agree with traditionalists that excessive individualism is antithetical to social order. But they also agree with social minimalists that economic security is a matter for individual striving, not a matter that should be protected by the state as a human right.

The principle of universal, equal, and individual human rights is challenged not only by right communitarians but also by left communitarians. The third communitarian challenge is what I call left collectivism, which is the Third World nationalist position that the most important human right is to national self-determination and relief from the control of Western states and multinational corporations. To Third World left collectivists, the ideals of human rights are a form of Western cultural imperialism. The Third World left collectivist challenge is finding its way into recent discussions of peoples’ rights or groups’ rights as opposed to individual rights.⁶ This position merges with traditionalism insofar as traditionalists also assert a nationalist right to be free of liberal pressures from imperialist societies that undermine their social values.

The fourth communitarian challenge, which also emanates from the left, is what I have dubbed status radicalism. It might be more familiar to readers in its guise as the politics of identity. Proponents of this position argue that in practice, certain categories of people are systematically denied their human rights on the basis of their social identity or status. Status radicals view the differences among categories of people variously positioned in the hierarchy of oppression as so large as to be insurmountable. Since the denial is systemic, it implies that liberalism has failed, in principle, by not recognizing that human rights are not available to certain status groups. In the Western world, some feminists and some black activists therefore argue that the individual’s status membership is more salient than her individual identity. Human rights are available only for dominant status groups and are an irrelevant principle for subordinated ones.

I discuss the various individualist and communitarian positions described here in both theory and empirical practice. As a sociologist, I am interested in what ordinary people believe and value and in what motivates their interactions with others. There may or may not be sophisticated intellectual justifications for the way individualists or communitarians behave. But people will base their actions and judgments on their own beliefs about the correct way to live, even when there are no intellectuals who agree with them. Methodologically, I describe the holders of these various positions as ideal types. These ideal types illustrate social trends in both North American and Third World society, and demonstrate how the various critiques of human rights intersect.

Both right and left communitarians believe that materialism and social alienation are inherent in the individualism that human rights seem to encourage. Western societies, it seems to communitarians, encourage individualism to the point of social breakdown. Social minimalists, by contrast, rejoice in individualism and disregard its social costs. They attribute social breakdown not to materialist excess but to the unwillingness of some individuals to avail themselves of free-market opportunities for personal and material betterment.

The debate over the meaning of modernity is crucial to this debate on the value of individualism. “Modern” society seems to many of its critics to be characterized by materialism, competitiveness, excessive individualism, and the breakdown of community. If modern society does indeed encourage individualism at the price of responsibility to others, then both traditionalist and Western communitarians want no part of it. I believe that misinterpretation of the meaning and organization of the modern community contributes to much of the communitarian critique of individualism. There can be community in modern society, although it is weaker and thinner than community in traditional society.

I define a “community” as a group of individuals who have a sense of obligation toward one another. This obligation can be thicker or thinner, as one moves from smaller local communities to larger communities such as the city or nation. Community is not necessarily based on primordial ties of kinship, common religion, common language, or common ancestral origins—as much of the nostalgia for the supposedly lost, premodern community supposes. Modern community rests on secondary, not primary, associations and on voluntary rather than ascriptive memberships. Modern community is created by individuals acting out complex role-sets, not conforming to a limited and prescribed set of roles. Social obligation and commitment to the community are possible, and indeed are frequently found, in societies that value autonomy, privacy, and individualism.

Some communitarians view the principle of human rights and its social manifestation of individualism as a form of cultural imperialism. Traditionalists, left collectivists, and status radicals are all connected by relativism, the claim that the universalism implied by the international human rights documents is both unattainable in practice and unethical in principle. They are also connected by culturalism, the view that culture is the most important defining aspect of the human person’s identity. For the traditionalist, culture is a holistic entity that is entirely un-problematic for the members of the society and must be preserved. For the left collectivist, the culture of oppressed national groups ought to be preserved against the onslaught of imperialism. For status radicals, a new kind of culture exists, the culture of oppressed social categories (for example, “women’s culture” as opposed to that of men).

The radical capitalist challenge to human rights takes the opposite perspective on culturalism. For radical capitalists, culture is irrelevant, and there is no such thing as an oppressed group defined immutably by its status. The radical capitalist is a universalist, arguing for universal civil and political rights and discounting the need for relativistic adjustment. Radical capitalism is concerned only with individual achievements and interests: It is not part of radical capitalism’s agenda to try to build a community in which all social categories are included.

By contrast, underneath both the right and the left communitarian challenges to the principle of human rights is the concern that community is disappearing. Traditionalists and reactionary conservatives alike worry that societies based on human rights produce anomie or alienation. They fear that the individualism inherent in human rights produces people withdrawn from their societies, people who suffer from normlessness and a lack of connection to others. Left collectivists join traditionalists and reactionary conservatives in their fear of the selfish individualism that they believe is exemplified in its worst form in the United States. Status radicals maintain that by retreating into their own cultural groups they will be able to create more caring societies in which individuals feel a sense of obligation to the oppressed.

I propose that both the radical capitalist and the right and left communitarian c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Human Rights and the Search for Community
• 2 Liberal Society
• 3 Cultural Absolutism and Nostalgia for Community
• 4 Rights, Dignity, and Secular Society
• 5 The Modern Community
• 6 Honor and Shame
• 7 Social Exclusion
• 8 Individualism and Social Obligation
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index