The Trouble with Human Rights

 
In After Evil, Robert Meister provocatively documents the emergence of, the ethics of, and the regrettable lack of political change demanded by our contemporary understanding of human rights. This ambitious and persuasive book charts human rights as an ethical philosophy, a symbolic relation between subjects, and a pervasive ideology of our own relationship to history, as well as a rationale for the deferral of material, economic and political change. Within the contemporary logic of human rights, there is a key contradiction that, for Meister, serves as an unfortunate yet operative logic: genocide is figured as something that happens in a past from which we have had or must have a clean break, yet even though we imagine such a clean break from past genocide, there is still never enough time to properly work through the historical trauma that resonates from human suffering. Because of this impasse—”never again” and “never enough time”—human rights appears to be political when it is, in fact, merely ethical. Human Rights Discourse, for Meister, emerged in its full-blown, global, contemporary form in 1989, and it quickly became the dominant rationale for, especially, U.S. and U.N. intervention in sovereign nations: “The fall of communism in 1989 eliminated the excuse that a humanitarian show of force could provoke nuclear countermeasures and also weakened the constraint on intervention.
 
By the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, a self-described ‘world community’ no longer doubted its power to prevail over evil. And after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which outsiders could have easily interrupted, the advocates of human rights intervention shifted from questioning whether ‘couldn’t implies shouldn’t’ to arguing that ‘could implies should'” (3).
 
By the 1990s, then, humanitarian intervention became an imperative rather than a question, and concerns about whether intervention in sovereign nations makes the intervening power imperialist seem “at best an anachronism and at worst the same old craven excuse for doing nothing that allowed the horrors of the twentieth century to take place” (3). In After Evil, Meister traces and analyzes the valences of Human Rights Discourse, synthesizing case studies of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Abraham Lincoln’s addresses during the Civil War, explications of ethical and political philosophers Alain Badiou and Emmanuel Levinas, interpretations of the Nuremberg trials, and analyses of Human Rights Discourse’s roots in theology. Human Rights Discourse, ultimately, functions as a kind of salve in Meister’s analysis, a way of obscuring rather than reckoning with past, present, and future injustice. Our contemporary version of human rights—Meister refers to it in the book’s preface as “sentimental humanitarianism” (vii)—supersedes earlier conceptions of the Rights of Man. Indeed, Human Rights Discourse is “the self-consciously ethical rejection of previous versions of the Rights of Man that were violently against the power of aristocracies, autocracies, and the like” (8). The actions encouraged by Human Rights Discourse are meant to facilitate security, and they are inherently opposed to the kinds of revolutionary thinking and action that motivated and stemmed from 18th-century constructions of the Rights of Man. As a counterrevolutionary political theology, Human Rights Discourse casts perpetrators of genocide as potential victims of, and victims/survivors of genocide as potential perpetrators of, future genocide. The goal of Human Rights Discourse, then, is to place the perpetrator and the victim in an affective relation where both bear witness to and promise never to participate again in genocide. This affective relation, of course, requires nothing like revolutionary change, and, according to Meister, it ends up reinforcing the unjust distribution of wealth and resources that are often the result of genocide. In Human Rights Discourse, Meister claims, the idealized figure of identification is less the victim than aid workers, “exemplary precursors on a path to redemption that we must all eventually follow . . . Despite (perhaps even because) such saintly figures exist in Human Rights Discourse, I would continue to argue that its real aim is to reassure the compassionate witness of his own redemption” (78).
 
Human Rights Discourse’s counterrevolutionary effects are most clearly seen, in Meister’s analysis, through the role accorded to the beneficiary of genocide. In the case of South Africa, for example, “former victims establish that they were morally undamaged by allowing beneficiaries to keep most, if not all, of their gains from the discredited past without having to defend those gains as legitimate. Distributive justice is thus largely off the agenda of societies with new human rights cultures, except to the extent that redistribution can be divorced from retribution and recast as ‘reparation’—which in South Africa consisted of acknowledging past practices of repression that beneficiaries no longer have reason to deny or condone” (23-24). Reparation, then, is largely affective, a project of remembering and bearing witness rather than redistributing wealth and ill-gotten fortunes. Human Rights Discourse thus facilitates an ideological break with the past, “a time of cyclical violence,” and the emergence of a new era “in which the evil is remembered rather than repeated” (25).
 
Meister’s account of how Human Rights Discourse approaches genocide comprises the core of this book’s polemical argument: that institutions like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are successful in Human Rights Discourse precisely because they produce an affective response on the part of the beneficiaries of human rights violations and work against any type of structural or economic reparations on the part of victim. What counts, in Meister’s account of Human Rights Discourse, is that the beneficiaries of genocide recognize that they, too, could have been, or might in the future be, victims of yet another genocide, and thus pledge to “never again” stand by while another genocide occurs. In this way, Human Rights Discourse encourages identification with victims, while at the same time producing an anxiety, even fear, of those victims, because they might become the perpetrators of a cycle of violence against beneficiaries. These relations—between victim, beneficiary, and perpetrator—function less to resolve trauma than to push it aside, to cast past atrocities as a legacy of injustice for which remediation will come in some nebulous future. The beneficiaries of past injustice, those who remain in power even after reconciliation, “always want more time: the time they have is never sufficient for justice to be done. Their professed compassion for victims is a distinctive ethical attitude that refuses apathy but that can also substitute for justice” (313). This ethical attitude demands that all subjects bear witness to human rights violations, “an act of memory that makes compassion in the present discontinuous with the past,” producing a radical break that allows inequality to persist in the face of testimony to the history of that very inequality (230). Human Rights Discourse, then, interpellates all subjects as survivors of some past or future genocide. This universalization of the category of the “victim” has become key to how scholars understand the late twentieth century. For example, Donald Pease has argued that this subject position is one of the chief effects of nuclear warfare: “As an anticipated total disaster, Hiroshima transmuted cold war spectators into symbolic survivors of their everyday lives, able to encounter everyday events as the after-images of ever-possible nuclear disaster” (51). Lauren Berlant has also analyzed the ways in which sentimental texts like Show Boat universalize suffering and survival into national feelings; she describes this as “a project of emotional humanism that wants to turn the enduring sexual and economic politics of racism in the United States into a story about suffering in general, one that offers a liberal lens through which to see all American sufferers as part of the same survival subculture” (69). Meister’s book can be read as an elaboration of this project. Human Rights Discourse broadens the survivor/victim subject position to all nations and shifts it from a mode of subcultural belonging to a mode of mainstream belonging. Within Human Rights Discourse, all citizens of any nation are asked to think of themselves as survivors of human rights violations; even if a subject has never experienced such violations, one is asked to bear witness to the suffering of others, thus identifying with suffering as constitutive of ethical personhood.
 
Because national sovereignty is imagined as a victimary position, Israel, the permanent exception that responds to the exceptional horrors of the Holocaust, receives a great deal of analysis in this book as a mid-century model for emergent Human Rights Discourse. Israel is especially significant in Meister’s analysis, both because of the United States’s ideological relation to it—Israel’s existence serves as a kind of proof of America’s humanitarianism—but also because Europe and America’s resolve to prevent genocide on the scale of the Holocaust from ever happening again means that Israel must be protected at all costs. Indeed, Meister explicates in this book “the Israeliness of the way the U.S. expresses itself in matters of human rights. Through Human Rights Discourse . . . the U.S. has appropriated Jewish American victimary identity to describe its own global hegemony—that we have always been an Israel is now taken to explain why the U.S. is hated by anti-Semites throughout the world” (203). In our contemporary moment, the concept of sovereignty shifts as we increasingly conceive of “nation-states based on victimhood” (111).
 
In her recent analysis of borders and sovereignty, Wendy Brown argues that “key characteristics of sovereignty are migrating from the nation-state to the unrelieved domination of capital and God-sanctioned political violence” (23). Meister’s analysis of Human Rights Discourse takes a different vantage point, but his findings are similar. Sovereignty is paid lip service by Human Rights Discourse, but the exceptional case of Israel proves the rule that the types of reparations and reconciliations championed by advocates of human rights typically involve little in the way of the reconfiguration of nation-states and the redistribution of wealth, and much in the way of compassion and forgiveness. That is, in the discourse of contemporary human rights, religious rhetoric and affective relations are privileged, resulting in stymied political and economic change. Without any real moves toward economic or political equality, Meister argues, sovereignty and reconciliation will remain mere tropes, masking the consolidation of wealth and the persistence of the very inequalities that facilitate human rights violations.
 
The exception of Israel’s sovereignty underlies the contemporary Human Rights Discourse that Meister analyzes in his wide-ranging and provocative study. While Israel’s statehood underwrites the logic of sovereignty today—especially with its emphasis on race/ethnicity’s coextension with nationhood—genocide stands as the catastrophe that must be warded off by whatever means necessary, and thus, what legitimates and stabilizes the discourse. When genocide does occur, it must be worked through in a process of reconciliation, by which the genocide’s beneficiaries and victims recognize one another’s mutual losses without any redistribution of wealth. While Meister largely casts Human Rights Discourse in religious terms, it is also clearly part of late capitalism. As Richard Dienst argues in relation to the pop singer Bono’s philanthropic work for Africa:

 

The trajectory of Bono’s campaigns over the past decade tells us a great deal about the limits of philanthropy, reform, and popular politics in a world where any feeling of global collectivity seems increasingly remote . . . in spite of his high-flown rhetoric, he does not want to forge a bond of solidarity and obligation between the mass audience he addresses in the West and the subjects in the South whom he claims to represent: such a bond might all too easily turn against the system he serves.

(118)

This “system,” global capitalism, also operates behind Human Rights Discourse. Encouraging affective bonds but delaying any redistribution of wealth, reconciliation, witnessing, and testimony all serve to alleviate the guilt that beneficiaries of human rights violations feel, without doing anything to remedy the very real inequalities that exist in any situation where human rights violations occur.

 
After Evil is a large, even magisterial work, and because it is an analysis of a discourse, it often veers away from the particular and toward the abstract. Meister uses nebulous pronouns to denote beliefs that “they” or “we” hold, and the explications of symbolic or psychoanalytic structures of disavowal and identification are often free-floating and unattached to particular subjects or events. As an analysis of one of the most prevalent discourses of our contemporary moment, this methodology works well. When the book swerves into more practical analyses of how redistributive justice might work or why Islam interpellates subjects differently than the Judeo-Christian Human Rights Discourse, the book’s abstractions falter and seem ill-suited for the kind of particular, detailed analysis promised by those topics. These slippages do seem to be intentional on Meister’s part. After Evil contains over 130 pages of endnotes, and the detailed evidence for many of the book’s claims and case studies are to be found in those notes. This is understandable in a work of such scope, and especially because the book ultimately aims to document Human Rights Discourse as a discourse, even an ideology, that transcends any particular instance and operates as a symbolic logic, governing not just international law but our own emotional lives.
 
In its analysis of Human Rights Discourse, After Evil does clearly demonstrate how the logic of human rights, with its emphasis on testimony, redemption, and forgiveness, forms a kind of civil religion today. Human Rights Discourse “is a set of cultural techniques that allows individuals to disavow the collective wishes on which past struggles were based in much the way that missionaries get pagans to renounce their violent gods” (316). This conversion discourse aspires to interpellate us all, and it renders collective wishes irrelevant as we are all transformed into compassionate individuals. The fantasy of collective belonging made possible by Human Rights discourse, After Evil posits, furnishes us with the illusion that sentimentality and compassion can help us comprehend the phenomenon of genocide, and that this understanding in turn makes possible just responses to past, present, and future atrocities.