The Phlogiston of Human Rights

8/9/2019 The Phlogiston of Human Rights

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THE PHLOGISTON OF HUMAN RIGHTS

cultures, practices, ideologies, mythologies and wishful thinking

Valerio Fusi

First of all—as always—there is the matter of definition. The expression ‘human rights’

delineates a concept that is too laden with connotations to be used in an anthropological context

without giving rise to problems. Laden with connotations is the noun right , which stands as the

end-point of a long and complex process of cultural elaboration, and is now understood only in

terms of the juridical and political formalisms that are organically intrinsic to the modern

Western form of life. Laden with connotations, too—albeit in a different manner—is the

adjective human, which has assumed for us a sense of historical profundity, a scientific valence

and a biological dimension without precedents or counterparts in other cultures. And laden

with connotations is the association of the two terms, which produce, when taken together, an

autonomous and largely incommensurable semantic field.

Before inquiring how much of our idea of ‘human rights’ may be traced back to the

experience of classical civilisations and of alien contemporary cultures, it may be worthwhile toattempt some exercises of linguistic hygiene in order to scrape from our lexicon as much

ethnocentric encrustation as possible. Even in doing so, naturally, the most we might hope for

would be to reduce in reasonable measure the degree of fallaciousness of our reasoning. Truth,

whatever that may be, is not a goal within the anthropologist’s reach (and perhaps not such an

interesting one, after all).

The nature of anthropology is essentially comparative: that which it perceives, that

which it recognizes, that which it professes to describe may be described, recognized and

perceived only through (within, and according to the terms and conditions of) a language (a

linguistic game) the rules of which deeply structure the culture of the anthropologist, confer

meaning on his or her experience and define the limits and the expectations of his or her

perception and knowledge of the world (and are—obviously—unfounded and relative).

This language is fashioned to handle concepts with which it is already familiar or whichis able to recognize by means of analogy and isomorphism with concepts already known. Even

the concept of ‘concept’ is, in some ways, already part of its grammar (more a work tool than a

universal cognitive precondition). Indeed, the anthropologist, too, who scrupulously records

and investigates concepts which are absent in his or her own culture (and not merely different)

seeks out concepts and carries on thinking in terms of ‘concepts’, that is, a type of specialised

abstraction which, within our culture, shapes mental life, experience and the representation of

reality in a very definite and specific fashion. Yet perhaps it is our idea itself of ‘concept’ that

differs from those of other cultures, if in fact they have one. Who can say? And who then can

say whether communication between cultures, despite their apparent translatability, hides

instead an insurmountable hermeneutic misunderstanding which ontologically precludes

reciprocal intelligibility?

Not that these are particularly original considerations. Willard Quine has saideverything there was to say on the subject. It is nonetheless surprising to discover time and

again how little even shrewd researchers and academics pay heed to (or prefer to hide

themselves from) the insidious pitfalls of careless handling of their semantic tools, as well as the

high stakes they place upon the rigour and, potentially, the verisimilitude of their investigations.

progress

It is therefore necessary to clarify from the outset what one is talking about when one

speaks of human rights, and whence one speaks—from which moment in history and from

which physical place.

In so doing, we soon realize how widespread—even among the epistemologically wary

—is the conviction (or more correctly, the implicit, introjected and visceral faith) that our idea

of human rights rests upon the uppermost tip of a temporal cone and at the centre of a spacial

circumference which stand as the convergence point of the very best that human history has



convinces itself the opposite is true); arbitrary insofar as it is without grounds. But this,

however, is anything but random and capricious: there is a method, a cogency, a momentum

that ensure that a culture chooses one solution over another, or at least a group of solutions

which it believes to be more practicable than other groups.

This is what happens in the case of ‘human rights.’ This is what happens, earlier still,

with the term ‘human,’ with the idea, the concept, the word, the semantic field of ‘human.’

What does it mean to be ‘human’? Where does man’s humanity lie? How may it be measured

and how is it to be appreciated? To what degree do we distinguish that which is essentially,irreducibly human from that which is not? Is there truly something human, some human

constant that endures beyond different accepted meanings and answers in different cultures? Is

there a nucleus of being human inside which all human beings may reasonably expect to find

the same things? At first glance, this would appear an easy question; discussing the matter

through among gentlemen, it should not be impossible to find a shared response.

genes and legs

Personally I am rather pessimistic in this regard. I am inclined to believe that, like all

other concepts and not less than all the others, ‘human,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘human nature’ are

culturally based concepts that have value and a sphere of legitimacy, a semantic legality, only

within a specific social and cultural reality.

To be sure, we all expect that possession of certain physical requisites defines us

sufficiently. But which common requisites are we prepared to admit as being fundamental, and

which do we push aside as superfluous accessories? Are we going to accept as relevant a

correspondence in the number of genes, or is the number of legs that we will take into account?

It is here that the insoluble problem lies: we may well accept the logical principle that equals

cannot be other than equal also in matters of rights, yet when we seek to define what equal means, we realize that similarity and correspondence are not viable criteria for our purposes, for

they are always definitely relative to one point of view, to one arbitrary and variable

segmentation of atomic aspects of reality which in turn are clustered or disjointed in order to

construct identity. Every culture makes its choice in its own ways, according to its principles,

values and interests, and defines on that basis only a set of characteristics that excludes everyother possible configuration. That which we accept as equal to ourselves cannot be and has

never been the same for any other.

And why then should this physical correspondence (however declined) constitute the

basis for a right? By what universal law must equal things have equal rights and different things

different rights? Why should the opposable thumb be granted more rights than the cleft foot?

Why should other primates have fewer rights than we enjoy, to say nothing of other mammals?

The right to life: now there’s a principle that surely might lay claim to some sort of universal

basis—but who knows?

Addressing the latter question of the right to life of all living beings (not only of human

beings) may perhaps help to better understand what human rights are based on insomuch as they

are human.

Universal respect for living beings hits up against a limit in the paradoxical necessitythat life generates and preserves itself only by means of suppressing other life. In order to make

bearable the fact that we kill other living beings to nourish ourselves, we have decided that

other living beings (most of them, at any rate) are—first—not equal to us, and—second and

most importantly—inferior to us. In this way, life’s natural aversion to suppressing life is

tempered, made tolerable within a superior order of necessity. The exceptions confirm the rule:

pork, the sacred cow, the hyrax are indeed perceived as different by various religions but are

also placed on a level of sacredness (or dangerousness) not conferred upon other animal species,

thereby granting them a special right to life.

birds of a feather

This elementary mechanism reproduces itself in the same way in the human sphere: themore necessary it is to carry out on our fellow human beings operations and actions that we

would not accept if carried out on us, the less ready we are to recognize them as similar, and the



less human than ourselves do they become. That is why, if their quantum of humanity is not

equal to our own, must their being human have narrower boundaries; their rights shall not be the

same as those we reserve for ourselves, not because they have lesser rights but because they

have less humanity. It is useful to link this curtailment to a perceptible difference: a different

pigmentation of the epidermis, an obscure language that sounds like barbaric muttering, a

deviation from those laws which we deem natural, a minority that is in some way visible. Thus

have been classified, each in their turn, blacks, savages, women, children, foetuses, the disabled.

But it is not truly necessary that the difference be physically perceptible: there is room on thelist for Jews, Communists, infidels, non-European aliens, the poor. Certainly, many of us might

find this type of lists to be shameful and intolerable, but perhaps the same people might be

inclined to accept other lists less grossly offensive to the common sense of decency shared by

inhabitants of our region in this period in history. For many of us, foetuses have a relative and

conditioned right. Many others (respectable people who are, so it would appear, absolutely

equal to us) do not agree. To the minds of others still, a further distinction must be made, a

different graduated scale, so that some foetuses shall be granted admittance to the human

condition while others shall not on the basis of their age. Age thus becomes the discriminating

factor of humanity, and - strictly speaking - the young foetus and the old should be given

different denominations.

The pairs of opposites similar/different, near/far shape and give meaning to our

perceptions, our behaviour and our self-awareness, and they can be arranged according to pairs

of preference: the son before the brother, the brother before the friend, the friend before the

neighbour, the neighbour before the foreigner; the Italian rather than the Englishman, the

Englishman rather than the Islamic. (“well, If you’re white, that’s all right; if you’re brown,

stick around; but if you’re black, get back, get back, get back.” So goes the song). In each of

these passages a minimal fraction of humanity is lost, and with it goes a bit of our inclination to

recognise equality, as does the corresponding measure of rights. And at a certain point along

the line, human rights grow weaker (in juridical terminology as well) and the common sense

and taboos upon which they rest lose their power. Depending on which point we are at along

this line, as Geertz says, we decide how hard we may bite.

disgust

Why then should I refuse other visions for which recognising the possession of similar

somatic or genetic features is not a sufficient condition for also recognising a common nature,

an identical degree of humanity? We should protect ourselves against the meddling of our own

ethical prejudices in evaluating the connotations that the human principle has assumed in other

cultures, because it is there that lurks the powerful and epistemologically impracticable view of

the evolutionistic idea of progress. The fact that in today’s world widows do not immolate

themselves on their husbands’ pyre, that handmaidens and servants are not buried alive with the

king along with his horses, that newborn girls, disabled people and the elderly are not

suppressed, that blacks are not slaves, that prisoners of war are not sacrificed to Tlaloc or served

up as meat for the banquet table, none of this results from a providential or benign evolution

that finally conjoined the world’s good sense with a universal principle of justice. It simplymeans that the type of culture we live in cannot allow itself to segment and classify humanity

according to those principles. Although we do not wish, not even for an instant, to justify or

tolerate those life- and value-systems, although they are repugnant to us in the most visceral

way, we still cannot look back upon those cultural experiences as though we had completed a

hard and luminous progression toward today’s comfortable vantage point. Our disgust, which I

myself feel and on the basis of which I accept that other cultures may be fought against (and

eventually destroyed), is a cultural sense of disgust, a disgust arising from that which our

culture has taught us to behold as disgusting. Do we truly believe that our ancestors, or other

cultures, were so perverse, so depraved—through lack of inner light, lack of the moral richness

that sets us apart—as to give themselves over to the inhuman and bestial practices that we take

pride in condemning? Inhuman, precisely: it is here that we, too, set a limit, declaring not

human, albeit with other purposes in mind, those who adopt such practices.



ladders/adders

Once again, a point must be identified along a graduated scale, but once again no one can say

for sure where that point lies.

Yet marking the point remains indispensable, for that point signals the limit to that

which is just.

Just. There is one possible definition of rights, prior even to juridical or cultural setting:

the perception that something is just, a condition of ease of the mind that recognises and acceptsa state and a configuration of reality because it perceives them as part of a natural order

necessarily brought about, introjected into human awareness, hinging on the mechanism of the

world.

Insofar as we sense we have a clear understanding of what kind of thing the human

principle is, there is no such need to define its rights. In a certain sense, the right of a thing is

none other than the recognition of its inviolability as a thing in itself, the expectation that its

truest nature and identity shall not be threatened, questioned, restricted or conditioned in any

way, neither shall be its claim to its own integrity as the obvious expectation for the persistence

of its defining characteristics. Any action intended to limit this claim offends its proper right,

and at the same time reveals it and establishes it as a right.

Let us be clear, then: in whom do we recognise—and in what form, in what manner, to

what degree—the condition of ‘being human’? To whom do we recognise the rights proper to

human beings?

For us, a person’s rights are an intrinsic, exclusive attribute tied up with the individual

just as the individual is perceived by Western Civilisation: a unique personality, the conceptual

and physical borders of which are bounded by the person and by his or her attributes. The

rights of the human ‘person.’ Precisely. The person, the individual: there is an entire semantic

field structured around this conjoined meaning of singleness, individuation, personality,

identity. There is nothing more culturally connotated than this. Individual identity as a set of

inalienable, distinctive and autonomous qualities is a prerogative of our culture. Other

societies, other cultures in different moments of history and in different places on the face of the

earth do not know, do not apply this distinction, at least not in terms that are familiar to us. It is

not that they have chosen not to practise the distinction; more simply, their history went in adifferent direction, and our own experience—were they to conceive of it or even perceive it—

would prompt only their disgust and sense of revulsion, just as we feel toward theirs, in the

name of an ethic equally solid and well-founded as that in which we believe we must place our

faith.

In this sense, it may be instructive to read once again the writings of Jean Paul Vernant

and of Eric Havelock on the concept of personal identity (and its correlation with the semantics

of ontology and with the idea and practice of justice) in Ancient Greece, along with a group of

interesting works on the idea of person in Polynesia (Pritz Johansen) and among the Ancient

Scandinavians (Gronbeck). This entire tradition of study serves to remind us how the

representation of a the human person must inevitably be relativized to the cultural and social

setting in which human action is expressed and manifests itself , relativized also to its power—

and interest—to produce change in the surrounding environment, to the degree andintentionality of its intervention upon nature. And also, consequently, to the perception people

have of their own relationship to the species, tribe, family, group to which they belong, as well

as their perception of the physical and even temporal boundaries drawn around their person.

There are identities that take on meaning and are structured exclusively in a tribal setting,

identities for which—on the linguistic level as well—it is impossible to extricate the perception

and representation of individuality from the context of social life and of blood ties: hunter-

gatherer societies in Africa, ergative cultures in Australia and Siberia, the incomprehensible

indigenous psychologies with which time and again anthropological research and anecdotage

astonish us, the bewildering train of bizarre human behaviours that make it so very pleasurable,

fascinating and disquieting.

Things, therefore, are rather more complicated than they might appear at first glance.

And even that which seems most natural and obvious to us (especially that which seems mostnatural and obvious to us) fails to guarantee acceptable conditions of legitimacy and veracity,

despite the deceptive and insidious conceit of universality with which it presents itself.



What surprises and disturbs us when we think, for example, of slave-trading societies in

history and more generally of all societies that practise discrimination and violence against

individuals whom we consider to be fully human, is that those very same individuals do not

rebel, do not fight to affirm their own ‘rights’—as surely would seem natural to us, and as

perhaps we would do in their position. And if they do fight, they do so only in historical

circumstances that are extraordinarily complex and rent by transition; never, anyway, in the

context of a romantic struggle for justice and equality (“Equality, I spoke the word, as if a

wedding vow.” So goes another song).Slave-trading systems could not be upheld by mere coercion and violence; they never were.

Like all societies in history, the slave-trading society, too, stood as a shared system, an order, a

mental and ethical structure with which all members of society could relate, regardless of the

position they occupied in that society. The slave, the helot, the metic, the taurekareka, each

knew and identified himself as a slave, and in this condition—however uncomfortable and

‘inhuman’—he felt the mental ease that nourishes the perception of a state of justice. His

culture assigned him a role to which a social, cultural and individual identity could be

associated, a role beyond which no meaning could be found, nor desire to possess rights

assigned to other human forms who shared his cultural space. A body of literature exists on the

bewilderment experienced by black slaves who had been freed—despite themselves or amid

their indifference—after the Civil War, literature on the ruinous effects that liberation brought

about upon the social and private lives within the black community in the Southern states.

My great-grandfather—a sharecropper for his entire life—considered it indecorous that

his family ate chicken on Sunday, for that was the food of the property owners, and he remained

ever proud to serve, proud to know his place.

stereotypes

In the contemporary world the complex interaction of social relations, economic

structures, cultural force-fields, communication systems, forms of work organisation and market

dynamics, international political equilibria (and also, obviously, the variable represented by

cultural ethics) has come to configure a rather open and comprehensive statistical model of

‘human rights.’Thus, for reasons that very probably do not have much to do with ethics, we have been

put in the position to extend our recognition of humanity and (potentially) of equality to various

typologies of human being that could never have been obtained from our ancestors or even from

our fathers.

Nevertheless, upon reflection, we, too, in the end do not refuse to draw boundaries

around our human territory, for we allow full admittance only to some, begrudgingly offering

others only a visitor’s visa. And others still we do not wish to see at all in our midst.

Certainly, in a culture that has no way of accepting human beings if not in terms of phylogenetic

lineage, no one would ever maintain (or at times even confess to himself or herself) that certain

humans may be less human than others.

Let us evaluate without hypocrisy, however, our personal reactions to racial prejudice.

With what degree of revulsion might we react to the statement that all black people are dirty?Would we react in the same manner were we to hear someone say that all Jews are greedy? Or,

in this second case, do we not sense something more sinister and unsettling, something

unforgivable?

To the contrary, many are inclined with no great pangs of conscience to subscribe to the notion

that Albanians are violent—many of the same people who never would call Jews greedy or

black people dirty. And what about gypsies? There is nearly unanimous (universal?)

agreement that they are thieves, as there is regarding the idea that Islamics are fanatical and

slothful. Many of us who find antisemitic declarations to be intolerable (but not all antisemitic

declarations, only those that concern the Jews) react with tolerance, humour, and even bland

consent to racial stereotypes that contain exactly the same measure of prejudice, discrimination

and hostility.

In this case, too, there is a graduated scale, and a point beyond which racial stereotype turns intoracism—simple, good old-fashioned, traditional racism. It is improbable that all this is without

consequence on our willingness to recognise rights. Could we truly accept that dirty, greedy,



violent, thieving, fanatical, slothful people may inhabit our world, move next door to us, or

marry our sister, attend the same schools as our children, drink from the same cup?

keeping them at bay

How could we ever dream of reconciling diversities in an impracticable and hypocritical

utopia of growth and of mutual exchange among worldviews which, in reality, structure

irreconciliable interests and areas of power? The political and civil challenge of today, to thecontrary, lies more in keeping at bay people and groups of people who are tendentially hostile

and potentially aggressive all within the same normative sphere. This is the democratic utopia

in which we can put our trust, although pessimistically: a simplicity that is hard to come by, as

in Brecht’s poem. When put this way, it would appear a disarming triviality: democracy is the

condition of juridical and political equality among different people. That is what we have been

hearing for hundreds of years now, the primordial and fundamental principle of our civilisation.

But as in the case of people, it would be ingenuous indeed to expect to judge a culture

solely on the basis of its declarations of principle or in terms of its own idea of itself. Rather, it

is practices, behaviours, and the harsh preponderance of reality that truly counts. And all our

practices and behaviours tell us that a declared, nuncupative and universal recognition of

equality among members of our species (on the subject of which diurturnal propaganda is

spread among rows of parish pews and elementary-school desks, and through pathetic stories on

the evening television news) is met in fact by a highly complex and diversified practice of

segmentation and gradation of rights, a practice influenced by many subterranean and deeply

rooted cultural configurations: drifting, vestigial, together with the primordial, visceral call of

the ineradicable territoriality seated in the innermost part of every human being.

The fact that a portion of us feel dutibound to protect and defend human rights

demonstrates just how constantly those rights are violated, and together that constant violation

proves that there is no basis for belief in the universality of such rights, no moral imperative on

the grounds of which deviant behaviours cry out for vengeance before God; nothing that is

altogether cogent like maternal love, for example, or the incest taboo, or sexual desire.

Everything would suggest that human rights are conditioned and relative rights—even

in the context of a culture that professes, theorises, and defends such rights—and they arefragile, therefore, and permanently at risk of being violated.

We had better acknowledge with full awareness the even logical impossibility of

fulfilling our own statements of principle, the distance that separates our declared ethicality

from our crude handling of the human affairs in which we are immersed. We had better

recognise unflinchingly the degree to which our civilisation (including many valiant upholders

of human rights) proves willing, under certain conditions, to deny human rights to some in the

name of the rights of others. Generous democratic Westerners have exterminated hundreds of

innocent Afghanis (without, it would appear, any particular concern for their human rights), yet

it is also true that they have guaranteed the right of Afghani women to get rid of the burqa

(though so many of them still obstinately refuse to take advantage of the opportunity).

Palestinians have the same rights as we do, certainly, but they should have the good sense to not

put our coherency to the test, demanding so insistently that those rights be respected.

ethics?

Ethics. In the end, we see that manoeuvring around ethical prohibitions is not all that

difficult, as long as one knows how to conveniently manipulate the contexts or stage a

convincing ritual of exclusion and inclusion. With expedients of this sort, even putting others

to death becomes acceptable, as do torture, kidnapping and violence of every kind:

Guantanamo, Abu Grahib—there’s a case in point—and even the benign Italians in Libya and

Nasiriyah. As the experiments of Stanley Milgram demonstrated, ordinary normal people may

turn into cold torturers and killers if they are given the chance to be so in a context of legitimacy

and in the name of some principle of authority and order.

In short, the purely theoretical and sentimental recognition of an essential unity anduniversality of being human is superceded by the power of interests and dynamics that are a lot

more potent and frighteningly universal. Before the horrifying tragedies of our time, the



recognition of humanity, when unaccompanied by political awareness and realism, is at risk of

resolving itself, once more, in nothing but empty declarations of principle, eventually

underscored by a trace of unease: an indignant intellectual refusal and a measure of pathetic

bleeding-heartedness. But no one knows how much a heart may bleed before other vital

functions are threatened.

phlogistons

As in St Augustine’s saying on the subject of time, each of us in his or her heart knows perfectly

well what human rights are, but when we endeavour to subject our convictions to thorough

examination, we realise how little we know in truth.

Unfortunately, although each of us would feel reassured, human rights cannot be based

on a universal law, on an imperative established outside of time and space, on a shining and

unquestionable voice that booms from the heavens above. There is nothing of the sort, not

even the tiny modicum that the most lay among us would wish for, to guarantee an essential

nucleus, a minimal level of verity on which to base our conduct.

The most we can hope for is something similar to the theory of phlogiston, a

conventional and irremediably false explanation that allows us nonetheless to walk upon the

void for as long as possible. Solvitur ambulando, St Augustine would say again, but every day

we realise just how difficult—and tragic—our walk really is.

The Phlogiston of Human Rights

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