Fear, hope and human rights
By Boaventura de Sousa Santos: The great seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that the two basic feelings of the human being (affections, in his terminology) are fear and hope. And he suggested that a balance between the two is necessary, since fear without hope leads to abandonment and hope without fear can lead to destructive self-confidence. This idea can be extrapolated to contemporary societies, especially at a time when, with cyberspace, instant interpersonal digital communications, the massification of industrial entertainment and the mass customization of commercial and political microtargeting, collective feelings are increasingly “ similar to individual feelings, even if they are always selective aggregations. That is why currently the identification with what is heard or read is so immediate ("that is precisely what I think", although never before has thought about "that"), as well as repulsion ("had good reasons to hate that ”, even though“ that ”has never been hated). In this way, collective feelings easily become an invented memory, in the future of individuals' past. Of course, this is only possible because, in the absence of an alternative, the degradation of material living conditions becomes vulnerable to a comforting ratification of the status quo.
If we turn feelings of hope and fear into collective feelings, we can conclude that perhaps there has never been such an unequal distribution of fear and hope on a global scale. The vast majority of the world's population lives dominated by fear: hunger, war, violence, disease, boss, job loss or improbability of finding work, the next drought or the next flood. This fear is almost always lived without the hope that something can be done to make things better. On the contrary, a tiny fraction of the world's population lives with such excessive hope that it seems totally fearless. He does not fear enemies because he considers that they have been annulled or disarmed; he does not fear the uncertainty of the future because he has comprehensive insurance; he does not fear the insecurities of his place of residence because at any moment he can move to another country or another continent (and even begins to consider the possibility of occupying other planets); he does not fear violence because he has security and surveillance services: sophisticated alarms, electrified walls, private armies.
Every year, millions fall into the poverty trap from which they cannot escape.
The global social division of fear and hope is so unequal that phenomena unthinkable less than thirty years ago today seem normal characteristics of a new normal. Workers "accept" to be exploited more and more through work without rights; young entrepreneurs "confuse" autonomy with self-slavery; Racialized populations face racist prejudices that often come from those who do not consider themselves racist; women and the LGTBI population continue to be victims of gender-based violence, despite all the victories of the feminist and antihomophobic movements; non-believers or believers of "wrong" religions are victims of the worst fundamentalisms. On the political level, democracy, conceived as the government of many for the benefit of many, tends to become the government of few for the benefit of the few, the state of exception with fascist drive is infiltrating democratic normality, while the The judicial system, conceived as the rule of law to protect the weak against the arbitrary power of the strong, is becoming the legal war of the powerful against the oppressed and of the fascists against the Democrats.
It is urgent to change this state of affairs or life will become absolutely unbearable for the vast majority of humanity. When the only freedom left to this majority is the freedom to be miserable, we will face the misery of freedom. To get out of this hell, which seems programmed by a voracious and unintelligent plan, it is necessary to alter the unequal distribution of fear and hope. It is urgent that the great majorities have some hope again and, for this, it is necessary that small minorities with excess of hope (because they do not fear the resistance of those who are only afraid) are afraid again. For this to happen, many ruptures and struggles in the social, political, cultural, epistemological, subjective fields will be needed, subjective and intersubjective. The last century began with the optimism that ruptures with fear and struggles for hope were close and effective. This optimism had the initial and initiatory name of socialism or communism. Other satellite names joined them, such as republicanism, secularism, secularism. As the century progressed, new names joined, such as liberation from the colonial yoke, self-determination, democracy, human rights, liberation and emancipation of women, among others.
Today, in the first half of the 21st century, we live among the ruins of many of those names. The first two seem to be reduced, at best, to history books and, at worst, to oblivion. The remaining remain disfigured or, at the very least, are confronted with the perplexity of accumulating as many defeats as victories they star. For these reasons, ruptures and struggles against the awkwardly unequal distribution of fear and hope will be a huge task, because all the instruments available to carry them out are fragile. Moreover, this discrepancy constitutes in itself a manifestation of the contemporary imbalance between fear and hope. The fight against such an imbalance must begin with the instruments that reflect this same imbalance. Only through effective struggles against this imbalance will it be possible to point out the expansion of hope and the retraction of fear among the great majority.
When the foundations collapse, they become ruins. When everything seems to be in ruins, there is no alternative but to search through the ruins, not only the memory of what was better, but especially the disidentification with what when designing the foundations contributed to the fragility of the building. This process involves transforming dead ruins into living ruins. And it will have as many dimensions as required by the socioarchaeological predictor. Let's start today for human rights.
Human rights have a double genealogy. Throughout their vast history since the 16th century, they were successively (sometimes simultaneously) an instrument of legitimation of Eurocentric, capitalist and colonialist oppression, and an instrument of legitimization of the struggles against that oppression. But they were always more intensely an instrument of oppression than of fighting against it. That is why they contributed to the situation of extreme inequality of the global division of fear and hope in which we find ourselves today. In the middle of the last century, after the devastation of the two wars in Europe (with global impact due to colonialism), human rights had a high moment with the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came to support ideologically the work from the ONU. On December 10, the 71 years of the Declaration were commemorated. This is not the place to analyze this document in detail, which in its origin is not universal (in fact, it is culturally and politically very Eurocentric) but gradually established itself as a global narrative of human dignity.
Police Repression and Civil Liberties
It is possible to say that between 1948 and 1989 human rights were predominantly an instrument of the cold war, a reading that for a long time was a minority. The hegemonic discourse of human rights was used by Western democratic governments to exalt the superiority of capitalism in relation to the communism of the socialist bloc of the Soviet and Chinese regimes. According to this speech, human rights violations only occurred in that block and in all sympathetic countries or under its influence. The violations that were in the "friendly" countries of the West, increasingly under the influence of the United States, were ignored or silenced. Portuguese fascism, for example, benefited for a long time from that "sociology of absences", as happened with Indonesia during the period in which it invaded and occupied East Timor, or with Israel from the beginning of the colonial occupation of Palestine until today. In general, European colonialism was for a long time the main beneficiary of that sociology of absences. Thus the moral superiority of capitalism was built in relation to socialism, a construction in which the socialist parties of the Western world actively collaborated.
This construction was not free of contradictions. During this period, human rights in capitalist countries and under the influence of the United States were often invoked by organizations and social movements in resistance against flagrant violations of those rights. The imperial interventions of the United Kingdom and the United States in the Middle East, and of the United States in Latin America, throughout the 20th century, were never considered human rights violations internationally, although many human rights activists sacrificed Your life defending them. On the other hand, especially in the capitalist countries of the North Atlantic, political struggles led to the progressive expansion of the human rights catalog: social, economic and cultural rights joined civil and political rights. Some dissociation then arose between the defenders of the priority of civil and political rights over others (liberal current), and the defenders of the priority of economic and social rights or of the indivisibility of human rights (socialist or social-democratic current) .
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was seen as the unconditional victory of human rights. But the truth is that subsequent international politics revealed that, with the fall of the socialist bloc, human rights also fell. From that moment on, the type of global capitalism that prevailed since the 1980s (neoliberalism and global financial capital) was promoting an increasingly restricted narrative of human rights. He began by provoking a fight against social and economic rights. And today, with the total priority of economic freedom over all other freedoms, and with the rise of the extreme right, civil and political rights themselves, and with them liberal democracy itself, are called into question as obstacles to capitalist growth. . All this confirms the relationship between the hegemonic conception of human rights and the cold war.
In this scenario, two paradoxical and disturbing conclusions and a demanding challenge are imposed. The apparent historical victory of human rights is leading to an unprecedented degradation of the life expectancy of the majority of the world's population. Human rights ceased to be a conditionality in international relations. At most, instead of human rights subjects, individuals and peoples are reduced to the status of objects of human rights discourses. In turn, the challenge can be formulated like this: will it still be possible to transform human rights into a living ruin, an instrument to transform despair into hope? I am convincent that is yes.
* Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a doctor in Sociology of Law, professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Wisconsin-Madison (USA). Translation by Antoni Aguiló and José Luis Exeni Rodríguez.
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