Although the challenging argument of If God Were a Human Rights Activist may appear at first sight to have been made less relevant by contemporary populist anti-globalist trends within the very centers of hegemonic liberal capitalism, Boaventura Santos's thoughtful book about the contemporary global human condition deserves a serious consideration.
Santos's basic premise is that the world is living under the material and ideological hegemony of global neoliberal capitalism. His central question is whether the discourse of human rights, despite its seemingly global hegemony as a discourse of human dignity, can serve as a counterhegemonic efficacious weight “in helping the struggles of the excluded, the exploited, and the discriminated against, or whether on the contrary, they make those struggles more difficult” (1). Given Santos's suspicion that the discourse of human rights is compromised by its kinship with the liberal ideology of possessive individualistic autonomy, an ideology that does not allow so much unjust suffering in the world to be considered a violation of human rights, then the answer must be that we need to look for other discourses of human dignity that could serve to strengthen counterhegemonic conceptions of human rights. Given the ideological exhaustion of historical ideals of national liberation—such as socialism, communism, revolution, and nationalism—that had constituted alternative secular grammars of human dignity throughout the twentieth century, Santos sees the need to examine whether political theologies could not perhaps serve as an alternative source for counterhegemonic normative politics.
The structure of Santos's grounding argument raises three distinct issues. The first concerns the validity of the basic premise that the world is still living under the global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. We can leave this issue aside for the time being, for even if the premise is questionable, it does not affect the relevance of the other two issues that are the central ones in the book: Santos's critical assessment of the weak efficacy of the contemporary discourse of human rights and his examination of political theologies as an alternative source for counterhegemonic normative politics.
In the first chapter Santos examines “the fragile hegemony” of human rights. Human rights are “hegemonic” insofar as they have become the dominant discourse of human dignity and insofar as the concept of law and rights has triumphed as the dominant discourse of social emancipation. But this hegemony is fragile insofar as the discourse of human rights is impotent in protecting the majority of the world's inhabitants from gross human rights violations. Following Ernst Bloch, Santos attributes this impotence to the genealogical embeddedness of the discourse of human rights in Western bourgeois revolutions and in the ideology of bourgeois individualism, which fails to recognize collective rights and other more utopian discourses of social emancipation.
Only a hermeneutics of suspicion that reveals what Santos views as the “four illusions” built into the contemporary common-sense understanding of conventional rights can free the discourse of human rights from its Western liberal matrix and make it available for a more counterhegemonic usage. The first illusion is a “teleological” reading of the history of human rights as a linear path inexorably leading to our present conventional understanding that impedes us in taking seriously other historical possibilities that could have led to alternative yet unrealized conceptions of human dignity and social dignity.
Closely connected to this is a second illusion, the illusion of “triumphalism,” which views the victory of human rights as an unconditional human good and therefore is unable to evaluate critically the alleged political superiority of human rights over other grammars and discourses of emancipation. Alternative discourses such as the ones grounding the anticolonial liberation movements or the socialist and communist movements, thus appear rightly defeated and relegated to the dustbin of history.
Yet another illusion is “decontextualization,” which takes the discourse of human rights out of its particular sociohistorical context in order to enhance human rights’ abstract universality. Thus, human rights talk was detached from the revolutionary tradition in which it had first emerged and began to be conceived “as a grammar of depoliticized social change” (4).
The final and most dangerous illusion, and the focus of Santos's book, is a kind of “monolithism” that denies or minimizes “the tensions and even internal contradictions of the theories of human rights” (4–5). The most obvious example is the ambiguity built into the very discourse of the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man, insofar as it speaks ambivalently of the rights of man and of the citizen. Clearly the citizen has political rights as a member of a democratic polity which constitutionally protects those rights exclusively for those citizens. By definition the political rights of citizens are particular to a given polity, whereas human rights are universal, but abstractly so, and human rights are therefore nonenforceable unless states assume the responsibility to protect also the rights of those who are not their citizens. As a consequence, human rights are invoked mainly in situations of either erosion or particularly serious violations of the rights of individuals and groups. Such is the condition of stateless persons, immigrants, and refugees who are unwelcome at the border; individuals and groups who live under failed states with no rule of law able to protect those rights; and those who live under authoritarian states that do not recognize the rule of law as a constitutional constraint on the rulers or as a constitutional protection for the subjects.
This fundamental tension or contradiction is not just built into the conventional human rights discourse, but it is also embedded institutionally into the very Westphalian system of sovereign territorial nation-states. Reformulating the discourse of human rights will not per se change this institutional reality. Only by changing the international geopolitical system could this fundamental contradiction be addressed. However, remaining focused at the level of discourse, Santos does not provide institutional analysis.
The fundamental question is whether Santos does not overburden human rights excessively with the task of institutional political change and social transformation, tasks that perhaps should be the sphere of democratic politics, constitutional change, or the transformation of the international political system in order to create enforceable international and transnational legal structures to protect the universal human rights of all. A change in the conventional discourse of human rights would not alter the fundamental institutional reality that only states can protect human rights, but only the rights of their own citizens, while states also happen to be simultaneously the greatest violators of the rights of their own subjects.
But Santos is right that the contradiction goes back to the very first enunciation of universal human rights by the French and American revolutions. These revolutions proclaimed not the rights of French or Americans but the rights of “all men.” But when those republics have tried to extend those rights beyond their borders, either to liberate or to make the world safe for democracy, they have landed in what Santos designates as the “abyssal” politics of imperialism and colonialism.
At this level, Santos points to the existing problems but does not offer any viable institutional solution. Santos's most important contribution with this book lies at a different level, in asking the deeper question as to what constitutes the “human universal.” Santos asks, “If humanity is one alone, why are there so many different principles concerning human dignity and a just society, all of them presumably unique, yet often contradictory among themselves?” (8).
Only by recognizing the plurality of conceptions of the human built into the plurality of human civilizations and into the plurality of world religions can we become aware “that much has been elided by the modern Western understanding of the world and thus by the Western-centric conception of universal human rights” (8).
What Santos proposes is that we free ourselves from the secular cosmopolitan illusion that Western intellectuals can legislate universal morality for global humanity. He proposes that we instead enter into serious intercultural dialogue with other sources and conceptions of social justice and human dignity that are deposited in the grammars of human dignity and in the motivational force of political theologies, for they offer today the only real alternative to the conventional discourse of human rights.
Santos is of course aware that not all political theologies may be useful as alternatives: some of them may be antithetical to human rights, cannot be used to strengthen them, and ultimately may leave us with a worse condition. Evaluating the alternatives leads into a rather problematic typological exercise based on simple binary distinctions between “pluralist” and “fundamentalist” political theologies, on the one hand, and “progressive” and “traditionalist” political theologies, on the other.
Naturally, as is to be expected, only those political theologies that are both “pluralist” and “progressive” are serviceable to further counterhegemonic globalization. Pluralist theologies are those that evince the proper relation between reason and revelation, and between revelation and history. Progressive theologies, in turn, are those grounded on the distinction between the religion of the oppressors and the religion of the oppressed.
Fundamentalist political theologies, while being perhaps nonhegemonic and resisting some aspects of Western modernist secular globalization, would support even more oppressive forms of domination that could even aggravate unequal social power relations. Traditionalist political theologies, in turn, may offer nonhegemonic forms of globalization, but not counterhegemonic ones.
All these binary classificatory exercises ultimately rest on the dualist idea, or the Manichean principle, of a single global struggle for hegemony. The forces of evil and oppression are those working in tandem with or offering no resistance to neoliberal hegemonic globalization. The forces of good are those resisting all forms of oppression grounded on the interrelated global structures of power and domination, namely, on the trinity of “capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (12). Only such progressive forces could contribute to a counterhegemonic globalization.
This brings us back to the question of the validity of the starting premise of Santos's entire argument. Is it the case that, as he suggests, in our new global age the world is still living under the material and ideological hegemony of global neoliberal capitalism? Or are we perhaps entering a multipolar global disorder with multiple competing centers and peripheries? Consider the consolidation of authoritarian regimes from China to Russia and the rise of antiglobalist populism everywhere, even in the very centers of neoliberal hegemony, the United Kingdom and the United States. These historical developments may have become most evident only after Santos's book was published, but the evidence that we are entering a more multipolar and plural global order, or disorder, after Western hegemony has been visible since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Santos's case for the need to expand the search for alternative moral sources for human dignity and social justice beyond the secular West and to enter into a serious intercultural dialogue with other civilizations and political theologies is, in my view, his most laudable contribution with this book. Only what Pope Francis calls the culture of the encounter can help us move from the present globalization of indifference to a globalization of fraternity.
But Santos enters into dialogue only with the monotheistic cultures of the Abrahamic traditions. The religions and cultures of Asia, which account for 60 percent of the global population, are not part of this dialogue. China and India are also absent from the conversation about global humanity, even though these two rising superpowers, which account for 37 percent of the world's population, are most likely to determine the direction and the shape of globalization in the future.
From this perspective, Santos ends his book with the right answer to the metaphoric question posed by the title, if God were a human rights activist: the only solution would be “a monotheistic God making a plea for polytheism” (86).
But one could question whether such a polytheist conception of the world would be compatible with the view of a single Manichean struggle between hegemonic and counterhegemonic globalization on which Santos's entire argument appears to be premised.
