#liberal humanism

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Many of these [Critical Theory-based] movements initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace) but quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism.

The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.

In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow.”

-- Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, “Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education"

In other words, explicitly anti-liberal, paranoid theories that deny all progress as a conspiratorial illusion.

[thelonguepuree]

[Oishik Sircar]: Carrying on with the reparation/rehabilitation dynamic, I’m interested in your thoughts on queer rights protections through the universalizing languages of international human rights law, anti-discrimination legislation, decriminalization of sodomy, privacy and marriage equality reforms/ plebiscites, that have almost become integral to the governmental rationalities of secularism and democracy … That human rights are pharmakon-like (both medicine and poison) has become axiomatic of any critical position. Yet, how does one work with rights under conditions where nation states legitimize their monopoly over violence through rights? [Jasbir K. Puar]: Increasingly, I think that the pharmakon formulation attributed to human rights is also relevant to academia in the United States, whereby education and the upward mobility and respectable subjecthood it supposedly grants are the medicine and student debt is the poison—a paragon of liberal elitism stubbornly inscrutable to itself. So, I am not outside the critique of rights, nor of academia. It would be foolish not to acknowledge that one accrues cultural and pecuniary capital through the work of critique, to portend that somehow one is standing in some politically pure position. I have learned a lot from Critical University Studies, a field that argues that counter-carceral knowledge production sutures more so than disrupts the corporate university, and that the university has to be rethought—perhaps more precisely, thought of again—as a site of political contestation, dissent, and theft rather than legitimacy. So my concern is never isolated from human rights per se but more anchored in the exclusionary practices and politics of liberal inclusion. The most interesting human rights workers I have met—from NGO folks to lawyers to professional feminists and so on—understand best the paradoxes of the work they do. It’s like summoning undercommons that stretch through these mutually reinforcing institutions that we are implicated in. All we can do is keep asking: where is it? How do we reach (for) it? Can we even imagine it much less generate a world free of these contradictions? Of course, contradictions are the dialectical productive force of change and with every encounter with contradiction that we embrace rather than deny, something moves. The last point you mention about working through rights that are being used against you has specific resonance in Palestine (though hardly exclusively). There is no liberal “solution” to Palestine. Both the one state and two state solutions are pharmakons and can only be the starting point for liberation, not the end. In some sense Palestine is the fertile ground for emblematic decolonizing movements—there is no recourse not only to rights, but what Arendt would call “the right to have rights,” no nation-state to appeal to, no international community safeguarding their human rights. So those are the spaces of the yet-to-be-known.

“‘A Deep and Ongoing Dive into the Brutal Humanism that Undergirds Liberalism’: An Interview with Jasbir K. Puar,” Oishik Sircar and Jasbir Puar, Humanity, Winter 2020

[arabfanon]

Orientalism, Edward Said, Page 226 (2003 Penguin Edition)

[epicsmiley13]

It is a fallacy to say you know what the author intended...Politics is pervasive, language is constitutive, truth is provisional, meaning is contingent, human nature is a myth.

Some fun stuff I learned in class today about liberal humanism.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Liberal Humanism vs Critical Social Justice & More with Helen Pluckrose

“If you appeal to a human sense of fairness, it’s likely to work. If you pile blame and opposition onto somebody, they’re likely to get defensive.

I think Steven Pinker is great with this, when he writes about how we've expanded our circle of empathy as the world has got smaller and we're not just sympathetic to the people in our village anymore, or even in our country, we can see a lot more.

We care a lot that a greater range of humans, and I think identity politics tries to draw this back in again. It tries to, unintentionally, trigger our most tribal feelings, which are going to intensify our in-group loyalty and our out-group prejudice, which I think is a terrible mistake.”

[thelonguepuree]

[T]he problem of human ontology—What is the nature of human beingness in the absence of a deistic explanation?—is answered in the aftermath of Enlightenment by suppressing the contradiction between positing sovereign, distinct individuality and establishing the general properties of humanity. Kant’s anthropological writings especially register the taxonomic production of racial difference as organized by geography and especially biology. Such “biocentricity,” Wynter has shown, narrowly casts the definition of the human as primarily biological rather than social, with the effect of consolidating the ascription of fundamental differences among capacities to the seemingly irreducible register of the natural. Considerable uncertainty as to the grounds and boundaries of human subjectivity characterized the Western European eighteenth century, and the scientific racism of the era reflects a drive to order captured in the taxonomic imperative. In broad strokes, we may observe that post-Enlightenment, such uncertainty is managed by an appeal to universal humanity in the form of identity, buttressed by the co-extensive emergence of the nation-state as the dominant geopolitical form of modernity. The philosophical subordination of difference to identity that ensues inaugurates representational and identity politics. Backed by the policing authority of the nation-state, the liberal citizen-subject acts as the formal category of such a politics, which effaces and abstracts the very material conditions of its emergence, namely, those of empire and capitalism. Corporealized into sub- or unhuman bodies by the materializing processes of capital, empire, and the imposition of the nation-state as the naturalized and dominant geopolitical formation, the incapacity for proper aesthetic judgment signaled the difference between those who would and would not realize human potential by achieving full self-consciousness.

Kandice Chuh, from The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019)

[arabfanon]

My point is that the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man's difficult civilizing mission—all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one full of concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness. In fact, what took place was the very opposite of liberal: the hardening of doctrine and meaning, imparted by "science," into "truth." For if such truth reserved for itself the right to judge the Orient as immutably Oriental in the ways I have indicated, then liberality was no more than a form of oppression and mentalistic prejudice.

— Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Penguin Classics 2003 Edition, Page 254 

[perfect-readers]

It may feel like a historical accident that the foremost revisionary challenge to these European promises [of universal human rights] in the last two decades comes from precisely that geographic region whose importance to the development of the concept of the human it is The Hypothetical Mandarin’s task to demonstrate. But it feels like less of one if one recognizes that the “Asian values” whose legitimacy is asserted in the human rights field gain almost all of their rhetorical force from the economic success of the East Asian countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The structure of the contemporary debate thus reproduces the one that allowed Europe to export its culture through cultural and military imperialism over the last few centuries, and not incidentally to place its values at the center of the 1948 Universal Declaration: the right to assert the potential universality of one’s cultural values derives almost directly from the perceived ability of those values to sustain economic development, and thus, given the history we have, on a relationship to capitalism. (This is why culturalist arguments against civil and political rights made by third-worldist movements in the 1960s, or three other recent declarations—the Cairo Declaration of 1990, the Tunis Declaration of 1991, and the San José Declaration of 1993—did not generate anything like the philosophical response that the Bangkok Declaration did.) Recognizing the degree to which the legitimacy of any given piece of state-generated human rights discourse relies on the success of its economy allows us to see that the entire question of universal rights cannot be thought outside the process of industrial and postindustrial modernization. From that larger perspective the apparent civilizational divide separating the two behemoths, East and West, facing each other across the Viennese tables of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, coalesces into a deeper affinity produced by the “subtending line of force of global capital” that joins them, as Pheng Cheah has argued, “against the possibility of other alternatives of development, feminist or ecological-subalternist.”

— Eric Hayot, “Introduction,” The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, & Chinese Pain (2009)