Seeing the Myth in Human Rights

Jenna Reinbold

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293586
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Menschenrechte

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been called one of the most powerful documents in human history. Today, the mere accusation of violations of the rights outlined in this document cows political leaders and riles the international community. Yet as a nonbinding document with no mechanism for enforcement, it holds almost no legal authority. Indeed, since its adoption, the Declaration's authority has been portrayed not as legal or political but as moral. Rather than providing a set of rules to follow or laws to obey, it represents a set of standards against which the world's societies are measured. It has achieved a level of rhetorical power and influence unlike anything else in modern world politics, becoming the foundational myth of the human rights project. Seeing the Myth in Human Rights presents an interdisciplinary investigation into the role of mythmaking in the creation and propagation of the Universal Declaration. Pushing beyond conventional understandings of myth, which tend to view such narratives as vehicles either for the spreading of particular religious dogmas or for the spreading of erroneous, even duplicitous, discourses, Jenna Reinbold mobilizes a robust body of scholarship within the field of religious studies to help us appreciate myth as a mode of human labor designed to generate meaning, solidarity, and order. This usage does not merely parallel today's scholarship on myth; it dovetails in unexpected ways with a burgeoning body of scholarship on the origin and function of contemporary human rights, and it puts the field of religious studies into conversation with the fields of political philosophy, critical legal studies, and human rights historiography. For Reinbold, myth is a phenomenon that is not merely germane to the exploration of specific religious narratives but is key to a broader understanding of the nature of political authority in the modern world.

CHAPTER 1

Sacred Myth, Political Myth

In her history of the creation of the Universal Declaration, Mary Ann Glendon describes a sculpture that stands on the plaza outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City:

A gift from the government of Italy, it consists of an enormous sphere of burnished bronze, suggesting a globe. The sphere is pleasing to behold, even though it startles with its imperfection. There are deep, jagged cracks in its golden-hued surface, cracks too large ever to be repaired. Perhaps it’s cracked because it’s defective (like the broken world), one thinks. Or maybe (like an egg) it has to break in order for something else to emerge. Perhaps both. Sure enough, when one peers into the gashes on its surface, there is another brightly shining sphere coming along inside. But this one is already cracked too!

Whatever is going on inside those spheres, it does not seem to be all chance and accident. There is a tremendous sense of motion, of dynamism, of potency, of emergent possibilities.¹

This sculpture embodies a logic of woundedness and rectification that, while relevant to the development of human rights in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, also speaks to the more general human endeavor to create order and meaning within a world marked by all variety of imperfection: the imperfections of war and conflict, of human knowledge, of biological finitude. This connection between the work of the Commission on Human Rights and the broader work of meaning making within a broken world is not speculative; the Commission’s members were overt in their assertions that they were involved in the work of rejuvenating a world rent not only by statism and war, but also rent by a moral orientation that had facilitated the profanation of that which, according to many, should be most scared to us: human life. The task that such members envisioned for the Declaration, then, was not merely to delineate particular rights, but also to recalibrate both the legal and the moral landscapes of the twentieth century—to reorient people’s sensibilities and commitments such that, as Roosevelt put it, the people of the world could be inspired and enabled to “progress inwardly.”² Furthermore, the Committee worked very self-consciously under the imperative that this recalibration should avoid any appearance of cultural or ideological bias—under the imperative that, to a large extent, this vehicle of recalibration efface its own constructedness and contingency. Only through such an effacement could the Commission claim to be articulating a set of principles aligned not with imperialist ambitions or elitist predilections but with the proper, albeit recently undermined, order of things.

How does one accomplish such moral recalibration? For the greater part of human history, throughout the past and into today, this type of moral calibration has fallen within the purview of myth. Though frequently grounded within specific religious traditions and practices, and though very often identified as a narrative concerned with gods or other supernatural beings, myth in its broadest sense consists of narratives designed to dictate a world to its audience that is simultaneously factual and moral—simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive—and to do so in a manner that brokers no counterargument. Myths distinguish themselves by the “extraordinary authority” with which they speak: they do not “argue” or “induce discussion” but instead present their descriptions of the world and the moral imperatives stemming from these descriptions.³ They accomplish this authoritative presentation of information in a variety of ways: by describing the prescriptions of supernatural beings, by narrating the feats of exemplary figures from earlier times, by explicating the origin of the world or of a given people, or by drawing connections between the present and a paradigmatic epoch in the past. For all their potential variation, though, such narratives partake of an important common logic: they enable narrators to set language to the task of “lending an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.”⁴

Notwithstanding the tendency to think of myth as primarily concerned with supernatural beings and cosmic (or at least prehistoric) timeframes—and notwithstanding myth’s strong historical ties to precisely such matters—mythopoeic narratives need not hinge upon such particularities. We witness the cultivation of authoritative, evocative narratives within all types of societies, including societies that lack a strong orientation toward the supernatural. Such “post-traditional” societies, distinguishable in part by their efforts to forgo appeals to controversial sources of authority in the course of prescribing social and political norms, nevertheless share with all human societies the need to cultivate authoritative narratives aimed at morally (re)orienting their members. The Declaration offers its prescriptions within precisely such a post-traditional context: in the face of an evident and intractable pluralism of beliefs regarding the supernatural, this document pursues its goal of moral recalibration in an emphatically secular language. The Declaration’s secular discourse, however, is not the rationalist discourse of Enlightenment philosophy or the empiricist discourse of positive law; indeed, it is a discourse that pointedly aims to locate its claims beyond the realms of realms of both rationalism and argumentation. Instead, the Declaration presents a formulation for social and political life that is simultaneously mythopoeic and secularized—a striking example of what theorists frequently refer to as political myth. Given the lack of scholarly consensus on the basic parameters of myth, however, the definition of political myth is far from a settled matter. This chapter will trace a definition of myth that is both germane to a theorization of a secular narrative such as the Declaration and is simultaneously faithful to the sociofunctionalist formulation of religion.

Toward a Theory of Political Myth

One of the most significant trends within the theorization of religion in the twentieth century—and one of the most important refinements that contemporary theorists have made within this field—has been an increasing emphasis on the political nature of all forms of religious meaning making. Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, the scientific study of religion was marked by a tendency to frame religious beliefs and practices as apolitical and basically consensual—as the almost inevitable products of human encounters with such things as the unexplainable facets of the world,⁵ the mystery of death,⁶ the numinous,⁷ or some other transcendent experience. The study of myth has lent itself particularly well to this approach, dealing as it does with timeframes, figures, and archetypes that are often avowedly ahistorical, and with narratives that by definition function to naturalize the ontological and normative claims that they impart to their audiences. The same “‘always-already-given’ quality” that lends mythic narratives their power is the very same quality that has led many theorists to neglect the strategic human labor that inevitably goes into the construction and maintenance of such powerful narratives.⁸ However, as theorists beginning in the 1970s point out, when such political work is neglected, we run the risk of separating the events, characters, and ideals described in a given myth from the variable, politically charged events, characters, and ideals of the everyday world; we run the risk, in other words, of separating myth from its constitutive “political, historical, and cultural contexts.”⁹

Scholars of religion over the past forty years have endeavored in a variety of ways to take account of the fact that, whether they ultimately work to broadcast or to obscure such contexts, myths “are always context-sensitive”—are always “a tool in the hands of human beings.”¹⁰ The study of myth over the intervening years has been marked by multifaceted efforts to ground analyses of such narratives within equally robust analyses of the particular contexts in which they are created, reiterated, and revised. In highlighting myth’s “labors,” “strains,” and “achievements,” the analyst of a given myth seeks to understand not merely the content of the narrative but its contribution and indebtedness to broader systems of meaning within a particular society.¹¹ Given the manner in which such narratives endeavor to efface the very social, political and historical contingencies that underlie their creation and their preservation, it is no small irony that this approach entails a certain unmaking of the very myth that one seeks to understand. This tendency toward unmaking has often had the effect of entrenching sociofunctionalist scholars of religion within a camp of theorists accused of “reducing” mythopoeic narratives to little more than socio-political ideologies.¹²

Yet, this endeavor to bring together the (often apolitical) content and the (always political) context of myth has important and far-reaching implications. The tendency among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists to divorce the contents of mythopoeic narratives from the contexts of such narratives has not merely influenced the development of the study of myth, it has infused the broader study of religion with presumptions from which scholars continue to endeavor to extricate themselves. One of the trickiest of these is the presumption that “religious” beliefs and practices are clearly and universally distinguishable from “nonreligious” beliefs and practices—that the logic of religion is sufficiently distinct from other areas of human life to warrant a markedly different framework of analysis. This presumption is deeply implicated within the presumption that, as Talal Asad puts it, “religion has an autonomous essence not to be confused with the essence of science, or of politics, or of common sense.”¹³ The fact that such essentialism lends itself nicely to comparative analysis has helped to endear this approach to religious studies scholars of all sorts. Whether one favors a phenomenological, a psychological, or a structuralist approach to the study of religion, such study is rendered much less complicated when one assumes that all religions are comprised of certain elementary features that operate independently of the historical and social dynamics of the societies that gave birth to them, and that can therefore be cross-culturally compared with near impunity. Indeed, the allure of this approach is hardly limited to academia; the popular successes of Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, both comparative scholars of religion and of myth in particular, attest to the pleasure inherent in imagining that the category of religion fundamentally transcends our myriad historical, cultural, and political differences.¹⁴ However, as scholars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have turned a critical eye upon the presumptions of their progenitors, this legacy of religious essentialism has generated particularly passionate soul-searching. If one erects a theory of religion upon the presumption that religion is “delimite[d], and therefore definable,” does one run the risk of favoring particular religious traditions over others?¹⁵ Yes, claim theorists ranging from Asad to Bruce Lincoln.¹⁶ If in fact religion should not or cannot be so delineated, precisely what object of study resides at the center of religious studies? In pushing this critical spirit to its limit, Smith claims that the object at the center of religious studies is ultimately an “imaginary” one:

while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion—there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.¹⁷

Smith’s admonition is crucial: it articulates a fundamental shift in the scholarly approach to religion that reaches back to the nineteenth century but has achieved particular traction only in the past thirty to forty years. An infusion of new data—predominately, but not entirely, non-western—has forced scholars to recognize the parochialism of the longstanding presumption that religion is a phenomenon readily distinguishable from other aspects of human life. As Brent Nongbri puts it, “The very idea of ‘being religious’ requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be ‘not religious,’ and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world.”¹⁸ Nor is it intrinsic to much of the so-called Islamic world, argue Asad and Lincoln.¹⁹ Nor to Hinduism or even to much of Christianity, as the likes of Diana Eck and Robert Orsi have pointed out.²⁰ Ultimately, it seems that what such a presumption is intrinsic to is a particular brand of “Western secular modernity,” and, by extension, to the history of colonial expansion, the Protestant Reformation, and the European Enlightenment.²¹ This interpenetration of histories, and their bearing upon contemporary conceptions of religion both within and outside the academy, has been the focus of extensive inquiry and critique in recent years, and has been a central preoccupation within the burgeoning study of secularization and secularity.²² Even outside of the field of secular studies, however, such inquiries have inspired a generation of scholars to work in various ways to complicate the distinctions we tend to draw between the religious and other realms of human life.

The shift away from a conception of religion as something clearly distinguishable from other human institutions has gone hand-in-hand with a rejection of the conception of religion as a force that impresses itself upon more or less passive individuals and communities—a force that impedes upon human life from “beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, the familiar.”²³ Myth, by its very nature a phenomenon evocative of various modes of “beyond,” has proven a particularly difficult phenomenon to extricate from this presumption. However, a number of influential scholars of religion have pushed for precisely such a reconceptualization, and have laid the groundwork for thinking about mythmaking as an enterprise that is deeply political and, simultaneously, deeply invested in the effacement of its own politics.

Lincoln, for example, is well known for his aversion to the reification of myth and of religion more broadly, and has insisted upon a rejection of simplistic distinctions between myth and mere social or political “ideology.” A mythopoeic narrative, asserts Lincoln, “packages a specific, contingent system of discrimination in a particularly attractive and memorable form. What is more, it naturalizes and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Sacred Myth, Political Myth
• Chapter 2. The Sacred Center of Human Rights
• Chapter 3. The Sacred and the Social
• Chapter 4. The Legal Personality and a New World Order
• Conclusion. Making and Unmaking Political Myth
• Appendix. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments