{"id":1022,"date":"2012-11-29T19:52:53","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T00:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/?p=1022"},"modified":"2020-06-23T16:06:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T20:06:00","slug":"making-human-rights-sexy-authenticity-in-glamorous-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/2012\/11\/making-human-rights-sexy-authenticity-in-glamorous-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Human Rights Sexy: Authenticity in Glamorous Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Payam Akhavan[1]<\/a> (Harvard LLM \u201990 SJD \u201901) is Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He was previously Senior Fellow at Yale Law School and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. Professor Akhavan was the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor\u2019s Office of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague (1994-2000) and has served with the United Nations in Cambodia, East Timor, and Guatemala. He has appeared as counsel in leading cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the European Court of Human Rights.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Joseph Kony and George Clooney, seemingly disparate, occupy a common space in our imagination: wanted criminal and vaunted celebrity, both are human rights spectacles of our times.\u00a0 Kony, leader of the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army messianic cult, is wanted by the International Criminal Court.\u00a0 He stands accused of crimes against humanity for the horrific abuse of child soldiers and terrorization of civilians in northern Uganda.\u00a0 He became globally infamous by the efforts of Invisible Children, a hitherto obscure organization that made the appealing but simplistic Kony 2012 short film calling for his arrest.\u00a0 They succeeded in spreading the film virally on an unprecedented scale: within a few days of its release, it registered 100 million views on the YouTube video-sharing website and raised millions of dollars.\u00a0 Clooney, a Hollywood actor of great renown and wealth, has starred in numerous best-selling films and is the subject of much idle gossip in the tabloids.\u00a0 Among his many accomplishments, he has received the Academy Award \u2013 the so-called \u201cOscar\u201d \u2013 the pinnacle of success in the film industry.\u00a0 He is also famous for his human rights activism and celebrity diplomacy concerning mass-atrocities in the Darfur and South Sudan.\u00a0 There is an obvious contrast between Kony and Clooney.\u00a0 But there is also an intriguing similarity: they are both personalities that the average person \u201con the street\u201d can probably identify with global human rights issues.\u00a0 Both public figures owe this distinction to successful engagement with the hyper-culture of cyber-compassion: amidst myriad distractions just a click away, worthy causes must assume an air of glamour to compete for our fleeting attention.\u00a0 In short, in affluent consumer societies that privilege superficial sentimentality over profound commitment, mass-mobilization and public awareness usually depends on making human rights sexy.\u00a0 What should we make of this reality?<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether it is the Kony 2012 video or the star power of Clooney, the contemporary discourse surrounding human rights activism is seemingly a struggle between utilitarianism and authenticity.\u00a0 Consider Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole decrying the \u201cWhite Saviour Industrial Complex\u201d and disparaging Kony 2012 as \u201ca big emotional experience that validates privilege\u201d rather than justice:\u00a0 \u201cThe banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality.\u201d\u00a0 By contrast, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof praised the video \u201cfor galvanizing young Americans to look up from their iPhones and seek to make a difference\u201d, retorting that \u201cif I were a Congolese villager, I would welcome these uncertain efforts over the sneering scorn of do-nothing armchair cynics.\u201d[2]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 Amidst public apathy, the question seems to be whether \u201cslacktivism\u201d \u2013 substituting \u201cfeel good\u201d activism for meaningful engagement \u2013 is better than doing nothing at all.\u00a0 This meagre utilitarian discourse and its contrary polemics are hardly sufficient to address the enormity of the moral challenges facing us in the struggle for justice.\u00a0 What then is the appropriate context for addressing the glamourization of human rights and its implications on our self-definition?\u00a0 Exploring this query requires a brief deviation from the topic at hand into the historical journey that has resulted in the fusion of the superficial with the sacred.<\/span><\/p>\n

The etymology of \u201cglamour\u201d is itself an instructive illustration and starting point.\u00a0 The Oxford Dictionary traces the word to the early 18th<\/sup> century \u2013 originally a variant of the Scottish gramarye<\/em> \u2013 meaning \u201cenchantment\u201d or \u201cmagic\u201d.\u00a0 It was an alteration of the English word grammar<\/em> with a medieval meaning of \u201cscholarship\u201d or \u201clearning\u201d.\u00a0 Grammar was about the proper form of words and sentences as it is today.\u00a0 But since only a few religious clerics could read and write in the European Dark Ages, and much of scholarship related to knowledge of occult practices, the learned grammarian\u2019s craft was perceived as mysterious and magical.\u00a0 Use of the word \u201cglamour\u201d was popularized in English by Sir Walter Scott\u2019s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft<\/em>, published in 1830.\u00a0 It referred to a magic spell likened to a \u201cdelusive or alluring charm\u201d.\u00a0 With the decline of religious thought, \u201cglamour\u201d assumed a non-magical meaning, referring to the impression of attraction or fascination; an impression that is better than reality, but ultimately deceptive.\u00a0 In its archaic use, glamour is still defined by the Oxford Dictionary as \u201cenchantment\u201d or \u201cmagic\u201d.\u00a0 Its contemporary meaning however is \u201can attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing\u201d.\u00a0 Its usage in American English \u2013 in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary \u2013 is also variously \u201ca magic spell\u201d or \u201can exciting and often illusory and romantic attractiveness\u201d (the example offered is \u201cthe glamour<\/em> of Hollywood\u201d).\u00a0 The American cultural critic Virginia Postrel defines glamour in contemporary usage as a \u201ccalculated, carefully polished image designed to impress and persuade.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, glamour<\/em> invites us to transcend the mediocrity of everyday life to enter into an idealized world; a world of glitter that is ultimately an illusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The linguistic evolution of \u201cglamour\u201d is thus situated in the broader historical context of the European Enlightenment which the 19th<\/sup> century German sociologist Max Weber described as a process of \u201crationalization and intellectualization and … the disenchantment of the world.\u201d\u00a0 In his worldview, modernity, progress, and secularization were synonymous.\u00a0 Belief in the mystical world was gradually extinguished as the rationalism of scientific inquiry and separation of state from church triumphed.\u00a0 In brief, the magic was gone.\u00a0 In its stead, materialistic ideologies emerged to offer new utopias, not unlike substitute religions.\u00a0 Hitler and Stalin appropriated modern-day prophets like Nietzsche and Marx, in pursuit of modern visions of glory and transcendence. Others worshipped the creed of racial superiority and colonial domination in the name of civilization.\u00a0 Millions of lives were sacrificed at the altar of these modern ideologies, each with an illusory better world.\u00a0 The unprecedented magnitude of this violence shattered modernity\u2019s promise of progress.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The monstrous atrocities of the 20th<\/sup> century were scarcely imaginable during the Dark Ages.\u00a0 The incantations and rituals of modern ideologies had cast a magic spell of such destructive force that it rendered medieval ignorance and superstition comparatively benign.\u00a0 In 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, in a ceremonial exorcism of Nazi excesses, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.\u00a0 Redolent with the promise of a better future, its preamble proclaimed \u201crecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family\u201d as \u201cthe foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world\u201d.\u00a0 Bemoaning the horrors of the war, it recognized that \u201cdisregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind\u201d.\u00a0 In a testament to its universality, the Declaration was enshrined as \u201ca common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations\u201d.\u00a0 Conceived as a transcendent and unimpeachable axiom at the core of a new global ethos, human rights discourse assumed the role of the sacred.\u00a0 Even if it was clothed in secular terminology, it defined an inviolable space from which all things good flowed.\u00a0 As \u00c9mile Durkheim maintained [in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life<\/em>], \u201cthe distinctive trait of religious thought\u201d was the division of the world between the domain of the sacred and the profane; not between the sacred and the secular.\u00a0 Thus, amidst a disenchanted Western civilization in desperate search of a moral compass, enchantment with inalienable human rights fell manifestly within the socially constructed domain of the sacred.\u00a0 Beyond reproach, these fundamental norms became the magic incantation of both state and society; a cosmopolitan faith complete with its own deity, temples, and rituals.<\/span><\/p>\n

With decolonization, globalization, and the collapse of communism, Western liberalism and human rights ideals spread.\u00a0 But the market economy\u2019s consumerist culture spread even more rapidly.\u00a0 In place of spent totalitarian ideologies, hedonism and self-indulgence increasingly define the pursuit of happiness.\u00a0 The seduction of the American dream, the relentless propaganda of mass-culture, has cast a magic spell on people from all corners of the world.\u00a0 Consumption and greed have become a pervasive belief system, the seeming purpose of existence, the true opiate of the masses.\u00a0 This materialistic ideology is not without its competitors.\u00a0 This is captured in Benjamin Barber\u2019s juxtaposition of Jihad vs. McWorld<\/em>, symbolizing the struggle between economic globalization and religious fundamentalism.\u00a0 But it seems both that McWorld is winning the contest, and that Jihad manifestly fails to provide an appealing alternative.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is telling that in American English, the archetypal image of the \u201cglamour of Hollywood\u201d is so integral to cultural self-definition.\u00a0 In the virtual pantheon of consumerism, star power and entertainment are the pillars of escapism and instant gratification. As Neil Gabler puts it, \u201cHollywood has always been an irresistible, prefabricated metaphor for the crass, the materialistic, the shallow, and the craven.\u201d\u00a0 In this realm of kitsch<\/em>, authenticity is worthless.\u00a0 Why pay a steep price for the original when the imitation is readily available?\u00a0 Why fill in the emptiness with depth and sacrifice when escape is but a click away?\u00a0 And why heartfelt empathy when exaggerated sentimentality can provide effortless meaning?\u00a0 It is here that glamour intersects with human rights, to cast a magic spell likened to a \u201cdelusive or alluring charm\u201d; an \u201cexciting\u201d and \u201cromantic attractiveness\u201d that appropriates the discourse and imagery of the secular sacred to create the illusion of authenticity.\u00a0 In this exercise, the reality of the victims is lost as people marvel at the beautiful spectacle of the saviour.\u00a0 Adventures, adrenaline, and awards become tantamount to action.\u00a0 The suffering of others becomes a platform for demonstrating virtue.\u00a0 Vanity and justice embrace.<\/span><\/p>\n

But why should authenticity matter?\u00a0 If glamour can persuade young Americans to momentarily look up from their iPhones and learn that there is a place called Africa where people suffer, is that not praiseworthy?\u00a0 The utilitarian argument it seems accepts this superficial culture far too casually, especially when it implicates the human rights industry itself.\u00a0 It abruptly dismisses deeper contemplation in the name of sensational activism, without consideration to how the voices of the dispossessed constantly fail to penetrate the self-contained world of the saviours.\u00a0 The scale of injustice and despair, the nobility of the human spirit, our capacity for profound compassion, the extraordinary means at our disposal, these demand something far greater than fame-seeking and righteous platitudes. Authenticity matters because only true seeking and genuine empathy allows us to penetrate the veils that delude us into believing that we are doing good when we are not doing nearly enough.\u00a0 By being true to our self, by connecting with others in a communion of oneness, we begin to conceive the world in a different perspective, to imagine other possibilities.\u00a0 The greatest acts of heroism, the daily struggles of those that suffer, are not headline news; they do not entail prestigious awards or chasing the latest mass-atrocity.\u00a0 They are not entertaining.\u00a0 The tortured prisoner of conscience whose youth wastes away in prison; the mother mourning her activist daughter\u2019s execution; a child struggling to survive in the streets amidst crushing poverty; a father\u2019s despair for his starving family in a corrupt world of plenty; these images call for humble contemplation so the depth of reality and the moral challenge in its wake can fully sink into our conscience.\u00a0 These are felt experiences that cannot be reduced to \u201cfeel-good\u201d sound bites and tweets in a consumer culture that has emptied itself of all depth and meaning.\u00a0 Without being touched in this profound way, we are not wont to make any profound changes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sentimentality is not spirituality.\u00a0 Self-indulgence is not sacrifice.\u00a0 The learned grammarians of the Dark Ages dabbled in occult practices.\u00a0 They confused magical incantations with mystical experience.\u00a0 In seeking the divine, they mistook the illusion of rituals for the reality of love that is at the essence of our humanity.\u00a0 The learned grammarian \u2013 magical and enchanting \u2013 the glamorous activist \u2013 superficial spectacle \u2013 both represent our capacity for self-deception, our propensity to avoid the hard work by portraying hypocrisy as righteousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

I left Iran for Canada as a child because my family belonged to the persecuted B\u00e1h\u00e1\u2019\u00ed religious minority.\u00a0\u00a0 After the establishment of the Islamic Republic following the 1979 revolution, life in exile gave way to unbearable anguish.\u00a0 On 14 June 1981, my uncle Dr. Firouz Naimi \u2013 a physician of great renown and friend of the poor \u2013 was executed in the city of Hamadan after enduring horrific torture.\u00a0 His sole crime was that his religious belief was deemed a \u201cheresy\u201d by fanatical clerics. \u00a0Two years later, on 18 June 1983, my contemporary, Mona Mahmudnizhad, was hanged in the city of Shiraz at the age of 17, also because of her religious belief.\u00a0 The infinite courage and dignity of these souls in the face of the unthinkable, and the many others whose suffering is beyond words, profoundly shaped my understanding of human rights.\u00a0 Suspended somewhere between Jihad and McWorld, between the violence of religious fanaticism and the vulgarity of fanatic consumerism, I have since grappled with the human condition in our world of extremes.\u00a0 As a young lawyer, I spent my early career as a UN war crimes prosecutor in The Hague, served in Bosnia during the war, and subsequently in Rwanda, Cambodia, Guatemala, and other battered, bleeding countries torn apart by hatred and cruelty.\u00a0 In 2003, I advised the Ugandan Government to refer the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army case to the International Criminal Court.\u00a0 By 2006, this strategy to isolate Joseph Kony succeeded in bringing an end to nearly two decades of terror in Acholiland.\u00a0 I watched with interest Kony 2012\u2019s rendition of events and the critical reactions of my Ugandan friends.\u00a0 I watched Hotel Rwanda and In the Land of Blood and Honey (about the Bosnian war) and other films depicting events that transpired many years ago, but which seemingly never transpired until Hollywood took notice of it.\u00a0 Yes, it is good that people who are oblivious to the world become somewhat less oblivious.\u00a0 But it is grossly inadequate.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have had no shortage of exposure to grim realities.\u00a0 Nor am I unaware of the urgency with which we must come to the help of those in distress.\u00a0 But I am of the view that the knowledge we fundamentally lack is not how to find practical solutions, or to achieve mass-mobilization through attractive awareness campaigns.\u00a0 Making human rights sexy may be better than nothing.\u00a0 But it will bring meagre results.\u00a0 It will rationalize our sentimental self-delusion and justify our manifest lack of sustained and profound commitment.\u00a0 The knowledge that we lack in a culture of crass materialism is the magic of painful struggle, the enchantment of genuine empathy, and the transforming power of mystical experience that awakens us to our extraordinary potential for good.\u00a0 If we are to move beyond the narrow confines of glamour to the vast expanse of authenticity, then we must first learn to distinguish between illusion and reality:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe story is told of a mystic knower, who went on a journey with a learned grammarian as his companion.\u00a0 They came to the shore of the Sea of Grandeur.\u00a0 The knower straightway flung himself into the waves, but the grammarian stood lost in his reasonings, which were as words that are written on water.\u201d[3]<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

********* <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1]<\/span><\/a> Payam Akhavan LLB (Osgoode) LLM, SJD (Harvard) is Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and former Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor\u2019s Office of the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/span><\/a> Nicholas D. Kristof, \u201cViral Video, Vicious Warlord\u201d, New York Times<\/em>, 14 March 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/span><\/a> Bah\u00e1\u2019u\u2019ll\u00e1h, The Four Valleys<\/em>, p. 51.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Payam Akhavan[1] (Harvard LLM \u201990 SJD \u201901) is Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He was previously Senior Fellow at Yale Law School and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. Professor Akhavan was the first Legal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101946,"featured_media":1025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-online-journal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/83\/2012\/11\/Payam-Akhavan_feat.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101946"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hrj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}