From Racism to Human Rights

Suppose a political community has from a certain point of time established a consensus not unlike what we today called "racism". According to some liberal democratic ideas, this is obviously a violation to human rights; some might even condemn them as "immoral". But then we would have to ask, by what reason?

As Bernard Williams made crystal clear in his article "Human Rights and Relativism," the problem of human rights is of necessity connected with the problem of legitimation: 

The situation of one lot of people terrorizing another lot of people is not a political situation; it is, rather, the situation which the existence of the political is in the first place supposed to alleviate (replace). If the power of one lot of people over another is to represent a solution to the first political question, and not be itself part of the problem, something has to be said to explain (to the less empowered, to concerned bystanders, to children being educated in this structure, etc.) what the difference is between the solution and the problem; and that cannot simply be an account of successful domination. It has to be something in the mode of justifying explanation or legitimation.

Williams's argument can be summarized roughly as such: consider politics as a human device to solve some problems, in particular problems concerning domination and coercion. Then the existence of politics, the reason for us to have such a thing called "politics" must be that we expect this thing to do its job, namely to provide some agreeable conditions for mutual living -- "the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of co-operation." Note that none of these has direct connection to what we nowadays take to be the more "liberal" values such as property rights, freedom of speech, universal suffrage, and the like. The thing called "politics" works is the main point here. And then there often arises a series of problems, that is, the rulers, the ones that everyone in the community expects to solve the problem of coercion and provide political order and protection and conditions of cooperation, turn out to be part of the problem, by enslaving members of the community themselves. Anyone within a community would have such doubts even before the community is being built. And so here comes the problem of legitimacy/legitimation: how can some person(s) prove themselves to be legitimate to establish a political community and rule over other members? In other words, how would they solve the problem of legitimation and provide some version of human rights?

Under such articulation, the "human rights" part is neither dictated by the first political question itself ("the securing of order, etc.") since ideas like "order" and "safety" allows multiple interpretations; nor will it be decided by liberal preferences alone; it is and should be decided by the community itself. This does not exclude members of another community from criticizing this community, provided that the two community are interacting with each other, hence automatically crreating an "international society," to the point that issues of either one will have potential outcome on the other, that is, to the point that "their" issues do matter to "us."

So let's just say, approximately, today's China is just such a gigantic community that violates (liberal) human rights on a daily basis. The question is not, as many liberals would suppose, "how do we overthrow such inhumane regime?" but firstly "how on earth is such a regime legitimated?" and then "does it pass the test of the first political question?" To the first question one might reject with another question, "how on earth do you know they are legitimate? what if they aren't?" The fact that social order in China hasn't collapsed does not translate into legitimacy; it might as well be that the regime has been so successful in oppression and control. Nevertheless we can suppose, or imagine, the possibility of a non-liberal China that somehow passed the test of the first political question, only it does not fit with liberal ideas. Is that possible?

It is on this basis that we re-evaluate all the liberal values, not to see if they fit with any apriori model of "human nature" (to use Jose Ortega y Gasset's words: "Man has no nature. All he has is ... history.") but to see if it practically solved and solves the problem of order and legitimation. Racism is no different. The seeming contradiction that Williams strongly rejected a liberal political philosophy on the one hand, while repeating that "Now and around here the BLD [Basic Legitimation Demand] together with the historical conditions permit only a liberal solution: other forms of answer are unacceptable" can be well understood if we recognize the "historical conditions" here means nothing other than an age of populism and enlightenment, an age that has manufactured techniques both physical and mental that empowers the mass on a large scale, an age that thrives mostly because the majority of the people within a community has the opportunity to thrive and create, to "live out one's potential" so to speak, and not because there's any intrinsic value or necessity behind "some liberal conception of the person."

Don't get me wrong. I am not endorsing CCP's policies in any sense. I am following Williams's logic as much as possible, and I totally agree with him that the point here is not to say that CCP violates human rights blatantly; nor is that the CCP is unreasonable and we should give up the hope of one day persuading them to "turn right from wrong"; the point here is to show that in reality what they did and are doing is actually undermining their own political order, thereby weakening their own legitimation, and that would have nothing to do with the Chinese being a slavish nation (we surely aren't) or the necessity of Marxist historical dialectics. You don't get people's consent, you don't even know whether you get that consent or not (because you don't allow freedom of speech), and so you don't have the chance to fix the problem of legitimation, whenever things go south.