Abstract
A book on social research may be noteworthy for many different reasons, ranging from the current relevance of its topic, to its intention to shed new light on the epistemological foundations of scientific activity and the canonical interpretations of its predecessors in a specific field of knowledge, to its unique take on unnoticed areas of society. However it is much rarer to find a book that makes all these contributions in a balanced, harmonious fashion. Die Sakralität der Person: Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte [The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights] by Hans Joas is such a book.
In this text the sociological focus is on the formation of human rights as a current, ongoing process subject to discussion in which contemporary society as a whole, in all its plurality and variety, defines its priorities and its collective hopes. The author asserts that they can only be properly understood on the basis of a renewal of values that embodies a long process of social change, and in renewed ideas and images launched by the Enlightenment in Europe that, in spite of the secular and secularizing component of its institutions, includes the strength of the sacred as a driving force in its creative episodes. Modern life is aware of the ‘historical contingency’ in which agents introduce innovations and breaks into the course of events. However this is made possible by a fertile, creative reinterpretation of traditions whose semantic sediments continue to offer renewing responses to specific situations. In human rights as a new source of value, the governing principle is the sacredness of human life as expressed in one way or another in major religions in general and in the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular, in the proposals of an ‘ethos of love’ and ‘universal respect’.
Joas’s originality and his boldness lie in his approach, which focuses on the historical process of formation of values. In line with the contingency in today’s life, values are seen as the constituent elements of social coexistence, as the web of ideals that bring together as a project a number of agents linked by a shared image of the world. Rather than reverting to the positivistic rejection of any presence of value in social action and in the task of sociology itself, Joas argues that human life cannot be explained without the almost demiurgic ability to transform mere empirical facts into horizons of meaning that generate frameworks of collective identification. Value is not a dispensable part of human life; indeed, its absence would render inconceivable an existence whose orientation and path lie in a creative, transcendent power that leads it towards scenarios invested with the force of the desirable and the inclusive. To paraphrase his own words in the book under discussion here, ‘we must be aware that the fact that our values are historical individualities does not mean that our link with them is weak or replaceable’ (p. 149).
The book is organized around two core elements: on the one hand the task of social diagnosis, in which it takes an axiological/historical reconstruction as the basis for outlining currents of meaning, stopping at the sequence of creativity, values and social change. On the other hand there is the methodological approach through which Joas sets out his proposal of ‘affirmative genealogy’. Inspired by the work of German theologian Ernst Troeltsch, it ponders the scope of values in a given situation and in a historical present that is forced to reinvent itself to meet its most urgent challenges, revitalizing models and frameworks bequeathed to it by the historical past.
In regard to the first element, Joas analyses the current of sacralization that has turned human rights into a new secular deity in which all expressions of humankind are included merely by the fact of their being human, regardless of religious, political, cultural and ethical labels, age or physical or mental disability. In spite of the resistance that is still found in some countries and among some social groups and individuals, human rights have taken on that sanctity that is expressed in the respect due to all human life as an inalienable, inviolable, unquestionable right for bodies of state law and ecclesiastical authorities. Joas continues Durkheim’s reflection on the sacralization of the person as a new source of veneration in contemporary society, in which a long process is detected of the emergence of a new secular, universal value that incorporates the legacy of the symbols and images of the major religions.
In the second main part of the book, Joas reflects on methods for establishing research guidelines based on the creative impulse of values as an essential, core element. What he proposes follows from his earlier detailed reflections on the rise of collective ideals that move agents, and at the same time move the course of historical events and institutional renewal processes, generating the basis for social change. He refers to the method that he proposes as ‘affirmative genealogy’. It is based on the sociological conviction that collective adherence experiences in which social groups project their ideals and draw up the frameworks of their identities lie at the foundation of all expressions of society and all agreements and disagreements, consensus and conflict that arise in conditions of coexistence.
In this sense it is possible to speak of an affirmative genealogy of the universalism of any value. First of all this proposal has nothing to do with the ideas of discovery or construction. The idea of discovery would have more to do with a pre-existing range of values or an objective natural law. On the other hand the concept of construction evokes voluntary or voluntaristic preparation. Affirmative genealogy is a research method in which on the one hand genealogy focuses on the experience of emergence or formation as an episode of historical innovation and a promoter of social change, and on the other hand its affirmative nature refers to commitment to a value in spite of its historical origins. The fact that it may be contingent does not make it any less of a value for those who profess it.
Joas’s approach opens up various lines of debate that are worth clarifying and examining in detail. One of those is concerned with the importance of ‘situation’, a core concept in the sociology of Joas. He explains the processes of social creativity and the social changes that result from them on the basis of the challenges and problems that society has to answer. The activation of the creative potential of social agents does not take place abstractly in a vacuum, but in response to a context that no longer guarantees the consensus needed for social coexistence. It is the current situation, experienced intersubjectively, that leads to processes of rethinking and questioning of the definitions used to date. In this sense, it might be beneficial and interesting to establish a dialogue with the contributions of Robert Bellah in his most recent book, Religion in Human Evolution, in which he argues that certain practices, experiences and abilities used in historical episodes of the past persist and have not been superseded in the historical process. In his classic Beyond Belief Bellah clearly sets out the superseding of forms of organization and religious symbolism prevalent in the primitive or archaic religions by more complex forms, which give us historical and modern religions. But in his latest book he holds that those first stages of religious experience remain current in the phylogenetic memory of the more highly developed, rationalized forms of our times. According to Bellah nothing of humanity’s past disappears in any given present situation. In this sense the importance of rites in articulating and organizing society, the role of imitation and collective imagination in activating the self-transcendent dimension of social life, and the relevance of myth in giving meaning to social actions, are all symbolic resources that coexist with the capability for reason, which originated according to Karl Jaspers, Shmuel Eisentadt and, more recently, Bellah himself, with the ‘Axial cultures’ (Buddhism, Ancient Israel, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Greek philosophy, etc.). Those have in common the awakening of the human being as a free agent capable of defining him/herself and defining his/her place in empirical facts. It is true to say that the situation to which Joas refers is the starting point for any process of social creation, but the response of agents reveals those cultural faculties that were core in the old social models, and that return in any situation that requires the updating of humanity’s capability for transcending itself and imagining itself under other horizons of coexistence.
This criticism may be directly linked to another area of Joas’s reflections which is worth pondering. Sometimes his work can give the sensation that the feeling of coming together inherent in times of ritual leads unilaterally to religion or religiosity, and that secularization processes are thus relegated to a minor role or are mere excess material that can be dispensed with in the binding emergence of the sacred. This may be largely due to the fact that in the academic world and in public opinion the three-fold notion of sacredness/transcendence/religion seems so semantically familiar that the three are taken as synonyms. Although this idea has traditionally been encouraged in much of sociology, these terms do not (or at least not necessarily) mean the same thing. In a dialogue with José Casanova, an authority in sociology of religion and in Joas’s own reflections, ‘sacredness’ can be distinguished as an extrinsic force with no being of its own characterized by the instilling of value and representative force into objects into which it is projected, and which it sanctifies in the collective representations of society. That extrinsic force awakens symbolic projections that can foster transcendental proposals of value (salvation in Christianity) and others of immanence (such as the ‘motherland’, scientific reason and markets in modernity). In this sense religion is not something derived readily from ritual intensity. According to Casanova, what makes religion such is its narrative articulation of that effervescent experience explained by the influence of an unfounded being or of the mystery that dwells in the transcendent dimension of reality. However, as Joas himself shows, the secular sacralization of human rights is not based on an entity which is ‘wholly other’ than human (Rudolf Otto), but on the human condition itself and on all the individuals who embody it. In this sense it is not clear whether these ritual experiences of collective coming together can be seen strictly speaking as a religious process or a secular value.
These questions form part of the project of a book that takes its time and displays abundant theoretical ambition and explanatory boldness. The author charts out the course of values of current society, and shows the way in which those values are not a source of conflict but rather a true global common denominator through which it is possible to posit a human community based on understanding. This alone makes the book an unrefusable opportunity to take a serene reading of the enormous complexity of the time in which we live.