The False Promise of Progress: Human Rights and the Legitimation of Inequality

Abstract

Modernity’s social betterment programs such as human rights depend upon a narrative of progress. Progress sustains the ideology that the problems of the non-Western and non-white world are caused by a lagging behind in time that prevents the embrace of the norms that deliver social progress and not by unjust structures of global political and economic power. Progress frames the problem of inequality as cultural rather than political. This occlusion of power means that human rights do not attempt to address important power differences between the Global North and the Global South. Because human rights discourse is undergirded by progress, material human rights frames and institutions actually prevent radical change and reproduce imperial domination. Human rights, therefore, cannot deliver on their promise of equality. This promise must instead be entrusted to an eschatological hope that rejects progress and is disruptive of ongoing oppressive power arrangements.