Advice to a Young Radical

William O'Neill, S.J., Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of social ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology and a faculty scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are his own.

We are a house divided. Today, deep and seemingly irreconcilable divisions have eroded our political ecology. Claims and counter-claims are made as if they were vindicated by the mere vehemence of their assertion. Indeed, we differ over the very meaning of our differences: are our student protests a cri d’coeur against ethnic cleansing and genocide or rather hotbeds of antisemitism?

In defending the place of Catholics in American civil life, John Courtney Murray, S.J., emphasized the contributions of the Catholic moral tradition in fostering a “reasonable disposition to argue our many disagreements in an intelligent and temperate fashion.” Yet today, postmodernity has left us with an ethical bricolage—we lack a common moral vocabulary, a shared lexicon. There is, we might say, a willing suspension of belief—belief, that is, that can be vindicated or verified “in an intelligent and temperate fashion.”

Yes, we decry mass atrocity, invoking universal human rights; but in the accents of strangers. We must, it seems, decide which atrocities matter. For still, we say, there are necessary victims, righteous terror. Morally bereft, we have become sum of our grievances; our politics, what Nietzsche called “ressentiment”: the self-vindicating exercise of rage or indignation.

Yet for Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Archibshop Desmond Tutu, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” The rhetoric of human rights, incorporated now in modern Catholic social teaching, bids us to recognize atrocity, name victims and, no less, name the structures that victimize, the Molochs that require victims. What are the complex, causal factors that led to genocide, apartheid, mass atrocity? What keeps us from seeing what Emmanuel Lévinas calls the “command of the face”: “Thou shalt not kill”? For the victims are legion but each ineluctably unique.

Systemic critique turns on this first “no!” Only if we say “no” to atrocity can we redress the causes of victimization, be it the terror of Hamas or the betrayal of International Humanitarian Law by Israel. Comparative assessments of systems, structures and policies can and must be made (there was no “moral equivalence” between apartheid and the African National Congress). But as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela recognized, no appeal to historic inequity can justify atrocity.

And finally, we must take the victims’ side. Systemic redress goes hand in hand with particular redress, for the denial of human rights generates ancillary rights and duties: rights of victims to restitution, reparation, humanitarian aid and protection. So too, perpetrators bear ancillary duties of restitution, reparation, and retribution where fitting. Recognition, Systemic Redress and Particular Redress—these are the uses of rights in the midst of conflict and uncivil strife. And it is in light of them, and with due acknowledgment of my own moral myopia, that I offer this advice to young radicals: Be radical!

• Do not succumb to the politics of ressentiment. Protest is never simply about expressing interests however deeply held. Surely, outrage is warranted. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, argument about atrocity without outrage is empty. But outrage without argument is blind. Indeed, political theatre, with all its emotive tropes and gestures, is business as usual, politics as performance. But protest, political protest is the passion of argument. As Edward Said once said, we use the language of rights against the dominant powers, unmasking what has been silenced or effaced. Ghandi, King, Mandela dismantled the edifices of oppression by using their very language of legitimacy against them. And the rhetoric of human rights does this, lets us name victims, recognize systemic distortion.

We must ask ourselves, then, if our protests are radical enough. Have we silenced or effaced victims in the very act of speaking—whether victims of Hamas’s terror or of the disproportionate and indiscriminate response of the IDF? Do our tropes, symbols, gestures show that it is justice and not vengeance we seek? Or does our silence become complicity?

• But naming victims is not enough. Recognition must lead to systemic redress of victimization. What policies, programs, and initiatives will best redress historic inequities?

The grammar of rights lets stories become testimony, but testimony itself must be woven into a new social narrative upholding the rights of all—what Charles Villa-Vicencio, Research Director of the TRC, once called a “greater story that unites.” What, then, do we seek? A cease fire, divestment, a viable peace? And if the latter, must we not acknowledge the equal human rights of both Palestinians and Israelis—rights to security, to equality under the law, to a homeland?

Are our rhetoric and gestures commensurate with our ends? Have we adopted effective rhetorical strategies so that it is our message, and not some other that appears on the nightly news? Ghandi, King, Mandela were keenly sensitive to the effects of their protests. Civil disobedience, legitimate in the face of what King called “unjust law,” must consider not only the righteousness of the cause but the efficacy of the consequences. Protests must not become what rhetoricians call a “self-consuming artifact.”

• Finally, take the victims’ side. If we believe in equal dignity and equal rights, then the key political imperative must be to defend all those whose equal rights and dignity are unequally imperiled or denied. There are no necessary victims, no righteous terror. We must name victims and redress the systemic causes of victimization; but it is systems that must be compared not victims. Recognition, systemic, and particular redress cannot be separated.

Be radical. Let your narrative embody the grammar of rights thereby disclosing what the dominant powers have silenced or effaced. Yet some may object that the rhetoric of rights is itself passe, a token of bourgeoise liberalism. And rights have indeed been invoked to defend what Marx called private interest and private caprice. But for others, many in the Global South, like Mandela, Tutu, Julius Nyerere, etc., human rights remain a cri d’coeur against atrocity, against victimization. And that is the use, bottom up, I have in mind here.

We may be tempted, of course, to “essentialize” victimhood, dividing the world variously into oppressors and oppressed. But this is to succumb to our postmodern bricolage—trading on the very language of rights we deny; for genocide, atrocity, ethnic cleansing, these derive their moral force precisely as systemic violations of human rights. To deny the latter is to render protest impotent, a display of interest not argument. Protest is divested of meaning if it is divested of truth. And as we were reminded by a Galilean Jew long ago, it is truth that will set us free.