Inventing Human Rights
Inventing Human Rights: A History by
Lynn Hunt, is an important and excellent book.
Professor Hunt, a former president of the American Historical Association,
ponders the obvious inconsistency of a century of human rights, including
abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of black males, coexisting with
denial of civil rights to women.
Professor
Hunt’s history is designed to illuminate the forces that led to the creation of
human rights. In the process, she comes
to a deep understanding and disturbing conclusion.
“The two questions, then, are: what can motivate us to act on
our feelings for those far away, and what makes fellow feeling break down so
much that we can torture, maim or even kill those closest to us? Distance and
closeness, positive feelings and negative ones, all have to enter into the
equation.
“From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, and
precisely because of the emergence of a notion of human rights, these tensions
became ever more deadly. Late eighteenth
century campaigners against slavery, legal torture, and cruel punishment all
highlighted cruelty in their emotionally wrenching narratives. They intended to provoke revulsion, but the
arousal of sensations through reading and viewing explicit engravings of
suffering could not always be carefully channeled. Similarly, the novel that drew intense
attention to the travails of ordinary girls took on other, more sinister forms
by the end of the eighteenth century.
The Gothic novel, exemplified by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), featured scenes of incest, rape, torture, and
murder, and those sensationalist scenes increasingly seemed to be the point of
the exercise rather than the study of interior feelings or moral outcomes. The marquis de Sade took the Gothic novel a
step further into an explicit pornography of pain, deliberately reducing to
their sexual core the long, drawn-out seduction scenes of earlier novels like
Richardson’s Clarissa. Sade aimed to reveal the hidden meanings of
previous novels: sex, domination, pain and power rather than love, empathy, and
benevolence. ‘Natural right’ for him meant only the right to grab as much power
as you could and enjoy wielding it over others.
It is no accident that Sade wrote almost all his novels in the 1790’s
during the French Revolution.
“The notion of
human rights thus brought in its train a whole succession of evil twins. The call for universal, equal, and natural
rights stimulated the growth of new and sometimes fanatical ideologies of
difference. New modes for gaining
empathetic understanding opened the way to a sensationalism
of violence. The effort to dislodge
cruelty from its legal, judicial and religious moorings made it more accessible
as an everyday tool of domination and dehumanization. The utterly dehumanizing
crimes of the twentieth century only became conceivable once everyone could
claim to be an equal member of the human family. Recognition of these dualities is essential
for the future of human rights. Empathy has not been exhausted, as some have
claimed. It has become a more powerful force for good than every before. But the countervailing effect of violence,
pain, and domination is also greater than ever before.
“Human rights
are our only commonly shared bulwark against those evils. We must still continually improve on the
eighteenth-century version of human rights, ensuring that the ‘Human’ in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights leaves none of the ambiguities of ‘man’
in the ‘rights of man.’ The cascade of rights continues, though always with
great conflict about how it should flow: the right of a woman to choose versus
the right of a fetus to live, the right to die with dignity versus the absolute
right to life, the rights of the disabled, the rights of homosexuals, the
rights of children, the rights of animals – the arguments have not and will not
end. The eighteenth-century campaigners
for the rights of man could condemn their opponents as unfeeling
traditionalists, interested only in maintaining a social order predicated on
inequality, particularity, and historical custom rather than equality, universality, and
natural rights. But we no longer have
the luxury of simple rejection of an older view. At the other end of the
struggle for human rights, when belief in them has become more widespread, we
have to face the world that has been wrought by that endeavor. We have to
figure out what to do with the torturers and the murderers, how to prevent
their emergence in the future, all the while recognizing that they are us. We can neither tolerate nor dehumanize them.”
Inventing Human Rights, pages 211 – 213
This is an important
book and essential reading for anyone interested in democratic politics and
government.
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