Human Rights and the Uses of History. Samuel Moyn

declarations of the rights of man could achieve.” Human rights having long been associated with the French Revolution’s legacy, no wonder the pope was nervous about them. And so the most unfortunate fact in the history of human dignity is that, when the notion entered world politics in Christian hands, it had been severed from a revolutionary legacy thought at the time to be a slippery slope to communism and a road to serfdom.

      The political theorist Charles Beitz has recently discovered that it was Barnard College dean Virginia Gildersleeve who altered the preamble of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1945 to include its current reference to “the dignity and worth of the human person.” The language seems most traceable to Catholic usage, because no one else invoked the idea during wartime. One thing is clear: the appearance of human dignity in the charter was surely not an evocation of a principle violated by the European Holocaust, because the Jews were of no serious concern to either Pius XII or Gildersleeve. The latter had spent much of the 1930s trying to bar Jews from her school, and she gave speeches sympathetic to Germany’s territorial expansion. After the war, as the historian Stephen Norwood has shown, Gildersleeve’s “campaign” against what she called “International Zionism” testified to “the inability of many … to comprehend the depth … of Jewish suffering.”¹⁴ The same is true in postwar West Germany, where the annunciation of dignity suited the agendas of its time.

      The main one, it seems, was the rise of Christian Democracy, a conservative political movement that established dominance in Western Europe in which appeals to “human dignity” figured by far most commonly. In the history of postwar constitutions, after Ireland’s pioneering usage, dignity appeared first in conservative Catholic Bavaria’s constitution in 1946, then in that of Christian Democratic Italy in 1947, before the West German constitution was written with its now famous first article: “Human dignity is inviolable.” And indeed, the enduring influence of Catholic premises on West German legal thought shaped dignity’s meaning for a long time. Rosen seriously overstates the Kantian influence in the original West German constitution and its early interpretation. The figure he cites as a Kantian interpreter, Günter Dürig, drew his influential interpretation of dignity and other precepts of constitutional law as “objective values” from one of Kant’s most incisive modern critics, sometime Catholic philosopher Max Scheler.¹⁵

      After 1945, Westerners generally followed the example of the Catholics in the previous decade and used the notion of dignity to attack communism. A founding document of American Cold War politics, NSC-68, says the point of the campaign is the defense of human dignity, and President Harry Truman agreed that “both religion and democracy are founded on one basic principle, the worth and dignity of the individual man and woman.”¹⁶ But this Cold War rhetoric as much obstructed its currency as guaranteed its centrality.

      With that rhetoric’s gradual dissolution, human dignity became open to new interpretations. At least in Western Europe, public Christianity collapsed. There and elsewhere, Kant became popular thanks to the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, which suddenly established individual rights as the indispensable foundation of social justice. (Interestingly, Rawls himself never focused on dignity, but the retrieval of Kant he inspired eventually got there—though, as Rosen shows in one of his most impressive discussions, it was in a far more secular key than Kant’s texts permit.) Finally, and at first independently, a new sort of international human rights movement arose, one initially focused on bodily violations like torture which a global public came to regard as the most egregious violations of dignity.¹⁷ When the Cold War ended, it became possible to surmise that most people, after all, agree about the dictates of “dignity” and other basic values, even though they spent the twentieth century slaughtering one another over which ideals to prize.

      Rosen is a wonderful guide to recent German constitutional thinking about dignity crafted in this new climate. Today, he shows, West German dignity is generally secular, liberal and even Kantian in its meaning, notably in a controversial decision made after 9/11 forbidding the state from shooting down an airliner captured by terrorists. (Rosen also has amusing discussions of dwarf-tossing and other current controversies, and is in general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.) Dignity is a feature of nearly all constitutions written lately, especially South Africa’s exemplary and prestigious document. Basic conflicts are easily reframed in terms of dignity: the dignity of life of infants used to be set off against women’s liberation in abortion debates, but defenders of choice long ago learned to deploy dignity too.

      Yet dignity’s religious sources make it hard for secular progressives to claim it easily or unambiguously. The 2012 Democratic Party platform referred to dignity frequently, in association with the universal human rights that liberals in the United States say are the country’s foundation, including emphasis on global women’s rights and global development, as well in relation to liberal social policy like health care. Yet the Republican platform invoked dignity just as frequently: to inveigh against abortion and explain why it is wrong (one reason being that it offends “the dignity of women”), to insist that marriage is exclusively for heterosexuals, and to support the military, warning that it must not become the site of “social experimentation.” In these usages, dignity clearly refers to a moral code above and beyond society, to which democracy must defer.¹⁸

      Not even Ishmael thought dignity could be a purely secular ideal. He is nonchalant by comparison to Captain Ahab—but that’s a low bar. Ishmael is an exile too (and the namesake of one), but not, like Ahab, exercised about it. He is even complacent about God’s fickle disappearance, however much he allows himself to be temporarily seduced by Ahab’s quest. He has no place in the world, and usually does not seem concerned about his metaphysical standing.¹⁹ Yet strangely, when he celebrates democracy, Ishmael does so precisely in terms of the godly dignity that he mocked earlier, when describing kings and their coronations. “Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces,” Ishmael muses,

      but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes … [T]his august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. [It is] that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!²⁰

      Ishmael’s “faith” is rousing. But how can Melville’s character salvage anointed worth from the overthrown order in which kings and aristocrats acted as the dignified intermediaries between God and everyone else? And if men need robes to hide their blemishes, how can they do without “robed investiture” of some kind? Most important, how could Ishmael appeal so effortlessly to God, and the human dignity based on Him, as if it were not the very premise that Ahab needed to test in his fiery hunt?

      Searching for divine certification of our standing may always be appealing, but the liberal interest in dignity seems to follow from less exalted and metaphysical concerns. When the French Revolution and the struggle for the freedoms of blacks, women, and workers were being won across the nineteenth century, no theories of human dignity were required. Human rights in particular were unconnected to dignity, outside Kant, until Catholics yoked them together at mid-century. Today human dignity is a principle chiefly for those who admire judges and want them to have the power to check the state in the name of basic humanitarian values.²¹ Its currency is a sign that our morality has been redefined around the worst that can transpire in history, rather than some better order that could be achieved through political contest and struggle. A consensus about dignity may have become deep enough for us to insist the state not torture, but it has proved far less helpful when some of us insist that our fellow humans care about one another’s broader welfare or collective emancipation. Isn’t that undignified?

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