Читать книгу Human Rights and the Uses of History - Samuel Moyn - Страница 11

“A king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad,” Ishmael jokes in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, in the course of cataloging every last use of whale blubber. “Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process,” he adds. “Dignity” appears twenty times in Melville’s novel, and usually refers to the high standing of offices and activities—including, inevitably, whaling. But most often, dignity pertains to monarchs, and the humorous treatment that somehow elevates kings does not work its magic on everyone. For Ishmael, the notion that democracy offers everyone the dignified prerogatives of kings seems mistaken, if not ridiculous. “In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,” he surmises, “can’t amount to much in his totality.”¹

In Dignity, Rank, and Rights, Jeremy Waldron, perhaps the leading legal and political philosopher of our day, argues that the notion of human dignity originated in the democratization of the high social status once reserved for the well-born.² “Dignity” means rank, and Waldron argues that we are the beneficiaries of a long, gradual process he calls “leveling up.” More and more people, he says, are treated as high-status individuals, deserving of the social respect once restricted to the solemnly oiled. In an age of human rights, everyone can become a king, at least on paper or in court, where claims that basic human dignity is non-negotiable have achieved a remarkable presence in the last few years.

Since the end of World War II, nobody besides conservative and typically Catholic thinkers had staked philosophical systems on the notion of human dignity, but liberal philosophers like Waldron are flocking to it to revitalize theories of political ethics. Around the same time as Waldron turned to dignity, the late Ronald Dworkin, in his masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), claimed that it is the most basic value society should advance. Jürgen Habermas, the great German thinker, recently admitted that human dignity had not featured as the cited authority for human rights for most of modern history, whether in 1776 in Virginia or 1789 in France or thereafter; he concluded from this fact that dignity must have been implicit to human rights all along. That cannot be correct. During most of that time dignity served to elevate some people over others, rather than putting them on the same level.³ And when dignity did finally enter politics—mysteriously encoded at mid-century in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and West German constitutional Basic Law (1949)—it was not the watchword in philosophy or political theory that it has become. Which leads to a question: what is in the water—other than fewer whales than in Melville’s day?

Before the modern era, dignity was not considered to be an inviolable value. The Renaissance guru Pico della Mirandola, who wrote an oration in the fifteenth century later called “On the Dignity of Man,” is often regarded as a confused precursor of later understandings of it. (In Dignity: Its History and Meaning, Harvard political theorist Michael Rosen treats Pico this way.⁴) But Pico, a Cabbalist and magician, was too idiosyncratic a thinker to be anyone’s ancestor.⁵ After all, he insisted that what makes humans different than everything else in the universe is their lack of any defined essence. As contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has noted, Pico’s discourse “does not contain the term dignitas, which … could not in any case refer to man. For the central thesis of the oration is that man, having been molded when the models of creation were all used up, can have neither archetype nor proper place nor specific rank.”⁶

In modern times, Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to write about the democratization of high standing. A French aristocrat who travelled to America to size up a newfangled thing called “democracy,” Tocqueville warned that if aristocratic values were not somehow preserved after the departure of feudal kings and nobles, humanity would be debased. “In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man,” he noted.⁷ Democracy might promise leveling up but mainly threatened to flatten distinctions altogether—a risk which neither Waldron nor other current chroniclers of dignity seem to take seriously. But even on its own terms, there are problems with Waldron’s argument.

Aristocratic social status is not an innate characteristic: ask the riff-raff who have bought or married into it over the centuries. And even for those who lucked into high birth, their standing was always ritually established, as the ceremonial anointing of kings suggests. For nobles, social requirements included dress, language, manners and manor, and for males also involved the sort of repetitious violence and denigration of the body that we now think human dignity is supposed to deter or forbid. Nineteenth-century aristocrats, in their last gasp of importance, whiled away their idle hours rattling sabers, and when not preparing to fight were engaged in nasty duels, giving one another the physical scars that were frequently the mandatory signs of their superiority.⁸ Such rituals, like anointing, seem fairly silly when applied to everyone; besides, discussions about human dignity consider it to be “inherent.” It is not something that elaborate social rituals, and least of all bodily violence, are required to establish.

The historical origins of dignity in social status are important to Waldron because of the recent popularity of the turn to another potential source—abstract philosophy—for securing human worth. Even as dignity was slowly being recognized as existing beyond aristocrats, philosophers continued their age-old struggle to identify some uniquely human properties that set us above the other animals. One philosopher, however, the sage of the German Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, thought about human distinction precisely in terms of dignity—namely, the priceless worth conferred on us by our freedom to choose.⁹ Kant inserted a break in the great chain of being between the rest of the animals, which are purely subject to the determination of nature’s laws, and human beings, who could (he hoped) deploy their free will to make their own rules rather than slavishly obey beastly imperatives. In a difficult argument, Kant insisted that man’s “rational nature,” our ability to set ends, makes everyone of highest value, and indeed provides the basis of all value in the world. His metaphysical promotion of the centrality of human dignity is significant intellectually because, as Rosen remarks, it is on Kant’s “giant shoulders the modern theory of human rights rests” nowadays.¹⁰

Waldron, whose latest book is typically careful, lucid, and subtle, seems openly nervous about resting everything on those shoulders. In practical terms, he suggests that it is best to establish people’s worth in the future not by abstract and controversial claims like Kant’s about their freedom and autonomy, which do not command universal agreement, but rather by letting the law work slowly to grant them higher status, as has been the case in constitutional and international human rights law during the last few decades. Further, as Waldron persuasively argues, it’s not possible to derive from Kant’s idea of human dignity all that human rights law might protect. For example, the Universal Declaration makes room for economic and social protections, but how can the notion of human dignity justify the declaration’s more specific protection of unionization rights or paid vacations?

The partisans of a metaphysical basis for human dignity might respond, predictably, that what goes up can go down. And ultimately some knockdown argument is required to establish the grounds for treating human beings as inherently precious. Social status is a powerful source of norms, but it is no necessary basis for improving treatment. The arc of the moral universe is definitely long, as our president likes to say, but it does not bend towards justice unless pushed. Waldron’s proposal is that the universal and egalitarian implications of Kant’s kingdom of ends can be reached indirectly by allowing the democratization of high status to continue through various legal institutions. But it is hard to see why anyone could be confident about this bet—unless Waldron were, like Tocqueville (or Barack Obama), committed to the view that history inevitably betters humanity’s lot. But at this late date it is naïve to appeal to the workings of providence. In fact, a closer look at the historical details of dignity’s trajectory suggests that its prominence today is directly related to a crisis of progress.

There is a big omission in the view that dignity is the rank due to high social status: the lord at the top of the totem pole, God. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael allows that dignity still exists in the natural kingdom, where divine majesty remains intact even if America has shown the world that men can rule themselves. “In the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,” he remarks, “that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.”¹¹ This is the sort of dignity that matters to Captain Ahab, famously obsessed with the Deity who refuses to answer him—and for whom the white whale stands in as proxy.

Unlike Ishmael, Ahab fears the loss of dignity resulting from the departure or silence of God. He fears that when belief in a God on high wanes, humanity’s worth and purpose is thrown radically into doubt. As the literary critic Robert Milder argues in his magnificent study of Melville, Exiled Royalties, “Ahab craves recognition that he is heaven-born and, if not heaven-destined, then at least, by nature and bearing, heaven-worthy … If God will not condescend to him by word or sign, Ahab will extort the sign, if only by forcing God to kill him.”¹² By extension, Moby-Dick explores how human dignity ultimately depends on (and comes from) a theological principle, not a political or social one alone.

Kings and aristocrats relied heavily on a theological worldview, with God establishing their “divine right” for the rule of his noble representatives on earth. In fact, it is extremely doubtful that Kant’s bundle of assumptions about what makes human beings dignified can be plausibly traced to European beliefs about social status, as opposed to theological premises which he struggled to reformulate in secular terms. As the nineteenth century passed, and Kant’s thought fell out of favor (Arthur Schopenhauer called dignity “the shibboleth of all empty-headed moralists”), the party most closely associated with claims about human dignity was neither liberal nor socialist but conservative and rigid in its commitment to hierarchy: the Catholic Church.

In his penetrating and sprightly essay on human dignity, Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism to the modern history of claims on human dignity. His command of the history is impressive, but his chiefly philosophical purpose leads him to overlook some dramatic historical developments or note them only in passing. Rosen leaves the impression that human dignity rose as a kind of common ground between liberal Kantians and post-Holocaust Catholics, who agreed that our humanity is the source of moral worth, but differed slightly about its implications. But no Kantians were around when it mattered: at mid-century, when the UN Charter, Universal Declaration and German Constitution were written. Furthermore, Rosen throws up his hands when it comes to explaining how political Catholicism, mostly closely associated with human dignity in the 1930s, was changed by fascism and war, which in turn proved crucial to the re-invocation of dignity in the 1940s.

Rosen beautifully shows, however, that Catholic dignity long bolstered the vision of a highly hierarchical society. In the confusing decade of the 1930s, when Catholic social thought profoundly informed the illiberal regimes in Austria, Portugal, and Spain, dignity seemed to refer to man’s place in a divine order in which the high “rank” of humans still meant their subordination to one another—and notably the subordination of women to men. The first constitution to feature human dignity in a prominent way dates from Ireland in 1937, where “the freedom and dignity of the individual” is linked to theological virtues, and women were told—contrary to the country’s earlier liberal constitution which the new document repealed—to find their “place in the home.”¹³ And the notion of human dignity invoked by the Church forbade the egalitarian solutions of communism—which promised to “level up” humanity more than liberals have. But Catholics in the 1930s were not yet sure whether the protection of dignity was served by liberal democracy, or threatened by it almost as frighteningly as by communism itself.

Some Catholic dissidents, however, argued against the alliance of Catholicism and reaction, advocating instead for a moralistic conservatism compatible with, or even dependent on, a liberal democracy whose viability had long been doubted in mainstream Catholic circles. When the Allied victory in World War II swept the table of reactionary politics (except in Iberia), Catholics began to link human dignity with parliamentary democracy and “human rights.” But even then, Catholics wanted to separate human dignity from the potentially anarchistic implications of individual human rights. “The holy story of Christmas proclaims this inviolable dignity of man with a vigor and authority that cannot be gainsaid,” Pope Pius XII observed in a hugely influential message in late 1944, “an authority and vigor that infinitely transcends that which all possible 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?