Human Rights and the Uses of History - Samuel Moyn

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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

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