The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 197s

8. Oasis in the Desert? America’s Human Rights Rediscovery

C h a p t e r 8 Oasis in the Desert? America’s Human Rights Rediscovery Daniel Sargent An oasis in the Sonora desert begins with a fracture in the earth’s crust. If the groundwater is high enough, liquid under pressure will seep through the cracks. With time, these trickles may support vegetation, even animal life. For travelers, the oasis offers a respite from the heat of the California interior. For historians, its provenance may spur reflection. Like oases, human rights breakthroughs are rare. In the expanses of world history, the idea of human rights has had limited relevance for most people. Yet ruptures do occur, as in the 1970s, and the oasis evokes the dynamics that create them. The groundwater stands for the elements that produce human rights, which I take to be the idea of inalienable natural rights and the sentimental humanitarianism that can nourish and universalize rights concepts. The desert represents forces arrayed against them. For the historian Paul Gordon Lauren, by contrast, human rights are a river that courses through history, a river that has grown “larger and mightier ” as new tributaries have flooded it.1 This is appealing but too hopeful. Human rights flow, but they also ebb. The guillotine spilled streams of blood in the years that followed the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. The British Empire abolished the slave trade, but its imperial mission also culminated with heads on spikes. In recent years, human rights have been fickle. They proved a wedge against totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, but they brought no relief to victims of man-made apocalypses in Cambodia or Rwanda. To 126 Daniel Sargent explain human rights is to grapple with omissions. In some places and at some times, they have borne consequences. At others, they have not. The oasis, which acknowledges both the specificity in place and time of particular human rights eruptions and their connectedness to deeper wells of action and thought, may be more apt a metaphor than the river flowing forward. The question of genealogies is contentious. Some historians, such as Lauren , favor theories of origins that are deep and cosmopolitan. They reach back in time and take human rights for the common inheritance of humankind. Others argue for the Western origins of human rights but nonetheless trace the story back centuries, perhaps to the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.2 Another approach rejects theories of deep origins altogether. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann calls long-term genealogies a “chimera” and argues that human rights became historically salient only in the twentieth century.3 Nobody states this revisionist hypothesis better than Samuel Moyn, who locates the emergence of a recognizable human rights doctrine in the 1970s.4 There is a pattern to the interpretive wrangling, and it has to do with definitions. Those who argue for novelty define their terms more precisely than do those who emphasize the deep origins. For Moyn it is disentanglement from the nation-state that distinguishes late twentieth-century instantiations of human rights from earlier concepts. “The move from the politics of the state to the morality of the globe,” he writes, “defines contemporary aspirations.”5 Those who trace deep origins define their subject with less precision . For Micheline Ishay, human rights are simply the litany of “rights held by individuals because they are part of the human species.”6 In both cases, the definitional precision (or lack thereof) serves an interpretative strategy. The desert oasis suggests a different way of looking at the problem. The groundwater represents continuity, a source of underlying connection. But the oasis metaphor also emphasizes the particularity of human rights moments, whether in the 1780s or in the 1970s. Crucially, it draws our attention to the geological circumstances—the tectonic pressures, the cracks in the earth, the historical topography—that permit human rights to flourish at certain times. What comprises the groundwater? I see it as a compound of two elements. One, humanitarianism, is ethical and moral; the other, the idea of natural rights, is political and philosophical. Humanitarianism begins with empathy: the capacity to view others as fully human, equally capable of experiencing pain and no less entitled to life and its opportunities than oneself. Empathetic identification is not new; ancient religious and philosophical texts expound America's Human Rights Rediscovery 127 its virtues. Still, the emergence of a modern culture of sympathy, as Thomas Laqueur argues, reflects the effects of mass literacy...