Where did the belief in universal human rights come from?
Why did western societies ever begin to write documents proclaiming that “all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”?
What was the original spark of humanitarian instinct that eventually gave rise to a document like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
The Judeao-Christian belief that all people are created as the Image of God certainly had an important role to play. But many “Christian” societies have embraced this biblical doctrine without any practical implementation towards eliminating torture, injustice, or discrimination.
So how did the broad-based, societal belief in establishing “human rights” for everyone equally as a matter of law spring into life?
Professor Lynn Hunt teaches modern European history, specializing in the French Revolution, at UCLA. She has written a fascinating book called Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007) where she argues that the impetus towards universal human rights arose with the creation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.
It is difficult today for us to imagine a time when the fictional novel was a new invention, a new form of literature. It is also difficult to understand the novel’s wild popularity among the masses.
Almost everyone who could read consumed them whole. And many who could not read had someone read the latest novel to them.
One of the major social benefits of this craze was the rise in empathy for others, especially others who were not like you, others whom the reader did not know personally, first hand.
An important question this book raises for me concerns the possible connection between American xenophobia, and our hard-heartedness towards warfare and the suffering of “foreigners” and the decline in American literacy.
Nearly 1/3 of American’s did not read a single book last year. Only 20% read
for pleasure on a daily basis. When we do read, it is on average for 17 minutes per day.
Below is an excerpt from Inventing Human Rights (emphasis mine):
(Novels) drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters, who were by definition unknown to the reader personally. Readers empathized with the characters, especially their heroine or hero, thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself. Through the fictional exchange of letters [the epistolary form of novel was especially popular] taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and political order. . . Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative. Can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of “the rights of man”?
. . . Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century, 
readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women. As a consequence, they came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence. The equality of souls in heaven is not the same thing as equal rights here on earth. Before the eighteenth century, Christians readily accepted the former without granting the latter.
Professor Hunt’s observations raise troubling questions about the demise of literacy and the liberal arts in American education.
I fear that the increasing turn towards “professionalization” as opposed to cultural literacy in education will pave the way for a harsher, more xenophobic, aggressive, inhumane vision of the world for American society.
But, then, maybe we are already there…
