Historical Origins of Human Rights

1
Historical Origins of Human Rights

• Lecture 6
• Far-Flung Strangers (in Pictures)
• September 22, 2005

2
outline

• introduction
• the novelty of distance
• close and personal v. faraway and produced?
• digression history of representations
• technologies of producing compassion
• the history of images
• image and emotion
• photography
• compassion fatigue
• sentimentalism and sensationalism
• sentimentalism and sadism
• conclusion

3
introduction

• human rights as a culture
• a step-by-step argument
• how do subjects connect to objects?

4
the novelty of distance

• the Chinese mandarin problem
• identification is harder and harder to the extent
  people are not like you (as Carlo Ginzburg
  notes, a point Aristotle made long ago)
• David Hume if theres any natural pity, its for
  people and problems that are close rather than
  faraway Men are principally concernd about
  those objects, which are not much removd either
  in space or time leaving what is afar off to
  the care of chance and fortune. The breaking of
  a mirror gives us more concern when at home, than
  the burning of a house, when abroad, and some
  hundred leagues distant.
•  Adam Smith follows him Let us suppose that the
  great empire of China, with all its myriads of
  inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an
  earthquake, and let us consider how a man of
  humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion
  with that part of the world, would be affected
  upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful
  calamity. If he was to lose his little finger
  to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night but,
  provided he never saw them, he will snore with
  the most profound security over the ruin of a
  hundred millions of his brethren, and the
  destruction of that immense multitude seems
  plainly an object less interesting to him, than
  this paltry misfortune of his own.

5
two perspectives on distance

• caring about the distant as innate human
  imperative
• caring a moral attribute that needs to be
  produced
•  
• key point to take from Ginzburgs article the
  rise of moral interest in the anonymous and
  distant (central to the humanitarian movement,
  since the it presupposes caring about harmed
  strangers) occurred in history
• why did it occur?
•  one potential explanation the rise of actual
  implication in others lives
• but there is actual implication without awareness
  or caring
• it might coincide with the rise of moral
  indifference about them
• to be indifferent you have to be related
• what if the rise of caring is just a footnote to
  the rise of indifference?
• thats to say, the rise of relations to distant
  people allowed both new kinds of indifference to
  suffering and the rise of moral concern about
  those suffering anonymous and distantly

6
close and authentic v. faraway and produced?

• See Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering
• for the sentimentalists, ALL identification
  required imagination
• the role of the imagination in sympathy By the
  imagination we place ourselves in his situation,
  we conceive ourselves enduring all the same
  torments, we enter as it were into this body, and
  become in some measure the same person with him,
  and then form some idea of his sensations His
  agonies, when they are thus brought home to
  ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made
  them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we
  then tremble and shudder at the thought of what
  he feels (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments).
• pity and compassion as the emotion we feel for
  the misery of others, when we either see it, or
  are made to conceive it in a very lively manner
  (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments).
• note importance of seeing (as Diderot already
  suggests in his Letter on the Blind, in which he
  doubted that blind men pity as much)
• if there is a difference, it is between
  identification made by oneself and one made by
  use of technology
• technologies to see far away

7
digression history of representations

• public world of images variable across space and
  in time
• history of representations studies this
  variability

8
technologies of allowing compassion to connect

• Susan Sontag on images of suffering The
  practice of representing atrocious suffering as
  something to be deplored, and, if possible,
  stopped, enters the history of images with a
  specific subject the sufferings endured by a
  civilian population at the hands of a victorious
  army on a rampage.

9
The History of Images

• early examples iconography/painting
• Hendrik Goltzius, The Dragon Devouring the
  Companions of Cadmus (1588)
• Jacques Callot, Les Misères et malheurs de la
  guerre Misery and Disaster of War (1633)
• Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la Guerra
  Disasters of War (1810-1820, first publ. 1863)
• relation between images of war and images of
  poverty follows larger relation between
  humanitarian responses to war and humanitarian
  responses to other disasters (including poverty)

10
Goltzius
11
recruitment
12
scenes of pillage
13
plundering a large farmhouse
14
plunder/burning of village
15
attack on a coach
16
strappado
17
hanging
18
wheel
19
peasants revenge
20
image and emotion

• three (mutually exclusive) views about the
  relation between images of suffering and culture
  of humanitarianism
• the priority of the emotion humanitarianism is
  natural and gives rise to the need to document
  suffering as technology allows. comparison I
  always wanted the product (the Lexus) and the
  image simply responded to this emotion (informing
  me where to get it, information about it, etc.)
• the interdependence of image and emotion
  humanitarianism is brought about by the
  documentation of suffering, but only in the sense
  that it awakens a dormant faculty. comparison I
  may not have known I wanted the product (the
  Lexus) until shown a picture, but the emotion
  pre-exists the picture and is only activated by
  it
• the priority of the image the emotion doesnt
  exist until the image brings it about.
  comparison I did not want the product (the
  Lexus) until the image made me want it
• which one is right?

21
photography

• photography a revolutionary breakthrough?
• is there an essential relationship between
  humanitarianism and photography?
• could humanitarianism have developed the same way
  without photography?
• the CNN effect
• what are the characteristics of photography that
  make it so important in the history of
  humanitarianism?

22
compassion fatigue

• the moral sentiments could become dulled through
  excessive exposure
• Susan Sontag from On Photography to Regarding
  the Pain of Others In the end, such images just
  make us a little less able to feel, to have our
  conscience pricked.
• Bishop Joseph Butler emotion may diminish, but
  the hope is that in the meantime practice of
  caring for others becomes habit Let a man set
  himself to attend to, inquire out, and relieve
  distressed persons, and he cannot but grow less
  and less sensibly affected with the various
  miseries of life, with which he must become
  acquainted when yet, at the time, benevolence,
  considered not as a passion, but as a practical
  principle of action will strengthen and whilst
  he passively compassionates the distressed less,
  he will acquire a greater aptitude actively to
  assist and befriend them.
• is education for compassion self-defeating?
•  if not, is education for compassion a temporary
  problem or a permanent need?

23
sentimentalism and sensationalism

• sympathy could become an end in itself, without
  taking the next step to the alleviation of
  suffering
• When we read of torments, wounds, deaths, and
  the like dismal accidents, our pleasure does not
  flow so properly from the grief which such
  melancholy description gives us, as from the
  secret comparison which we make between ourselves
  and the person who suffers. Such representations
  teach us to set a just value upon our own
  condition, and make us prize our good fortune,
  which exempts us from like the like calamities
  (The Spectator, 1712).
• from being a spectator to being a voyeur

24
spectacle v. structure

• representations of physical cruelty (torture,
  slavery and war) as opposed to what?
• does humanitarianism have a bias for spectacular
  versus structural suffering (whether the latter
  is embodied or not)?

25
sentimentalism and sadism

• emergence of Gothic fiction and Romantic agony
• the constant depiction of suffering in order to
  suggest its alleviation also created people who
  reveled in it.
• William Wordsworth degrading thirst after
  outrageous stimulation
• far from dulling the sentiments, the
  representation of pain (notably in visual form)
  could whet ones appetite for it
• Karen Halttunen Humanitarian reformers were
  caught in a contradiction largely of their own
  making. To around popular opposition to the evil
  practices they sought to eradicate, they deemed
  it necessary to display those practices in all
  their horror. But, by their own line of
  argument, viewing the spectacle of suffering
  could inflict terrible moral damage on the
  spectator, turning him or her into a savage
  with an atrocious passion for cruelty.
  Humanitarian reform was a major cultural vehicle
  for the growing unacceptability of pain it was
  also, inescapably, an expression and even a
  demonstration of the new obscenity of pain.
• historians also suggest that it was in this
  period of sentiment that pornography emerged as a
  genre, and involved novel scenes of stimulating
  pain

26
sadism contd

• Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) Cruelty, very far
  from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature
  injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy,
  bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary
  long before he is able to reason cruelty is
  stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have
  said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be
  read than in ourselves cruelty exists amongst
  savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized
  men are absurd then to maintain cruelty is a
  consequence of depravity. Cruelty is simply the
  energy in a man civilization has not yet
  altogether corrupted therefore it is a virtue,
  not a vice.
• Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
  (1782)
• Michel Foucault Sadism is not a name finally
  given to a practice as old as Eros it is a
  massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at
  the end of the eighteenth century.
• The term Sadism comes only from the end of the
  nineteenth-century, coined by Richard von
  Krafft-Ebing. One of the cases that led him to
  the coinage involved a person whose first
  experience of sexual excitement at puberty came
  as a result of reading Uncle Toms Cabin, which
  is of course one of the great monuments of
  humanitarian propaganda, opening with a horrific
  scene of slave torture in the American South.

27
conclusion

• Sontag Being a spectator of calamities taking
  place in another country is a quintessential
  modern experience.