Human Rights, Literature, and Empathy
James Dawes
Writing in the wake of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), William Wordsworth argued that the pleasure of poetry was not a matter of “amusement and idle pleasure” ([1802] 1986: 166–67), but rather an extension of the revolutionary idea of foundational human dignity. Poetic pleasure, he writes, is “an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe … homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves” (Wordsworth [1802] 1986: 166–67). Further, poetic pleasure fosters universal human sympathy:
We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.
(Wordsworth and Coleridge 2013: 105–7)
Contemporary historian Lynn Hunt concurs, arguing that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen – often pointed to as the genesis moment of modern human rights – was made possible only because of the seductions of literary pleasure. She claims that the rise of the epistolary novel – Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – made the very idea of the rights of man possible by teaching readers how to empathize across race, religion, gender, class, and nationality. The novel as a technology of storytelling, in sum, changed the human experience and practice of empathy, and this new, Wordsworthian, universalizing human empathy became the foundation of human rights.
Literature promotes empathy, and empathy promotes rights. This is a powerful, important story that informs both the work of human rights (NGOs around the world see narrative empathy as one of their most powerful tools) and the work of literary education in high schools and colleges (the presumed lack of financial benefits in studying literature are made up for by its presumed amplification of thoughtful civic virtue). Nonetheless, there are powerful, important counterstories about empathy and rights, counterstories made urgent by the implicit ethical claim undergirding them: namely, that just as human rights stories can have unintended ethical and political consequences (the naming and shaming campaign that incites rather than inhibits perpetrator violence; the famine photography that damages rather than strengthens our sense of connection to the other), the story of human rights itself can also have unintended ethical and political consequences. So before discussing the empathy of stories, let me take a moment to discuss the stories of empathy.
At the highest level of abstraction, there are two primary and opposed narratives for thinking about the history of human rights: the continuity and discontinuity models. The continuity model includes the work not only of Hunt but also of historians like Paul Gordon Lauren and Micheline Ishay, who argue that the history of human rights as a movement can be traced with some degree of consistency at least back to the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and possibly much further, as far back as Greek and Roman Stoic formulations of the cosmopolitan. The essence of the argument is that human rights as an historical telos has a continuous and traceable evolution, that it was invented or manifested itself through the development of philosophical reason or the historical expansion of empathy. Political movements and philosophical and religious ideas about human dignity from centuries ago and across cultures are most properly understood as antecedents that have established the basic conceptual groundwork for our contemporary human rights movement. The history of human rights is the history of a messy and complicated, but nonetheless continuous, progress.
On the other end of the spectrum is the discontinuity model, whose most visible spokespersons right now are Samuel Moyn and Barbara Keys. Moyn argues that human rights is what happens to be left now that history’s other utopias have all failed. The historical story offered by scholars like Lauren is a basic historical mistake, Moyn thinks. The story of the march of history toward our contemporary moment of human rights is a teleological story and for that reason should be considered suspect. It is a grand narrative that makes us the endpoint of history, that looks for deep historical foundations for our contingent modern values. It treats wildly different political, religious, and utopian traditions as if they were all inevitably pointing to and building upon each other. The truth of the matter, Moyn says, is that human rights in the way we think about it today in the United States is fundamentally a post–Jimmy Carter phenomenon. All those who have been depicted as fighting for human rights in the more distant past, even those who used the phrase “human rights,” were either entirely marginal, or they were thinking and talking about something fundamentally different from what we are talking about today when we say “human rights.” They were talking about citizenship or membership rights, not the rights due to us simply by virtue of being human. The closest we can get to a plausible origin point, Moyn believes, is 1977. In that year, Amnesty International received the Nobel Prize, Jimmy Carter used the phrase “human rights” in his inaugural address and made it a modern buzzword, and The New York Times quintupled its use of the phrase over all previous years that we can trace (Moyn 2010).
The debates between these two factions (in conferences, books, journals, and magazines) are fierce – much fiercer than has been usually the case for academic periodizing and goalpost setting. It is fierce because each story is based upon a powerful, if implicit, moral claim. Continuists believe that their story supports the urgent work of human rights today by offering historical and philosophical authority to new, sometimes fragile organizational forms, forms that are vulnerable to delegitimization not only by way of political force but also by way of intellectual and cultural arguments. The discontinuist story, which seeks to break the historical linkage of changes in empathy with developments in human rights, has a different but equally compelling moral motivation. It objects to continuism’s implicit or perhaps unintended claim: namely, that when we study any particular empathy-based social justice movement from the past, what we are studying is a point along the long arc of the history of human rights, because human rights is the necessary organizational manifestation of human empathy. In other words, human rights continuism constrains what we can imagine as justice.
Whatever stance one takes on the competition of stories about human rights and the history of empathy, one thing is undeniable: our collective conceptions of empathy are at best fractured and at worst incoherent. Let me unpack that claim by offering two lists about the function of empathy, first in human rights and humanitarian fieldwork and second in literary criticism.
Conducting interviews over the years with fieldworkers in a range of positions – from large international organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch to small torture treatment centers and local, issue-based advocacy groups – I have heard people describe a range of theories about the role of empathy in their work:
1. Generating empathy in distant spectators is the first and most important step in addressing human rights violations. Human rights is, in a sense, nothing more than the historical expansion of our capacity to empathize: expanding our circle of concern beyond our kin, our community, our region, our religion, our nation-state, expanding it to encompass the globe.
2. Generating empathy in distant spectators is ineffective and sometimes counterproductive for addressing human rights violations. When empathy-inspired action cannot quickly find a clear, straightforward, and personalizing solution, it fades, and the unpleasant (guilty, helpless) sensation of fading promotes empathy-avoidance in the future.
3. The imperatives of empathy inspire people to pursue careers in human rights and continue to keep them there. Whether it is a personal encounter with an individual or a more general discomfort with patterns of suffering, what brings people to the field is the feeling of empathy rather than the acknowledgment of moral duty.
4. The imperatives of empathy make it difficult for rights workers to do their jobs effectively and to stay in their careers over the long run. As one torture-treatment worker told me: empathy is killing us one piece at a time; we need to find ways to disconnect. “The dreadful gift of pity,” Primo Levi writes, threatens psychic survival (Levi 1989: 56).
5. Empathy might not be empathy. Rights workers are not certain about what they are experiencing when they experience distress at another’s distress. It can be hard, for instance, to disentangle a committed empathetic stance from temporary, spasmodic emotional contagion, or to distinguish care for others from care for the idea of caring for others.
These views do not easily coexist, though it is not uncommon for a single individual to hold them all.
For literary scholars who focus upon human rights, there is a related list:
1. Stories generate empathy, and empathy generates helping behaviors. Richard Rorty, Lynn Hunt, and Martha Nussbaum are prominent exponents of this view, each making some version of the argument that literary experience promotes virtuous citizenship. Sad and sentimental stories, writes Rorty,
repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation.
(1993: 133–34)
2. Stories generate empathy, and empathy generates helping behaviors, but helping behaviors do not help. As Martha Nussbaum points out, vivid, empathy-arousing stories are just as likely to make people act immorally as morally, diverging “from a principle of fairness they themselves have endorsed” (2013: 157). Paul Bloom explains that we are more likely to care about a baby trapped in a well than about thousands of babies born into dire poverty, because the former makes for a good story. Given scarce emotional and financial resources, the needs of the vividly narratable individual often come at the expense of the collective good.
3. Stories generate empathy, but empathy does not generate helping behaviors. Studies from the sciences and social sciences continue to test for relationships among reading, empathy, and action. In 2013, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a study in Science arguing that reading literary fictions improves “theory of mind” – that is, the individual’s capacity to understand what and how others think and feel. Kidd and Castano offer their study as a preliminary corrective to those who dismiss the social value of teaching fiction: effective theory of mind is positively linked to empathy and negatively linked to antisocial behavior; fiction reading is linked to theory of mind; therefore fiction reading must be linked to prosocial behavior (Kidd and Castano 2013). However, in her exhaustive work on empathy and the novel, Suzanne Keen considers an array of such studies and finds the connections weak or merely implicative. “Reading by itself,” she argues, is unlikely to take empathy “beyond its predictable reach of family, community, and tribe” (Keen 2007: 108).
4. Stories do not generate empathy; they generate pseudo-empathy. Rousseau expressed the view eloquently in 1758:
In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence, from all of which we are quite content to be exempt. It could be said that our heart closes itself for fear of being touched at our expense. In the final accounting, when a man has gone to admire fine actions in stories and to cry for imaginary miseries, what more can be asked of him? Is he not satisfied with himself? Does he not applaud his fine soul? Has he not acquitted himself of all that he owes to virtue by the homage which has just rendered it? What more could one want of him? That he practice it himself? He has no role to play; he is no actor.
(1960: 25)
5. Stories actively interfere with real-world empathy. Invoking the zero-sum possibilities of empathy, Elaine Scarry warns:
There is always the danger that a fictional character’s suffering (whether physical or psychological) will divert our attention away from the living sister or uncle who can be helped by our compassion in a way that the fictional character cannot be; there is also the danger that because artists so successfully express suffering, they may themselves collectively come to be thought of as the most authentic class of sufferers, and thus may inadvertently appropriate concern away from others in radical need of assistance.
(1985: 11)
Again, these views do not easily coexist, though it is not uncommon for a single individual to hold them all.
Some would argue that it is a mistake to try to resolve the concerns in this second list. They would argue, indeed, that scholars who worry about literature and empathy in this way are asking their questions the wrong way around. Scholars who focus upon the way literary empathy transfers from the reader to the external world would make empathy a hostage to cause and consequence and thus miss the point of literary ethics. As James Baldwin puts it:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or ever had been alive … [A writer’s] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.
(Baldwin 1963: 89)
In other words, literary empathy does not point past the reader. It points to the reader.
Baldwin, J. (1963) “Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are,” Life Magazine, May 24.
Bloom, P. (2013) “The Baby in the Well: The Case against Empathy,” The New Yorker, May 20.
Hunt, L. (2007) Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York: Norton.
Keen, S. (2007) Empathy and the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kidd, D. and Castano, E. (2013) “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342(6156): 377–80.
Levi, P. (1989) The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal, New York: Vintage.
Moyn, S. (2010) The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2013) Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, R. (1993) “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, New York: Basic Books, pp. 112–34.
Rousseau, J. (1960) Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater, Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth, W. ([1802] 1986) “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., vol. 2, M. H. Abrams (ed.), New York: W. W. Norton & Co., pp. 155–68.
Wordsworth, W. and Coleridge, S. (2013) Lyrical Ballads, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further reading
Dawes, J. (2013) Evil Men, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An extended treatment of the ethics of storytelling.)
Ishay, M. (2004) The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era, Berkeley: University of California Press. (A continuist history of human rights.)
Keys, B. (2014) Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A discontinuist history of human rights.)
Lauren, P. G. (2011) The Evolution of International Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (A continuist history of human rights.)