Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn

Author:Samuel Moyn [Moyn, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL035010 Political Science / Human Rights
ISBN: 9780812292770
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2015-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

That a long train of critics such as Barraclough have indicted Ritter for continuing the nationalist traditions of German historiography is understandable. The evidence for that conclusion is there to see. Much more interesting to note, however, is that if Ritter struggled to fit the need for a morality now formulated as human rights together with the role of “power,” it was not simply out of nationalist apologia. His vision harmonized with the transnational crystallization of Christian realism that, in America and England no less than in Germany, insisted on the realities of power as a framework for moralism. Just as he esteemed Dulles, Ritter heaped praise on Reinhold Niebuhr and his fellow Christian “theologians of a new world order.” (Niebuhr, like Ritter, attended the WCC Amsterdam congress, but it is not clear whether they met.) Similarly, Ritter floridly welcomed the spectacular emergence of Cambridge don Herbert Butterfield as a prominent Christian theorist of international affairs whose emphasis, like Niebuhr’s, fell on the permanence of sin and the need to grant’s power inevitable role and not simply deplore it moralistically.76

Recent affiliates with Christian realism typically take the emphasis on a fallen humanity as warrant for belligerence in an evil world, rarely seeing its relevance—as Niebuhr certainly did—for their own potential conduct. Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, American president Barack Obama appealed to Christian realism to explain why he must still fight wars, making the hard choices in a world of enemies that the “human rights lobby” in his country and especially Western Europe finds abhorrent.77 Yet it is worth noting that few of the early Christian realists cared much for the percolation of human rights; Niebuhr, most notably, disdained them.

Almost uniquely for his time and since, and perhaps precisely because he knew his own country had indeed gone so wrong, Ritter strove to make Christian realism compatible with devotion to the new human rights. Instead of rejecting them as hollow optimism, Ritter simply insisted that like all idealistic moral aspirations, human rights were ambiguous in their implications because they depend on politics to be embedded in national life and world affairs. Besides constraining states, Ritter knew that appeals to such norms can consecrate dangerous “crusades for idealistic ends,” including ones specific states are empowered to conduct.78 Ritter’s history claimed human rights but without treating them as a refuge of moral safety that could ever remain free of the impurity of power.

In this sense, if in no other, Ritter’s priority as the first historian of human rights is deserved, no matter the suspect origins of his argument and the very ambiguous legacy of Christian realism. After all, so far historians of human rights as an emerging group have most frequently identified closely and empathetically with the moralization of world politics, offering the validation that deep roots seem to provide and favoring uplifting tales in which struggles are followed by success. Less examined, let alone explored, has been the relationship of the embrace of this set of norms to concrete results—including their multiple pathways and blatant failures.

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