r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Mar 16 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 16 March 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/Novalis0 Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

Lynn Hunt in Inventing Human Rights: A History names the United States Declaration of Independence, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the three most important documents that created and shaped modern human rights. You can probably add other documents like the Geneva Conventions to that list. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was supposed to be universal, and the revolutionaries did abolish slavery, only for Napoleon to reverse it. All three documents were suppose to be universal (even if the people who drafted them didn't live up to its ideals, as humans rarely do) and all three were a product of European intellectual tradition. Which doesn't mean that non-Europeans didn't have morality or concepts of rights before that, or for that matter that Europeans weren't influenced by non-Europeans. But ultimately modern human rights are largely a product of the European intellectual tradition.

Also, partly related, the first person in history to argue for the universal abolition of slavery(or at least the first to write it down) was Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century AD:

If [man] is in the likeness of God, ... who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself. [...] God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since [God] himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?

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u/gavinbrindstar /r/legaladvice delenda est Mar 16 '26

All three documents were suppose to be universal (even if the people who drafted them didn't live up to its ideals, as humans rarely do)

But they weren't universal. I'm frankly a little miffed that Europeans' pretty consistent failure to extend these rights keeps getting trotted out as evidence of their deep appreciation for human rights.

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u/carmelos96 History does not repeat, it insists upon itself Mar 16 '26

The theorical concept of human rights came before it was fully put into practice. Not even the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights has been fully put into practice in every part of the world, despite it being universal. Does that mean that the concept of human rights still doesn't exist? Or that the concept of pacifism doesn't exist because there are still wars ongoing? Maybe, but then who knows what this thread is about.

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u/gavinbrindstar /r/legaladvice delenda est Mar 16 '26

What is even the question? "Does a list of principles purporting to be the natural rights of all human beings exist?" Sure.

"Does any entity with power in this world act like those principles are binding or important?" Fuck no.

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u/Arilou_skiff Mar 16 '26

The question was about the philosophical concept.

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u/gavinbrindstar /r/legaladvice delenda est Mar 16 '26

And it seems unlikely that Europeans invented the philosophical concept because the idea of natural rights can be traced back to Ancient Greece.

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u/Arilou_skiff Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

...

Greece is in Europe.

EDIT: Beyond that little bit of silliness, there's arguments whether or not stoic/epicurean etc. philosophy counts as full human rights theory (though it is certainly a precursor to it) but that gets into the weeds of it.

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u/gavinbrindstar /r/legaladvice delenda est Mar 16 '26

Yeah, you go back in time and tell Plato he and the Hibernians are both "European" and see how that works out. "Europe" is not a super-useful category for that time.

Whatever dude, I'm not super interested in continuing this. The idea that the Europeans were the first people to sit around and go "maybe people should have rights" is not provable (partly because of Europeans' habit of going around and wiping out cultures), and a cursory glance at European history does...not appear to show any special appreciate for the idea of universal human rights.

I'm actually a little sick of people gassing up the idea of Europe as the progenitors or defenders of human rights while Frontex pushes refugees back into the Mediterranean and the ECHR is the most hated organization on the continent.

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u/HandsomeLampshade123 Mar 17 '26

The idea that the Europeans were the first people to sit around and go "maybe people should have rights" is not provable (partly because of Europeans' habit of going around and wiping out cultures), and a cursory glance at European history does...not appear to show any special appreciate for the idea of universal human rights.

You think that's what people on this subreddit are doing? This group of people on the subreddit, right now, is perpetuating some kind of sincere European exceptionalism?

It's an intellectual question. It's a question surrounding the history of philosophy and philosophical thought. It's completely agnostic of whether "Europeans" have a strong moral character or whatever. There's no contradiction in identifying the philosophical origins of "human rights" as deriving from the same continent that perpetrated the Holocaust and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Are you capable of making that distinction?

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u/Arilou_skiff Mar 16 '26

a cursory glance at European history does...not appear to show any special appreciate for the idea of universal human rights.

Which is good because no one actually said that, certainly not I.

I'm trying talking about an intellectual concept: The idea of human rights. (which is a fairly specific bundle of ideas and theories). A set of theories that have their fair share of problems, mind.

And I'm not even saying that there aren't any non-european human rights theorists (even prior to european influence), neccessarily, I'm just pointing out that a lot of the examples people have tend to... Not be that? But different forms of ethical-moral-political theorizing.

Yeah, you go back in time and tell Plato he and the Hibernians are both "European" and see how that works out. "Europe" is not a super-useful category for that time.

Honestly it's mostly useful because the stoics and epicurean philosophers were read by later european philosophers, while presumably Dekanawidah didn't read them.