Questioning Rights - Part I of III

Why Rights Might Be Our False Friend

The political, at least in the West, is now generally expressed in terms of ‘Rights’.  I am not going to undertake the customary exercise of working through the modern history of such rights in too much detail (although this will be the subject of Part II) because the problem I want to address derives from something deeper within humanity that is partly embedded in its evolutionary nature, It is a problem that arises from our emergence as a story-telling species, one that is never totally free of its condition in this respect yet also one capable of envisaging the possibility of being free of it. The stories we tell ourselves are both necessary and untrue. Our unfortunate fate is to be unravelled, even if only momentarily, when we start to think about the truth of these tales that we tell ourselves. Eventually, we solve the problem that we have created for ourselves by thinking away an old story and replacing it with a new and more useful story, one that is then both necessary and not true but more suitable to our new situation.

This is our fate – to develop working useful narratives that are untruths once we start thinking seriously about them yet truths in terms of what we require to function as soon as we are obliged to live with others. Our stories bind in both directions – all of us as individuals into socialisation and culture (often in defiance of at least some aspects of our own true nature) and as a totalising society and culture without which we cannot survive and function. This is why I have previously characterised us as a ‘half-hive’ species where our changing environment creates the conditions for the ‘hive’ aspect to be questioned from within and then re-formed to meet our needs in new situations. This questioning forms a new ‘half-hive’ that, in turn, will be challenged and challenged again to meet each new condition as it arises. This makes our species marvellously adaptive to the world, but it also ensures that its adaptation is as cruel and wasteful as the rest of nature. Each process of transformation results in victims, often at a mass level, whether of those who cannot adapt or are surplus to requirements or of those whose dissident stories are lost because of chance or necessity.

This looks like a dystopian curse – a species caught between the animal and the divine, the psycho-biological imperative and that will to think belonging to the creative individual. This has sometimes been cast in terms of yet another story, that of the split brain, but it is far better to think of it in terms of the dialectic between the individual mind that is unknowable except to itself (and even then not as much as it thinks, at least not without a level of effort that might become absurd in survival terms) and the systems and structures that are required to ensure personal survival. The absurdity, of course, is that both sides of the dialectic tend to get out of control under pressure. An extreme individual can unravel society and does not need to be a psychopath to do this. Society in its determination to survive as a system (we are speaking of the survival of those who are masters of the system and perhaps cannot afford to do too much thinking about their own hegemony) can destroy millions of individuals as bodies (holocausts, war and famine) or as souls (religion, ideology, law).

What role do Rights play in this? Are they liberatory in this constant adaptive game or are they just another temporary expression of the game? Have they now reached a point where they have become absurd because of their internal contradictions?

Each civilisation has its own game, its own ‘half-hive’. Much of human creativity comes from the hybridisation in real time of these civilisations, feeding the potential for change in every direction. The theory of a ‘clash of civilisations’, an over-simplification but another ‘useful story’, reflects the crisis humanity constantly faces as it trades with and challenges the variants within its own species. Variation is as important to us as it is to the survival of any other species.  Sometimes it becomes a matter of extermination, almost accidental from greed (as in the case of the Amerindians) and sometimes deliberate (the slaughters of Tamerlane or the Shoah), but the constant risk of cultural if not always physical extermination means that a civilisation can also become brutal in its own defence. This is perhaps how Russia and Iran see themselves.

The point at which the West defined itself as its very latest story adaptation was when it no longer had to relate to the Communist story as challenger and sought to expand outwards as the dominant global narrative. It is against this story of liberal triumphalism that a Resistance would inevitably construct itself. This is our world now – the hubris of one civilisation (the ‘West’) creating its own nemesis or at least new and serious challenges to itself because it could not respect difference and had to fill any vacuum that might emerge. One of our attributes as a species is that we abhor a vacuum. We cannot discuss all competing civilisations here. We should concern ourselves solely with the one we are stuck in – the West. Its attempt at hegemony has been unravelling before our eyes. This is a hegemony based on a theory of Rights that is now riven by so many internal contradictions that it is becoming almost inevitable that a major conceptual change is on the way (although it may unfold over centuries). This is what these three articles are exploring.

The West’s civilisation might be characterised as having been dominated by three successive groundings which rose and fell – gods, God and Rights. Before historical records there may have been other groundings but, as Professor Ronald Hutton has taught us repeatedly, storytelling backwards in order to invent such ideas as Mother Goddesses may be highly creative but is part of the ideology of the present and no true picture of the past. He wisely notes that the gap in knowing before history (written records also need to be treated with circumspection) means that many surmises are possible. These can become meat and drink for imaginative reconstructions that give pleasure and contemporary meaning but the evidential base for constructing past belief and ideology is simply not there except in very limited contexts. Anthropology that studies other peoples in a ‘similar state of development’ might help us surmise but we cannot know. We still need to have our surmises underpinned by what material facts are available from archaeology and the specificities of place as well as time. So, history leaves us with the easy-going polytheism of the ancients, the harsher monotheism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and … Rights.

I am going to have to jump forward rather than get trapped into too much Toynbee-like historical explanations of the transition from gods to God and from God to Rights. If I did that, we might also need a lot of explanation of the resistance and dissent that either foreshadows the shift from one grounding to another (as in Platonic philosophy in moving from gods to God or Whig atheism and rationalism in moving from God to Rights) or which acted as an alternative grounding that failed to compete (as in the Gnosticism of antiquity in the first case or Occult studies in the second). Indeed, the era of Rights is unusual in living uneasily with a counter-grounding that governs the material conditions of all advanced societies yet which carefully avoids getting involved in what a true grounding claims as its justification – moral choice. This counter-grounding is Science. However, Science in the West has become wholly detached from morality (as we see in the primacy of war in its development) even if individual scientists often become very troubled by this lack. Science is just about what the world is, a world to which humans must adjust where it cannot control (by means of ‘techne’). We should also be careful of over-simplification. The transitions from one grounding to another – short of civilisational extermination – are slow processes involving seizures of power at the top of any system that will take time to filter down and ensure ‘totality’.

The second article will look at how Rights emerged in the West as a substitute for religion. The third article will look at how order may be reconstructed in a post-Rights West.