Questioning Rights - Part II of III

Rights as Substitute for Religion

Our first article reviewed the nature of Rights within the context of what it is to be human. We continue with a review of how Rights developed out of religion and never lost the social character of religion in the process.

Monotheism effectively crushed the ideology of gods but not those human impulses for the supernatural which were to re-emerge in the Catholic world as the worship of saints and new superstitions. Science only replaced God as grounding for the nature of the world (as opposed to its meaning) in a succession of moves. The most decisive break was that of Darwin. He unravelled the moral meaning of intelligent design scientifically but without replacing it with something else that might be a viable alternative (this is the gap which Rights tries to fill). We too easily forget that Nietzsche was not screaming with joy at the death of God. He accepted new ‘facts’ from science and biblical criticism, drawing attention to the risk of Nihil to us given our apparent need for meaning (the narrative aspect of being human outlined in Part I). His solution was to strip away the God-thing completely and ‘transvaluate values’ by returning to the pagan world in which he had been steeped as a philologist. This conservative looking-back was an aesthetic stance but ultimately futile.

The solution of the ‘system’ itself (especially after what happened when the logic of Social Darwinism combined with a loopy over-imaginative reconstruction of an unknowable past had resulted in the wild destructive mania of National Socialism) was to rely on a different fiction that had been centuries in development – the universalising of Rights in a Constantine moment in which two rising and two falling powers and the Chinese nationalist ghost at the feast created the ideal of the United Nations. The liberal impulse behind this still faced (in the late 1940s) a separate challenge from another pseudo-scientific and fundamentally Idealist (Hegelian) alternative in Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. This was prepared initially to ‘go with the flow’ of a new world order and even embraced it in its most limited form.

This potential new ‘grounding’ collapsed on Cold War tensions and then lost its footing because of the global imbalance created when the Soviet Union also collapsed on its own internal contradictions. This imbalance was reflected in an interpretation of Rights expanded as a tool or weapon in the hands of the apparent victor in the Cold War. The Hegelian alternative still survives but only at the margins or (as in China) where there has been a solution to contradictions through engagement with traditional civilisation. Traditionalism is another dissenting tradition. Yet Rights Theory, like the Church, is always universal that prospers ultimately only at the barrel of a gun or because of superior access to credit or organisation. Like religion, Rights need to work for Power in some way just as Rights ideology restrains Power. There are always potential alternatives lurking in its shadow or at their boundaries for both sides in the game - those who rule and those who define the ‘moral’ conditions of rule.

So, if Rights were apparently the grounding that had apparently been the last man standing at the beginning of the century, why is the ideology in trouble now? Evidently, one reason is that its ‘imperialism’ (the urge to impose its values as absolute on the wider world, backed by capital and military hardware) created sufficient dissent for those dissenters to mount a viable movement of resistance to it. This dissent has learned under pressure to organise itself increasingly effectively through trial and error. From being the last game in town where the globe’s upper middle class elites were left wondering how to accommodate to its values and survive in place (much like doomed Roman client kingdoms or the princes of the British Raj) and with only a few sanctioned stand-outs in depressed corners of the world (North Korea or Cuba, say), the West has been fighting what started as a series of initially offensive wars (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria) that have now become defensive (Counter-Terrorism, Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Iran). Many of its core liberal values have had to be openly suspended or even abandoned entirely in the process.

Defensive localised ‘warm war’ is not only against new blocs of rising or reviving powers who have now remembered their simmering resentments of past less benign imperialisms but internally against increasing resentment within domestic populations of the blow-back arising from the very attempt to ‘conquer the world’ – complicity in assaults on the very human rights claimed to be the grounding of the West, mass economic and refugee migration, high levels of debt and incoming austerity, job losses from competition from within the globalised system of international capital, denigration of traditional culture, anomie, the list goes on. There is none of the heroic engagement of past imperial adventures precisely because the latest iteration of them is not overt and centred on territorial conquest but is vague, costly and inconclusive. It is too obviously profitable to the few rather than the many.

This much is obvious but what is less obvious is that Rights ideology is probably on the road to eventual death as ‘grounding’ for much the same reason as the gods and God died as ‘grounding’ even if the former have re-emerged imaginatively in neo-paganism and faith remains strong even as a fragmented menu of alternative meanings. Multiple reconstructions of a past unity of thought are, in fact, signs that an original shared ideology has fully broken down. As we shall see in Part III, a fragmentation in the ideology of Rights has been well under way since the 1970s.

Of course, many human beings are hard-wired to need the God-thing in some form and this is just who they are. Others simply cannot see the existence of such things. It may be a simple matter of hard-wiring in the brain. The former will always find ways to bring the supernatural or the ideal back into their lives (which is their privilege) whether as reality or a sehnsucht for a meaning they may even know is not there (if they bother to think deeply about it). In other words, the claim to Rights (as the most recent impulse towards the moral ideal) is not going to go away (at least in a free society) any more than God or gods and nature worship. Their absurdity protects them because meaning itself is absurd yet necessary to the vast bulk of humanity.

However, what is at threat is the idea that the good society is sufficiently or exclusively maintained by Rights in a world where so many claims about Rights are contradictory and lack any fundamental basis beyond ‘half-hive’ and indvidual belief. Gods, God and Rights (but not Science, at least until you get to the more extreme hypotheses) are always ultimately matters of belief, shared illusions that hide many differences of interpretation. All of these ways of seeing in their prime tend to brow-beat anyone whose ‘thinking’ leads them to see through the illusion and who want to start facing the issues raised by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century or who never shared the illusion in the first place. Once a way of seeing starts to lose its ability to brow-beat its rivals, then it starts to fragment. The liberal loathing of an unregulated social media is the loathing of a hegemonic ideology for the emergence of means of resistance to the cultural and moral brow-beating essential to that hegemony.

We certainly do not have to agree with Nietzsche’s solution to understand that any serious thought about gods, God and Rights will end up eliminating them as anything more than unreliable belief systems that became useful for social order or private meaning. Use value may, of course, be retained long past belief. The belief dissipates but the structures hold. However, once fully unravelled as lacking in coherence or exposed as things misused for the sake of power or control, we either need to find something in Existence itself to re-order the social (our ‘half-hive’) or invent something else. Of course, the easiest route out of this is not to think at all. This works for most people most of the time. It may be quite reasonable – from a purely social point of view – to do what has worked to date in the West, marginalise intellectual dissent, punish it if it goes over a certain line and, finally, simply assert the grounding ideology to be useful rather than true. There are schools of radical conservative thought who propose just this. They embrace the Platonic ‘noble lie’ as best fitted for the crooked timber of humanity.

But let us assume that our culture prizes ‘thinking’ for the moment. This may be a dubious proposition but let us run with it. The ‘system’ will still want to ‘manage’ thought through patronage and pressure in order to maintain a system that has worked well for its elite and will try to do so for as long as possible. It will carefully plaster over the cracks in the wall even as the foundations crumble. The problem with ‘thinking’ in relation to social order takes place only when the contradictions in an ideology become so destructive that something new is required or else chaos will ensue. We may have already reached that point.

If we go back to our historical overview, Constantine ‘found’ Catholic Christianity amongst a range of potential competitors because the chaos of belief and loss of faith in the gods was a material threat to the viability of a universal empire. Catholicism delivered a ready-made inclusive universalist structure that could bind the empire (in theory) across space and time. A universal civilisational religion with God mirroring Emperor enabled a process of linking a belief system safely to patronage and administration (above all, the episcopal system). This meant the initially slow death of rival pagan, monotheistic and mystery belief systems, creating a boundary with other civilisations, a negotiating position with rising barbarian kings and allowing a final phase of direct repression of dissent. The gods died except as literary figments in classical literature. The Church expanded and survived the Empire.

The collapse of the universal Church in the later Middle Ages into corruption (perhaps we can see a mirror in the collapse of Sovietism into corruption or the clearly corrupt relations between politics and business in the modern twenty-first century West) was precursor to revolts that might be just intellectual (Erasmus) but would become, following lesser ‘national’ movements like the Lollards and Hussites, political and world-historical (Lutheranism and Calvinism). They could even become extreme as in Anabaptism. The trend was always towards fragmentation much as paganism was always fragmented outside the Cult of the Emperor. The collapse of the universal in Europe led to an era of bloody wars and, of course, witch hunts, not dissimilar to the European Civil War of 1914-1945 (which lasted even longer in Soviet occupied territories and if we include the often bloody business of de-colonisation)

A solution to the Catholic crisis of fragmentation emerged only after complete exhaustion in settlements like the Peace of Westphalia (which finally locked in the cuius regio, eius religio of the Peace of Augsburg) and the Glorious Revolution in the UK. Intellectually, rationalism whether Cartesian or that of Leibniz and Spinoza then led inexorably to opportunities for atheistic expression, political dissent, biblical criticism and the primacy of science (which would give the death blow to the ‘God grounding’ in Darwin’s work). As paganism could not provide order so neither could God at this point. Nietzsche’s thought must thus be regarded as merely a symptom of a much wider intellectual pandemic.

Given that we are still working through the consequences of the later mid-twentieth century crisis (the roots of crisis in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan) we have still not found a secure universal order. A collapse into fragmentation has happened not over centuries but decades. The post-Soviet Rights-based expansion of the West may be seen as one final and flawed attempt to create a new universal order in a temporary vacuum of global power but one as doomed as that of the late Roman Empire. Rights had perhaps found its Constantine in Washington but our democratic Constantine then failed to place itself under the moral authority of a ‘Church of Rights’, in this case the United Nations, that could perhaps survive even the collapse of its initial sponsors. As we write, the most extreme outlier of the Western system (Israel) is not only flouting many of the basic ‘moral’ principles of Rights Theory but making the proto-Pope of universal human rights (a weak UN Secretary-General) persona non grata and firing on UN peacekeepers with the effective sanction of its Emperor (Washington). If that is not a sign of ideological fragmentation I am not sure what else would be.

The third article will look at how order may be reconstructed in a post-Rights West.