Questioning Rights - Party III of III

Can order be reconstructed in a post-Rights West?

Our first two articles reviewed the nature of Rights within the context of what it is to be human and then how Rights developed out of religion and never lost the social character of religion in the process. Finally, we turn to the situation ‘post-Rights’.

So how are we to construct order again if it is true that order is collapsing? It may be that order is not collapsing entirely but fragmenting in a schismatic way, analogous to the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds as Roman imperialism weakened in the West and became the seeds of Byzantium in the East. In our time, this would be represented by a fragmenting West on the one hand unable to hold together its original hegemony and the rise of the BRICS. It is too early to tell whether this is in fact the case but the BRICS Summit this week indicated clearly that Washington had failed to isolate Moscow or intimidate Beijing and Tehran or to control and define the global order on the lines it had expected at the start of 2022. We are now seeing the seeds of new financial and trading mechanisms emerge that could ultimately undermine the economic leadership that the West has maintained since at least the eighteenth century. If so, ‘Rights’ may survive but in very different forms - fragmented or limited but more sharply defined - in the two successor civilisational networks.

As to the West, in a society where technology (we are back to Science) was a disruptor that had systematically created successive forms of globalisation (including enforced imperialism), industrial revolution, new powers for previously impotent populations, with dynastic traditional societies crumbling only rather late in the day, the effect of the latest round of environmental and digital technologies is unknown.  We have traced how Rights has had a long history from that point when it derived from God to that point where it displaced God. It created new gods in a multiple of often petty and invented nationalisms as well as (in its latest phase) trans-national identity politics. Rights had originally emerged as a rational quasi-scientific response to the need to maintain elite order and property in North-Western Europe, thence it went to the Americas where it was transformed into justification for colonial revolt (the seeds of the current BRICS ‘schism’). It became the basis, laundered through Marxism, for the national liberation struggles that are now condemned as ‘terrorism’ by whichever empire is being threatened by them. After the American colonial revolts, Rights returned to France where they justified bloody social revolution.

Through all these and other manoeuvres a new ‘grounding’ for the West centred on the Anglo-Saxon and, less surely, European worlds emerged. Its link to the God-thing was very much closer than we might expect from some of its secularist radical rhetoric. Although the US Constitution does not mention God, the Declaration of Independence talks of Divine Providence with three other references to God in some form within it. The American Civil War saw the introduction of ‘In God We Trust’ on the dollar bill. Infamously Robespierre displaced the Christian God with the Cult of the Supreme Being. In other words, just as Christianity needed Saints to displace gods so Rights ideology started its life requiring something that linked these new rights to the supernatural. Even today US politics retains a strong religious inflection.

Here is where it gets interesting. If Rights were initially embedded in an implicit theory that they derived from the supernatural, what happens to them when the supernatural is no longer relevant? In other words, Science (notably but far from exclusively Darwinism) undercuts much of the supernatural. The supernatural then starts spreading itself more thinly through society as superstitions (hauntings, occult belief, rational religion, spiritualism at one point). Elites lose interest in it or return to it only cynically (as Kamala Harris clearly did this week) to control the ‘democratic’ electoral process for a matter of mere weeks until power can be secured. If it is so that Science undercuts this supernatural origin story, then from whence does a Right now derive? This is a most inconvenient question to ask. The answer has to be that without a God or divine purpose on the one side or a scientific and materialist explanation or some explanation derived from an essentialist view of the human condition, a Right has no basis other than its utility to someone somewhere.

Now, this is where I might part company with some readers. There may be general agreement that Science (at this point in history) cannot demonstrate the reality of a Right. However, those who still believe in God might reasonably derive Rights from that belief (although more likely along Deist lines) but anyone else is going to have to demonstrate that Rights and being human are essentially connected or agree that this belief in Rights is no more than a belief. Even a humanistic approach is hard to detach from ‘belief’ in some essentialist view of what it is to be human that is extremely hard to justify analytically. And if this is so, this obliges the believer to ‘totalise’ human beings either into a fixed human nature (which is certainly hard to justify now) or to abandon any dissenting humans (in regard to their disbelief in Rights) to inhumanity, redefining what it is to be human as simply anyone who believes in Rights or, more particularly, the Rights that the believer believes in.

The partial de-humanisation of Palestinian Arabs derives in part from the totalisation of the ‘Right’ of Israel to exist. Game over for any child who gets in the way of a ‘righteous’ (the word-link ceases to be accidental) missile. This argument from ‘totality’ (essentially totalitarian in implication) is not only circular but has the odd effect of someone who believes in Rights denying Rights to anyone who does not believe in Rights or at least their definition of Rights. This dehumanisation of the dissenter is very similar to processes that went on in Catholic, Soviet and Nazi regimes and, if honestly believed, must be regarded as an example of ‘liberal (or Western) totalitarianism’.

And then there are the obfuscations and contradictions. Without going into more detail, we might see the Right to Life as simply cover for invoking God amongst many of its adherents because the current secular hegemony of Rights ideology demands that God be cloaked in order to permit a claim to be effective. It would be more honest simply to say ‘I believe in God and God tells me (by revelation in a text or some other means) that killing foetuses is a fundamental moral wrong’. The language of rights is then irrelevant. The Right to Choose too looks like a polemical over-simplification of a complex social problem whose purpose is feminist mobilisation by assuming that individual choice is all that there is to being human.

The Right of Israel to Exist and the Palestinian Right of Return are also contradictory as are most claimed Rights related to territorial or economic competition. The Russians are castigated for crossing a border arbitraily invented less than a century previously because of the invention of rights fixed in cement by a dominant West seventy years before and then reply that they do so because of their own right to existential defence and as defender of the rights of minority groups oppressed after what they see as an unconstitutional coup. Their opponents cite a democratic claim (which may or may not be dubious) and refer back to repressed rights under the Soviet Empire of people who had allied to national socialists and some of whom had removed the right to life of Poles and Jews and, in turn, can cite their losses as the Soviet regime in economic desperation plundered their farms and caused their ancestors to die. And so on with Right piled against Right like my God against yours. The West will cite human rights in one place and (as in Palestine) totally ignore them in another. Competing Rights are ordered as priorities according to the material interest of whoever is doing the ordering.

Mounting numbers of special interest groups whether huge coalitions like LGBTQ+ or new ones like the Neuro-Diverse or more curious ones like Furries take an impulse, a desire or an attribute and then create a total social identity held together by some Right. The members of these groups have ceased to be rounded and complex humans and become objects defined by a part - no wonder identity politics goes hand in hand with an almost clinically insane philosophical abandonment of the concept of the Self in society. Instead of simply recognising that a Right is just a thwarted desire turned into a social demand and has no validity beyond that desire and that demand, there is an attempt to sacralise desire and demand by appeal to an abstract conception whose lineage can ultimately be traced back to the supernatural. The activist who relies on Rights is deploying a useful tool or weapon in campaigning (as, in fact, a ‘noble lie’) but not expressing a truth. They are brutally masking themselves in a form of social objectification where they become only the desire or their demand for political purposes and not a ‘moral person’ weighing up the complexities of existing in the world as a rounded personality.

A critical stance towards Rights claims may now be more necessary than ever on two separate grounds. First to challenge the use of Rights as cover for societal, sectional or individual advantage. In other words, we should stop ‘not thinking’ and ask ourselves each time someone claims a Right what the actual underlying ethical basis for their claim is and whether we agree or not with that claim on that ethical basis. Indeed, we should be thinking existentially exactly about what our ethical grounding is to be and that includes a critical self-acceptance of the supernatural if that is what we are. In this sense, a Catholic, Humanist, Islamic or even Marxist ethical base may be more solid if disputable than a liberal Rights-based one because it has the grounding in the Self required to act effectively and honestly in the world. The arbitrary ‘Right’ emerges because the supernatural is no longer viable societally and the individual components of the social have been fragmented into parts that emotionally displace the integrated Self. Nations have done the same replacing their own sense of organic wholeness with abstract theory drawn from intellectuals who have confused education with intelligence. Societies seem to die in direct proportion to the influence of their ‘think tanks’.

The second, which is a corollary of the first, is to challenge the use of a Right to justify ethically wrong acts. If we need gods, God or Rights to know what is right or wrong without critically reviewing the underlying ethic behind the choices we make, we may be fully socialised but we may not be thinking. If we are not thinking we are going to be prey to the manipulative use of gods, God and Rights in order to make us complicit in bad acts. Liberating slaves and women then transforms into complicity in crusades and institutionalised child abuse. Liberating nations becomes complicity in enforced conformity on minorities within nations and the conscription of the young to die for intellectualised liberal nationalist elites.

For example, we need to take personal responsibility for the decisions around abortion and not hide behind a Right. We need to ask the price of existential survival of a nation built on an abstract ideal if it involves over 40,000 civilian dead (just as we need to ask the same questions of civilian hostage-taking and forced conscription). We need to ask why someone who is attracted to the same sex or dresses up harmlessly to make love as a wolf has to claim it as a Right instead of as a desire to be accepted of society simply as a free individual who harms no other. There is something to be said for the libertarian neo-pagan ‘Do what thou wilt an harm no other’ as a baseline from which complexity creates caveats and social protections.

Accepting that the very idea of ethics itself is problematic because it too can be criticised on the grounds outlined above (it requires the supernatural, unjustified essentialism about the human condition or a scientific basis that simply is not there) nevertheless what I am proposing is that social order and individual development and their dialectic require the effective initial removal of all externally-derived essentialist ‘groundings’ since we cannot find a reliable philosophical ground for any particular essential position. We may return to something essential to fill the vacuum but from strength rather than from habit. We should challenge evil (which I may try to demonstrate actually exists in a later posting) by comprehending it from within ourselves and choosing to fight it or at least not be complicit in it and speak out against it. Complicity in providing arms to a regime that targets places where children live, refusing to consider the retrial of someone when the evidence mounts of injustice, banging up people who are vulnerable for a few idiot words online or transferring scarce funds from your own poor and weak to maintain a war between distant oligarchs may all be seen as signs of inherent evil arising out of weakness.

All necessarily compete with all in a ‘free society’. The triumph of one such position requires some ‘totalitarian’ repression of the others. We should require instead an honest assessment at a deeper level of the workings of human desire and resilience in the context of the necessity for a society that must a) be functional (especially in crises) and b) meet desires and survival requirements on terms that are c) respectful of the desires and survival requirements of others and which d) create the conditions that can challenge self-destructive behaviours in both society and the individual.

In other words, the revolution required is in ‘being’ for a world which is going to be more rather than less challenging in the future, with different possible social structures and very different individuals needing to co-exist in the context of the coming artificial intelligence cognitive revolution and with clear signs of mounting elite ineptitude in meeting complex challenges. That is, that a new grounding needs to sweep away the ‘hard’ version of Rights as a dangerous tool in the hands of the inept and replace it with a more fundamental ethic based on a social order that respects persons here and elsewhere. Sending young men to die for an idea, corralling people with an attribute into a defensive identity and failing to accept the consequences of the desires and demands given cover by Rights ideology should no longer be acceptable. Rights still have a place as a short-hand argument for change and as the language of socially accepted protection of the oppressed and vulnerable and the maintenance of social cohesion and order but Rights as ideology, especially in the hands of well armed sociopathic maniacs of limited intellectual imagination and no moral compass, are, in short, an absurd and increasingly dangerous and socially distorting distraction.