The Age of Rights


Why is it that a world that bombs people for freedom's cause is full of people telling me not to smoke my cigar, believe in God, or talk about abortion?

The Western world, and by extension those parts of the globe amenable to western versions of modernity, are in the grip of a culture of rights. Like many complex processes, this culture is the product of more than one source, and has been associated with both positive and negative consequences.

The causes are multiple, beyond the eternal perversity of human societies. So, for instance, cheap oil, the rise of state welfare programmes, the philosophical schools of the late 1960s, the reemergence of classical liberalism and the growth of private global monopolies have all contributed. Likewise, the great wealth of a small few, and the dominance of the United States in popular culture, and of continental European philsophers in high culture, also partake of the essence of the 'rights agenda'.

The idea of rights is a mindset associated with the idea of individual property. Things are given meaning by the properties they are perceived to have, and these properties are inalienable. If they could be removed from a thing, they would be secondary and not central to it. Some have tried to bend it to Theism; I suspect that they are indulging in syllogism and that the two are incompatible.

There are patholigies to belief systems, and certain ideas lend themselves to self-repression more than others. St Augustine's trinitarianism, for instance, helped kill off the pre-381 Greek argument that a universal God would sponsor and welcome argument over the nature of his existence.

It helped, after centuries of sleep, to create an intolerance . Later on, Eastern then western Kings and States exploited the potential and kinetic energy of the idea of heresy in the service of a particular idea of catholicism. Similarly, the agenda of rights may now have reached an intolerant and highly destructive phase.

This outlook, when applied to human beings, gives rise to the idea that we are possessed of a 'right' to free speech, a 'right' to control of our own bodies, and so forth and so on, which is historically quite unusual. Most human societies have depended upon the idea of community as a state of reciprocity, leading to the idea of mutual duties. Some still do. Even early liberals thought in terms of contracts, though I think that they meant something different from today.

Like all ideologies, the modern idea of rights is also is both expansive and controlling. Expansive because the search for new rights, or the association of secondary qualities with fundamental rights has in some quarters given rise to lifestyle ghettoes the proponents of which impose upon others.

Controlling because, as in other spheres of western life, people are now punished legally, socially or economically by others for not holding opinions which correspond to fact but not to the ideology of rights whose expression is, ultimately, liberal consumerism.

Take the issue of abortion in England, for instance. Abortion is illegal. It is contrary to sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which gives rise to most of the criminal law relating to offences against the person in this country. It was always a defence, solidified in 1929, to a charge that an individual doctor was acting to prevent grave risk to a mother; indeed, in 1939, it was suggested that doctors had a duty to prevent such risk.

In 1967, a series of further defences to a charge of procuring an illegal abortion were raised. These were all predicated upon the discretion of doctors, not the rights of patients. If a doctor acted as a retailer and 'sold' on demand an abortion, the law was quite clear; they should be prosecuted and a jury should decide on their behaviour. Only one such prosecution has ever been launched and carried through.

However, in the forty one years since the 1967 Act, public debate has been focussed relentlessly on the 'right' to an abortion. There is not one. It is not written anywhere. It is a creature of construction as much as the equality of black people under segregation was a hardened legal construct.

A reversal has occurred as part of the general acceptance of this useful construct in the role of doctors. The discretion of doctors has been ignored, and the traditions of that profession overturned. Instead, any doctor who now refuses an abortion is questioned, as indeed is the right of any doctor to do so. People behave as though they have a right to an abortion, and they are told so at every opportunity.

That secular objections, or humanist objections, could exist, is airily dismissed. In law schools, perfectly valid arguments about the viability of foetuses are brushed away.

A separate agenda of what one of my correspondents on this blog calls 'anti-religionism' usually follows. Any objection is cast into a well reserved for 'religious fundamentalism' by people who have no grasp of the differences within or between Catholicism and Protestantism in the West, and secular doubters are redefined as 'crazy' when they do not seem to be.

Individuals who may have been prepared to be secular in the public sense are forced into intellectual units where people are defined by what they are not and by what they cannot agree with others upon. 'I have my Rights' trumps all other argument.

I could have used other examples. In the name of the rights of children, families are broken up, infants are stolen, and parents are sanctioned for disciplining their offspring; in the name of equality, schools are destroyed, except for those who can afford escape; in the name of non-discrimination, the destruction and crucifixion of the aspirations, in this country, of the black community upon a cross of crime and degradation is ignored.

We are as islands on dark seas. I have no rights, other than those of force, that are not guaranteed by the law and by the community within which viable law must exist. If secret courts are created, if rules of evidence are taken away, if we must believe impossible things about medical procedures, or global warming, or the market, if we cannot question, and if we must delude ourselves that rights trump, say, social equality or trust, your liberties flow away as surely as do mine.

If we see everything as a matter of consumption, and if an individual should not expect to be limited, or is filled with an idea of constant growth and adaptability as though they were always a child, you, reader, will never rise to maturity.

If this decadence proceeds, then all that stands between our civilisation and the people outside who have not embraced this culture--and for that matter some within--will be our technology of killing, our money, and cheap energy. And how much of those did Georgia have two weeks ago? What would be the consequence of the use of our more potent nuclear force?

I can't shake off the idea that the Age of Rights has led us, from the mountaintops and promised land of civil rights, to the wrong side of the gates that Honorious forgot about whilst bothering his chickens and which have no Horatius to defend them anymore. But these might be summer fantasies in the dying weeks of August, and pompous ones too. You can think, though.

If you have read this far, you can question, you can refuse to take a line from people, you can ask what is worth preserving and what is wrong. The world of rights, and consumption, and retail around you is pleasant, and hectic, and you are probably enmeshed in it by debts and monied cords, but you can stop and look up and you don't have to say 'I believe'. You don't have to extend rules that make shopping for food pleasant to human beings and to communities and states and to the conduct of our moral lives.

You don't have to have religious faith, though that is a part of my being and I would recommend it to you. All you have to do is to say 'what can I prove and what is true and what is too certain and what is a lie?'. I think that all of these questions will lead you to the question of what the best way to be truly happy is.

I think that that is found in working out what is true and what can be relied upon. I don't think that means that you will end up wanting to regulate the world, or that you will be uncomfortable at the inconsistencies of the good life and of others. trust in your reason and in the radical truth of love.

Ask yourself-- who benefits from the lies and untruths that people are increasingly pressured to believe. A climate of fear, narcissism, paranoia and overloaded expectations of science-- a climate of groupthink and of the bilious herd, of superficial gratification and fundamental regulation--tell me, cui bono?