More On The Genesis Of Rights
Dean
Once in a while a thread here surprises me, generating a lot of discussion when I expected only a little. Such was our discussion last week on the concept of "natural rights." My own take: the 20th century has proven, quite definitively, that the best protection by far of human rights is constitutional republicanism married to liberal democracy. Period.
The notion that you need to inject a concept of a higher power, or elaborate philosophical systems, in order to protect rights is simply wrong--indeed, such a notion has proven itself to be as likely to threaten rights as protect them. It seems apparent to me that you need only consensual government combined with a strong Constitutional order to ensure the best possible protection of individual rights. History has proven it time and again over the last century.
What surprised me about that discussion was that most of the other bloggers who linked the discussion agreed with me, while most of the commenters here on Dean's World disagreed with me. I don't know if there's any significance to that, but it's interesting.
Anyway, you'll find more discussion on this concept of natural rights here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- More On The Genesis Of Rights
- The Genesis of Rights
- Are You A Liberal? (Rerun)
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law', because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
" The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
I think politics today is not so much polarized between Conservative and Liberal as between Jeffersonian thinkers and Prohibitionist reactionaries. The reactionary Prohibitionists infest both Left and Right political spectrums and fight like hell between themselves, calling each other "conservative" and "liberal" as if they were hurling profanities at the other.
In this somewhat hideous and vaingloriouly trashy squabble between the Republican and Democrat elites, the wisdom of the founders has largely been drowned out by the political factoids and hyperbole that spew from the MSM and the Dempublican-Republicrat hegemony.
The Jeffersonian spirt of the American People remains very strong. The Prohibitionists have strangled us with laws and regulations from the left and right, to the point our nation in drowning in duplicity; to the point the average American cannot go through a normal day without violating some law these reckless assholes have put on the books. We need to revitalize the Jeffersonian spirit of liberty. I have come to believe the Blogs may well become the Boston Tea Party of a modern Jeffersonian revolution.
Also, why constitutional republicanism?
Constitutional monarchy didn't do too badly during the 20th century.
What's your example of a country which has protected rights, over the last century, which has done so without the one or the other?
Chris, in reading Dean's post, it was precisely that thought which prompted my post.
It never fails to surprise me how we have been brainwashed by academia into not seeing all the references to God in our history, legal tradition, and jurisprudence. Over, and over, and over again, major decisions have been justified precisely by a reliance on religious authority when all else has failed us. As I pointed out in my post, it was Christianity that gave rise to abolition movement - without that, we'd still have slavery. The moral authority for upholding the rights of black men and women came -- not from MEN, but from the Bible.
I don't have to go to church to recognize this. I don't even have to be Christian - David Horowitz is a Jew and he freely owns up to it. I just have to be honest.
As I also pointed out, as soon as the ink dried on the Bill of Rights, it ceased to matter whether the Founders viewed our rights as God-given in one sense. The C is the primary source of law in the land - if we are to remain a Republic, whether the original ideas came from God or Hobbits, we must uphold the law or change it under the rules set forth for doing so, or we make a mockery of orderly government.
But in a more cynical, political sense it does matter, when one considers that that phrase "endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights" effectively placed them beyond dispute for almost 200 years, until recently when a full-out assault on religion threatens to remove that as a possible defense.
And with a nutty court that is willing to call 47% a national consensus and values the opinions of the EU over those of the several states, I guess I think the Bill of Rights can use all the help it can get :)
And no one - NO ONE - should be taking a topic of discussion completely off the table in America.
this should have read -
whether the our natural rights came from God or Hobbits
Don't multi-task.
You're also guilty of a false dichotomy here, Dean. That I do not believe rights are merely social conventions does not make me a believer in "natural rights" in any sense. Nor do I deny that rights must be recognized by others in order to be real.
I merely point out the amazing amount of overlap in moral codes over the millenia, and argue that there's something there besides mere chance.
(I'd probably go farther and assert that this something comes from God, but that's a separate subject, and I certainly don't think it wrong to posit other sources for the "something".)
If you want a dissenting trackback, I'll see what I can do later. I think Cassandra, at least, deserves more serious scrutiny.
Rxcellent. Thank you!
Dean wrote:
"What surprised me about that discussion was that most of the other bloggers who linked the discussion agreed with me, while most of the commenters here on Dean's World disagreed with me. I don't know if there's any significance to that, but it's interesting."
The reason for that is Dean's noble character (like the Queen's), which draws to this blog men and women of like noble character, freedom-loving, patriotic, moral, and mostly devoutly religious.
A couple of those other blogs you linked to, by contrast, were infested with Communists, Godless "scientistic" collectivists, "logical positivists", "de-constructionists", nihilists, and other sophists, subversives, and just plain thugs.
All this got me to thinking again of the education I received back in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the NEA got its Communistic clutches on our schools. Even before I had ever heard of "liberalism" vs. "conservatism" or other such ideological conflicts and spectra, we were taught what can only be called just basic bedrock Americanism. Patriotism, love of Flag and Country, support for our Constitution, admiration for our Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and other national heroes. Later, we were taught something about the evils of Communism as well as the horrors of Nazism. No sectarian religion was taught, but there was also no ban on the mention of God, the celebration of Christmas and other holidays, etc.. Such things were never questioned. Nobody had ever heard of Political Correctness.
My Dad was an agnostic and a New Deal liberal, but he was also a veteran of World War II, and, sometime in the early 1960s, he gave us "The Liberty Collection", a collection of various historic American documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Monroe Doctrine, the Gettysburg Address, and "The Star-Spangled Banner", put out by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. On the back of the packet it had this:
"The American Way of Life
"Political and Economic Rights Which Protect the Dignity and Freedom of the Individual:
"Right to Worship God in One's Own Way
"Right to Free Speech and Press
"Right to Peaceably Assemble
"Right to Petition for Redress of Grievances
"Right to Privacy in Our Homes
"Right of Habeas Corpus -- No Excessive Bail
"Right to Trial by Jury -- Innocent Until Proved Guilty
"Right to Move About Freely at Home and Abroad
"Right to Own Private Property
"Right to Free Elections and Personal Secret Ballot
"Right to Work in Callings and Localities of Our Choice
"Right to Bargain with Our Employers and Employees
"Right to Go into Business, Compete, Make a Profit
"Right to Bargain for Goods and Services in a Free Market
"Right to the Service of Government as a Protector and Referee
"Right to Freedom from Arbitrary Government Regulation and Control
"Constitutional Government Designed to Serve the People
"Fundamental Belief in God
"To personally understand and maintain The American Way of Life, to honor it by his own exemplary conduct, and to pass it intact to succeeding generations is the responsibility of every true American."
"1 -- Does the system exist for the individual man or does the individual man exist for the system?
"2 -- Is the social order more important than the people it embraces, or is it the other way around?
"3 -- Does John Doe have personal individual rights which the system is bound to respect and if so, can he force the system to protect them, or is John Doe an indistinguishable part of a 'mass,' 'class,' or 'group' of the total Society?
"Communism, along with Fascism, Nazism, Socialism, and every form of Statism, answers:
"1 -- Man exists fo the system.
"2 -- The social order is all important.
"3 -- The individual John Doe has no rights that the system is bound to respect.
"Thus, in Communism, as in despotism generally, the individual as a person is completely lost in the government. His very life's blood is transfused into the government body for the exclusive use and purpose of that body. Communism frankly admits that it is a completely materialistic conception. It insists that man is merely matter, oil in the engines or cogs on the wheels. The entity is the machine and the machine is the dictatorship."
-Clarence E. Manion, The Key to Peace: A Formula for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism (1950)
So, no follow-up post for the foreseeable future. Those holding their breath in anticipation will have to be disappointed, I'm afraid. :-)