The Political Dead End of "Rights and Freedoms" pt. 1
The Political Dead End of "Rights and Freedoms" pt. 1
The political right and conservatives in general have a language problem. All of the ideas to which we cling most tightly and trumpet most loudly are little more than the precursors of progressivism.
The title of this piece makes a bold claim. It was a conclusion long in coming for me. I was a long time celebrant of “The American Experiment.” The notion that you could found a society on a set of ideas and that this rational approach would allow this same society to sidestep or transcend many of the petty disputes surrounding ethnicity or religion that waylaid so many other places was, and is an inspiring thought. I clung to the idea that the American Founding Fathers had in mind a nation that successfully married a Christian society to Enlightenment principles. I long kept a copy of the two volume “Debate on the Constitution” on my desk next to my Bible. I was one of “those.”
I don’t know when the change began, but it did start a while ago and has continued for a number of years now. Recently, I quietly relegated “Debate on the Constitution” to the general stacks of my office library. The Bible remains. I have long recognized, but chose to ignore, the problems of the Enlightenment ideology which underpins The Founding. Recent works such a Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” and Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” were instrumental in this transition. The problem is, though, that even if one is able to reject the ideas of the Enlightenment, our culture is soaked in its language. We marinate in it. It is hard, even within one’s own head, to relate to the world without somehow using Enlightenment categories at some point or another. This greatly weakens the cause of conservatism and the right in general as some of us try to chart a post-liberal or even post-western present and future for ourselves.
How does this work? A recent example from my own recent experience can hopefully illuminate this. I was listening to a recent recording of Alex Kaschuta’s “Subversive Podcast” with guest Auron MacIntyre:
Subversive Podcast - No Such Thing as a Secular Society
Auron made the point that leftism is “entropy,” in that it’s basic inclination is to poke at, attack, and undermine the status quo. Liberalism disolves. Conservatism is dispositionally disposed towards maintaining order and the status quo. Liberalism attempts to break down the existing order. That seemed to me an astute observation. He also noted that building society and civilization is hard work, in that one is in a constant battle with entropy when trying to establish order and stability in the world. Liberalism can seem preferable to conservatism because it is easier.
This thought bouncing around in my mind, I raised it with my wife. It was one of those offhand dinner conversations. “I heard this interesting thought in podcast today…” and proceeded to give her the rundown of Auron’s argument. To which my wife responded, “That sounds just like you.” I was shocked. “What do you mean?” She proceeded to throw back at me, “You are always talking about your rights and freedoms and how the government shouldn’t be telling you what to do. You say all the same things that liberals do. You are just like them.” That stopped me cold. I realized that she was right. She was right in ways that were deeper than she knew. I have been stewing on this for several days now and have come to the conclusion that conservatives lose in part because we use the same language of the left but just employ a form of it from yesteryear.
Basically, when we as “conservatives” talk, what we are trying to “conserve” is the so-called “good enlightenment” of the Founding Fathers. We reject the “bad enlightenment” of Critical Theory. We throw out words like “cultural Marxism” and the like to separate ourselves from these ideas, never acknowledging that they spring from the same intellectual source, that of Enlightenment Rationalism. What we are often doing without realizing it is trying to out liberal the liberals. And this plays into their hands. It is one of the big reasons why the political right has such a problem resisting the left. All of their language assumes the same basic philosophical presuppositions as that of their political opponents. At its core, conservatives simply want liberalism enacted more slowly. Or, they hope that if they revert to a liberalism of a time now past, that they can avoid some the distasteful elements we see cropping up today.
What this would mean in practice is that conservatives should cut ties with ideas like “natural rights” or “my God-given rights.” We have to stop talking about the right to free speech, the right to own a gun, the right to assembly, the right to freedom of worship and so forth. It will be hard, but we need to do it if we are ever going to carve out a different political vision for society than the one offered by left liberalism in its many forms.
Why? Why is this so important? Here is where I found MacIntyre’s arguments in “After Virtue” compelling. Each of us taught to see ourselves as first of all an individual, an autonomous moral agent. This integrity and primacy of the individual is at the heart of the liberal project of Enlightenment moral thinking. If we were a society of one person, that would be fine. But we are not all little islands. We are part of a community, a society. Each of us may be out there making our own choices, but eventually we will run into other people also making their own autonomous moral choices. What happens if my choices conflict with your choices? We could give each other space and say, “You make your choices and I will make mine.” Seems fair. But what if it is not possible for my choice to avoid having an impact upon you and your personal autonomy and your moral sensibilities. We might say, as long as I am not harming you, then lets each go our own way. But who can assess harm? What if the harm is subtle, delayed or indirect? How would we adjudicate this? How does this differing sense of rights get resolved?
The classic example today is the conflict between the claimed right of a mother to abort, that is kill, her unborn baby. Whose rights should prevail? The baby’s? The mother’s? Or does the father have a claim here also? Who decides whose “rights” should prevail? All of these disputes, at their root, are coercive. Whether I am trying to sway you with argumentation or force, my goal is to bend you towards my position so as to protect my autonomy as a moral agent and my “rights.” At the same time others are also doing this. There is a constant battle for whose “rights” or whose interpretation of a “right” should have sway over society. In essence, this is the heart of the idea of the “social compact.” We come together and hash out between each other and the governing authorities what our “rights” are and how they should be interpreted. Basically, modern “rights” based public morality is a constant battle of manipulating others or being manipulated. In this frame, all morality is essentially a power play. The question will always be who has the power to convince, manipulate or force others to agree to their version of what “rights” there are and what they mean?
You might respond that you thought all rights are given us by God. Within Christian teaching the idea of a “right” is a foreign thing. Nowhere in the scriptures or in church teaching up to even into the late Middle Ages is this even a thing. There isn’t even language or words to talk about it. At best, the idea of a “natural right” or a “God-given right” is a derivative concept based on notions such as man being made in the image of God and thus having a fundamental dignity. Even concepts such as “freedom” in the Bible do not mean anything close to the idea of an “autonomous moral agent.” Biblical freedom meant release from bondage to the devil so as to become a slave to Christ. Such as thing as freedom can only be experienced through one’s obedience to God and his will, not in making one’s own moral choices.
As far as the idea of “natural rights,” this idea that they are self-evident, is itself suspect. There are no self-evident moral truths. This argumentation is a refuge for those who fail to make their moral arguments convincingly. Simply asserting a “natural right” does not suddenly make such a thing real. By what method do we divine such rights? It comes down to a hermeneutical problem. How do we interpret the entrails of nature so as to read them such that they will produce definitive proof that such things exist? Who has the authority to interpret nature and read the rights that are apparently so self-evidently contained therein? Every appeal to nature and every appeal to reason has failed, and failed miserably, to produce a suitable natural “grounding” for our regime of “rights” and “freedoms.” As MacIntyre says, a belief in natural rights is about as justifiable as a belief in unicorns.
When you bore down into the matter, this notion of “human rights” was a tool of the Enlightenment used as a substitute for traditional morality which claimed it was revealed by God combined with a several thousand years of tradition as embodied in the church. The church was the interpretive authority. This idea of “human rights” gave the appearance of a stable and grounded moral framework all while maintaining the independence of the autonomous moral agent. The claim was that, using reason, informed by natural law, each person would arrive at the same moral conclusions: universally binding moral truths. These moral truths that reason uncovered usually ended up being form of the Christian moral teaching that they were all familiar with, but now without the obligations to God and church.
In reality, once moral reasoning was shorn from the anchor of biblical revelation and church teaching, it steadily devolved into a will for power. Without anything to ground morality, without any authoritative interpreter, the clash of whose “rights” would prevail became a battle of one against the other in a desperate attempt to assert primacy. This is why protest is such a valued and distinct part of our society and why anger and indignation are so prominent. Any threat to my personal autonomy is an attack on my person. And there is no way to argue your way past these disputes because there is no shared language of morality. It is one person pitted against another in a battle over whose “rights” will win the day. If you have power, you can impose and coerce others. Our society has become one constant moral battle over “rights.” The “culture war” is the preeminent battle of our society. Without a broad agreement at to the “ground” for our “rights” the battle will continue. Our society has devolved into a constant “will to power” battle.
What has made this battle doubly hard, is that the Enlightenment solution to the post-Reformation religious wars in Europe exacerbates the problem. By banishing the Christian faith from the public sphere, creating a secular space revolving around “rights,” our western societies ensured that eventually these battles over rights would take on a religious character. In a sense, the new civic religion is the battle over “rights.” Our society told the battling churches that they could not take their religious battles into the public spaces. Those are private disputes. In so doing they attempted to administer the body politic according to the practical needs of providing security and prosperity for the people. In practice, though, societies need some sort of faith at the core of their civic identity. That void was filled with modern day Progressivism and the quest for discovering and enacting people’s “human rights.” In a sense, it elevated the idea of “human rights” into a kind of religion of the state. The state would administer “rights” and decide between competing versions of “rights,” in essence playing the role that the church hierarchy once played.
If not “rights” and “freedoms” then what? A couple of things. First, one of the traps that we should try to avoid is thinking that if we could capture and control the system, the levers of power, that we could force upon the people a different morality. This is the essence of “reactionary” politics. The idea is that we engage in revolutionary action, seize the reigns of power, purge those who disagree with us on “rights” and “freedoms” and restore society to a proper morality. The problem with this idea, even beyond its practicality and the likely barbarism that would result, is that it is a “reaction.”
In any reaction against something, you in essence are allowing yourself to be defined by the thing against which you are reacting. You become its mirror. In this case, you would be taking over a society in which the system and all the core assumptions upon which it is built are the same, but they are being run by us and not them. In essence, you become the thing you are fighting against. This dynamic explains much of what is wrong with the “culture war” from the position of the right. It is a reactionary position. We are defined by our enemy. We share all their assumptions but we don’t like the direction they took with them. Boot them out and we will cleanse the system and restore the American that the Founding Fathers intended. In practice, that will look just like what you see on the left, but with right wing implementing its idea of “rights” in ways just as onerous as the way the left tries to impose “critical theory.” There is no escaping the broken America of today by remaining within its foundational system of “rights” and “freedoms.”
One path forward, perhaps - and this is just a loose suggestion at this point - would be to opt out of the current system, beginning again in small communities or in localized regions. You would have to start over using a different religious, philosophical and moral foundation. We might want to reach back to an old idea, that of “responsibility.” This is a very biblical idea, a very Christian idea. We are responsible to God and to our neighbour for our behaviour. We owe God something. We owe our neighbour something. This goes back to something Auron spoke about in the above podcast and that is the responsibility to create order and deepen the bonds between us and our Creator. In this sense, I am becoming increasingly convinced that conservatism, or the right in general, needs to be less about “ideas” and more about “doing.” Specifically, we need to learn again the habits of “right doing,” that is, a society based not on “human rights” but on “righteousness.” At its heart, the concept of “righteousness” is about having a right relationship with God and a right relationship with our fellow man. A conjoined idea to “righteousness” is that of “justice.” In its core, the idea of “justice” is about maintaining and restoring a right relationship with my neighbour.
How might this work out in practice? I don’t want to even begin to attempt to work this out in its fullness. It is something that would require time and a community to properly instantiate it, but for example, what we now know as the “right to free speech” would be better seen as a two fold thing of learning to speak with wisdom and goodness, but also giving others the dignity of listening to them and their concerns. We all want to be heard and feel like we have been heard. Listening is hard work. Especially when there is a power or status differential. It is an obligation for the powerful to listen to the ordinary person and hear their concerns.
The idea of the “right to bear arms” might become something like the responsibility to defend yourself and your neighbour, especially the weaker among us from the predations of the powerful, the criminal or the invader.
All of this is a long way of saying that conservatives need abandon the language of the Enlightenment and the liberalism out of which it grew. I have nothing approaching all the answers and frankly distrust those that offer such rational plans. I sense that we somehow need to just start doing it in alternative communities and let it develop organically as we encounter problems. We need to teach ourselves a new language with a new vocabulary, in part to help us chart a path that is neither surrender nor reactionary. Embracing this post-liberal space tasks us with the responsibility of finding our own voice built on our own foundations. I would argue that only stable ground for that is an old foundation, that of the Christian faith and the authority of the church.