The runaway horizon of rights

Of course parents have a responsibility to parent their kids — but don’t lose sight of the fact that children have rights.

— Bruce Arthur

The above cut line is from an Toronto Star columnist attacking parents’ groups who don’t want schools teaching their children trans ideology, which the author claims, unconvincingly, is the state performing child protection. I’ve linked my thoughts on the ideology ^^^, but what I want to dive into here is that word Arthur uses: rights.

I’ve probably mentioned in passing at various points in my writing that I haven’t much use for rights-talk. I’m not sure, though, that I’ve ever explained myself on that account. To begin with, it’s a slime word. Not like pond slime, but like that goopey stuff kids play with.

It’s a term that’s fun to use for a while, but too elastic to form anything identifiable. It takes on the shape of its containers. That’s because “rights” — which are defined in very numerous ways — are abstractions within abstractions.

Unfortunately, rights-talk rolls off the lips of everyone now in spite of its groundlessness, its lack of any foundation in the real world. Is a right an entitlement, a prohibition, access, claim, what? It’s this very lack of specificity and definition that gives the word a kind of sanctifying property. I can say, for example, that a public health system insulated against the profit motive is a good idea (it is) because X, Y, Z; but it I really want to be politically assertive, I’ll say, “Health care is a right.” (It’s not.)

Okay, do we mean by “health care” a restorative or a meliorist paradigm? Does one have a right to, say, the state paying for abortion in a normal pregnancy? “Gender transition” surgeries? Cosmetic surgery? How does this “right” factor into decisions about end-of-life? Do we keep someone on technological life support indefinitely? How many? At what cost? Do we allow assisted suicide? Where are the boundaries dividing “health care” from things like nutrition, safety, addiction, environment, etc.? Does the “right to health care” extend rootlets into each of these areas? If so, how does this right potentially come into contact, even conflict, with other rights? When asking these questions, it becomes apparent that “rights,” in the end, are ultimately (1) arbitrary and (2) a question of the power to both interpret and enforce this abstraction.

Some would argue that the above example is moot, because a right is never to something (an entitlement), but from or against something (a negative right — the right to non-interference), like limits on “speech” (another slime-word) or limits on the ownership of firearms or limits on the accumulation of wealth.

Certainly legal, social, and even philosophical theorists have parsed these questions and come up with various, provisional, and sometimes contradictory solutions. But the everyday person considers a right, with no parsing at all, to be something simultaneously singular, axiomatic, inalienable, and sacred. This everyday consideration is what gives rights-talk such political force.

One theoretical diagram of the property right to a computer

There are theories about negative rights, positive rights, active rights, passive rights, first- and second-order rights, and so forth. Parental rights are what some theorists call a power-right, the right to make decisions for another, even to command the other to do certain things. The children’s rights referenced in the Arthur quote pertain to whether teachers and administrators should be allowed to indoctrinate children into an ideology, the ideology of which, it is claimed by Arthur, is somehow “protective” of children . . . they might be bullied or kill themselves without the ideology’s protective cover. Stretchy . . . like slime.

We’ll come back to children, because their very existence banjaxes rights-talk. Before that, though, let’s review where all this rights-talk originated.

One misguided argument is that there have always been rights, in one form or another, even before rights-talk came onto the scene. Every society, even from the earliest clans, has had some set of privileges and prerogatives that correspond to social position within the group and to membership generally (though not recognized outside the group). But to call these rights or proto-rights based purely on a few abstract similarities is begging the question on one abstraction by historically retrojecting features of that abstraction into the past with no account of the more numerous differences.

“Right” as an undifferentiated word has all the problems of “good” as an undifferentiated word. Doing the right thing is far from having the right of free speech, and not just the difference between adjective and noun. When we speak of rights, this notion of a noun describing some inhering entitlement to either some service or to being left alone or to sovereignty over property including sovereignty over the body-as-property . . . these rights require laws to secure them, because — as any honest person will attest — no such thing attains prior to the law. Rights are a juridical, and neither an inherently customary nor a “natural” abstraction. US law, for example, was philosophically prefaced in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — -That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

There’s a lot of stuff here, beginning with “self-evident.” In other words, one must accept at the outset that these rights exist and attach to “men” without recourse to further evidence. We don’t have to prove anything. We’ve already arrived at the baseline of Truth. And that truth must be “secured” by “consensual” governments — which for Jefferson and the rest meant a nation-state, a territorially circumscribed sovereign with a legal monopoly on violence, with “consent” determined by majorities or representative majorities of those who had a “right” to vote. (We’ve seen how that means the right of the rich to rule.) Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — words that are now liturgical, sacred — would be spelled out apart from the declaration as fundamentally based on an entitlement to property. At that time, property included around 390,000 human beings who were external to the body politic. But I skipped over the most important part: “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Jefferson, a smart guy who rewrote the Bible to make it suit himself, understood that this rights-talk was circular and insupportable without some kind of final judge. Trying to foreclose all dissent by merely saying that something is self-evident is not enough to pass muster against the first baby-step of rational interrogation. This self-evidence is an article of faith, if you will, and there’s nothing wrong with articles of faith (I say the Nicene creed, for example), but that faith requires a ground, an origin, a final authority. In this case, even though he didn’t write “God,” he did say “their Creator,” which could be interpreted as God as the court of last instance, or Nature as that court. (Paine would assert “natural rights.”)

Post-enlightenment mavens liked to flog the whole religious-secular distinction; but in truth human societies cannot hold together without what Jacques Ellul called an organizing “myth.” Eugene McCarrarher wrote a massive book, called The Enchantments of Mammon, that pretty much proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that post-Enlightenment “secularism” and its dominant capitalist political economy are every bit as “religious” as any twelfth century abbey. In asserting these rights, Jefferson et al had to close the door on arguments against their “rights” with a kind of supreme court called “Creator.”

These guys were also counting on pre-Enlightenment religious values to hem in any tendencies people might have to carry this rights-thing so far that it would erase interpersonal obligation and descend into anarchic libertinism. In the essay, “Failure of the Secular,” I wrote:

Back around the time of the bourgeois revolutions in France and the US, the philosophical materialism of these revolutions’ intellectual fathers was understood to function politically alongside “religion,” with religion providing a kind of moral check on materialistic excesses. They had consigned “religion” to the private sphere in part because they thought religious privatization would prevent violent conflicts that would tear their ideal societies apart — something they’d learned from the financial ascendance of the Dutch Republic.

The bourgeois revolutionaries — read Benjamin Franklin’s self-help advice or Thomas Jefferson’s ruminations, or even Rousseau’s utopian rants — assumed that some of the key moral precepts inherited from Christianity would persist beyond the privatization of “religion,” as cultural norms, and that these moral precepts would attenuate the libido dominandi, will-to-power, whatever you want to call it; and that this persistent vestige of Christianity would serve as an extra-legal, extra-judicial insurance policy for peaceful coexistence. They could assume that in their time, because it was apparent then. Deism, agnosticism, and atheism were not widespread, except among a few intellectuals, and many of the Christian virtues still held sway, albeit in the form of parochial altruism — “altruism that is directed in a preferential manner towards members of one’s own social group” (racial and some religious minorities excluded).

This didn’t work out.

In the meantime, rights-talk came to be claimed by more and more people — the unpropertied, former slaves, despised minorities, women. Now — as noted— some adults lay claim to rights for children. Along with the expansion of the franchise and other citizen-rights, the scope of rights took an a mission creep. People talk now about a right to privacy, which can be found nowhere in the US Constitution. Others say things like, “Housing is a right.”

Before I leave the wrong impression, I support a universal adult franchise, the protection of children, reasonable expectations of privacy, and everyone having decent shelter. What is not necessary, or even often desirable, is that these goods be justified by an appeal to rights. Fairness and common decency should do.

When Bruce Arthur made his claim to children’s rights, he was really asserting the right of the state (with its legal monopoly on violence) to indoctrinate children into his religion. His religion ultimately says children have the right to make life-changing decisions over and against parents, like taking hormones that could sterilize them because someone on the internet told them their sex was somehow arbitrarily “assigned.” Unlike housing or the adult entitlement to vote, this is clearly not a good, and it is equally clearly not “protecting children.” It is protecting an abstraction . . . rights, which in his view supersede all other goods. (True enough, there are several layers of delusion at work here.)

Children are an embarrassment to rights-talk, because everyone who is not intentionally being obtuse knows and will say that the protection and sensible formation of children is a duty and responsibility that calls on adults to make decisions for children, to tell them no when need be, to establish clear boundaries and lines of authority, and to discipline them. We also have to play with them, commiserate with them, nurse their injuries, teach them, feed and bathe them, and love them. None of this requires rights. We have some parents nowadays who also assert, against their own children, that they (the parents) have rights, when what they mean is (a) they are weary of unreasonable demands or being sibling rivalry umpires or tantrum-tyranny, or (b) that certain (selfish-ass) parent wants more time to go to clubs or whatever.

Rights-talk is like a trump card. We’ve internalized the idea that rights are the final call to authority, the sacred ground, the Self-Evident against which no further evidence can be marshaled. It’s the final argument . . . secured by the potential for violence.

That’s the part we seldom discuss. Rights is a fighting word. Once we say that rights are being violated, we grant ourselves the “right” to attack the supposed violators. I have heard from a lot of people — speaking of the current gender insanity, who for merely questioning the whole ideological narrative (or sterilizing children as somehow an expression of children’s rights), who’ve been relentlessly attacked, in some cases physically, but more often (for now) in trying to destroy their reputations and relationships, lose their jobs, or be subjected to harassment. People on the so-called left of the political spectrum who have questioned gender ideology, and who have been subjected to these attacks, have remarked that no one on the right, with whom they’ve publicly disagreed, has ever resorted to these kinds of attacks . . . which are ever more marked by an almost sadistic ferocity. That’s because these ideologues really believe they are protecting “rights.”

I know that in our current state of affairs, at all scales, we live in a world already dissolved into hyper-pluralism, and one where rights-talk is so utterly, unquestionably hegemonic, that there is neither a means for mini-gadlfies like me to change people’s thinking, nor some overarching political solution with a snowball’s chance in hell (sorry, “activists,” nothing happens now from the top, we gotta meet as we are at the anarchic bottom). This little intervention might be read by fifty people, and the best I can hope to do is provide a little dislocative shoulder bump against ideological axioms.

All I’m saying is that (1) the best we can hope for is a modicum of charity between me and thee, and (2) that rights-talk is a stumbling block to the exercise thereof.