Against Human Rights
Below is an excrept from my upcoming book, Convert or Die.
As the West has escaped want and tragedy since the end of the Cold War, one hears asserted an ever-expanding list of rights. These include the right to healthcare, to education, to holiday, to safe spaces, and even to killing unborn babies. The right to safe spaces is often asserted to deny others the right to speak the truth. The right to choose to end pregnancies is asserted by people who seem oblivious to how it conflicts with the right to life. Rather than protect the individual, human rights laws now harm the collective, as well as individuals. In the UK, Stephen Wood, a convicted rapist and paedophile who now goes by the name of Karen White, was placed in a women’s prison because, as a self-declared “transgender woman”, not doing so would have violated his rights. He proceeded to rape two other women in jail. Similar cases have recurred in the US, where authorities in some states now refuse to deport convicted criminals, also to protect their right to stay in the US illegally. Immigration activist lawyers in the UK often submit new humanitarian objections against deportation 24 hours before the deportation of their criminal clients is set to take place. As these criminals have the right to appeal, in some cases, almost endlessly, the result is that dangerous criminals remain in the UK, risking the rights of British citizens to safety and protection. In the US, the media has the right to publish any fabrication, no matter how divisive and harmful to American society and interests, because it has the right to free speech. Pornography, which violates the dignity of women and men, is presumed to be permitted under this right.
The result of the endless expansion of rights has been a mental and moral muddle, where it is easier to assert new rights than to examine whether the old ones stood on solid ground. In this essay, I will try to examine whether rights are universal or located within a culture and a society. I will then highlight a basic misunderstanding: we once understood rights as being a space permitted by society to the individual to act in accordance with his duties; we now understand rights as claims an individual can make against a society. I will explain why this is nonsense: nature shows that we are born and reach adulthood indebted to family and society, not that we can make claims against society the moment we enter it. I assert that without returning to our original understanding of rights, we will continue down this path of madness and decline.
Universal rights and freedoms?
It is not clear to me at all where a right to life can come from, except from God. Atheistic claims, such as the right to life coming from an innate concept of fairness, are simply hollow: the strong have no need for fairness, and in fact constantly seek to subvert it. Moreover, secular ideologies that derive from Christianity, such as Marxism, have never recognised a right to life, and had no problem with eradicating entire classes of people. Communists and socialists in Russia, China, Cambodia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and others were universally murderous. Furthermore, every pagan religion involves some form of human sacrifice. Offering for sacrifice the lives of virgins, slaves and, often, children, was seen as the most effective way of appeasing the gods by peoples such as diverse as the Incas, the Aztecs, the Vikings, the Carthaginians and the Dahomey. Indeed, child sacrifice is still practised by pagans today, as Stone Age Herbalist explains. All three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, fought and vanquished faiths that practiced human sacrifice, in part to assert that the innocent and the weak also have a right to life.
Equally, there is no cross-cultural consensus on a right to liberty, or, indeed, a definition of liberty. Slavery ended in the Islamic world thank to Christian firepower and dominance. The minute there was an opening for an Islamic group to impose a literalist interpretation of Islam, slavery resumed, as we saw in Syria and Libya. Slavery in Africa was practiced before the arrival of Europeans, probably for centuries. Slavery was not expressly prohibited in any culture until Pope Eugene IV did so in 1435, nor was slavery eradicated at any point in history until Europe and the Union forces in the United States took it upon themselves to eradicate it. The concept of liberty, individual or collective, did not exist for much of the world. It is, simply put, a European and Christian construct.
Furthermore, freedom did not always mean unfettered individual freedom, as it seems to mean today. Freedom was always understood as bounded, but, now, with the abortionists and the trans movement, freedom is asserted even against biology. People now demand that their “sex assigned at birth”, that is, the sex objectively observed from their genitals, be subject to review at their whim. Women and men demand the right to dispose of unwanted babies, as a means of addressing their lack of responsibility and commitment. Now, through euthanasia, we are demanding the freedom to kill the sick and the elderly because they are inconvenient, all under the name of liberty and the right to choose. This has reached such terrifying proportions that in the Netherlands the law permits teenagers to be killed by doctors for being depressed.
Some progressives demand freedom from religion, by which they mean preventing communities where a faith predominates from publicly living in accordance with their faith, lest that offend a single individual's sensibilities. Such people are willing to force schools to ban collective prayer because a single atheist family complained. This is an inversion of rights – rights may have at one time meant that the collective cannot impose its will on the individual. Now, rights mean that the individual does have in fact the right to impose his will on the collective. That this conception of freedom destroys the coherence and cohesiveness of society is not something that is considered by progressives. They believe in the perfectly atomised individual, who is not tied down by things like religion, traditional morality or God.
Clearly, this is nonsense. It is nonsense because it goes against human nature, which is religious, as well as society’s wellbeing. A good and functioning society is a precondition for there to be any rights, and so our thinking of rights must be bounded by our need to protect society. Furthermore, the definition of freedom has never before included freedom from obligations towards the collective, or freedom from biology, or freedom from order. Liberty can only be within an order. Anything else would be more appropriately described as chaos, in which millions of petty tyrants would daily flourish and die. Rights and freedoms are not universal for the simple reason that many societies do not agree with the Western definition of rights, which derives from Christianity, or even with their existence. Indeed, from an atheistic perspective, it is unclear why Man would have any rights. Are we not merely poorly evolved chimpanzees, according to Christopher Hitchens, or the Third Chimpanzee, according to Jared Diamond? Why should chimps have rights or freedoms?
Defining rights
We are confused about what the word rights means. It used to mean a carve out granted by society to the individual, so that the individual may act in accordance with his conscience. It was correctly deemed necessary for an individual to enjoy things like privacy, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech to enable him to exercise his conscience in an informed manner, though it was also always understood that these freedoms are bounded. Today, however, the word rights refers to claims that an individual can make against a society, such as a right to be provided with healthcare, education, or welfare. This conception of rights is applied today even when the individual in question is completely alien to the society against which he makes claims, as in the case of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants.
In the first meaning of the word ‘rights’, we refer to society recognising the duties that Man has towards himself. This includes his duty to preserve his own life and that of his family, his duty to act in accordance with his own conscience, his duty to be true to the Truth. In this sense, Man has a right to life, a right to self-defence, a right to liberty, a right to freedom of conscience, and a right to speak the truth freely (which is not quite the same as freedom of speech). The word “rights” used in this sense refers to obligations that Man has against himself, to duties that he has to live up to in order to be worthy of being called Man. In this sense, the word rights is used to signify that society recognises that all men are burdened by these duties, and should act accordingly, for the benefit of society as a whole. In this conception, no man has absolute authority or complete access to the truth, and so society creates these carve outs, or rights, to permit Man enough freedom to reach the Truth and live and act in accordance with it.
The second sense of the word rights has become more and more common in modern parlance. As such, we hear about the right to free healthcare, the right to free education, the right to asylum in a foreign land, the right to safe spaces, the right to travel across international borders, the right to reside in foreign lands among foreign peoples and foreign cultures, etc… In this sense, the word “rights” refers to claims that individuals can make against a society, even against a society of which the individual is not a member, or even against a society towards whom the claimant is in fact hostile, as in the case of a large proportion of asylum seekers or economic migrants. It is the opposite of the original meaning of the word.
One can argue, convincingly, that one wishes to live in a society that does feel and act as though it is obligated to provide healthcare, education, and welfare for every resident. However, one must also ask what the individual owes to such a society. And one must address the question – are equal rights to be given to everyone who claims them upon arrival into a society to which he has no relationship, or are there prior debts than one must pay before one can claim rights?
Rights or duties?
Man is born in debt. Man enters society owing it his life, his knowledge and his talents, and not with claims against it.
A woman’s body will involuntarily abort a baby she is carrying if she is stressed enough. While breastfeeding, her milk will stop flowing if she is placed under sufficient pressure. Basic biology shows that any child who makes it to five owes a debt to fortune, or, more precisely, providence, and owes a far bigger debt to the society that protected him and his mother to allow her to nurse, shelter and raise him. If it is a society where the norm is for a mother and father to be involved in the life of the child, the child’s debt is even greater, as this is a society where some of the male’s baser instincts have been at least partially tamed. A father who resists his baser instincts and stays to raise and protect his family passes to his sons the obligations to do the same, and to his daughters the expectation that their husbands will eventually do the same. Survival within the confines of a loving family confers on the child a debt to his family and society, not obligations that his family and society have towards him.
Similarly, one does not choose to have, say, musical talent. And he who has such talent may not even know that he has it unless it’s discovered by someone else. Even then, unless he’s helped to develop his talent, sometimes with the help being given before there is any indication that such talent exists, his talent is of no use. As such, the musically talented man owes enormous debts to those that help him develop, and the same logic applies to any other kind of talent - carpenting, building, painting, engineering, etc…. A man whose talents have been discovered and refined owes enormous debts to those who discovered his potential, to those who taught him, to those who came before him to discover and teach his teachers, and to all of those who enabled the functioning of a society in which the discovery and development of talents was rewarded. Similarly, one born into a position of privilege, such as wealth or political power, has greater obligations than one who is born destitute. He has received a bigger gift from providence, and owes in return a greater debt. Such a man also owes a debt to those who permit a legal and political order to function well enough for power and wealth to be passed on.
Rather critically, the debts men owe are specific to a society. We owe our first debts to our parents, their parents, their friends and community; to our teachers, to the discoverers of our talents, to those in our immediate neighbourhood and vicinity, and not to people halfway across the globe with whom no one we know has ever had any interaction. Our debts tie us to specific people, places, legal traditions, cultures and religions. Our morality must be based on the reality of these debts and obligations towards our society, not on the baseless abstraction that is individual rights. Only by recognising that can we begin to escape the dangerous moral and mental muddle that modern human rights law has become.
A Path Forward
There is no point in being a conservative - there is almost nothing left to conserve in Western institutions. Our goal is restoration. To begin this difficult task, the first step must be to impose a limit on the rights culture. We must return to our original understanding of rights - a set of necessary carve outs that permit society to function well, without sacrificing its cohesion or sanity. We must insist on the right of society to restrict who enters it, as a necessary part of maintaining social cohesion and social sanity. We must exclude from our conception of rights those whose inclusion would only promote madness and division. We must insist on the right of society to impose minimal norms of decency. We must clearly oppose the idea of rights as claims that an individual can make against a society, and insist on the duty of a society to compel its members to pay their social and cultural debts. It is only through such an understanding of society and the relationship between its constituents that we can begin to return to sanity.