What gives you the right?

One of the changes in the last five decades is that we are inundated with the language of rights, civil rights and human rights. Rights have gone viral. And, IMHO, haywire.

One of my thoughtful commentors recently asked me about where rights come from. I am afraid that's a bit above my pay grade. I know enough to know that it is not a simply answered question. It requires elucidating views about human nature, human communities, history, the world and God.

On the homepage of the Dominican Order, its justice-and-peace devotees have articles up like this one: Brazilian street orphans and education: a human rights perspective. Without reading beyond the headline, you know that they will argue for a rights-based duty on the part of the Brazilian state to provide education for these kids. For most of the folks who speak the lingo of human rights, anything they think a person needs becomes a positive right. In America, we are now asked to believe that free health care is a human and civil right. (And that balking at "free" aka paid-for-by-someone-else contraception amounts to a "war on women") Where does it stop? Jefferson's deeply ambiguous phrase about a right to pursuit of happiness is now heard as a right to happiness itself.

With a HT to Canuckistan curmudgeoness-in-training Kathy Shaidle, a critique of the "human rights" regime and industry in far-advanced Europe by Luke Samuel:

But there is a more fundamental reason that liberals should be sceptical of human-rights law: because it makes us all less free. Human rights are not ‘rights’ in a liberal sense at all. They bear no resemblance to the ‘rights’ fought for by the radical liberals of the English Civil War, or the French and American revolutions, which sought to limit the power of the state and protect the autonomy of citizens. Instead, human rights treat people as fundamentally vulnerable and in need of state protection. This view of human vulnerability, in the eyes of the human-rights lobby, justifies the granting of absolute power to the state to set the boundaries of freedom.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently advised the remorphing Egyptian State not to use the old and limiting US Constitution as a model for their new make-believe democracy.  Her suggested models were the new-fangled and much more high-minded versions found in Canada and South Africa. She was right, but for the wrong reasons.

Since she was part of the Kelo decision, it probably does not bother her that the shiny Trudeaupian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lacks any recognition of the right to property. Or that no matter what kind of armchair glories the South African paper might describe, it does nothing to prevent world-class rates of robbery, rape and race-revenge murder*, to say nothing of the tribalism and corruption endemic to Third World countries (which Black "Truth-and-Reconciliation" South Africa now is). Anyway, we all know how respectful Arab Muslim states are when it comes to constitutional fidelity, so Ginsberg's advice is just pissing in the wind...(can females do that?)

*More White farmers have been slaughtered by Blacks there since St Nelson Mandela's ANC victory in 1994 than all the Blacks lynched in the US since the Civil War.

My point is that the American Constitution, while a product of both the English Protestant temper and the (AngloScottish) Enlightenment, was uniquely adapted to the peoples it was designed for: the Original Thirteen States. It stood on massive cultural, social, philosophical, economic and religious assumptions and on very particular political grounds. It was not the French Revolution's grandiose Declaration of the Rights of Man (parent, of course, to the UN's verbose paper frauds). Most of it was designed to create a limited government, a structure of purposeful inefficiency which would attempt to thwart or at least to slow the natural drift of any State toward tyranny. The Bill of Rights was a set of  amendments.

What strikes me more and more is that while democracy and human rights and dignity is touted around the globe as the unquestioned currency of civilized discourse, even by the Roman Catholic Church, it is as strange to human nature as it is rare in history. It is an opus contra naturam, requiring the skill, dedication and discipline of an alchemist searching for the gold hidden in the lead.

Mr Samuel puts his finger on the root difference between the once-robust and now fading-into-history American sense of rights and the Eurotopian version: ours assumed that the what people most needed was protection from the State. On the Old Continent --and its backwash here-- it's protection by the State.

A world of difference.

And as our demographics become more and more disconnected from the culture that gave birth to us, it is likely that, regardless of what the Dead White Men's document says, the collectivism deep in the human psyche will triumph. To say that we are a Creedal Nation, not an Ethnic one, is as much a deception as imagining that either Nature or Nurture have power unconnected to the other.

The group most likely to carry on the American tradition of rights, as opposed to the European, is the group most like the one that created it: White Christian Males. And that group is like the duck in Peter and the Wolf. The groups who naturally fall into the arms of the Statists, shown clearly by their voting patterns, are urbanites, women, Blacks and Hispanics, gays, Jews and Catholics. And we all know how much more White and rural the country is becoming.