On Rights, Part Two: Liberty, Society, and the Tyranny of the Individual

A little more than a year ago, when I had grander ambitions for what I might do with this platform, I tried to raise some questions about where rights come from and what they mean as we interact with each other. In that piece, I noted how we alienate our so-called "unalienable" rights, rights which, by their very definition, can neither be taken nor given away. I suggested that the very fact that we do abridge them and that they can be abridged should cause us to pause and to re-think this notion. I ended with a plea that we take responsibility for the exercise and limitation of our "rights," asking if the tyranny of the majority was really any worse than the tyranny of the individual. These questions still plague me.

A number of articles I have read online recently, about a variety of topics, have brought me back to thinking about these issues, about the way that individual rights intersect with those of the community. Mostly, it has to do with a rising tide of libertarianism, embodied in politicians such as Ron and Rand Paul and in the Tea Party movement; everywhere we look, shrill voices are crying out about the loss of personal liberty and the encroachment of government in our daily lives. Smaller government, lower (or indeed no) taxes, much less regulation, absolutism on property rights, an end to foreign wars, the aggrandizement of individual rights... these are major components of the libertarian agenda. I have to admit a certain sympathy for it. Authority and I have at best a cordial relationship. I have, for the record, voted Libertarian twice (1996 and 2000, in states where it made no difference, it should be noted). And my inner two-year old, who stamps his feet and takes his toys and goes home when he gets mad, finds it easy to understand a political philosophy that can be summed up in a single word, "Mine!"

But the libertarian movement, whatever point its adherents might have about the morality and advisability of our foreign wars, whatever legitimate fears they may have about government overreach, encapsulates everything I fear about the tyranny of the individual. It forces to the fore my earlier question about where we calibrate the balance of personal liberty and the greater good, unless I am question-begging by assuming they are not the same. Embracing the otherwise laudatory goal of non-coercion, libertarians deny that we have any responsibility towards each other that we do not voluntarily take on. Thus, progressive taxation to fund public goods such as infrastructure, welfare, education and health care are prima facie immoral, constituting a taking from one person to give to another. Governments exist only to protect citizens against fraud and force; individuals are best left to chart their own destinies completely free of outside interference.

This valorization of the individual is all well and good, except that there is an accompanying moral apparatus that is truly horrifying. It assumes that we all succeed or fail by dint of our talents and, so, we should own all the fruits of those talents. It seems a natural outgrowth of a religious worldview that sees success as proof of God's favor and failure as the result of immorality. We see echoes of it in the popularity of the "prosperity Gospel," which seems often little more than a fig leaf for divinely-sanctioned greed. The resurgent appeal (recrudescence?) of Ayn Rand's work, which presents a world where the truly creative stand astride the world attempting to shed the common parasites who live off their labor, in conservative circles is a testament to the search for justifications. Placing the individual at the pinnacle of the social world is empowering, bold, American. And wrong, because it denies everything that makes us human.

The individualistic streak in Western political philosophy was a seventeenth-century invention, and runs counter to the main stream of most previous Christian and pre-Christian thought, which saw man as being most complete, indeed natural, in a community. While I generally shy away from claims about a so-called human nature, I think it not unreasonable to assume that there are certain habits that are, so to speak, hard-wired into the species. One such is society. What is my evidence for such a contention? Only this: that everywhere humans live, they live in the company of other humans. There may have been a point in our distant evolutionary past where humans lived alone, but the exigencies of sexual reproduction and simple survival made social organization advantageous. Simply put, those who lived in societies out-competed those who did not, they reproduced in greater numbers and we who live now are the beneficiaries of their success.

This is what makes the tyranny of the individual so pernicious. What I mean by this term is the notion that individual rights always predominate, that none of us can be forced into involuntary associations with others, that none of us should be required to contribute to the well-being of our fellows. If the absolute freedom of one requires others to suffer for lack of help we can provide, so be it, goes this line of reasoning. As we have seen earlier, their failure or suffering is the result of moral turpitude, so it would be immoral for government to tax the just in order to aid them. The tyranny of the majority is little better, and I would not argue for it, but there is of course a middle position and it is the position that, despite the absolutism of our founding documents, we have tried to steer as a nation. For the most part.

And, of course, it is important not to tar all assertions of individual rights against those of the greater society as tyranny. It is not tyranny to assert rights that do not harm others (in my opinion gay marriage, for instance, falls into this category; others may differ) and, in fact, the majority is tyrannical when it insists on abridging such rights. The community ought not abridge your right to speak because you say unpopular, even vile, things. It is positively tyrannical, however, to assert that your right to do what you will outweighs the rights of others, even rights broadly construed and un-enumerated. Sorry, but those taxes you pay are the price of civilization and if you think civilization is bad, go live in Somalia and tell me what the alternative is like. The discipline of civilization is the restraint of individual will, a discipline that must be enforced if we are to have civilization at all. Part of this discipline is the harnessing of resources to the greater good. We all give up some measure of autonomy for the privilege of living with others, an arrangement that has served us well. To assume you can live otherwise is childish.

I hope that I have not strayed too far from my original notions, but I am a little too close to this to tell. In a later post, I hope to offer my understanding of the nature of human societies, which informs the views I have expressed. If there is anything to take away, it is simply that I think it is fine to assert individual rights, but only to the point where it does no harm to others, and that individuals must be as careful about asserting the primacy of their rights as society must be. Libertarians would, generally, agree with the first part of this, though the sphere of action they claim would extend much farther from themselves.

And, a final point. I have picked on libertarians a great deal without going after far leftists. That is because, here at least, true leftists have such an insignificant voice that it does not even register. Radical collectivism is not the answer to our troubles any more than radical individualism is. Indeed, both are susceptible to the same aggregation of power and wealth in the hands of a few, and in the breakdown of social structures, as to be hard to differentiate by their results.