On Rights, Part Four: Towards a Wider Ethos

In a previous post, I suggested that it is up to us to determine the relationship of ourselves to government. It is also up to us, having untethered the concept of rights from “Nature and Nature’s God” to also untether it from the nihilism that can follow. When rights were perceived as coming as though through divine writ, this imprimatur was sufficient justification for their existence. Recognizing that we, as humans, are the authors of our rights seems to open the door to all sorts of abuses. My call above that we accept responsibility for the exercise and limitation of rights becomes seemingly pointless.

If, the argument might go, rights do not come built in to the cosmos, why bother with them at all? At first pass, this is a logical response. Absent divine sanction, it would seem, we are left to visit all manner of horror on our fellow man. Free speech? Freedom of religion? No longer! In the absence of this moral component, we are left to return to a more “natural” state, what Hobbes called the “war of all against all,” where the strongest can impose their will on the weak without consideration of any “rights.” Those ruling over us have no obligation to consider our welfare and, if they are kind, will give us our rights only to the extent that their exercise does not threaten their prerogatives.

This only follows, though, so far as we have forgotten what has come before. We are individuals, but individuals integrated into society; society is our natural mode of living, selected for over the millennia; groups of individuals who cooperate tend to out-compete those groups that do not; morality, religion and government are all ways of extending the recognition and protection of kin to those not related to us. Government, the largest of these, is still us.

Rights, then, are the courtesy we extend to each other as fellow human beings, or at least as fellow citizens, in order to secure civic harmony. Just as we agree that a paper dollar or a coin made of gold has value, we agree that we have rights to speak freely or to worship as we please. Together, a group of us might have the power to repress the speech of others. We do not do this, ultimately, because we would not wish it done to us. This you will perhaps recognize as the so-called Golden Rule, close to its original Judaic formulation, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow.”

When we do curtail these rights, these courtesies, it is in the public good. So, child pornography is made illegal, the shouting of “Fire” in the crowded theater is not protected. There is no sense in which these activities can be construed to be in the public good. On the other hand, we do not prevent the members of the Westboro Baptist Church from picketing military funerals, provided no other laws are being broken, because their message, no matter how odious, does not harm the public good. Most messages, good and ill, fall into this category. We can argue their moral worth, but they will not cause physical harm, they will not lead the republic to fall.

Trouble comes, however, when allowing others the due exercise of their rights conflicts with our moral values. The problem with morality is that it is largely tribal, and tribal values tend to be conservative (writ small). Emphasis in the tribe is on stability, and since individual deviance tends to be disruptive of that stability, the tribe’s bias is to quash innovation. This pressure to conform can be seen among members of closed organization such as clubs or cults, and in open organizations like churches, companies or unions, where members profess an allegiance that stands beyond mere acquaintance and hold to a common set of core values. Deviants who resist pressure to conform often find themselves expelled.

Nation-states, on the other hand, have to take the longer view, so deviance is harder to define. Tribal values—or, if you will, “community standards”—vary from place to place; thus, what is required is a wider range of acceptable behaviors, so that the ethos of the nation-state can encompass the maximum number of its citizens (it will never embrace them all without dissolution). This range cannot be identical with any one set of tribal values, since no set of tribal values has the inclusivity needed though, obviously, tribal values can provide building blocks in the development of a larger ethos. Eventually, though, tribal mores that find their way into the larger scheme must shed their tribal underpinnings or risk turning into atavism at best and sources of division at worst.