Please Tell Me Human Rights are Still Alive

Part 1: Human Rights and Why They're Important

I was going to title this "Are Human Rights Dead?", but I thought that was too much of a downer.  In this post, I won't be talking much about conservatism, because I think it's already clear that the conservative leadership is opposed to human rights.  If you don't believe me, consider Unpatriotic Acts I and II, oppressing the right to justice by throwing people in Guantanamo Bay who were only ever suspected of terrorism, and, well, just about the entire Trump presidency.  (If you need an example, earlier this year, Trump called a summit at the White House to debate human rights and discuss which human rights to keep and which to discard.)

My concern, in this post, is about a type of leftism that isn't my leftism.  I've come to call this other leftism alt-left.  In this series of posts, I'll argue that the alt-left is authoritarian, even if they don't realize it, and argue for moving back to a human rights based liberal left.

I'm a life long classic liberal.[1]  That is, I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, as progressed by our society into the Twenty First Century.  What I mean by that is that I support women's rights, racial rights, LGBTQ+ rights, religious freedom, disabled rights, etc.  The key point, though, is that I do so because I believe in human rights, from which these ideas naturally follow.  This is no surprise, because human rights and Enlightenment philosophy have been the underpinnings of many of the social changes in our society, including the Civil Rights movement and much of feminism.  They informed people like Martin Luther King.  The Suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton led a serious paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence to demand women's voting rights, and rightfully so, thus demonstrating that women's voting rights follow naturally and logically from the very ideals that founded America.  The oppression of women in a free society is a contradiction in terms, but a hypocrisy that many generations of women had been forced to endure.  It was these very ideals that allowed the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and so forth, to progress our society.

I also see classic liberalism, as I mean it, as supporting equal opportunity, promoting class mobility, providing our children with their right to an excellent education (which I would say is currently being oppressed), making sure everybody has the healthcare they need, supporting women's reproductive rights (it's their bodies and the government should stay out of it), providing a safety net for the poor, etc.  In short, I understand classical liberalism in America to be on the left and basically progressive in nature.

Because I have a lot to say, I've decided to break my content into what will probably be three posts, as follows:

• In "Part 1: Human Rights and Why They're Important", I'll discuss why I think human rights are so important and why they should be the underpinnings of all progress in the west.
• In "Part 2: Why the Alt-Left is Authoritarian", I'll explain why I think that this certain alternative leftism I'm seeing these days is actually authoritarian, even if its adherents don't know it.  I'll also explain why I think this is an extremely dangerous move, not only for classic liberals like me, but for the alt-left adherents as well.  That is, it's a lose-lose proposition.
• In "Part 3: A Return to Liberalism", I'll argue that, to keep a free society, and to achieve the ends all of us on the left want, we should return to a truly liberal paradigm that focuses on human rights.

What is the Enlightenment?

Here's what Wikipedia has to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a period of changing thought and philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.  It shifted western thought away from old concepts that were still residual from the Medieval period.  The old guard of that era endorsed:

• the Divine Right of Kings (the Medieval idea that monarchs have been given the right to rule by God)
• a hierarchical view of rights, which understood aristocrats as having more rights than members of lower classes
• the notion that monarchy was normal and good
• the concept that rights only came from governments, rather than being universal
• that countries could and should have official established state religions that every citizen had to be a member of with the full force of the government to imprison, torture, and even kill anyone who wasn't. (By "religion," at that time, they meant what we would call denominations of Christianity, such as Catholic, Anglican, Puritan, etc.).  

The Enlightenment was a social revolution that changed all that.  It held that:

• kings have no divine right to rule
• governments should be run by the people
• everyone should have equal rights, regardless of class or title
• there are inalienable rights that everyone has, regardless of the law of governments
• people have the inalienable right to freedom of religion and, thus, that countries should not have official religions or, if they must, that citizens should at least be completely free to have different religions than the one established by the government.[2]

If the Enlightenment ideas make more intuitive sense to you than the pre-Englightenment ones, it's because the Enlightenment thinkers were so successful in changing society.  For example, in the 1770's, 13 British colonies in North America, armed with Enlightenment philosophy, fought a bloody revolution against the Crown to found the United States of America.

What Are Human Rights?

This is what Wikipedia has to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

Human rights are basically the second generation of a concept that originally came from the Enlightenment.  I think it's fair to think of them as Neo-Enlightenment ideals.  The older concept from the actual Enlightenment was something called natural rights.  When the Declaration of Independence talks about "inalienable rights", it means natural rights.  Natural rights are the concept that every human being has been given rights by nature, and ultimately God, which transcend any restrictions imposed on people by the government.  These include things like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to justice (no searches and seizures without a warrant, trial by a jury of one's peers, etc.), and many of the rights that are normal to us in free societies like the U.S.


However, as science advanced, this concept needed to be retrofitted.  For example, Darwin proved that living organisms like us evolve over time.  This calls into question the idea that a God is necessary to explain nature.  If we weren't created according to some divine plan, the idea that nature and God provide us with inalienable Natural Rights would seem to come under threat.  The retrofit is to simplify the claim.  Human beings, then, by our very nature and existence, have inalienable human rights.  So human rights are not all that different from natural rights.  No God or nature needed.  Think of human rights as natural rights 2.0.

Human rights include everything that I've already listed (freedom of speech, etc.), but have been expanded.  We have the inalienable human rights to egalitarian respect (as opposed to deferential respect), dignity, and education, for example.  Human rights are a major part of the underpinnings of our understanding today of what a free society is.  A free society is a nation that is not only of the people, by the people, and for the people (think democracy, here), but one in which the government defends people's human rights.

There's one last point.  I mentioned that natural rights transcend any government laws.  The same is true of human rights.  This is extremely important, so pay attention, please, because I've heard way too many people get this wrong.  There's a difference between human rights and legal rights.   A legal right is given by the government.  A human right is a right that each of us has regardless of the government.  Which one is the Bill of Rights?  Well, it's legal rights, but it's in our constitution because our founders believed so strongly in inalienable rights that they made sure our legal rights matched our inalienable ones.  That is, they took responsibility for making sure our free society does not oppress our inalienable rights.  While human rights can be oppressed, they can never be taken away.  Let me explain.

In a truly free society, the government's laws will always be aligned with human rights.  However, if a government fails to grant human rights to the people, that government is oppressing its citizens' human rights.  For example, because Saudi Arabia does not have freedom of religion (it imposes Muslim law on its citizens), it is oppressing its citizens' inalienable rights to freedom of religion.  Those citizens still have those rights (they're inalienable and cannot be taken away, because they're inherent in being human), but they are oppressed.  Every human being on earth as the inalienable right to freedom of religion, because freedom of religion is a human right, and human rights transcend legal rights.  Therefore, and this is critical to pay attention to because I'm downright frightened at how many people get this wrong, every human being in Saudi Arabia, just as every human being everywhere, has the inalienable right to freedom of religion.  It's false to to say that people don't have freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia, because that's thinking in terms of legal rights, not in terms of human rights.  The correct thing to say is that Saudi Arabia is oppressing people's freedom of religion. 

For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Saudi_Arabia

Another instance of this is that Guantanamo Bay is a human rights violation.  I've heard people defend it on the grounds that it was, apparently, according to them anyway, technically legal.[3]   Every human being on the planet, regardless of nationality, has the right to justice, to be confronted with the crimes of which they're accused, to be put on trial, and not to be imprisoned for long periods (say, longer than a day or two) without being accused of a crime, etc., etc.  They also have a right to a lawyer, to not be tortured, to not be forced to testify against themselves, etc., etc.  So, the U.S. government violated the human right to justice of the people it threw in Guantanamo Bay.


(This is the picture from the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp)

Another point, which follows directly from this, is that there's only one set of human rights.  People may disagree about what those are, but you can't have one set of human rights in one country and a different one in another country.  Whatever you think is on the list pertains to absolutely every human being on the planet without exception, and beyond borders, otherwise you're not talking about human rights.  Legal rights vary from country to country, but human rights do not.  This is because human rights come from the fact that we're human, not from any government.  So, Saudi Arabia, for example, can't just say, "well, here in Saudi Arabia, people have different human rights than they do in the U.S."  If they do, they've misunderstood the concept.

A belief in human rights is critical to any contemporary belief in a free society.  Without human rights, we are not truly free.  To believe in a free society is to believe in human rights.  To oppose human rights is authoritarian.

The Alt-Left Threat to Human Rights

In my next post, I'll talk about how I think a certain type of leftism, which I've termed the alt-left, has abandoned the concept of human rights in favor of something that, whether they know it or not, is actually authoritarian.

I've thought about this for a long time.  There have been times when I felt like I was in an H.P. Lovecraft story.  It felt like I was walking through some nice neighborhood, rounded a corner, and met a tentacled and fanged monster about to eat me.  I'm referring to something subtle here.  It's not what classic liberals like me affirm vs what this alt-left identity politics cult affirms, but how we each affirm it that makes us different.


This alt-left, believes, as I do, that we should support groups that have traditionally been oppressed, such as women, people of color, LGBTQ+, disabled people, religious minorities, and the lower classes.  That's not in question.  What differs is our methods and, more deeply, our underlying philosophy.  I know that human rights have a very important and central place in the philosophy that drives my classical liberal convictions.  However, I'm worried that human rights have little or no place in the underlying philosophy of this alt-left and that makes them authoritarians, whether they know it or not.

More on this in the next post and, after that, in the third post, I'll propose my solution.

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[1] I mean that in the American sense of the term.  I realize that in Britain and Europe, the term "liberal" can have other meanings. 
[2] What I've described is fair, I think, middle of the bell curve, as a thumbnail of what Enlightenment thinking was more or less like, but there was actually a lot of debate among Enlightenment thinkers, as there is with any school of thought. So what I've said isn't necessarily true in absolutely every case but shall serve, for the purposes of this post, as a workable reference point.
[3] I still don't get that myself... but there's some twisted way in which the U.S. government sending foreign nationals to a U.S. military base in Cuba, somehow, apparently, according to its advocates, anyway, somehow circumvents the rights guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights in our constitution... I'm still dubious about the legality of Guantanamo Bay, but, if true, its prisoners did not have the legal right under U.S. law not to be sent there, but they certainly had the human right not to be sent there, which means our government oppressed them.