IKNOR!TE:

The concept of “human rights”, “individual rights”, and “natural rights” is fundamentally inextricable from the notion of “being right” and “living rightly”. If, for instance, suicide is wrong, according to the intrinsic value of an individual life, then the individual has the RIGHT to survive. If tolerance and complacency in the face of oppression is wrong, then the individual who lives with it has the RIGHT to speak out against it, even if it is only in one’s own defense. In every instance, rights and responsibilities are identical once framed within the context of a universal value, without which rights would amount to little more than feelings of entitlement and responsibilities would become the instruments of an impersonal, arbitrary and inhumane social order. In other words: HAVING a right, BEING IN THE right, and DOING the right THING, are one.

Contemporary philosophers try to deconstruct this notion, but in the process they only reveal their own shortcomings. In the wake of several devastating totalitarian regimes, we cannot afford to be Benthamites, presuming upon the Utilitarian pretensions of “greatest good for the greatest number”. This intellectual puzzle for excessively clever minds is actually child’s play for the devout monk who loves. Genuine altruism seeks not to put the Other at a distance nor to focus exclusively upon the Other’s distinguishing qualities. Compassion is by definition suffering with another; when we love others, truly, we regard them as individuals with needs not unlike our own, and weighed against their own, honest expressions of these needs as THEY understand them, we can help them to fulfill these needs, thereby healing the world by helping one individual at a time. This attitude of compassion is an appeal to the universality of human longings, and it transcends all boundaries of culture, nationality, and business interests.

Philosophers with very nationalistic or communitarian tendencies, often not without binding affiliations to their name, tend to behave as though natural rights have done little more in practice than to defend personal privilege. These philosophers are tempted to bypass human rights in the interest of vague notions such as “enfranchisement”. Yet for all of their talk of how the intrinsic nature of human rights was never “proven” they do nothing to prove that groups have some sort of natural value. Suffering, while it can be transmitted empathically, is an individual affair, as is innovation. Groups do not “do” anything, effectively. They do not feel, think, or invent; they simply MAKE us feel, think, and invent along certain lines. Groups have no rights, so it is absurd to try to appeal to the social progress of any group if one dismisses the value of every person. As I have indicated, it can only restrict our access to the universality of compassion. A person who claims that “black lives matter” but who scoffs at the suggestion that “all lives matter” has absolutely no foundation upon which to warrant her politics; while I can agree that all lives matter, for that includes me, and by extension I might extend compassion to those whose lives are (I am told to classify as) black, being told that not only do black lives EXIST but that they MATTER is ridiculous if I cannot even prove that my OWN life, within which this knowledge is phenomenologically contained, matters. Furthermore, if I can admit that ALL lives matter, I need not even the distinction of BLACK to DEFEND the rights of a person, which immediately eliminates epistemological confusion and allows the healing process to be direct, especially since it does not attempt to use the same thinking which produces a problem to solve it.

While human rights might have had little direct effect upon the civil rights movement, they were nonetheless the perpetual means by which that movement was vindicated. Had Dr. King not been educated in philosophy, we might never have found reason to defend his propositions. Any time that a mob is gathered in agreement, often violently and subversively, the mind’s instinctive reaction is to either fight or flee. One cannot derive anything of substance from a group, and wretched is the mind which is caught in it. Fascism only dies with the death of groupthink.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]