Tonight I have for you a recent half-hour talk by Anthony Daniels (A.K.A. Theodore Dalrymple), on the corrosive combined effects of today’s expansive view of rights and the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism. I’ve transcribed some excerpts.
Dr. Daniels mentions that he had asked a young patient, who had announced with the glow of religious inspiration that she aspired to be a human-rights lawyer, where human rights came from. “After all,” he said, “there seem to be so many of them about these days!” She was stymied by the question, and appalled that he would ask it.
After a penetrating discussion of the blooming abundance of newly minted positive “rights” — he mentions such things as a “right” to clean water, or even to good hearing — he takes up the multiculturalist notion of group rights:
Rights, having first encouraged a kind of egotistical individualism in the population… are now widely believed also to inhere in or belong to groups, so long as those groups are perceived in some way to be handicapped or oppressed or victimized, nor or at some time in the past.
… [T]hese rights often conflict, but this is all to the advantage of a bureaucratic apparatus of adjudicators. Among the group rights claimed in practice by the leaders of groups (who are themselves almost always self-appointed) is the right not to be offended — which of course includes the right to decide what is offensive. There is no need for an objective correlative: you are offended, of course, if you say you are. But just as the appetite grows with eating, so does taking offense increase with having taken previous offense — and since taking offense gives one the right to decree what may or may not be said, being offended actually becomes an exercise in power.
This is very good, and very clear: the ostentatious (and dissent-stifling) moral lexicon of oppression accompanying our new and hegemonic culture of positive “rights” is almost entirely a smokescreen for the arrogation of power. (Given also that the distribution of power that it facilitates, with the basis of that distribution being to put power in the hands of those who win the competition for most-oppressed (i.e. lowest) status, it is a system that is optimized to flatten all human gradients — and thus to maximize entropy. Again we see Leftism showing its true colors: it is not best understood as the embodiment of Statism, as so many seem to think, but of entropy.)
Dr. Daniels now takes up a theme of my own, one that I have called “the narrowing effect of diversity” (see also this post, from 2016, and this one, from 2013). He says:
It goes without saying that the more groups that claim the right not to be offended, on the grounds that either in the past or present they have been persecuted or maltreated, the narrower and narrower the range of opinion that can be expressed. Which groups are to be protected from from offense becomes itself a matter of conflict — but the fact of the matter is that the majority of the population now belongs to one minority or another that claims the right to decide what is offensive. An atmosphere not exactly of terror — that would be a bit of an exaggeration — but at least of fear and anxiety, that I think is now general, has resulted: people are afraid to speak their mind.
In conclusion:
Well, whatever one might think of the doctrine of human rights [as expressed in 1948], I think it fair to say it was intended to expand the scope of human freedom, and actually did so. But in our hands — I mean, in the hands of the intellectuals of our time — the doctrine of rights has been increasingly used to assume power and limit freedom. So in summary I would say that the notion of rights has the following effects:
It increases egotism and an insensate individualism. It increases self-esteem at the expense of self-respect (people have a right to self esteem!). It promotes a psychological dialectic between resentment and ingratitude — since what is received as a right, is not appreciated (since it is received as a right), and what is actually received is usually less than what people think they are entitled to, thus becoming a cause of resentment. It induces a permanent state of querulous vigilance, insofar as it is feared that one’s rights are being constantly infringed. It causes perpetual conflict between different people’s rights that are not compatible — an incompatibility that can only be resolved either by legal action (that’s in the best of cases), or, in some cases, violence. And insofar as rights are inalienable, they trump (if I may use that word) all other moral considerations. And while promoting personal egotism, they also promote group rights — which entails the Balkanization of society, and the promotion of the idea that the division of the spoils is the main aim of political and economic life.
Well worth your time, I think. Watch the whole thing here.