All philosophies stand on choices that cannot be justified by proof. Any amateur Socrates can demonstrate that I can’t prove that two and two are four, or that freedom is desirable, or even that I exist. Ultimately, ideas, no matter how passionately held, rest on assumptions that cannot be known with absolute certainty. It does not follow from this that we should avoid acting on significant assumptions, or that we should abandon the analysis of ideas. If I’m standing in the middle of the street, and see a twelve-ton truck hurtling in my direction, I don’t stand there, paralyzed by epistemological uncertainty. I jump out of its way. Later, seated on a comfortable couch, with a cold beer in my hand, I might indulge in the luxury of reflecting that the truck may have been an illusion, or that I cannot prove with certainty that being hit by a truck is worse than not being hit by a truck. All of us must choose our basic assumptions, either in a conscious process, guided by reason, or unconsciously.
This is a meditation on democracy, and democracy only becomes a coherent idea when it rests on the assumption that human beings have rights. This, in turn, rests on the assumption that there is a moral dimension to the universe. Outside of these assumptions, political thought becomes arbitrary. If individual human beings have no rights, then whatever happens is self-sufficiently justified, and any state of affairs that human beings find themselves in is as desirable as any other. Effectively, if there is no moral dimension to the universe, then it is a matter of indifference what happens. Events just come to pass ― say, the Holocaust, or the Slave Trade, or Abu Graib ― and there is no point in discussing them. It is pointless to seek justice or defy injustice, because the very idea of justice depends on the assumption of a morality that rests upon something more substantial than custom or whim. In the absence of moral choice, people seek some sense of order in human affairs through some amoral organizing principle. Loyalty to a group, obedience to authority, or the familiarity of ritual become substitutes for ethical conscience.
The unavoidable choice that a democrat makes is to assume that the universe has a moral aspect, just as it has a mathematical aspect, and an aspect of matter and energy ― no matter how hard to grasp these aspects might be. In the Democrat’s view, the demands of ethical conscience overule loyalty to groups, obedience to authority, or ritual.
Morality comes into play where there is consciousness. A human brain may be composed of cells, and those cells of chemicals, and those chemicals be reducible to atoms, but those simplifications do not rob it of its inherent complexity. It is fundamentally different, as a pattern, from a lump of coal, which can also be reduced to atoms. To get a hint of this kind of complexity, imagine an old-fashioned can of movie film containing the classic drama The Maltese Falcon. There is no material object inside that film can other than a long strip of celluloid, on which are printed blobs of opaque emulsion comprised of silver halide grains suspended in a gelatin colloid. What distinguishes these particular blobs is that they create a pattern of selective transparency and opacity, and that when light is projected through them, they create an image on a screen. That pattern is not an arbitrary jumble of light and dark. It preserves the recognizable images of human beings named Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. These human beings actually lived and breathed and thought. Their faces, voices, and many subtleties of their personalities are preserved by the celluloid. These “mere” blobs of light and dark amount to something with meaning. Levels upon levels of meaning can be discovered in this pattern, including irony, suspense, comedy, love, betrayal — all the intricate subtleties of an artistic creation. If there was only one surviving print of The Maltese Falcon, I would run into a burning building to save it. I would not run into a building to save a random exposure of film embodying no significant pattern.
One does not have to propose some supernatural agency to assign significance to a human mind, or to imagine a “ghost in the machine”, or something as undefinable as a “soul”. There may very well be such supernatural events and agencies. I have no way of knowing whether they exist or not. But their presence is not necessary for me to make a moral analysis, or to make moral choices.
Moral relationships come into being where there is consciousness. Any two conscious beings coming into contact with each other can be subject to a moral analysis. I have no moral relationship with a rock. Nothing I can do to a rock, or that a rock can do to me, requires moral judgment. But I have a moral relationship to anything that is self-aware and can think. This is why I assume that I must exercise moral judgment in my relationship with Stampy, my pet rabbit. Stampy has an evident degree of mind and self-awareness, which means in political terms that he has some “rights”. These rights emerge directly from his existence as a conscious being, and because of these rights, I cannot torture him for my own amusement, or let him starve to death in agony because I would rather spend his food money on dvds.
It’s consciousness, not life, that is the significant factor here. A bacterium and a carrot are living beings, but they are not conscious beings. I do not have to worry about violating the rights of a carrot. My respect for life impels me to act in defense of endangered species of plants, or to oppose the clear-cutting of ancient forests, but it does not impel me to enter a moral discourse with a particular tree. However, my relationships with conscious beings are individual relationships with a moral dimension. Wherever there is any degree of mind, I must exercise some degree of moral judgment. The presence of mind in human beings is self-evident to me, and I cannot evade the conclusion that human beings have rights, which I am bound to respect. “Rights”, in this sense, emerge from the nature of conscious beings, from the reality of the world. That is why it is appropriate to refer to them as “natural” rights. They are not arbitrary customs. They are not fabrications of society.
The practicing democrat assumes that the rights of humans emerge from their status as highly conscious beings, and that all human beings share the same basic type of consciousness. Consciousness should not be confused with intelligence. People may vary, individually, in mental skills, but these skills are trivial variations within the framework of consciousness. All of us, clever and not-so-clever, are self-aware beings, with personalities. Only those who have suffered extreme forms of brain damage, wiping out personality entirely, could be considered to have a substantially different level of consciousness. It follows from the recognition of this uniformity, that all human beings have rights, and that these rights are identical for all human beings. In fact, a consistently practicing Democrat would assume that these rights would hold true for members of an alien civilization, if we should come into contact with them.
Rights, emerging from individual consciousness, and presumed to be identical for all individual human beings, can be evaluated only in relation to individual human beings. There is no such thing as a “collective right” that somehow supersedes, or cancels out the rights of any individual. A group of human beings does not have a consciousness. It is merely a statistical abstraction. Nations do not have rights. Ethnicities do not have rights. Corporations do not have rights. Churches do not have rights. Genders do not have rights. Associations of people with surnames beginning with the letter L do not have rights. Only individual human beings have rights, and those rights are absolutely identical for all self-aware human beings, anywhere, at any time, without exception. Rights are not affected by, or dependent upon, culture, custom, or tradition. Rights do not vary geographically or temporally. They cannot be traded, rescinded, canceled out, renounced, disposed of, or altered. They are, in the charming vocabulary of the 18th Century, “inalienable.”
These three concepts — a moral aspect to human relationships; inalienable human rights; the moral equality of all human beings — are the fundamental premises of democratic thought. Attempts to establish democratic practice on a theoretical foundation without rights or morality are too intellectually slipshod to stand up to scrutiny.
In the early 19th century, such an attempt was made, by a cluster of philosophers called Utilitarians. Their influence was predominantly in the English-speaking part of the world, but echoes of their thoughts often occur elsewhere. To this day, Utilitarian arguments can be heard in political science classrooms, and have been absorbed into the vision of “Liberal Democracy” portrayed in many textbooks. The Utilitarian phrase that is most often repeated is that the purpose of government is to secure “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This is particularly confusing, because this phrase is usually accompanied by the assertion that there is no such thing as an objective moral choice, but only the possibility of a “utilitarian calculation”. Since the “good” implicit in the calculation of the “greatest good” cannot be allowed to refer to anything but the calculation itself, then it’s rather hard to determine exactly what is being calculated. Any action can, with a little creativity, be made to fit the Utilitarian formula. Could not 51% of a society choose to exterminate the other 49%, serving the “greatest good of the greatest number”, then 51% of the remainder exterminate another 49%, following the same logic, continuing until there remained three people, and two of them solemnly voted for the execution of the third? In fact, many of the outrages of history have presented themselves as some form of Utilitarian calculus. The Holocaust, after all, sacrificed a few million Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals on the alter of the “greater good” of the greater number.
We find the same type of statistical calculation, without reference to human rights, where “democracy” is crudely conceived of as an ideology justifying the absolute rule of any majority. There are many nations where political parties are nothing more than fancy names for particular ethnic groups, and the electoral victory of the largest group is followed by a ruthless persecution of the smaller.
In practice, Utilitarian thought was usually interpreted to mean whatever policy seemed most convenient to a ruling or managerial class. The early Utilitarians, whose pre-eminent spokesman was Jeremy Bentham, had little interest in the democratic process. The “greatest good” was something that was to be calculated by a ruling elite, with as little interference from the “greatest number” as possible. But a later generation, taking its cues from John Stuart Mill, inherited the philosophical trappings of the early Utilitarians, and modified them to the end of preserving social stability. The proponents of what came to be called “Liberalism” saw democratic institutions as a useful safety valve to head off revolution in the lower classes. Elected parliaments and a widespread franchise would provide useful input to guide a ruling class, prevent it from getting dangerously out of touch with its subordinates, and head off extremes of policy by promoting compromise. It would also invigorate a ruling class with “new blood” in the form of ambitious parvenus. But “rights”, as moral imperatives, in the sense proposed by some earlier thinkers, were dismissed as figments of the imagination. The inequality of human beings was taken as self-evident. There was no question, in their minds, that a society was a collective organism, whose survival was more important than the life or liberty of any individual. Individual human beings were seen as, in the end, disposable components. Rulers ruled over the ruled. The idea that people should be ruling themselves, as moral equals, was dismissed as a utopian piety, a primitive stage in history, or self-evidently impossible. The idea that inalienable rights might constrain the exercise of collective power over the individual was left out of the discussion entirely.
Variants and descendants of this view dominate the intellectual life of the countries that today hold democratic elections, but they are not, as often claimed, the philosophical basis of democratic thought. At best, they are confused attempts to jam some sort of democratic practice into the traditional framework of societies based on collectivism, rank, and caste. At worst, they envision democratic institutions as an etiquette, by which an aristocracy preserves its power more effectively with charm than with threats.
The evolution of democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, with its highly visible class divisions, was the template for this idea of democracy as a tool for defusing unrest. The attitudes which evolved there where widely imitated by ruling elites in other countries. Those who saw the survival of the State as the measure of all things pointed to the successful use of democratic institutions to ensure that survival. They concluded that it was more effective, in the long run, to manage people with temperance than to openly bully them. But this temperance remains, in the minds of most elite thinkers, an expedient policy in the service of the State, not a recognition of natural rights. The State is not seen as a structure with which to defend the dignity and rights of individual human beings. Instead, in this “liberal” tradition, human beings are seen as useful animals, which must be properly managed for the preservation of the State.
In North America, where class lines were never clearly drawn, social roles were vague, and the political elite drew its membership from varied origins, democratic institutions evolved with much less fear of “the mob”. Instead, democracy was seen there as a process for working out necessary compromises between confederated regions, cultural groups, and clusters of economic interests. Some public discussions hinged on the notion that the State exists for the purpose of protecting the rights of people, but more of them relied on the idea that people exist to serve the State. The inconsistency of these clashing premises is rarely pointed out. Public debates jump from one viewpoint to the other, eventually resolving themselves randomly. The tendency is for the subtler idea of the primacy of the individual to lose out to the amoral concept of the primacy of the State. People in Canada and the United States still have great difficulty visualizing democracy as a process of people governing themselves, and still see their elected representatives as being their bosses — not a hereditary or class-based ruling elite, to be sure, but still a bunch of people who outrank them, and make decisions for them. Nevertheless, a vague idea of preserving personal liberty floats around in the background. It’s not expressed in any rigorous theory, but merely felt as an emotional theme. When people feel that government is getting a bit too pushy, that their sense of propriety is being stressed, they grow uneasy. Politicians, ever sensitive to the public mood, pull back from excessively arrogant policies. To a democratic theorist, these are small victories in the battle to defend rights, but to the population at large, they are merely the preservation of comfortable custom.
Modern democratic practice developed from a series of conflicts and compromises between ruling elites and truculent populations, with only oblique and accidental influences from systematic democratic theory. This is not to say that the accomplishments of these democracies are negligible. Far from it. A person does not have to be an expert in medicine and biology to be healthy. They need only to have learned a healthy lifestyle. The lives of people in any country with a history of reasonably democratic institutions are profoundly different from those who live at the whim of strutting generals and marxist mobsters. No sensible person would choose the latter environment for their own children. Because they evolved mainly by lucky breaks and unanalysed impulses, rather than by explicit philosophical insights, does not mean that their practical success should be ignored. However, it does make it difficult for others to learn from them, and imitate their success. It’s rather like trying to lean how to ride a bicycle by listening to someone describe himself riding a bicycle. You don’t know exactly what it is that you are supposed to ask, and they can’t explain what they are doing. The rather poor outcome from attempts to “export” democracy from successful examples to new ground demonstrates this weakness. Neither the exporter nor the importer have a clear enough understanding of the “product” for it to be successfully duplicated. Instead, what ends up being exported is nothing more than a cluster of empty forms and arbitrary customs. Without the underlying ethical component, these forms and customs are useless.
Everyone who goes through the system of education in the countries that are called “democracies” is taught early in the game that “natural rights” are a quaint concept propounded by wig-wearing philosophers in the 18th century, but irrelevant to modern political thought. At the same time, the word “right” is used in the broad sense of any desired specific objective (“a child should have a right to have his own room”). To add to the confusion, people in these relatively privileged countries are regularly exposed to the desperate pleas of the oppressed and abused in non-democratic countries. The victims of such oppression have no choice but to appeal to a concept of universal morality, since they can hardly appeal to custom, or to a sense of propriety and normalcy that they have never experienced. They can’t look to Utilitarian sophistries or moral relativism for any hope. The language of Rights ― rights which are universal and inalienable ― is the only logical language for them to employ. From this kind of crisis, the word-pair “human rights” has entered the language. However, it has never quite penetrated the conscience of our intellectual community that “human rights” means nothing if it does not mean “natural rights”. The same professor, journalist, or social scientist who proclaims an enthusiasm for “human rights” causes, will simultaneously subscribe to a vague moral relativism, mixed with a jumble of contradictory formulas inherited from the Utilitarians, and assert that rights are an illusion. Their sense of justice, formed subconsciously from being raised in an environment of democratic normalcy and a vague sense of personal liberty, tells them that something is being violated. They sense that some concept of morality makes torture, concentration camps, and death squads objectively wrong. But they have no philosophical tools to connect their sense of justice to their view of the world.
My aim, in these meditations, is to make these tools available, both to observers who live in safe and comfortable places, but more importantly, to those on the firing line… the people who have to struggle to be free.
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