Tag Archives: rights

First Meditation on Democracy [written Wednesday, July 25, 2007] REPUBLISHED

https _s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com_736x_ee_59_33_ee593300e425c02784549e0228c025e1In the begin­ning years of this blog, I pub­lished a series of arti­cles called “Med­i­ta­tions on Democ­racy and Dic­ta­tor­ship” which are still reg­u­larly read today, and have had some influ­ence. They still elic­it inquiries from remote cor­ners of the globe. They are now buried in the back pages of the blog, so I’m mov­ing them up the chrono­log­i­cal counter so they can have anoth­er round of vis­i­bil­ity, espe­cially (I hope) with younger read­ers. I am re-post­ing them in their orig­i­nal sequence over part of 2018. Some ref­er­ences in these “med­i­ta­tions” will date them to 2007–2008, when they were writ­ten. But I will leave them un-retouched, though I may occa­sion­ally append some ret­ro­spec­tive notes. Most­ly, they deal with abstract issues that do not need updating.


18-02-10 BLOG First Med pic 1

Har­mod­ius and Aris­to­geiton, the gay cou­ple whom the Athe­ni­ans regard­ed as the founders of their democracy

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. Read more »