Reevaluating “Rights”

The main public event on my mind today is the Women’s March – not only from the widespread news coverage, but from many friends of mine who are participating. We should all be encouraged to see such strong evidence that despite the talk of subjective morality and human machines, most of us wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, some cause that deserves our support and sacrifice. And it is good that we find this greater purpose in care for others and the good of humankind. But I’m afraid that we’ve missed something very important – so important, in fact, that we’ve gotten the entire idea of human rights backwards.

There is no doubt that the people in this march were subject to some infringement on some of their rights. After all, everyone has their rights infringed upon at some point. This point was driven home on a recent plane ride. I have a right to personal space. The person in front of me has the right to put their seat back. But the math doesn’t work out; there’s only so much space to go around. And so, when the person in front of me decided to take full advantage of her right, I ended up passive-aggressively putting my knees into the back of the seat so that my laptop didn’t wind up driving a wedge into my chest.

The same problem emerged when I arrived back in my dorm. I have a right to relax by resting in quiet. The person in the room down the hall has the right to relax by blasting loud heavy metal. But the walls here are very thin, and the math doesn’t work out. So what’s the solution? If I can’t take any more without going crazy, I go down the hall and ask him to turn it down a little, and he’s very nice about it and does so. He gives up his right, because it’s interfering with mine.

That’s what courtesy is all about. Eating pasta with your fingers, or talking with food spilling out of your mouth, or refusing to bathe, isn’t intrinsically wrong; you have a perfect right to do those things. I don’t think anyone would argue that they’re wrong or evil in themselves. But they make other people uncomfortable, and you’re expected to have enough regard for your fellow man’s feelings to rein yourself in. All this tells us something very important: some things are more important than my rights.

We are talking about rights, you see, but rights can’t solve the problem. They are, in fact, causing the problem; we have gotten it backwards. We are so concerned with asserting all the things we can do, we have forgotten about what we should do, which is much more important. If I wish to go to a job interview dressed in warm-up pants and a tank top, I have a right to do so, but I should consider the lack of respect this shows for the person I’m meeting, as well as the consequences. Because just as I may take whatever action I see fit, the people around me may impose consequences for my actions. That is their right. Of course, it may infringe upon my rights, but that is the nature of rights: they clash. The math doesn’t work out; we must go beyond rights if we are to find the answer.

To understand this, we really have to go back and see where in the world we get this idea of ‘rights.’ Why, in the world, do we have rights? Why is it my right to live in peace, or in freedom, or with opportunity? The world started out as a clump of atoms, and eventually some of those atoms mutated into cells, and those cells reproduced, and the reproductions got more complex. At what point, exactly, did they suddenly become endowed with rights? At what point did the stars and the sun and the rest of the universe start generating the concepts of liberty and justice?

Or, if we just made them up ourselves, why do we have the right to demand them of societies that didn’t join us in making them up? We don’t talk about rights as a new concept we are forcing on governments or societies by coercion; we speak about them as something that already exists and merely needs to be recognized – indeed, must be recognized. But if we are to have objective rights that exist independent of our decisions, there must be some sort of legislator that gave us these rights, who also exists independent of us, and outside of the natural world – atoms cannot give us rights, no matter how they’re arranged; rights are outside the natural domain. We must, in fact, have some sort of a God.

This is where we got the idea of rights, after all, but since then, we as a society have rejected God, especially as the basis for any political action, and so we find ourselves unable to make sense of them. Because rights were never meant to be the end; only the beginning, the precursor. They were meant to show us that rights are inadequate, that rules were inadequate, that we could never legislate the world into perfection. We need law. But we also need more than law. We need grace. We need more than rights. We need love – the love demonstrated by a God who had every right, but chose to forego them for us.

Virtue is not meant to be an avoidance of things, although that’s what it becomes when we take God and grace out of things. Virtue is positive; it is for things, not against them. It is not about law; it transcends law. This is why, when Jesus was asked what the most important law was, he said it was to love God (who embodies all virtue) first, and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves – that is, acting in their best interests. Because if we stop worrying about our rights (and this includes self-importantly giving them up, as well as insisting on them) and simply worry about doing the best for our neighbors that we can, we will not only rule out harm. We will give help. Upon this hangs all the law.

Photo Credit: Mobilus in Mobili