We use the word "rights" a lot but we no longer think about what it means. We treat rights like the sun that comes up every morning and is just there. But rights aren't just there and, unlike the sun, they haven't existed long before the human civilization. They are a concept invented historically very recently by a specific culture for this culture's internal, situational uses.
For "rights" to exist, somebody has to a) grant them and b) guarantee them. In the deeply Christian worldview that gave us the idea of universal human rights, God is the entity that grants rights. Once we've accepted that God created us in his likeness and endowed us with rights simply because we are human, somebody will have to actually provide these rights and defend them. The US was created specifically for the purpose of guaranteeing these God-given rights.
What happens, though, when we take God out of the equation? What happens when we leave behind the idea that rights are given by God to whom we owe many onerous duties in return?
What happens is that we begin to invent rights. Interest groups battle each other to make the rights that each group invents at a rapid clip reign supreme.
Philosopher John Gray, the author of The New Leviathans, says that our reliance on a poorly understood concept of rights is creating unsolvable problems. Does the right of a man to be called Susan trump my right not to call him that? Does the right of a fetus to come into existence as a person trump the right of a woman to control her own body? Does the right of a female convict not to be raped by a male prisoner who claims he's a woman trump the right of a female-looking convict not to be raped by male prisoners? Does the right to choose where you live trump the right of other people to a meaningful concept of citizenship? Does the right to education or healthcare automatically negate other people's right not to pay for your education and healthcare?
Every individual has an answer to these questions based on their own understanding of what matters. But there's no way to come up with an answer that will be acceptable to everybody. As a result, we have doomed ourselves to an endless struggle to cram our understanding of rights down other people's gullets.
The whole idea of rights that can mushroom into infinity is flawed. Rights cannot be the most important thing that defines our life in society, says John Gray. In the West, we are so trapped by this concept of rights that we are dismantling everything that works in our civilization and dooming ourselves to impoverishment and insignificance.
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