What Is Happening to Human Rights?

Translated by Ralph C. Hancock with Daniel J. Mahoney. 

This article originally appeared in the September issue of the French monthly L’Incorrect. It is published in English translation with the magazine’s kind permission.  

In a limpid and profound book, Agnes Louis purports to explain the surprisingly persuasive power of progressivism in today’s society: on one hand, progressivism grandiosely declares each of its innovations (new rights, new laws) as if these were the advent of a new civilization, one that is at last humane. On the other hand, or rather at the same time, it explains that this great change changes almost nothing, or more precisely that it only extends the long succession of social [and societal] “advances,” that it is just one more step in the “long march of human rights.” This moral and intellectual device indeed deserves a vast and very careful examination.  Here I wish only to offer a few summary remarks on a major weakness of the great progressive narrative.  

In France, at least, we may in good faith derive all “new rights” from their source in the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789: “All men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” This principle seems in effect to provide a foundation for the right of women, after that of men, to vote; the right to create an enterprise as well as the right to work; the right to marriage of same-sex couples; the right of immigrants to enjoy the advantages of the country in which they arrive, etc. To be sure, the term “equal rights” is somewhat worrisome, since it contains or implies so many different, even opposed, transformations.  Consider a particularly significant example. In 1789, the principle of equal rights posited by the first article implied the abolition of privileges linked to birth and religious affiliation, thus giving all citizens the right to participate in the process of lawmaking. It also entailed Article 3, according to which “the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.” Today, we adhere wholly to the first article, but the third arouses the darkest suspicions in prevailing opinion. More precisely, the dominant opinion judges that the first article, rigorously understood, forbids all “national preference,” which would lead the citizens of one country to benefit from rights and advantages from which other human beings would be excluded. Why would a person born here have rights of which a person born elsewhere would be deprived? The very thing that in 1789 provided the uncontested framework of rights declared to be equal—the nation—is now seen as an obstacle, and even the most important obstacle, to the equality of human rights.  The rights declared at the beginning of the French Revolution overturned the rules of common life, but they still presupposed a common national bond; in fact, they elevated the nation to new heights. Today, the same rights tend to strip the nation of its legitimacy and thus weaken it and threaten its very existence.  

Thus, the principle of equal rights has led to the most contradictory consequences: first the consolidation and, so to speak, the sacralization of the nation, and then to its delegitimation and emptying out. This is because this principle defines a state or a condition; it is thus passive in nature. It is blind to any standpoint of action, or more generally to all human undertaking, which necessarily requires a framework to assemble the participants and a goal for them to pursue. The principle of the equality of rights, reduced to itself, makes it impossible to answer these primary questions: What shall we do? How shall we do it? Who are we? This principle can have a motivating and constructive effect, as in the process opened up in 1789; or, on the contrary, it can tend to discourage and to dissolve the framework of common life, as is the case today. After having helped to build the modern nation—with all its virtues and its vices—not only does it now deprive it of its political legitimacy, but it undermines the legitimacy of all the institutions of which it is composed, since every institution implies the necessity to discriminate between those who fulfill its goals and those that fail or refuse to do so.  

How was it possible for a principle with such ambivalent consequences, to say the least, to gain such strong and constant adherence? Here, we must note first of all the effect of an idea’s momentum, which has led to a “grand illusion.” Once awakened, the human mind seeks the universal, that is, the “human” as liberated from the limits of a particular group. It wants to find its bearings in humanity itself, humanity alone, taking into account only humanity in general, so as to be just and true. Alas, this man “in general” is an abstract and inert representation on the basis of which it is impossible to build anything, at least if one does not have access to another idea, a positive and concrete idea, of what one wants to do. Humanity in its concrete and active expression draws from sources wholly other than the indefinite equality of rights. 

We owe to Aristotle the formula for human effort: man is a political animal endowed with reason. An acting human being must therefore produce a “common thing,” he must give it a moral form and the means of self-government, a way to organize the education of its members and to conduct its own action internally and externally …  The question will thus not be that alone of equal rights, but also of the inequality of talents and of virtues, as was in fact noted in the Declaration of 1789. In other words, as important as the principle of equal rights may be, it has constructive relevance only as it is embedded in a practical goal and common action. 

To act in common in order to form an enterprise, a couple, a political community, a school, requires a separation, a distinction between the outside and the inside; it means loving one’s aim and the association that shares this aim, loving oneself and even preferring oneself. This is deeply rooted in the nature of things. The alternative is to be unable to do anything and in the end to no longer exist. Today we see the associations among which social life is apportioned as productive of advantages that we must urgently distribute equally both internally and externally. We are eager to distribute or redistribute what we neglect to produce. While Athens, by contrast, was the school of Greece, which spread its incomparable fecundity far and wide, down to the present time, it was always very jealous of its citizenship. In his famous “Funeral Oration,” Pericles exhorted his fellow citizens to be lovers of their city; he seemed not to fear that this preferential love would lead to a narrowing or closing of minds and hearts.  

The exclusive validity accorded to the principle of equal rights leads to the ever more rapid withering of the forms of common life, of the social and moral institutions within which human effort takes concrete form. There follows the dilution of the contents of life and the inflation of ideological signs and symbols. In schools and universities, grades and honors rise just as the overall level of achievement falls. We have lost the capacity to apply the criteria of the discipline or activity under consideration. Society maintains its self-esteem only by renouncing such criteria or making them illegible, by preventing itself from seeing and knowing what it is doing. 

A poignant example of this willing blindness is the French law called “End of Life.” Because we insist absolutely on making humanity master of life and death, we have decided to infringe upon the most venerated and universal, the most precious prohibition, that which forbids killing. How are members of society to be persuaded that administering death must and can become a form of service and even a form of care proposed by the State, and which the State is to furnish when asked? Of course, by offering them a “new right,” the “right to death with dignity.” Since this “death with dignity” is presented as the ultimate protest against the miseries of a life of illness, a life that is damaged or injured, there is hardly any humanly painful situation that cannot plausibly give rise to the demand to benefit from this right: the extension of the domain of administered death will be irresistible, as we see in countries that have legalized active aid to death or euthanasia. Under the shadow of this formula, death administered by the State becomes a particular case of dying, while in fact it is an unprecedented way of killing. The commission of the French National Assembly charged with specifying the terms of the law on the end of life had adopted an amendment (LFI) that would have recognized death by assisted suicide or euthanasia as “natural death,” resulting from illness. Is there any clearer way to reveal the unspeakable nature of the process that is being legalized? This amendment was not, in the end, included in the final version of the law, which refers simply to the general code of territorial authorities. But this of course says nothing about the administrative designation of this new way of “dying.” 

However one may judge this point, which is no minor detail, the most pernicious aspect of the new law lies in its treatment of the conscience clause. Only the individual caregiver can take advantage of this clause, and he or she must, moreover, point the patient making a request to a willing and available caregiver. Institutions that care for patients cannot invoke the conscience clause. However, when the law was submitted to the examination of the Conseil Constitutionnel, the latter formulated a “réserve d’interprétation”: the institution might refuse that such an “aid to death” be carried out on its premises if it went against its statutory missions, and on the condition that a willing institution be available in the neighborhood. Nobody knows how this potentially contradictory reasoning will pan out in practice. In any case, it leaves open the possibility that an unwilling institution will be forced to act against the conscience of its members. Thus, our State, under the pretext of validating a right that it invented, declares itself ready to force people’s consciences. Under the pretext of guaranteeing ever new human rights, this State lets itself be transformed into the instrument of an unprecedented tyranny.  

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