What’s Wrong With Human Rights?

Introduction

As I never tire of saying, all of our current cultural difficulties and challenges are the result of a pitched battle over editorial control of the dictionary. Everything comes down to that. He who defines, wins. This goes down to the pronouns, and outward and upward to the overall narrative. It includes the jots and tittles and it includes the entire novel. He who defines, wins. He who names, wins.

Teddy Roosevelt once talked about “weasel words.” The same way that weasels were purported to suck eggs, so also the purveyors of weasel words bite off one end of the word, and then suck all the content out of them. When all is said and done, you still have something that looks like an egg, and is shaped like an egg. It is just that nothing of substance is there any more.

So these people who are wanting to rename the world are guilty of two great offenses. First, they want to assume to themselves the right to name things they have no right to name, and secondly, if they get far enough along with their misbegotten venture, we discover how bad they are at naming.

What would you make of someone who walked into your house, pointed at your third child, there in the high chair, and said, “His name shall no longer be Trey.” One of the other kids, not knowing that you shouldn’t encourage this sort of behavior, blurted out, “What should be his name then?” If the reply was something like “Wizzlewirt,” you would then have two issues on the table. The first has to do with why a stranger thought he had the right to rename your kid. The second would be to ask why he thought he had the right to name anything, given that he was so obviously bad at it.

Humans and Human Rights

In order to speak intelligently about human rights, you need first to be able to explain what a human is. If someone claimed to be an expert in automotive maintenance, but then slowed down to a complete stop when you asked him what a car was, the chances are pretty good that he would not be your first choice when it came to your next tune-up.

We are dealing with competing versions of human rights because we have two mutually-exclusive understandings of what a human being is. One side believes that a human is nothing special in particular, while the other side believes that humans are God’s stewards on earth, created in His image in order to care for His creation.

One view believes that we are the end product of so many million years of evolutionary struggle, and that we are just one more twig on the great evolutionary tree. We clambered up from the primordial goo, taking our sweet time to do it, and in the ultimate scheme of things, we still have exactly the same value as that primordial goo—nothing more and nothing less, which is to say, none. We are time and chance, acting on matter.

If all this were true, the ringing words of the Declaration would need to be sent back to the editors for some more red-penning. According to this view, we were not created equal, but rather we evolved. Because we evolved over aeons, the process did not result in equal progress but rather in gross inequalities, as a glance at side-by-side photographs of the Tasmanian blobfish and Audrey Hepburn would quickly reveal. There being no Creator, he cannot endow anybody with anything, and so the vaunted inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have now rapidly devolved from rights into privileges, all of which are quickly evaporating. And because they are now privileges and not rights, the one word we may not apply to them is “inalienable.” Privileges are always alienable.

The reason that secular progressivism has such an egregiously low view of human rights is because they don’t believe in God, and God is the only possible foundation for any kind of human dignity at all. You cannot dispense with the God who created humans without simultaneously losing what it means to be a human. And when you have lost that, you no longer have any right to speak about human rights at all.

The other view holds that we were created by God, male and female, in order to bear His image in the world. God shaped the form of Adam from the dust of the ground, and then breathed the breath of life into him. If you refuse to believe that God did any such thing to the dust of the ground, then it follows, as night follows day, that all of us are still nothing more than the dust of the ground. If nothing happened there, then we are the dust of the ground that nothing happened to. Either God did something special with the dust of the ground, or He did not. Clearly He did not if He does not exist. That means that every human being is nothing more than matter in motion . . . just like a rat, or a mole, or a cockroach.

Human life has dignity because it was a dignity bestowed. Without that endowment, without that gift, without that grace, we are all of us nothing more than meat, bones, and protoplasm. We are meat robots. With the signature of God on us, we should all treat one another as the handiwork of God. He is the everlasting God, the holy one who inhabits eternity, and so this means that we all have an obligation to listen to his Word. We have an obligation to respect His signature, treating everything He signed with dignity and respect. We respect one another because we respect Him.

Freedom to Lie About It

If we put these two worldviews side by side, we see immediately that in one of them, anything goes, and in the other, there is a God who will judge all the affairs of men at the Last Day. In one there is no fear of God, and in the other one there is. We should freely grant that in the world where the fear of God is publicly recognized and honored, individual men are still sinners. There are always some who don’t behave in the fear of God, and so we must all long for the day when God will settle all accounts. That is a sad reality in every culture, in every time.

But when the fear of God is missing from an entire culture, when a society has formally embraced a civic atheism, what then? When a society has forcibly banned any consideration of transcendent holiness as any possible basis for our corporate behavior together, what then? I have already indicated the path that all such societies are on. There will be death camps, and struggle sessions, and abortion mills, and death panels, and confiscatory raids, and all of it, all the time, blanketed with nonstop lies.

This is actually the aspect of our corporate unbelief that we most need to be concerned with at the present time. This is where the action is right now. If the rulers and boss-men have the permission of their worldview to ship you off to the salt mines simply because you criticized them in print, do you think they have the permission of their worldview to lie to you and everybody else about what is going to happen to you? If they think they have the right to do the things they will do at the camp where the train stops, do you think they believe they have the right to lie to you about why you should get on the train in the first place?

So yes. They absolutely reserve to themselves the right to lie about what they are up to. Of course they reserve the right to lie, as a brief glance around will quickly verify. And I am not here talking about the lies that politicians have always wanted to tell in order to embellish their resumes. Of course that is bad, and indicative of a rotten heart, but we are talking there about penny-ante scandals. Politician A got five medals in Vietnam, not seven. Politician B never really made Eagle Scout, the way he said he did. Politician C says that she never had sex with Politician A, which was technically true, because it was really Politician B. All of that is bad, and sign of corruption, and God will judge every word (Matt. 12:36).

I am here talking about the grandiose lies, the “five-year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains.” I am talking about the Great Leap Forward stuff, or the great Campaign of Joy, or the Green New Deal, or the Great Society. In our day we have gotten to the point where all these commie lies are so manifest that they now entail the guilt of any who believe them, and not just those who tell them.

Solzhenitsyn once touched the thing with a needle.

Conclusion

Everyone always says that the next election is the most consequential in their lifetimes, but this time, that might actually be true. And the central duty we have in the run-up to this election is not so much how we vote—although that is important. The central duty we have is to develop an allergic reaction to lies of any sort. Big lies, little lies. Blue state lies, red pill lies. We cannot stop lies from being told to us. But we can stop accommodating the way we live our lives to them. We can refuse to act in any way that might indicate that we believe the lie is true. We can and must stop playing the role of gullible chumps.

So in such a time, in a moment like ours, the one great political imperative is to “live not by lies.”