The Rights Revolution Read Free

possible for rights to create community.
    I don’t want to sound pious or naïve; I’m describing the way our society ought to work, not the way it actually does. Nobody, least of all me, supposes that rights have driven force and violence from our society. We are a long way from the ideal — but the ideal is not powerless either. And the ideal is that we try to live in a shared world based on right rather than might. The ideal is not there to lull us into sleep; it’s a continual reminder to rulers and ruled alike that we do not actually live by what we say we believe.
    The wider point to make is that rights never securely legitimize the status quo; they actually make grievance legitimate, and in so doing compel societies to continue their partial, inadequate, and therefore unending process of reform. This idea that society is forever incomplete, forever in search of a justice that remains beyond its grasp, is characteristic of modern societies everywhere. Ancient empires — the Aztecs, the Moguls, the Chinese — thought of themselves as finished creations, works of art that could not be superseded or improved. People in modern societies cannot think in this way. One reason is our rights talk. It condemns modern societies to a permanent self-inquisition, a permanentself-questioning. It is largely because of rights, therefore, that, in the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s words, modernity is on endless trial. 3
    The claim that rights just make us selfish individualists, defending ourselves against all comers, hardly captures the truth of the matter. First of all, some rights, such as those protecting freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, were expressly created to enable individuals to get together and create communities of belief, faith, and commitment. Without these rights there wouldn’t have been, for example, any socialist or union politics in this country. Second, having rights means respecting the rights of others. Respect doesn’t have to mean sympathy, friendship, or fellow feeling. We can function with far less. Respect actually means listening to something you’d rather not hear, and listening must include the possibility of recognizing that there may be right on the other side.
    Rights alone cannot create community feeling — you need a common history and shared experience for that. But living in a rights culture can deepen one component of community, which is trust. It’s not full, loving trust of the kind you get in good families or happy marriages. A rights culture is properly poised between faith and suspicion: we trust each other just enough to argue out our differences, but not so much as to forget the possibility that others may be tempted to tread upon our rights.
    So rights do more than legitimize individual grievances. They express values, and in so doing help foster conditional respect and a limited kind of community. It isthe very nature of this community that everyone in it will have moments of disillusion, fears about the fragility of the fabric that holds it together. For a rights community is in constant dispute. The balance it seeks is just enough collective sense of purpose to resolve these disputes, but not so much as to force individuals into a communitarian strait-jacket.
    So far I have been talking about civil and political rights, and the kind of political community — disputatious, unfinished, and yet coherent — they help to create. These rights derive from citizenship in particular national communities. It is the relationship of rights to remedies provided by these nations that gives them a clear meaning. Now I want to shift the focus to another category: human rights. These are the inherent ones I referred to earlier, the ones that derive from the simple fact of being human. They don’t derive from citizenship or membership in a particular nation. So where do we get them from? And how do we enforce them? Here we are in a murky place. Imagine asking someone who he