Our co-conspirator Vero posted her first essay in a very long while yesterday, which gave me an excuse to open a bottle of bubbly (not technically Champagne, but a California methode champanoise produced by a French house, which given the lingering effects of Trump era tariffs is an affordable and more than delicious substitute for the good stuff). Generally speaking, one need no more excuse to drink good Champagne than a day ending in “y”, but it is nice to reserve it for a special occasion.
Something in her essay, though, caught in me: specifically, the last paragraph:
So, what ‘right’ do I possess to voice my perspective? None. But if I want to offer my thoughts to your consideration, then it is my responsibility to give voice to the concepts and arguments that I create. I cannot promise you the truth; and if I were you, I’d be wary of those who do. For my part, I can only assure you that I care deeply about ideas which are ‘right’, ‘worthy’, ‘good’ and ‘important’ enough to deserve to be articulated and defended. And in all humility, I sincerely hope to be worthy of a slice of your attention.
The word that catches in my throat is “right”, which Veronique uses in several different forms in the paragraph. Yes, I know, she uses the word just twice, once in quotation marks, but it is a particularly loaded word.
Right, of course, originates in the “left versus right” opposition of sidedness, and in that form I can’t argue with it. I have a right side, and so do you; organic molecules are often oriented chirally, and there is a basic opposition of clockwise and counter-clockwise which is mathematically equivalent. But over millenia, at least in European languages, the notion of “right” as both correct, as morally deserving, as legally obligatory, has emerged from what presumably started as just a this side versus that side kind of opposition. Right just doesn’t oppose left; it opposes wrong, and it also opposes obligation. What a strange thing for so small a word, to become loaded with the concepts of freedom, of morality, and to still retain the concept of just being on the clockwise side of 12 noon.
It makes the Trotskyite rebel in me wish to release myself from the word entirely. I’ve thought about this for awhile because I don’t think we have any rights – in the sense of moral freedoms – at all. Rights are, and always have been, social constructs. In the absence of a human social structure, the only “right” we have is to die, unfortunately. Everything else is contingent, and demands that we make a decision – or when we’re too young to do so, demands that others make a decision either for our benefit or not. Our parents fight for our lives as children not because we have rights to life, but because they consciously – or subconsciously – choose to sacrifice some of themselves for us in order that we may live. We have no right to life: we have a gratitude deserving to those who didn’t make a far more rational choice for us to die, so that they might have more food and stuff so as to make their own existence more sustainable.
Obviously, if all creatures were so narcissistic and selfish as to ignore their offspring, no species would survive – so we can observe that the choice to self-sacrifice is almost an evolutionary imperative. But that’s not a right: that’s an obligation. In other words the right to life is very, very poorly stated: it’s an obligation to support, not a right to life. And as we observe others, we see that obligations – once so viewed – are desperately resented by the selfish, and only embraced by the few.
Actually most of our “rights” in civil society map to this kind of a model. Our rights aren’t freedoms – they are obligations on the rest of us to respect our fellow citizen’s choices which are not our own. That is to say, the language of “right” is wrong. The language of rights is actually an accumulation of social obligations on the part of all of us to allow others to be different from ourselves. It’s not that they have a right, in other words; it’s that we owe an increasing obligation through time to society itself, to allow it to embrace others’ choices in ways which may bother, or offend, or horrify us. When it reaches that last extreme, we may push back against society demanding that obligation of us, and ask rightly whether it makes sense for us to be forced to withhold our approbation. But society shouldn’t hide behind the idea of a “right”: it should recognise that it is obliging its citizens to do a positive something.
I say all this not to complain about the expansion of “civil rights” or rights in general in our society. Overall, I think it’s appropriate for society to demand of us – as citizens in roughly participatory democracies – to accept others as they are, even if I’m very clearly a heterosexual white male with all of the unnecessary privilege and social access I get purely from the accident of my genomal history. For example, I’m actually pretty comfortable with the idea that I should have to work twice as hard to justify my talents, because for the past five hundred years Black people have had to work ten times as hard to do the same. It’s not that anyone has a right to a job or an opportunity – it’s that I have an obligation to demonstrate that my value as a human being is real, not just some historical accident due to the colour of my skin. I accept that the rights of others are not in fact rights, but are obligations of mine, obligations which, in their complex entirety, give meaning and solidity to a just society.
So I come back to Veronique’s question. What right does she have to voice her perspective? I turn that on its head. Veronique, you have no right: you have an obligation to voice your perspective. It’s not a question of right or wrong, of allowance; without you expressing your voice, society and we, your friends and colleagues and casual readers, are lost. We are less and we cannot become that which we hope to be without your voice. It’s not that you have a right: it’s that you are needed, and until you express yourself, we are lost. We may not find ourselves in any given work you give us – but without it, we will with certainty miss the point.
At the same time, these obligations are not right in the sense that they are necessarily correct. They are contingent. They will change. I probably won’t live to see them change materially – such is the reality of being subject to a four or maybe five score life in years – but they will change radically for my son, for his children, for their great grandchildren. The complexity of society will dictate the obligations that those future children will owe to their peers; the complexity of society today, in March 2021, will have little if anything to drive the notions of right and wrong, of correct and incorrect social obligation, in the centuries that lie ahead.
This is also not to say that there is no right and wrong – although maybe that is the correct way to put it. Respecting the potential of sentient beings, of beings who are capable of (even if they don’t achieve it) self-reflective and selfless action, is, I think, always a good. And maybe that’s the word I want to strive for: the good. Not the right, not the against-the-wrong, but the good. The good is what Veronique gave us yesterday in her essay; whether it’s correct or not is not particularly relevant, but her sharing, her giving, was good.
We spend a lot of time writing on this site, talking about what we think and about what does or does not make sense. I’m pleased to be a part of a good project, and to be accompanied by good people in moving that forward. Are we right?
No. We are not right. And that’s okay. In fact that’s good.
Dear Peter,
Thanks for pushing the argument even further than I did. I agree with you that “the language of ‘right’ is wrong”. It’s wrong in part because, as a concept, ‘right’ is only one side of a binary (ie. right/left, right/wrong, rights/responsibilities). To inquire into the privileged components of these dichotomies, without ever relating them to their conceptual counterpart, leads to a very skewed perception of the whole phenomena that we are engaging with. It can only create imbalance, like a Ying without its Yang.
Your focus on obligations highlights that there is only a limited entitlement which follows ‘rights’. In the plural form, it’s easier to see that we mean legal or moral rights; an expectation as to how one is to be treated by others, including by the ultimate of the King. This was the first raison d’etre of the ‘natural rights’: ie. that the King was obliged to other people than himself! Thus, as you point out, ‘rights’ put obligations onto others; an obligation to tolerate born of the realization that we must (somehow) live together (on this Earth, in this society, etc…).
I’d argue that my ‘right to free speech’ is real, even if it is socially constructed. As a society, we provisionally decided to value multiple perspectives. But you are ‘right’ (ie. in the good) to mention that my right to free speech is accompanied with an obligation to ‘say what needs to be said’; ie. to ‘speak truth to power, like Foucault, Chomsky or Edward Said would put it.
But I argue that this right/obligation to voice one’s perspective is already conditional: I can and therefore must speak IF (and possibly only if) I care. It is my care for the world, for others, for myself (ideally in this order) that justifies my actions. I think that this is the deeper message that I meant to say: that since I care how we are all going to continue to evolve within the ‘fabric-of-existence’, then I must contribute.
I disagree with you, though, about the ‘speed of change’ of the norms surrounding ‘what we owe to each others’. Many people today ask and abide by preferred gender pronouns. We practice ethnic diversity in more than our food choices. In Canada, we’ve had large scale attempts at ‘Reconciliation’ with indigenous populations. The norms regarding social obligations are evolving fast. I actually think that what is missing are attempts at clear articulations of the type we are doing on this blog!
Some say, Socrates amongst them, that a key role for a philosopher is to be a ‘midwife’ for concepts, for worldviews, for new relationships with others and with ideas. In other words, through our efforts at articulation and clarification, we can ‘bring into the world’ something that wasn’t there before. What I mean is this: the complexity that we call ‘World’ continuously gives birth to itself and we can — with our words, questions and methodic investigations — ease the contraction pain and lower the risks of still-birth. This is the type of ‘good’ that I want to do with my efforts.