IV. The Inversion of Rights
No concept is more central to the Enlightenment’s self-understanding than the idea of natural right, the inherent entitlements that belong to every human being by virtue of reason and nature, prior to and independent of any government. Life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness: these were to be the inviolable foundations upon which a just, rational, and enlightened society would be built.
The subsequent history of human rights demonstrates something the Enlightenment philosophers clearly did not anticipate and never discussed: a right without a sound basis is a right that can be redefined, expanded, contracted, and ultimately inverted by a government deemed capable of granting and defining them.
Consider the fate of intellectual freedom, that most cherished of Enlightenment values. J.B. Bury, in his 1913 History of the Freedom of Thought, offered a confident chronicle of humanity’s liberation from the shackles of religious and political censorship. The trajectory seemed clear: from the persecution of Socrates, through the medieval suppression of heresy, to the hard-won victories of the modern age, mankind was progressing toward ever-greater liberty of mind. A great scholar and the editor of The Cambridge Medieval History series, Bury wrote as a true believer in Enlightenment ideals, and his beliefs were representative of educated opinion in his time.
The subsequent century has not vindicated his optimism.
The terminus of this progression is now visible. In the nations most committed to Enlightenment values, the ones that pride themselves on their liberal traditions and constitutional protections, speech is criminalized today to a degree that would have astonished Bury. In Britain, in Germany, in France, in Canada, and increasingly in the United States, one may not express, and in some cases may not be permitted to hold, certain prohibited thoughts. “Hate speech” codes, “anti-discrimination” requirements, “anti-extremism” measures: the vocabulary varies, but the effect is consistent. The freedom of thought that Bury celebrated has become the regulation of expression that his heirs enforce.
The right, unmoored from any transcendent ground and no longer endowed by Man’s creator, transmogrified into anything those in power declared it to be or not to be. The freedom to think became the freedom to speak, became the freedom to express, and became the freedom to express only what is permitted, which is to say, no freedom at all. The Enlightenment’s signature achievement consumed itself through its own warped logic, and those who enforced the final inversion did so in the name of the very values they were negating.
Nor was this the only right that was modified over time. The right of free association transformed into the crime of racism. The right to worship the Christian God was reduced to the right to pray in silence so long as no one noticed. The right of self-defense was inverted into an obligation to retreat. Even the marital rights of a man to his wife and children, honored throughout the centuries, were reduced to nothing more than financial obligations.
The is not a corruption of Enlightenment principles by its enemies. To the contrary, it is the application and extension of those principles by their truest believers.
