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Entry: The Wrongs of "Rights" Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_wrongs_of_rights#7126 Post contents: A couple points to shore up and elucidate Mr. Robert's thesis that the rhetoric of rights undermines traditional political order and morality which I think is right on: 1. Rights are things that are almost always predicated of individuals. They are born of the early modern "philosophies" which posit the centralized power of the State over against a spray of atomistic individuals. This ideology is death to the traditional and realistic political order consisting of persons nested in a widening circle of intermediate organizations, a body politic which is organized naturally like a body with cells making up organs, organs making up organ systems and so on up to the fully perfected body. The rhetoric of individual rights tears apart this order, and paradoxically leaves individuals more helpless in the face of state power. 2. I think Adriana is right, it is not enough to repair to the traditional law of a people because over time these laws can become corrupt. Natural law and right reason are participations in the divine law, and therefore by their nature are open to the correction and perfection of revelation. Revelation is necessary because fallen man left on his own cannot for long keep pure the tenets of the natural law. The natural law and the revealed law which perfects it are universal (are for the perfection of every human being) but not in the same way as universalist Enlightenment rationalism is said to be universal. The "universal" of the Enlightenment refers to its propensity for abstracting from the particular circumstances of peoples, but the universalism of divine and natural law work on and perfect that which is innermost in a man, that which makes him to be a man and therefore works with in his particular circumstances. In a similar way Enlightenment "reason" is also false in that thinks itself not to participate in any higher order, but cuts itself off and pretends to an impossible and self-destructive self-sufficiency. Sent at: 2008 09 06