The Limits Of Equality

Minette Marrin in the Sunday Times :

Last week, for instance, David Goodhart, the much-respected editor of the intellectual magazine Prospect and a self-confessed “sensitive member of the liberal elite”, published a debate on whether the Human Rights Act can undermine national security; in his contribution, suggesting that it can, he talked of “a wider fallacy” about the origin and nature of rights. “People are not born with rights,” he said; at that I almost choked in surprise on my globalised Starbucks caffe latte.

“Regrettably, many of the world’s six billion people have few or none,” he went on. “Rights are a social construct, a product of history, ideas and of institutions. You and I have rights not as human beings, but mainly because we belong to the political and national community called the United Kingdom, with its infrastructure of laws and institutions.”

Exactly so. That is what millions of people of the right, the centre right and small “c” conservatives have always believed, not to mention some of the most distinguished of this country’s political philosophers. It may be what Goodhart has always thought, too — I don’t know.

But what I do know is that for as long as I can remember left liberals have entirely rejected that view and sneered censoriously at anyone bold enough to have doubts about universal human rights; they have used the phrases “human rights” and “universal human rights” as knock-down arguments — as if just to mention the words was itself proof of their validity.

We can see what happens to 'human rights' when things go pear-shaped.

Peter Glover :

"Lawlessness reminds us all that civilisation is a fragile thing. In the blink of the eye of a storm. And what we are left with is the blinding reminder of the nature of man's heart which, if left to its own devices without moral constraint, is capable of the most horrendous evil.

We have been appalled at the nature of the violence across the Middle East. We think we expect no more from some corrupt African or Asian nations. But what happened this week in the backyard of the world's leading 'civilised' super power has shocked not only Americans, but the world. Yet it will not, or ought not, to shock Christians nor Jews. Both know only too well that 'civilisation' is a name that expresses something about how man is able to overcome 'self' and work together in some kind of harmony. But look how quickly this civilised stack of cards took to collapse. Not months. Not weeks. Not even days. Just hours."

(I would expect Asian and African people - even from nations with corrupt government - to react better, because they come from societies where individual gratification has to take second place to family and community - just as it did in the UK a hundred years ago. There were floods of a much greater magnitude, with a much greater death toll, in Bangladesh a few years ago. I bet there were fewer rapes of seven year olds there.)

Two particular universal rights rapidly dissolving in the New Orleans Superdome were racial and sexual equality.

We saw that racism isn't a disease only carried by the hideously white :

He said of his eventual Superdome refuge: "There was a lot of heat from the people in there, people shouting racial abuse about us being white."

And that when push comes to shove, male-female relationships rapidly revert to something a little more basic than worrying about glass ceilings and women's earnings.

Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, told how students set up a security cordon when the power briefly went down in the Superdome amid fears they were going to be attacked. "All us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the outside, with chairs as protection," she said.