right

so anyway, i am teaching zero a lesson about rights, and it's quite instructive, so i'll share it with you.

like most Americans, zero believes he has a right to free speech in every arena because he has been granted it by the constitution of his nation. but he mistakes what a "right" is.

zero is barred from my comments. he will remain barred until he complies with a (fairly arbitrary) demand.

but doesn't he have the right to free expression? well, no, of course he doesn't. this is how rights work.

i can permit or refuse an opportunity for expression to anyone i choose. i can entirely withdraw it by not having comments, or entirely allow it by not moderating them in any form. until recently, i did the latter. i still grant the right to express yourself in my comments and encourage it, with the exception of one poster, whose comments i delete without reading. this is simply on account of his lack of intention to communicate anything. i bin him along with the other spammers. trolling is fine. i do it myself. but what's the point of trolling that has no function other than to say "i am a troll"? yeah okay, got the message.

so you have the right to free speech in my comments because i allow it. it's the same with most blogs. the owners allow you to speak in their comments, and can be said to have granted you a right to do it if they do not moderate their comments. but zero is not free.

this is how rights actually work. those empowered (me, in this instance) allow or disallow privileges to those not (you, in this instance). the right is not natural or inherent, no matter how much you whine about it. it's something negotiated. the powerful have to be made to concede rights.

but rights are often tenuous. they sometimes come with strings, and nearly always with limits. some you can only retain if you meet certain responsibilities. in a Western democracy, you have the right to liberty. but your responsibility is to obey the law. you did not negotiate most of the laws you must obey. (most are sufficiently old, in the UK at least, that not even our forebears negotiated them, because they are the customary justice of the powerful.) but this is how rights and responsibilities work. rights are ceded; responsibilities imposed. if you break the wrong law, your right to liberty is withdrawn.

so it is clear that rights are not absolute. why would they be? they are simple transactions between the powerful and the (relatively) powerless. of course, the powerless have power, usually. in the West, we are to some extent both. although power is difficult for us to wield, we could in principle change the rights we agree among ourselves, and we could change, or even overthrow, the law. in other times and places, even though one party might have been more powerful, or might have been recognised as holding power, others, each less powerful on their own, in concert had more power, even though they were not recognised as legitimately holding it. examples are the barons' revolt against King John, which led to the signing of the Magna Carta, and the second Russian Revolution, in which a power structure was torn away, and a whole new system of rights instituted.

Americans tend to believe their rights are inherent. it's easy to see why. the declaration of independence of the United States claims that it is "self-evident" that men are equal and are endowed by god with rights, which it further claims are inalienable. this contrasts strongly with the European conception of rights, embodied by Rousseau, which sees them as an outcome of a negotiation between different centres of power in the modern state. it should go without saying that the European idea is correct, and the American one completely wrong. after all, we do not have a creator, so his inability to endow us with rights is moot.

don't get me wrong. as do most liberals, i believe that some rights should be afforded all of humankind. i do not believe in rights for me and thee, but fuck the Chinee. i am a universalist in the main. i don't believe that cultural considerations should outweigh the need for universal rights. i won't list all those i believe are fundamental, but you probably have a similar list yourself, such things as the right to security of the person and the right to free association. how these rights are hedged and the responsibilities that are understood to come with them are in the main cultural matters.

zero can of course fight for his rights. he can continue to post comments, up to the point at which i'll have to moderate my comments. this happens in our world too. those with power, faced with demands for rights that they are not willing to concede--faced, you could say, with demands that they curtail their power: because that is another way to see the concession of a right, the voluntary (or sometimes not so voluntary) curtailment of power for the benefit of those you have power over, sometimes have to impose their power much more widely than they had wished because some will not accept the responsibilities they have imposed, and sometimes the imposition of power is irksome for those who have it, and they find it more burdensome to impose power than not to bother (as anyone who has kids will tell you). i should make it clear that i do not believe either that those who are imposed on must accept responsibilities that they consider unjust, or that they in any way become "unentitled" to rights because they refuse them. because i believe rights are generally negotiated (in a freer society such as ours; although i think that this is an outcome of a power struggle among different factions in society, which has led to a negotiated settlement over time) or ceded (in less free societies) or both, there is no question of entitlement.

and here is an interesting thing. no matter how "entitled" zero feels to his right to free expression, he cannot have it. he simply has too little power. he can force me to moderate my comments to impose my power on him, but he cannot force me to let him speak. he does so if i permit it, and not if i don't. in turn, i have this power because it is ceded to me by blogger, against whom i in turn am powerless. (it's a bit like vassalage, although the power is absolute here.) you can contrast this powerlessness with that of children. my kids generally do what i tell them. occasionally, i'll withhold privileges if they don't. i try not to, because a punishment model of discipline is far inferior to a negotiated self-discipline, but sometimes you do what it takes for the easy life. and kids respect it because they are well aware of what they do right and wrong. but mostly kids do what they're told because they agree that you have authority. they don't have to, but generally they do not understand how they could deny it to you. they also don't want to. children recognise that you have broader responsibilities than they do; even if they don't understand the mechanisms of it, they know that you provide food and shelter, and so on. the citizens of a democratic state are somewhat like children and less like zero. we may feel powerless, and our exercise of "power" is mainly restricted to elections that are as meaningless as family conferences. power is much more strongly influenced by pressure on lawmakers and the threat of the mob, which we rarely wield these days, but has been a powerful weapon in the past, gaining us some of the freedom we have today.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:06 am