In What or Whom are Human Rights Rooted?

By Dr. David Glesne
President, The Virtues Campus

Might the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution shed light on a better way forward?

The domestic and global conversation about human rights today has become muddled and politicized. There has been a dramatic proliferation of the number of rights. This proliferation is taking place by commissions and independent experts with scant democratic oversight. What kind of clarity might come domestically and globally were we to look to the foundations, to the first principles of human rights?

The Colonial Period: early 1600s - 1760

During the colonial period, the British largely left the colonists alone. The colonists established their own legislatures all the while royal governors were sent by the mother country to govern the people.

Early in the 1700s, the colonists began embracing a doctrine of natural rights and natural law, a doctrine that became widely known and discussed during the next 60 years. There was a deepening conviction that they had a right to be free, a right to self-government. The royal governors were always there to keep reminding them, “No, you are a part of the empire”.

An appeal to natural rights doctrine grew in intensity in the 1760s. It was a doctrine that claimed to be true for human beings everywhere – not just locally. In the colonial constitutions it was a staple conviction written into their documents. Within their biblical mindset, the natural rights doctrine gave birth to elections by the people, representative government, limitations to the powers of government and the securing of civil freedoms and rights. Most of the state constitutions had Bills of Rights. These state constitutions are restatements which help us clarify what is contained in the Declaration of Independence.

The Founders:

The Declaration of Independence begins with timeless, universal truths. For the Founders, human rights are rooted in the whole order of Nature, in the ultimate sense of right. The Declaration starts without reference to any place or group of people but with every place and every people. The Creator of all endows all human beings with certain inalienable rights.

Since these human rights are rooted in a just God who creates every person with equal dignity and value, they are equal. We are all born equal to each other. This is not an equality in the sense that we are all the same. We obviously are not. The score at the end of every ball game bears this out. It is not an equality of outcomes. Human beings are equal in the sense that no one has the right to dominate anyone else without their consent. No one has the right to rule another. King George III of England didn’t think that. The king of France didn’t think that. The whole world from time in memorial didn’t think that. But these Americans did think that because they had the Bible. The Bible shaped their state constitutions and the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration said something the ancients never said. “All men are created equal.” It was a remarkable development in human history.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” (Preamble, The Declaration of Independence)

(For a treatment of the absolute contradiction of the American Founding and the practice of slavery, see the post “The Elephant in the Room – Slavery”)

The Bible, which teaches that every human being is wonderfully created in the image of God and the doctrine of natural law which taught that all human beings have the right to be free by birth and thus free to govern themselves, shaped the Founders’ understanding of both the Source and content of human rights. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is conferred upon human beings by their Creator, before society or human government comes on the scene. Human rights that come from God by nature come first.

The notion of human equality, i.e. no one has the right to rule anyone else without their consent, was put in moral language in terms of rights and natural law, a moral claim on behalf of that free and equal state of being. From that claim comes a natural right to liberty from which all other rights can be derived.

If you have the right not to be ruled by another, it means having a right not to be assaulted or killed by another. Thus, the right to life. If you have the right to use your own mind and body to acquire and possess property, it means you have a right to property. If you have the right not to be dominated in the way you worship God, it means you have a right to religious freedom.

The human being is first and foremost an individual and only secondarily a member of society. Human government is legitimate if it respects those individual rights. A government is not legitimate if it does not.

The Progressives: 1890s to mid-1960s

At the end of the 19th century, a school of thought emerged calling itself Progressivism. It is a word that has been revived recently in American politics. This new school of thought said that the Declaration of Independence is obsolete.

“If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.” (Woodrow Wilson, July 4, 1911)

Obsolete, then, is the notion that human beings are born free and equal. They are born unfree and unequal. They do not have innate human rights to life, liberty and property by birth.

“Freedom is not something that individuals have as a ready-made possession. It is a product of human making.” (John Dewey)

These progressives thought that the central problem with the Founding was that the Founder’s assumed their principles were to apply not just to them and their own time, but to everyone at all times. No, they were mistaken, said the progressives. The Founders did not understand that they were confined only to their own historical circumstances.

Progressives regarded human beings first and foremost as members of society (the rise of identity politics) and secondarily as an individual. The human rights of these members of society are conferred upon them not by their Creator but rather by the society to which they belong. Rights are to be determined by legislative authority, by bureaucrats, in view of the needs of that society. That means that bureaucrats give rights and can take them away. Social expediency rather that natural rights determine the sphere of individual freedom.

The progressives were sure a shift in thinking is needed. Society as a whole needed to be thought of first, and the individual second. Society is more important than the individual. The power of the State tramples the rights of the individual.

The progressives believed human beings are different than they used to be. There has been tremendous progress, enlightenment and increased capacity for people to deal with all the new social and economic ills of the times. Therefore, it is thought government is no longer a danger to the liberties of citizens and so you can increase the scope of government.

In his “New Nationalism” speech in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt called for government to take a much more active role in effecting economic equality. Since human beings are born unfree and unequal, some need greater access to resources than others. The only way to make them free and equal is to take away someone else’s property and resources and give it to them. The old notion of the individual property rights had been serving as a hindrance to some of the more aggressive policy proposals. What was needed was a social view of property which would in time lead to the government taking property from some and redistributing to others.

“Socialism proposes that all ideas of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the state consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of public interests. The thesis of the state socialist is, that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the state may not cross at will.” (Socialism and Democracy, Woodrow Wilson, 1887)

The Post-60s Progressive Liberals

The New Left prepared the transition away from Progressivism to the Post-1965 view of liberalism. Anti-constitutionalism is taken to a new level. The Post-60s progressives continue to embrace the ideas of a living Constitution, the rule by experts and administrative decree rather than the rule of law and the new concept of human rights which demands the redistribution of resources rather than securing inalienable natural rights of all.

The new liberals rejected as too constraining the progressive framework of bureaucracy and administration which had held to the idea that government should secure the rights to equal and impartial laws. The progressive idea of “uplift” and duty to citizens was considered a horrible freedom. The strict demands on sexual morality and support of the family that characterized earlier progressives was tyrannical. They felt that the vast increase of the number of new victim groups of citizens were left out of the operations of the Administrative State. Expanded government power is needed to meet the needs of these new groups.

Therefore, a new ruling class must protect victim groups. Government must expand and be empowered to practice the denial of equal protection of law in favor of group rights and crony capitalism. Identity politics comes into full bloom. Instead of the Common Good and the security of the rights of all, it is now the rights of the less advantaged – especially the right to be recognized or the right of self-esteem. Equal protection of law and security of American rights at home and abroad is further undermined.

The incoherent blend of post-modernism with the earlier progressivism makes it well-nigh impossible for policymakers, who are almost always strongly influenced by these ideas, to think clearly about what is needed to secure American rights.

Bullets For Reflection:

• Following the Declaration of Independence, might not a better, healthier and more just way forward through the muddled and politicized confusion of human rights today be Equal rights for all, special privileges for none? Equal rights for blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, etc., regardless of gender or social standing. No special privileges for blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, etc., regardless of gender or social standing. That would mean Congress taking back their constitutionally mandated legislative duties and responsibilities from the administrative bureaucrats and make impartial laws which are then enforced equally for all for the Common Good.

• If the timeless and universal truths set forth in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence were true then, they have to be true now. If they are false now, they had to be false then.

• It is no longer self-evident to progressive liberals that all human beings are created, much less “created equal” or created as “male and female.” It is also not self-evident that a Creator has endowed every individual with inviolable rights, dignity and value. Ignoring “conscience” and shouting down opposing voices isn’t surprising when a “soul” doesn’t exist, man is a slightly more advanced beast and “conscience” is culturally conditioned chemistry.

• The reason we think we can do whatever we want if we work hard enough is because we are born equal, the same as each other.

• Historically in the West, the individual or the family is the grouping which informs the formation of governmental structures and policies. This is not so in totalitarian states. There is great variety within families, but extended families have the same root. It is not hard to see a family resemblance:

“Communism and Nazism…have founded themselves upon the opposite axiom, that individual men are secondary to society.” (Frank S. Meyer)

• If society is an organism, then the people who make it up are no more than cells in the body of society, and society becomes the criterion by which moral and political matters are judged. Rights exist essentially in society, not in individuals. Whatever ‘right’ a person is allowed to have are pseudo rights, granted and revocable by society. Moral claims of the individual are in effect reduced to nothingness.

• There is the assumption today that since human rights are universal, it is the job of every government in the world to protect rights all over the world. The Founders rejected that idea completely and totally.