Bloc Rights Are Not Rights
Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism foreshadowed the doom that befell the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for - for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number - becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself.” - Hannah Arendt, 1951
A great many people have recently rediscovered Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Written in the wake of World War II, just three years after the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt skilfully charts the conditions that led to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Birthed in the imperialism of the Age of Sail, accelerated by ideologies of hate, these darkest of regimes deployed terror, propaganda, and the destruction of individuality to cling to power. Almost everyone today sees parallels between these horrors and the political conditions today, albeit with wildly varying interpretations.
Chapter 9 is entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”, and describes the terrible circumstances following the Great War. The ‘Rights of Man’ does not refer to Kant’s rightful condition for freedom (where the Universal Declaration comes from), but ‘natural rights’ as championed by John Locke, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine - ideals influencing the US Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” claim that everyone is endowed with “unalienable Rights” such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the Rights of Man, unlike Universal Human Rights, were dependent upon belonging to a nation. After the Great War, hordes of nationless refugees had no viable means to claim such rights, having effectively become expelled from humanity.
However, Arendt recognised something we are blind to: while the Rights of Man era commenced with a recognition of nations being “under God”, the need to assert these rights came about because people were no longer secure in their equality before God as Christians, the religion that had dominated Europe and (in a corrupted form) driven imperialism. Rights transformed from sacred claims outside the political order into secular obligations. In the nineteenth century a consensus emerged that the Rights of Man needed to be invoked whenever people needed protection against the new arbitrariness of a society that no longer shared a common theological or ethical framework.
The warning from Arendt is that this loss of sacred transcendent measures led inevitably to conflating “what is right with the notion of what is good for”. As we have tragically discovered, this situation cannot be avoided by making the scope of ‘good for’ as wide as all humanity: it simply becomes a fulcrum to lift even greater atrocity in the name of necessity. If we had followed Kant’s path, this could have been avoided - but even the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights failed to cleave to Kant’s vision for securing our mutual freedom. Rather, after a Kantian-inspired opening within the first seven Articles, supposed rights to education, health, social security and so forth follow soon after. I am not alone in being slow to recognise why this approach must inevitably backfire.
As soon as ‘human rights’ are code for ‘good things we want’, we are hurtling towards the wishlists of pseudo-rights that dominate today. “Human rights are women’s rights”, “human rights are black rights”, or “trans rights are human rights” ought to be trivial claims, since we are all supposed to be equal and our civic rights should secure that equality. Instead, these slogans gradually degraded into assertions of bloc rights that are in no way concerned with securing a like freedom for all: they eventually devolved into demanding special considerations for one class of people against all others, a perverse situation culminating in the bizarre bigotry of ‘antiracism’.
Bloc rights are not rights, but merely political desires dressed up in the putrefying revenant language of human rights that came into being when the Universal Declaration diluted Kantian rightful freedom with a wishlist of government services. Thus just as the failure of the Rights of Man led to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, so the corrosion of Universal Rights has led inexorably to Bush and Obama’s America, Johnson and Starmer’s Britain, and Merkel and von der Leyen’s EU. This crisis is not something rushing towards us out of the uncertain future, it has already inflicted its terrors upon us all.