The notion of “rights” exercises an overwhelming authority over the world in which we now live.  Its reign is so absolute, at least in the West and among already westernized peoples, that we can hardly conceive of any other idiom in which to understand and organize our common world.

The power of the category of “rights” is not limited to what is directly at stake in a public forum, whether at the local, national or international level.  A frame of thought that structures our public discourse cannot help but profoundly condition the way we understand our world and indeed ourselves, our very humanity, in every domain of our existence, even the most “personal” or “private.”

In fact, the very pretension to a kind of insulation of the “private” from the “public” sphere is closely associated with the assertion of “rights” as the fundamental category of our moral and political existence.  Thus one might say that the notion of rights exercises its greatest power over us in the very moment when we think we can keep it at bay, when we attempt to circumscribe its influence by confining it to the public or political realm, while reserving some “private” sphere to ourselves.

For in “privatizing” what is arguably most important to us (religion, for example), we open ourselves to interpreting such goods as “rights” and therefore in effect subordinating them to the idea of rights, with all that is implied in that idea: the family can only be grasped as a “lifestyle” among others, and religious truth is necessarily understood as your truth or my truth or their truth or our truth, and the only truly “true” truth, public and authoritative, emerges as the right each of us has to whatever “truth” we may freely choose to profess. The truth of rights seems to be, by common consent, our only public, universal truth, and therefore, irresistibly, our only truth. One might almost say that, instead of truth, we are left with “rights.”

But surely this cannot be the final word.  The conquest of truth by “rights,” however far advanced, can never be complete, for reasons that are deeply political and deeply spiritual, rooted, I would venture, in the very meaning of our humanity. At the most political level, it is obvious that claims of rights will always multiply far beyond the capacity of any public authority to satisfy such claims, and so it will always be necessary to assess the justice of competing claims; thus our attention will be drawn to some larger context in which these claims may be understood and evaluated. And what could ground such an evaluative context, if not some understanding of truth, of how things really are?

The emancipation of the distinctive language and consciousness of rights from the problem of a higher “truth,” is strictly unthinkable.  But this is of course no reason for complacency: the world of rights is driven along by an attempt at such emancipation, or, more precisely, by a succession of ever more radical attempts to emancipate rights from the authority of any common truth.

From the beginning, the  “rational” assertion of human rights has been grounded in the promulgation of a new faith, a religion of humanity, or rather of the future of humanity, a faith in which the very definition of humanity must always once again be deferred to the future.

Today, for example, following Kant, but only as far as we find it convenient, we pursue “human rights” as an expression or vindication of “human dignity.” But defining this dignity would limit it, so we are left with no experience in terms of which to understand the worth or dignity of humanity but the very activity of the negative assertion of human rights, the ongoing repudiation of all attempts, rooted in religious or philosophical traditions, to give this “dignity” some positive content. And so a lazy materialism and militant relativism emerge as the effectual truth of the sublime dogma of human dignity. Without grounding in a substantial truth about humans, rights erode their own foundation.  Look around you.

Ralph C. Hancock is a professor of political science at BYU