| | Sent to the opinion editor of the UCI campus newspaper tonight:
I and apparently at least several other local SoCal residents were sadly mislead this past week by advertising posted in venues such as the local libraries concerning the UCI series of public lectures on human rights issues.
I specifically reference the May 2nd talk given by Sally Engle Merry entitled "Human Rights in the Vernacular, Plural Legalities and Traveling Rights in India, China and the USA."
Just reading the title would give the average educated layman the impression that this lecture would be concerned with issues such as how to protect one's rights from predatory government agents, speed traps, greedy, corrupt officials of all kinds, etc., all of which might have both intrinsic interest and practical value. The actual talk, naturally, had nothing whatsoever to do with any of these.
In fact, the other thing that several of us got out of the talk was that it could basically have been restated completely without losing anything in five minutes. The rest of the time, struggling to stay awake, was a blindingly boring rendition of gross generalities.
Unless I completely missed the point - if that is the correct image here - the entire talk could be boiled down to the idea that the concepts of rights engendered on high by various governmental agencies, starting with the United Nations, are subject to all kinds of re-interpretations and odd local implementations as they shred down to the village level.
Duh! Is this a new idea? Did we need to listen to an hour of generalities to get there? If the hard sciences people had performed equivalently with their marvelous series of public lectures on the human genome a couple years ago, their department would have been the laughingstock of the university.
Forget slides, videos, powerpoint graphs, statistics (which would have been EXCITING in this case).
The questions at the end were a lot more interesting than the lecture, but it didn't require a huge effort to accomplish that. I asked two of them, which themselves illustrate the vast gulf between where the people who must somehow think that this talk was cutting-edge brilliant intellectual adventure reside spiritually versus the rest of homo sapiens.
First, how was it that Sally Merry's entire focus was upon "rights" as something determined by states or organizations of states, as diametrically opposed to the concept of "rights" put forth in the Declaration of Independence and rigorously defended from the Enlightenment onward.
To wit, that rights are inherent in being human, that they constitute the underpinnings of the implicit social contract, that they are no more arbitrary than our need for oxygen to breathe or water to drink, but rather are the basic claims against interference with our actions without which civil society is provably impossible.
Rights, in the essential meaning that has dominated most of Western thought and especially that of legal philosophers in the U.S., are not handed down from on high by philosopher kings in the U.N. or the White House. Rather, governments are instituted to protect those pre-existing rights, and only derive their legitimacy from that very source.
However, to give Ms. Merry credit, she did appear to at least superficially understand my question. Her answer, however, was essentially to reiterate that this version of "rights" was old hat. A "right," now, by her conception, is whatever a ruling body hands down.
Instead of a right to the fruits of ones labor, we have a "right" to food, clothing, housing, transportation, etc., etc., all of which have to be created by someone's labor, BTW, which means - if a right is in fact an enforcable moral claim - that each of us has a "right" to enslave our fellows to provide us with whatever our political authorities feel is necessary to keep them in power.
I.e., rights are now the cutting edge concept of the Hobbesian war of all against all, a complete reversal of the original concept.
How embarrassing for UCI, to actually sponsor such a travesty.
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