Right to Question Rights?

XHerakleitos - ¼/11

“The western left that ignored or, worse, justified the suffocation of Budapest, Camus thundered, ‘is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws’.”

- Sohrab Ahmari: Beware those who sneer at 'human rights imperialism’

Writing in response to Stephen Kinzer’s End human rights imperialism now, Ahmari throws a deep and potentially annoying issue into some relief. What are human rights? Where are they? Insofar as they are 'universal’, how is this so - and in what manner? For those who take the new, trendy neo-atheism seriously, how can “rights” not be seen as fictive constructs, failing as they do to show up on natural science’s evidentiary radar screen?

Assuming we admit that human rights are yet another mythological posit, the scriptings of a ritual iconography, do we necessarily turn away from being actors in this story? Can we still question the story and vicariously participate in its unfolding, fated as it were to a faith we cannot escape? Would Ahmari concede Kinzer’s general observation that the issue stimulates a need for “a period of reflection, deep self-examination and renewal”?

Leisure and luxury afford conceptual and theoretical engagements; and yet, challenging this rite, the Camus in all of us knows the truth of the matter works itself already in wild, newfound expressions - and can come knocking on our privileged doors with bleeding faces looking for help.