Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Equilibrium

For no apparent reason I was sitting around this afternoon thinking about natural rights. I guess mostly because my job is boring. I wonder if perhaps the right to daydream is also unalienable, although the tax-payers paying my salary would likely not think so. Anyway, I have concluded that what so many try to define as natural rights are simply human predilections. We claim the right to free speech because it requires a severe beating to shut the average person up. We claim the right to bear arms because we are in parts hostile and fearful and fascinated with machines. We claim the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure because we don’t like anybody messing with our shit. We claim the right of association because drinking alone is not as much fun. Our rights are, for the most part, just the freedom to be what we are.

From what moral authority these rights devolve, no one can truly say. Many would claim they are “God given”, but the Bible is oddly silent on whether or not a corporation is a person. I personally see scant evidence of any god’s existence and therefore cannot accept intellectually the presupposed moral structure that bestows these rights upon man. Mr. Jefferson, et. al. made reference to “nature’s god” in their eloquent treatise on why King George was a douche-bag, but this could have been a reference to Baal or Pan, or simply just a metaphor. Nonetheless, there is a tenacious impulse in the people of our nation to presuppose and defend with a mortal certainty the existence, universal applicability and moral sanctity of these rights.

Perhaps I overstate the case. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can certainly be abridged, often with the enthusiastic support of the populace. In some places you don’t even have to be technically guilty of a crime to be deprived of your life, but perhaps some pigs are after all more equal than others. I suspect that part of Mr. Jefferson’s intent was to suggest that rights were possessed not only by those who had the power to assert them, but that proposition then begs the question of what authority will preserve the rights of those who are not capable of doing so independently. Of course, the answer is government, but ironically we are now in an age where a significant number of our countrymen, perhaps even a majority, see government as the greatest threat to their liberties and they seek to fracture the responsibility for protection of individual rights into ever smaller units, right down to the solitary random dude with a gun. This pervasive suspicion of the police power of the state is, however, strangely lacking when it comes to the government’s imposition of certain behavioral constraints related to the moral preferences of certain groups of citizens. In America independence and conformity, like irony and hypocrisy, are mostly interchangeable.

I have cultivated an interesting perspective on the issue of unalienable rights, having spent more than a quarter of a century as a government bureaucrat involved in areas of regulation of building and development. I have listened to countless citizens bemoan the oppressive weight of government regulation and the fundamentally inequitable limitation on their right to engage in commerce. As a general proposition, the basic argument is that a person should be able to put whatever product on the market that they desire, and the informed consumer will make a rational choice concerning its purchase. Sounds like a winner in theory, but of course a couple of people usually have to be severely injured or killed before the informed consumer becomes informed. What do we do when one person’s right to pursue happiness contradicts another’s right to life? Bangladesh is, after all, the model for the unfettered free market.

Of course, regulation does often go too far and unreasonably impair the rights of individuals and is too frequently applied without due recourse to common sense, but perfection is not a prominent human trait, and neither is logical consistency. I continue intermittently to find irony in the significant subset of the population who will strongly assert their inviolable individual rights and in the same prolonged breath tell me their neighbors are illegally harboring a rooster which makes a lot of godawful noise. This makes we wonder as to whether harboring a rooster should not be included in the universal declaration of the natural rights of man. Sadly, absolutism is a luxury of the idle and mentally infirm and the rest of civilization must simply muddle along making daily the thousand compromises necessary to hold back the darkness of chaos and prevent interruption of cable service.