But, of course, when rights are situated amid might and wealth something happens to rights

"facets of having one's way in the world"

IN THINKING ABOUT THE PERVERSION of the idea of rights divorced from moral responsibility which I have been writing about I remembered a sentence in the following passage from Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version Of Reality, the sentence I altered for the title.  Before you read the passage, consider what happens if you replace the word "wisdom" with the word "rights" and the situation of "rights" within the same triad with might and wealth when you really think about it in terms of what happens to the habitually considered virtue of the words in that context.  The implications of virtue in our habitual way of thinking about wisdom in that triad is a lot like the ill considered reality of rights divorced from any moral responsibility and that restraint on their perversion into something far removed from good.  Especially consider the role that the "free press" and their legal representatives have played in that perversion of the concept of equally endowed rights to the place where "rights" granted to artificial entities and the creation of money as the equal of speech was the Supreme Court rigging the biggest "rights" lottery for wealth and so might, the rich and so powerful.  And even more so the entertainment that is what most poeple spend most of their time consuming so it is what really bends and distorts the thinking of far more people, far more so than the "news".  

The poet focuses upon the great triad of control and pride, the three facets of having one's way in the world, might, wisdom and wealth.

Might here means military force, the capacity to control markets and natural resources.  Wealth means the capacity to manage capital and impose requirements and restraints and leverage on all of the others so that the whole of the global economy is ordered to flow toward us.

But, then, wisdom.  We had not expected wisdom to come along with might and wealth. Especially because our theme is wisdom and the work of the university is wisdom. Who can speak negatively of wisdom when we remember our great intellectual inheritance from the Greeks?  But, of course, when wisdom is situated amid might and wealth something happens to wisdom. And, of course, that is what has happened among us. We have understood with Bacon that knowledge is power and we have transposed wisdom into knowledge that could control, that strange interplay between wisdom and knowledge has brought us the gift of the great scientific revolution in Bacon's time.  And in its wake the great technological advances that have moved toward control that is never disinterested. And before we knew it Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas have entitled a book "The Wise Men," a study of six of the titanic figures who have managed U. S. foreign policy with Niebuhrian realism and have produced the abiding superpower, ample wisdom, ample might ample wealth in order to be the chosen race in the modern world.

Perhaps inevitably the great universities have signed on with that wisdom, have entered into compacts of wisdom that has bought the universities the wealth of research grants and the power of connectedness. And now we are sobered as we are in this consultation, needing to take a deep breath concerning the way of wisdom-enlightenment-knowledge to which we have been pledged. That wisdom has led us to immense power and wealth.

If you went through the exercise of considering "rights" in the same place in that triad with might and wealth you would, I think, find that in a very simliar way as "wisdom" you will find that the habitually considered virtue of "rights" becomes very problematic when you consider the actual inequality of the distribution of those due to the manipulation of those with wealth and, so, power and their servants in the judiciary, legislative bodies and in the executive branch.  

Consider what happens to this later passage from his lecture when you replace "rights" for "wisdom" and what really happens when you replace equality with inequality, whether you lie about that on the basis of "merit" or some other excuse.  When, like wisdom can, "rights" are turned from a necessary restraint of moral responsibility into a mere tool of having your way.   As any assertion of rights is inevitably tied in with or, rather, mistaken with MERELY "having your way in the world," they are probably even more problematic than "wisdom" when located within that triad of control.

Second.  The triad of fidelity focuses on the neighborhood as the triad of control is drawn to the club. The club is a staging ground for exclusion so that one need deal only with one of those one chooses who are most like us. It is a mark of privilege that brings with it the sense of knowing best and being right. It proceeds by excluding the other, variously Women or Blacks or Jews or the Poor.  And, of course, the best universities have been no more hospitable than the clubs with their exclusionary quotas.

But the neighborhood takes in all of us who move up and down the street. There is an egalitarian assumption about the legitimatcy of all its members and the sharing of resources to which all are entitled.  Historically, without romanticizing a rural community before social stratification and division of labor and the development of surplus wealth - with the exception of the doctor - was more or less an egalitarian community.

But the urban reality of social stratification, division of labor and surplus wealth has largely destroyed that sense of neighborly egalitarianism. And, of course, the university is deeply enmeshed with that crisis. For admission is a ticket to entitlement.

We can no longer have affirmative action the urban elite court has ruled, so that the privileged who come from better schools are better prepared for applications and, so, on the basis of socially constructed merit can occupy the space and the fellowships.

We produce a class of managers of social symbols - of which I am a member - marked out at best by only a vague memory of having done real work. The process of privilege and entitlement evokes a stream of influence that culminates in might and wealth and a certain kind of wisdom.  And, of course, such a trajectory of control will hide behind a hundred defenses of pedigree and certification and gated communities and tenure and all the rest.

See how that passage works when you replace notions of "rights" for notions of "wisdom."

I think the motives of how the idea of wisdom or the idea of rights are perverted through the accumulation of petty privileges in even the only slightly more favored population who want to get a first foothold in the climb to the top (as if any but a handful of them will get anywhere near that) and the ease with which their consciences can be numbed from what it gets them in regard to that inequality turning the amoral wisdom or denatured right into a virtue is worth thinking about.   

The idea of so-called merit, especially when you attribute that to an allegedly natural inequality in intelligence or  biological "fitness,"  is a very seductive temptation among the college credentialed who most certainly believe themselves and, so, their children will be so favorably endowed.  Story telling, especially the debased form of that in novels and movies and stage plays often interchange all of those singifiers of "virtue" in ways that pervert all of our thinking.   When you add the refusal to distinguish between rights as an equal endowment by God to God's creatures, which People are, to a mimicry of having the power to declare such endowments by jumped-up, often basely motivated or merely deluded judges, justices, legislatures, heads of state, etc. you get something very similar to the official designation of wise ones through academic credentialing and media publicity.  But if I go on in that line I'll get into the designated "public intellectuals" and that would turn into a rant.  


P. S. from the next day.  I decided to give you a small sample of how that would go.

The extent to which equality and democracy and any organized or group attempt to make life decent for all is dependent on the moral restraints of malignantly claimed and used freedoms or "rights," an attempt which is absolutely dependent on and even defined by an intention to follow moral precepts of the kind that will do that is as at odds with the conceptions of modern, materialist, secularism as it was the feudal notions of divine rights of kings.  

Kings, princes, legal frameworks of hereditary family dominance (such as the "democracy" of classical Athens was set up to benefit) were notorious for exempting themselves from the same kinds of moral restraints I'm talking about which were more often, haphazardly, demanded of those lower down in those systems.  As has been pointed out here, many times, the results of that were what God told the prophet Samuel to warn the Children of Israel would be the results if they turned to a king, he would rob them and oppress them and steal their livelihoods and even children and they would be their slaves.  Not unlike what the American financial and legal system is doing to what used to be the middle class. If republican government, even one allegedly a democracy, replaces our modern billionaire oligarchs for royals, nobles and other gangsters, it's not much of a deal for the rest of us.  

Unfortunately, when American and other modern "democracies" or just republics were being invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the role of prophet was given over to things like science which, by common agreement, excluded moral consideration because its laws were not laws for governing the lives of people but describing the movements of planets and bodies in motion, things which could be shown, on average, to mindlessly and predictably follow such laws.  The material success of that limited effort blinded the elites of the time to that exclusion of sucn an essential moral framework and intention necessary for the creation of laws to produce a decent life among we people who are reduced to the same category of atoms and molecules by the most extreme extensions of that materialist superstition in things such as the terminally decadent notion of eliminative materialism by a similarly deluded misidentification of the methodology of science with the ideological insistence that those are an all-encompassing, all seeing, all knowing seer when they so obviously cannot function as that.  The idolatry of science, in some, especially, academic contexts and certainly in a judicial one is matched or replaced with the idolatry of legalism, in the United States Constitutionalism, in a similar pseudo-historical ideological process. Many lies must be told in the process.  Some of them bald-faced lies.

Also See what I said the other day about the perversion of the framing of the U.S. Constitution by the slave power and the financiers who certainly never intended to establish equality for People of Color, Women, etc. and how we still live with the consequences in the very institutions created by the slave-holders and financiers to prevent equality and, so, any democracy that in a modern context deserves to be called that. Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, etc. are just the vulgar white trashy elite wanting to return to a time when People of Color are excluded, once again.  The entire focus of Republican-fascist politics since the election of Bill Clinton has been increasingly obvious as a force to reestablish that, the original scheme of the financiers to harness the fascists has resulted in the white supremacist fascist strain gaining dominance as it could have been predicted they would.  It costs nothing to be a racist, you've got to have money to be a rich oligarchic fascist.  And racists tend to be rather stupid, blaming those less powerful than themselves, or more cowardly because they are afraid to face who really robs, cheats and enslaves them.  The extent to which monarchies depended on the cowardice as much as the ignorance of the majority of "their subjects" could probably not be over-estimated.  Happens in "republics" too.