There Are Rights and Then There Are "Rights" - Hate Mail

ONE OF THE MOST helpful things I've ever done here was to transcribe and go through a speech which Walter Brueggemann gave in which he contrasted the values of the Jewish prophetic tradition with the values of modern liberal democracy, though he didn't call it that, he identified it as a triad of might, wisdom, and wealth, which can certainly serve things other than republics or even liberal democracies and which he explicitly identifies with the ideology of modernism based in science which is in service to those things.  We are urged in the snobbish abstractions of modern academics to forget that science was wisdom founded in and has never been separable from the enhancement of might and wealth even when those serve the powerful, the elite and the wealthy as they did when figures such as Bacon and Descartes invented modernism through inventing modern science.  And other forms of academic erudition have, as well.

Brueggemann contrasts that with a Jewish prophetic triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness which he remarkably demonstrated in eight ways was in opposition to and in contrast to the "triad of control."  Since his starting point was the Prophet Jeremiah condemning the royal-religious establishment of his day and since the same triad has served many kings, despots, dictators, aristocratic and oligarchic regimes since then, the "triad of control" is not specific to modern liberal democracies but that it can so comfortably find support from it is a significant indication that its endpoint is not going to be egalitarian or long remain genuinely democratic.

The fifth day of that series I transcribed this passage from his lecture which gets to the heart of why I reject liberal democracy as being in any way adequate, I don't know how Brueggemann would transcribe it or how he originally wrote it but it's the ideas in it I want to go into.  I also don't know how he would feel about my use of his points.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy. And the same poet says if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . . (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation)

What aroused objections in what I posted the other day was my supposed diminution of the importance of "rights," as those are idolatrously propitiated today.  That as included in my rejection of unfettered "liberty," rejecting both the "liberalism" (really libertarianism) which either demands or permits a definition of rights which will allow their unequal distribution and, so, unequal exercise.  I really don't think you can anymore separate the reality of rights from how they are exercised BY PEOPLE  anymore than you can from the natural beings, People, animals, etc. which hold those rights as an inherent aspect of their being.  I think the creation of "rights" that courts and even legislatures assign to man-made entities that don't possess rights, corporations, "institutions" even political and judicial offices is to be expected when courts separate rights from natural beings and make them into abstractions.

Notice the right that is the only mention of "rights" in this passage "they do not defend the right of the needy."  In the context of the passage which focuses on "the materiality of the biblical tradition" "the quotidian dimensions of the vulnerable,"  certainly those include most of all a right to clean and sufficient air, water, food, shelter, clothing, dignity for the most vulnerable and forgotten - not least of which because they are the least economically profitable - People.  

In all of the "rights" enumerated in the Constitution, even those listed in the Declaration of Independence, it should be mind-boggling that NONE OF THESE MOST IMPORTANT RIGHTS a human being can have are mentioned, a right to clean water and food in a decent sufficiency, a right to clothing and shelter adequate for the maintenance of a decent standard of living, the right to healthcare.  We are even noticing, at least for half of the population, that there isn't even the most basic right of bodily ownership and autonomy as the "justices" of the Supreme Court negate the right of Women to determine the state of their own bodies, even allowing states under Republican-fascist control to give rapists and other men more control over the bodies of Women than they allow Women to exercise over their own bodies.

I would bet that to just about anyone who reads this, proposing the rights to those material needs on the same level of abstract "rights" to "free press-speech" "freedom of religious belief" even the most dangerous of all those popularly expounded "right to bear arms" will seem very strange and even incomprehensible.  Pointing out that that gap in our Constitution is an enormous chasm between important rights of all of us on an equal basis and those as imagined by the rich and powerful based on their own interests, and so are the ones they addressed and which later rich and powerful people maintained as of supreme importance will seem rather dangerous.  I am regularly told when I say things like that that I really shouldn't say them. Freedom of speech is a very sometimes thing.

It should astound us that the framers of the United States Constitution, living in their society with such an abundance of poverty, of  hard-scrabble farms, frequent failures of crops, frequent illness due to bad water, bad healthcare (though some of that may be due to the science of medicine at the time being quite likely to kill a patient who may have recovered on their own) and other absolute necessities of life just had those kinds of rights slip their lofty minds.   That the framers were all aristocrats from the higher and highest economic class of the time certainly accounts for their priorities and what they entirely ignored in listing of "rights" and those "liberties" they put in their documents instead.  Jefferson's one word mention of a right to "life" is the closest thing to that in the founding documents of what likes to think of itself as the premier "new order of the ages" the start of modern liberal democracy but what is required to maintain even a miserable life, water, food, housing, clothing, as a right to these citizens of their "new order" goes unmentioned .

And in the succeeding periods, those lacks in the specific wording of our supreme law, the Constitution, has hardly mattered much and when it was made to matter was attacked on the very basis of that framing of liberal democracy.  As the right of mega-corporate media to lie with impunity is defended exhaustively, food assistance, clean water and air, healthcare, etc. are successfully thwarted and, when a few steps forward are taken, successfully driven back, not least of which with lies in the freest press in our history.  

That they also neglected the right to the truth, instead of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" is something that could be expanded on at length.  Which I have.  The Federalist Papers and other documents prove the founders, themselves, were quite experienced and manipulative managers of speech and press to mold public opinion to their own ends, not least of which with appeals made to the worst in us as well as some of our more abstractly idealistic aspirations, in that they often had very little desire for the truth to interfere with that.  They were, after all, mostly lawyers and politicians.  Compared to that Walter Brueggemann and Jeremiah are better than gold and sweeter than honey from the honeycomb. They are like a breath of fresh air and clear, cold water in a parching drought such as the one the world is suffering through, which the Supreme Court through its reading of the Constitution is furthering.

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The items in the Bill of Rights that gets the most attention, the "rights" to "speech" of "religion" of "press" are all focused on abstractions that have certainly not gotten us to anything like a common wealth or close to equality.  They have been used, more often than not, to oppose, hinder and delay of the real rights to clean water and even clean air (you will never be able to separate the depravity of the Roberts-Alito Court from these issues), food (as a right for those who need it, not a marketing opportunity for corporations who sell it with government subsidies) housing, clothing, medical care - my friend whose biopsy is being put off under a very expensive insurance plan under the ACA was told he might have to wait another six months to find out if he has cancer - . . . I could go on.

That we don't even begin to notice the most vital of rights for the destitute, the poor, the working poor, the middle class etc. in the framing of liberal democracy is, itself, an indictment of liberal democracy for whatever virtues are claimed for it.  I think those absolute failures of liberal democracy are both intentional and, since we've become accustomed to the habits of speech and thought about it, endemic to our thought, fixed in our habits.  And they are powerful no matter how dangerous the results are.  

Anyone who believes the United States Constitution and, really, much of any of the framing of liberal democracy as it is is sustainable is deluded.  We have to come down out of the clouds of idealistic abstraction to face the everyday material needs of life in order to have areal and important considerations of rights under a democratic government, we aren't anywhere near having that because the abstractions are what counts to those who count money.  We are distracted and deluded and conventional education is a part of that as much as anything, the dainty, scrupulously maintained habits of thought and speech surrounding these issues are the flying buttresses that hold up otherwise unsupportable walls.

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently .