The uncomfortable question of rights
Neither was I comfortable with the sentence as I wrote it. I left it stand after some thought because I don’t have a better idea and wanted to see what others would come up with in response. It has become clear that the basic concept of rights articulated in the founding documents of this country are no longer adequate to deal with the transformation of human society we are experiencing. And this is all just getting started.
As we see almost daily, the language of our interaction is prone to increasing abuse. Understanding the Enlightenment ideas that shaped everyone from Franklin to Jefferson, Washington, Payne and others fit neatly in the array of the European philosophes of the late 18th century. The American founders were a bit simpler and struggled to implement Enlightenment ideas in the mundane world of the American colonies and their revolution. While the subsequent European (starting from the French Revolution and it’s Rights of Man and Citizen) efforts to build socio-political architectural documents, things got more sophisticated but also more complex. For the next 200 years the American document was the only one that remained in it’s original form and that may have well been because of it’s more rudimentary nature. I’m not a constitutional specialist so I won’t go any farther than that.
The point I want to make is that the articulation of social and political rights have evolved but seem to be most successful (by degrees) where they are more precise and more flexible. The rights of man and citizen are the law around the planet however well they are implemented and protected or abused and ignored. It seems that the greatest problem is where these rights don’t have an active life in the society and can’t evolve at the human level as our environment and social structures change.
The right to speak carries great responsibility. Classically shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater is not protected. Everyone understands this. But in a virtual world where everyone is not just a speaker but a broadcast station and where instantaneous, fully automated systems can replicate and modify the voices of millions controlled by algorithms structured for psychological effect, we’re not talking 18th century town hall meetings. And the damage that can be done to people, particularly groups that are not part of the arbitrarily dominant group in any one area, is far greater than has ever been dealt with in the past. We started to see this in Germany of the 1930s and in Africa of 1980s and other places at different times. But that was nothing like the speed and depth of effect possible now.
So how do we protect discourse? How do we discuss issues that severely affect people everyday and that the very discussion itself affects them? If you notice above I did not address the great failing of the Enlightenment ideas in that they applied only to caucasian, European males. The failure to address that, except in the most superficial ways, has destroyed this culture and has spawned the distortion of rights producing the absurd racist, and misogynistic nonsense that has taken over the minds of the ignorant and childish in this country today.
Our two hundred year old “rights” not only fail to defend us from this but open the doors to the abuse that has allowed the immoral and brutal to take over the government in order to reward their cronies in feudal fashion while building fear to control the population. Yet the future must be based on free and open discussion. My suggestion is that we need to have a moderated environment for this. We also need to define the forum that are open to certain types of discussion. This is not oppression or censorship but, literally, management of the public process. Obviously this has already evolved as process in our twenty plus years of experience in online communities. And that is now the nature of many and soon all human communities.
Is there some other way to handle this? I’m open to suggestions.
