Posts Tagged ‘rights’
“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”*…
Following the often heated debate between Federalists and their opponents that led to the the ratification and adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were still unsatisfied. Then-Representative James Madison, who studied the deficiencies of the Constitution pointed out by Anti-Federalists, collected proposals (16 in all), and then crafted a series of 12 proposed corrective amendments. Congress approved the twelve articles of amendment on September 25, 1789, and submitted them to the states for ratification. 10 were ultimately ratified– the first 10 amendments to our Constitution… or as we know them, The Bill of Rights.
In an excerpt from his book, Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, Ray Raphael elaborates…
The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, did not follow the precedent set by these state constitutions. Despite spending almost four months drafting their new plan, the framers did not include within it a thoughtful listing of rights but only a scattering of guarantees. On September 12, just five days before the end of the Convention, George Mason finally suggested that delegates add a “Bill of Rights” similar to the state declarations of rights, but his motion failed to garner the support of a single state delegation.
Although state conventions ratified the Constitution, several included a caveat: the new plan should be amended as soon as possible. In fact, they proposed scores of amendments, some resembling provisions of what we now know as the Bill of Rights, but many others altering or even deleting structural features of the Constitution. New York’s convention coupled its list of proposed amendments with a demand for a second federal convention to consider these various proposals. The profusion of proposed amendments, plus the prospect of a second convention, frightened supporters of the Constitution, who feared that a new convention, if it met, would revise the fledgling Constitution before it could be put into effect and gut some of its major provisions.
Most leading Federalists hunkered down. In arguing against a second federal convention, they insisted that a bill of rights was not necessary and could even jeopardize rights that were not included. The job of the Constitution, they said, was to state what government could do, not what it couldn’t do. Rights already were secured because the government possessed no power that allowed it to impinge upon them. In fact, any catalog of specified rights would imply that rights were limited to those in the catalog, and not others.
James Madison and George Washington agreed with this argument, but they also took an accurate measure of people’s displeasure. It was strong and it was widespread. Rather than fight a rearguard action against the wave of discontent, they preferred to channel and control it. Article V of the Constitution stipulated that either Congress or state conventions might propose amendments. If Congress acted first, Madison and Washington reasoned, it could take charge of the issue and protect the substantive features of the new plan–congressional taxation, for instance–while giving ground elsewhere. Madison, meanwhile, pledged to his Virginia constituents that he would work to add a bill of rights if they elected him to represent them in Congress.
Once elected, in the First Federal Congress, Madison whittled down the large list of amendments suggested by the states’ ratifying conventions. With President Washington’s blessing, he proposed nineteen that did not endanger key constitutional components. After considerable debate and some revision, Congress pared Madison’s list down to twelve amendments, which it sent to the states for approval. Ten of these, which we call today the Bill of Rights, were ratified by three-quarters of the states, as required by the new Constitution. The genesis of the Bill of Rights, like the origins of the Constitution, was political as well as theoretical.
The short-term effect of the framing and ratification of the Bill of Rights was to put a Federalist stamp on the amendments and to doom the attempts by the Constitution’s opponents to modify the substantive or structural features of the new plan. The long-term effect was to reinforce America’s culture of rights and to infuse specific rights into American jurisprudence. After more than two centuries, the Bill of Rights, which had been so casually dismissed by the framers, figures so prominently in our minds that it often eclipses the Constitution itself. In an era when the word “government” has a bad name, the ten amendments that circumscribe the federal government’s authority over individuals are often viewed more favorably than the Constitution the framers created in 1787…
The backstory of the Bill of Rights, via the always-illuminating Delanceyplace.com
For more on the process that yielded them, and the texts of all 16 proposed amendments, see here.
* Thomas Jefferson, a critic of Federalists, in a 1787 letter to James Madison (who had originally been opposed to the idea of a “bill of rights,” both because he believed that the Constitution as written did not grant the federal government the power to take away people’s rights, and because he [and some other Framers] believed that we have natural rights too numerous to list– and that anything not explicitly included in a Bill of Rights would be unprotected.)
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As we ponder precedent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that a BBC newsreader had nothing to communicate. His entire script for the 8:45 pm news bulletin was: “There is no news”… after which piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment. The wireless service then returned to broadcasting from the Queen’s Hall in London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed.
“No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”*…
Individualism has been been a growing force in cultures around the world since the Enlightenment; it picked up momentum in the 20th century (c.f., e.g., Adam Curtis’ masterful Century of Self [and here]); and has become a– if not the— foundational concept in liberalism. But, Nils Gilman argues, the biological discovery of the holobiont gives the lie to “the autonomous individual” in a way that has massive implications not only for how we think about, but also how we govern ourselves…
We like to believe we end at our skin. This is the primary hallucination of modern political philosophy in the West, the foundational axiom upon which we have erected our laws, our economics, and our sense of self-worth. Philosophical liberalism imagines human individuals as discrete, bounded entities — monads moving through space, contained entirely within a fleshy envelope that separates “self” from “other.” This architectural model of the human being underpins the political concept of the autonomous liberal subject, just as it grounds the social scientific commitment to methodological individualism. It asserts that the basic unit of human reality is the singular actor, the “I” that thinks, chooses, and owns.
However, this model is a biological fiction. It is a map that corresponds to no territory found in nature. Over the last three decades the life sciences have undergone a quiet revolution that renders the classical liberal view of the subject not merely philosophical debatable, yet factually incorrect. The concept of the holobiont, coined by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943 but popularized in the anglophone world by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, has shattered the idea of the unitary organism. We now know that every macro-organism is actually a dynamic ecosystem, a chimera composed of a host and billions of symbiotic microbes that function as a distinct, integrated biological unit. You are not a single entity. You are a walking coral reef, a plural assemblage of human and non-human cells negotiating a fragile, continuous existence. Roughly half the cells in your body are not human; they are bacterial, fungal, and viral. They do not merely hitch a ride. They digest your food, regulate your immune system, modulate your mood, and structure the development of your brain.
The implications of this biological reality for political theory are cataclysmic. The entire edifice of Liberalism, from Hobbes and Locke to modern libertarianism, rests on the assumption of the “atomic individual” — a sovereign state of one. This core concept of liberal political theory posits a world of separate, self-governing agents who enter into contracts and demand rights to protect their private sphere from intrusion. The liberal subject claims (and demands) to be walled off, protected, and kept clean of the influence of others.
Biology exposes this desire for total autonomy as not just false, but a death wish. In the logic of the holobiont, absolute immunity is not health; it is starvation. A body hermetically sealed against the “other” dies. Our physical existence requires constant contamination and collaboration with foreign agents. We cannot be “self-made” because we are constitutively “made-with.” Donna Haraway describes this shift as moving from autopoiesis (self-making) to sympoiesis (making-with). We do not precede our relationships; our relationships constitute us. If the political subject is physically constituted by “others,” the concept of self-sovereignty collapses. One cannot be the sole monarch of a kingdom occupied by foreign powers that provide the essential infrastructure for the kingdom’s survival…
[Gilman elaborates on the implications both for our political and management systems and for the social sciences that study them. And he explores why this new perspective is hard to internalize and embrace…]
The resistance to this holobiontic perspective is fierce because it is terrifying. As Rudyard Kipling observed (in a quote often misattributed to Nietzsche), “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” The autonomous liberal subject offers psychological safety. It promises control. It tells us that we are captains of our souls. Embracing the holobiont requires admitting that we are porous, vulnerable, and inextricably entangled with things we cannot control. It demands that we surrender the fantasy of the impermeable border. The skin is not a wall; it is a heavily trafficked interface. The state is not a fortress; it is a metabolic node in a planetary flow.
We are living through the friction between our laws and our biology. We legislate for individuals, yet we live as assemblages. We worship independence while our bodies are grounded in interdependence. The future of political theory cannot simply be an adjustment of liberal categories. It requires a fundamental ontological revision that starts with relation rather than separation. We must stop trying to protect the self from the world and begin understanding the self as a spatially intensified instantiation of the world.
Clinging to the myth of the autonomous subject is a massive act of collective denial. It represents a refusal to look at the microscope and see the legions teeming inside us. We construct our societies around a myth of being that does not correspond to biogeochemical reality. The cost of this error is everywhere apparent — in the degradation of our ecology, the polarization of our politics, and the isolation of our private lives. We try to seal ourselves off, creating sterile environments that make us sick, physically and politically. The holobiont offers a different path, one that acknowledges that to be one is always to be many. We are not solitary thinkers looking out at nature. We are nature looking at itself, through a lens made of billions of other lives. The sovereign is dead. Long live the swarm…
“The Sovereign Individual Does Not Exist,” from @nilsgilman.bsky.social.
Further complicating the issue: “Externalities, Rights, and the Problem of Knowledge,” from Cyril Hédoin:
Very short summary: This essay explains how the knowledge problem [the challenge of a central authority having the information needed to make rational decisions for a complex system like a society] applies to the definition of jurisdictional rights. Jurisdictional rights define spheres of individual sovereignty. Rights are appropriately defined if they internalize all potential externalities. However, individuals may disagree about what counts as an externality. This disagreement stems from individuals’ preferences, which are typically dispersed and local. I discuss various solutions to this problem, including the use of polycentricity...
[Image above: source]
* John Donne
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As we incorporate the interconnected, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.
“Monetary policy is one of the most difficult topics in economics. But also, I believe, a topic of absolutely crucial importance for our prosperity.”*…
What can we learn from a twentieth century economist who was a critic of Keynes and a staunch advocate of the Gold Standard? Samuel Gregg considers the career of Jacques Rueff…
Money, it is often said, makes the world go round. The inverse of that axiom is that monetary disorder brings chaos in its wake. As we learned from the hyperinflation that wreaked havoc in 1920s Germany and the stagflation which hobbled Western economies throughout the 1970s, the effects of such disorder go far beyond the economy. Further complicating the problem is that restoring monetary stability is invariably a painful exercise, often bringing unemployment, recession and lasting social damage in its wake.
As a rule, monetary theory and monetary policy are dry affairs, dominated by highly technical discussions concerning topics such as the nature of capital or the likely impact of interest-rates set by central banks. One thinker who did not conform to this mould was the French monetary theorist Jacques Rueff (1896-1978). Arguably France’s most important twentieth-century economist, Rueff played a major role in shaping the Third Republic’s response to the Great Depression in the 1930s, designed the market liberalisation programme that saved France from economic collapse in 1958, and emerged in the 1960s as the leading critic of the US dollar’s role in the global economy and a prominent advocate of a return to the classic gold standard.
Rueff was, however, much more than an economist. A graduate of the École Polytechnique, he was among that small elite of civil servants trained in administration, engineering, mathematics, the natural sciences, foreign languages, and political economy whose role was to inject stability into the perpetual political pandemonium of the Third Republic. But even among that highly-educated cohort, Rueff stood out for the breadth and depth of his knowledge and his willingness to integrate it into his economic reflections. For Rueff, the significance of monetary order went beyond issues such as economic growth or employment, as important as they were. Ultimately, it was about whether Western civilisation flourished or embraced self-delusion…
Gregg recounts Rueff’s career, his championing of “real rights” (e.g., property rights) vs. “false rights” (which involve the state declaring something such as unemployment benefits to be a right and then trying to realize it through means that destroy real rights), and his advocacy of a return to the Gold Standard (part of his critique of the use of the U.S. dollar as a unit of reserve)… all positions with which reasonable people (including your correspondent) might disagree. But Gregg reminds us that Rueff’s most fundamental goal– a healthy society– surely remains desirable, and that his fear of the chaos that monetary meltdowns can cause is only too justified…
Monetary order wasn’t everything for Rueff. His writings reflect deep awareness of the ways in which culture, religion, philosophy, music and literature influenced civilisational development. Nonetheless Rueff insisted the threats posed by monetary disorder were more than economic. For him, civilisational growth was impossible without monetary order…
Let us not allow means with which we disagree to obscure important ends.
After examining the economic chaos of the early twentieth century, monetary theorist Jacques Rueff argued that without monetary order, civilizational growth is impossible: “Jacques Rueff’s quest for monetary order,” from @DrSamuelGregg in @EngelsbergIdeas.
* Maxime Bernier
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As we remember that neither should we allow ends with which we disagree to obscure important means, we might spare a thought for Leonid Kantorovich; he died on this date in 1986. An economist and mathematician best known for his theory and development of techniques for the optimal allocation of resources, he is regarded as the founder of linear programming— for which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975.
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under”*…
The majority of countries are democracies, but how many people enjoy what we think of as democratic rights? A nifty interactive map from Our World In Data charts the changes in political regimes across the globe, country by country, over the last 200 years. By way of explaining its categories:
• In closed autocracies, citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections.
• In electoral autocracies, citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression, that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair.
• In electoral democracies, citizens have the right to participate in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.
• In liberal democracies, citizens have further individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts.
As Visual Capitalist observes…
Do civilians get a representative say in how the government is run where you live?
While it might seem like living with a basic level of democratic rights is the status quo, this is only true for 93 countries or territories today—the majority of the world does not enjoy these rights.
It also might surprise you that much of the progress towards democracy came as late as the mid-20th century…
An interactive look at the state of democracy around the world, and how it has evolved. From @OurWorldInData, via @VisualCap.
* H. L. Mencken
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As we ruminate on representation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933, the day after an arsonist ignited the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin (and four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor of German), that Adolf Hitler attributed the fire to a conspiracy of Communist agitators.
Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch “council communist”, was the apparent culprit; but Hitler insisted on a wider network of villains. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and to pursue a “ruthless confrontation” with the Communists. A court later found that van der Lubbe had in fact acted alone. But Hitler’s orchestrated reaction to the Reichstag Fire began the effective rule of the Nazi Party and the establishment of Nazi Germany.
“Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think”*…
In the spirit of Nehru’s sage injunction…
The COVID19 pandemic has exposed a strange anomaly in the global economy. If it doesn’t keep growing endlessly, it just breaks. Grow, or die.
But there’s a deeper problem. New scientific research confirms that capitalism’s structural obsession with endless growth is destroying the very conditions for human survival on planet Earth.
A landmark study in the journal Nature Communications, “Scientists’ warning on affluence” — by scientists in Australia, Switzerland and the UK — concludes that the most fundamental driver of environmental destruction is the overconsumption of the super-rich.
This factor lies over and above other factors like fossil fuel consumption, industrial agriculture and deforestation: because it is overconsumption by the super-rich which is the chief driver of these other factors breaching key planetary boundaries.
The paper notes that the richest 10 percent of people are responsible for up to 43 percent of destructive global environmental impacts.
In contrast, the poorest 10 percent in the world are responsible just around 5 percent of these environmental impacts…
It confirms that global structural inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intimately related to an escalating environmental crisis threatening the very existence of human societies.
Synthesising knowledge from across the scientific community, the paper identifies capitalism as the main cause behind “alarming trends of environmental degradation” which now pose “existential threats to natural systems, economies and societies.”…
The research provides an important scientific context for how we can understand many earlier scientific studies revealing that industrial expansion has hugely increased the risks of new disease outbreaks.
Just last April, a paper in Landscape Ecology found that deforestation driven by increased demand for consumption of agricultural commodities or beef have increased the probability of ‘zoonotic’ diseases (exotic diseases circulating amongst animals) jumping to humans. This is because industrial expansion, driven by capitalist pressures, has intensified the encroachment of human activities on wildlife and natural ecosystems.
Two years ago, another study in Frontiers of Microbiology concluded presciently that accelerating deforestation due to “demographic growth” and the associated expansion of “farming, logging, and hunting”, is dangerously transforming rural environments. More bat species carrying exotic viruses have ended up next to human dwellings, the study said. This is increasing “the risk of transmission of viruses through direct contact, domestic animal infection, or contamination by urine or faeces.”
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the COVID19 pandemic thus emerged directly from these rapidly growing impacts of human activities. As the new paper in Nature Communications confirms, these impacts have accelerated in the context of the fundamental operations of industrial capitalism.
The result is that capitalism is causing human societies to increasingly breach key planetary boundaries, such as land-use change, biosphere integrity and climate change.
Remaining within these boundaries is essential to maintain what scientists describe as a “safe operating space” for human civilization. If those key ecosystems are disrupted, that “safe operating space” will begin to erode. The global impacts of the COVID19 pandemic are yet another clear indication that this process of erosion has already begun…
Humanity’s “own goal”? “Capitalism is destroying ‘safe operating space’ for humanity, warn scientists.”
Pair with “A New Land Contract“…
Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’
And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.
So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.
In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent…
So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.
“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”
And “Basic income isn’t just a nice idea. It’s a birthright“…
A basic income might defeat the scarcity mindset that has seeped so deep into our culture, freeing us from the imperatives of competition and allowing us to be more open and generous people. If extended universally, across borders, it might help instil a sense of solidarity – that we’re all in this together, and all have an equal right to the planet. It might ease the anxieties that gave us Brexit and Trump, and take the wind out of the fascist tendencies rising elsewhere in nativism that is spreading across much of the world.
We’ll never know until we try. And try we must, or brace ourselves for a 21st century of almost certain misery…
As Paul Romer (and so many others) have observed, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”…
[TotH to Patrick Tanguay (@inevernu)]
* Jawaharlal Nehru
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As we ruminate on remedies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1864 that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act (Senate Bill 203), giving California the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”
Mirror Lake, Yosemite
Carleton E. Watkins, photographer, circa 1860.
source: Library of Congress
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