The secular religion of civil rights: from limit to state power to instrument of political hegemony
The increasingly expanded and bulimic weight of civil rights resounds in public debate, in academia and courtrooms, on television screens, among the pages of books and even in bar chatter, as in a sinister carnival. Authentic state religion, with its own clerics, its own smiths, its own material executors and those, perhaps more secluded, of moral matrix.
Raymond Aron, Elie Wiesel, Francois Furet, with various accents and various shades, brought to light the marble and alabaster pedestal of this new Church, underlining its consistency, nuances, characterizations: once the rights of man as a man , that is, as a civil actor participating in a forum that for the first time recognized him as a protagonist after centuries of subjection and subjection, a protective barrier from the often malevolent state and political power exploded in some cases in the massacre and genocide, but then flowed back into a other dimension .
Jean-Louis Harouel teaches us this in his delightful "Human rights against the people" ( Liberilibri , 2018), the religion of human rights is today the most widespread version of the religion of humanity: a continuation of the great millenarianisms , an almost Gnostic and certainly mystical form that reproduces its own existence denying any alternative, made to disappear in the flame tongue of evil.
Because, and this appears clear, any human right, by its very essence and the way it is projected into social perception, becomes an indisputable paradigm: hence its more than moral, moralistic structure. And you know, it is well known, every moralist tends inexorably to hide his skeletons in the closets of others. On the other hand, it is clear that every civil, civic and human right is based on the assumption of its inalienability, its goodness, its being an earthly manifestation of an almost celestial power.
It is not surprising, given this perspective, how this secular religion has become the prerogative of a specific political party which, generally through consumption, lost its historical mission of redemption and emancipation of the proletariat ventured in search of ever new proletarians.
With the workers lost, of whom this political part no longer interests anything, discriminated, oppressed minorities have been sought in every dark corner of the globe, put in a corner, to make them the new cult object of civic and civil religion.
And precisely because the cult of human right has made itself the continuation of communism by other means, its power of camouflage and distortion of public attention has also been discovered, its strategic, instrumental value in terms of political hegemony.
The finger is pointed, while farther on the pearly shape of the moon stands out. And in pandemic times, you can swear to us, point some evil to public execration as well as reject and push away curious attentions from their skeletons and their flaws, it also helps to emphasize even more the lack of credibility, the smallness of mind, the structural infamy. of the antagonist.
And once the enemy is recognized as such, that is, dehumanized, stripped of his possibility and legitimacy to be part of the civil and democratic assembly, he will end up being reduced to the purest inaction, in any social, economic, political, cultural sphere.
We could define them, in this perspective, the Kansas City move of legal and conceptual options: in the film "Slevin" , a compelling noir and in its own way cerebral and brutal, there is Bruce Willis who explains, and immediately implements, a Kansas move City , a functional distraction tactic to strike fast and lethally.
Because, very often, there is really nothing humanitarian in those who empty chatter, as if it were a tired mantra, of human rights: we see them, they fill their mouths puffed up, they feed them in a continuous jet, in empty one-to-one dialogues. voice, the one they hear in their brains in the psychotic twist of social demands.
To verify how little 'human', but very moralistic, these totalitarian advocates of human rights are enough to try to argue against : and however much you can motivate, explain, detail your assertions, however much you try to alleviate any temptation controversy, you will still be covered and overwhelmed by an ocean of mafia-style insults, threats and warnings.
It is the revival of the Schmittian absolute enmity, with a metaphorical line drawn on the ground to separate the good and on the other side, in dim light, the wicked, the renegades of history. The ones you don't even have to talk to. I pariahs. The plague victims.
Because if a civil law integrates a religion, anyone who deviates from it ends up deserving the stake. And the dungeons and cells of the Inquisition have been replaced by the appeals of the intellectuals, by the first latent ostracization and then the discovery of every heretic, by the semantics chosen and used with surgical care, always aimed at flying towards the absolute precisely to cancel in the cradle any dialogic hypothesis.
On the other hand, civil rights are not talked about, they are simply accepted, almost as if they were an ultimatum.
But civil rights, let's face it, produce nothing, if not intellectual self-gratification in those who promote it, electoral glorification of some politician whose agenda is entirely occupied by them and the celebrity, returning, of some tired forgotten lane and with an uncertain career: civil rights do not produce anything because, simply, those who speak for them declaim them, as if they were Dante's verses messed with by Benigni, but are careful not to worry about their implementation. That is, frankly and perhaps brutally, of the fact that they can actually produce some effect.
Every right to be truly such should be followed, evaluated, weighed, even in its costs, analyzed in its negative externalities, distortions and its enforceability: on the contrary, we have rights-slogans , emphatic statements thrown at random in the debate.
And if, to quote Bobbio, we live in the age of rights, in this postal market of claims and mere historical descriptions subsumed in the tiny body of a norm, if we find ourselves in the continuous, unstoppable, torrential flow of claims raised to civil religion, we will end up leading to what Alfonso Celotto defines as the “age of (non) rights”.
With a significant aggravating circumstance: the overload, sensory, cultural and also economic, which ends up becoming a ballast. To permanently crystallize and ossify the evolution of life in society.
A bit like a leak in the hull of a boat, the water at first filters into small rivulets, but then the leak expands, lags and rivulets become rivers and the boat sinks. The mechanism is the same, replacing only the boat with the legal system.
There is a debate, a theme is introduced, this theme is often picked up by a political party that presents a bill, regardless of what will really come out of it and by some particularly active and activist judge who wants to permeate society with the its mission: a situation worthy of juridical appreciation is recognized, and with this it is brought into existence.
And in that recognition there are, apparently and in words, the transfer of economic resources, media attention, protection: a flag that flutters to claim the consent of a certain minority or of single, but powerful, individuals.
The "cost of rights", to recall a well-known essay by Cass R. Sunstein and Stephen Holmes, is there, motionless: resources are allocated, they are moved, they are taken away, they are divided, to try to give a first implementation to political agendas aimed at supporting the secular religion of civil rights, but resources are scarce.
We cannot think of producing a chessboard of thousands of new juridical situations, of new rights, and truly believe that each of them will have some practical and contingent relevance. And so the production machine of the new rights becomes a hologram, an evanescent scenario of easy and captivating slogans, an electoral program good only to be given a pat on the back.
Because of those minorities, nothing really interests those who talk about civil rights. It is a soliloquy, only the right itself counts, disconnected from reality, from its humanity. Perhaps they know it, they understand it, but cynically they hide the obvious reality of the facts: if everything is right, nothing is more straight.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-religione-secolare-dei-diritti-civili-da-limite-al-potere-statale-a-strumento-di-egemonia-politica/ on Mon, 19 Apr 2021 03:57:00 +0000.