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A post by Maynard

Friday’s news report describes a campaign to establish rights for chimpanzees. Such efforts are symptomatic of the moral confusion of the modern era.

We need to be clear on this point: Animals have no rights. They never did and they never will. Animals can have no rights because animals cannot undertake obligations. Rights only apply to creatures that are capable of acknowledging a contract.

Anyone familiar with accounting understands the concept of double-entry bookkeeping, in which every credit is balanced by a corresponding debit. So it is with rights, each of which is balanced by a corresponding obligation. In human society, the governing bodies which protect our rights operate under a social contract. Those who violate the social contract forfeit their rights, and may be deprived of property or freedom or even life itself. Governments that violate the social contract may be overthrown.

Animals can be coerced and trained, but they cannot undertake a contractual obligation, social or otherwise. An animal cannot be evil. We treat animals humanely because to do so is one of our human obligations. It’s a burden we’re stuck with under the terms with which God gave us the planet. The animals gain some benefit from this, but not because they have any “rights”.

In a leftwing culture, we find an emphasis of “rights” and a de-emphasis of obligations. This is how we get muddled. The social contract becomes something of a one-way street, and thus is really no longer a contract. There is a dogmatic belief that if only we give enough, then the recipient of our largesse will become uplifted. It’s the wrong-headed mentality that drives the domestic welfare state. In the international arena, it feeds the notion that enough aid and “rights” will, for example, encourage the militants of Palestine or Iraq to act with civility.

Alright then, you may ask, how is it that cultures become barbaric, and what can we do to transform barbarians into decent people? This is an ancient problem, and has no simple solution. Consider the tale of Exodus in the Bible.

When the Jews were suddenly freed from Egyptian slavery, they immediately proved themselves unworthy of their newfound freedom. They grumbled against Moses, who struggled endlessly to move them towards the Promised Land, even in the face of a rising sentiment that their lives had been better in Egypt. When Moses left them to ascend Mt. Sinai, the mob immediately reverted to idolatry and debauchery. Ultimately the Jewish people spent forty years in the desert, allowing the generation that carried slavery in its collective head to pass away and leaving the next generation that had the capacity to pick up the mantle of freedom. As sad as it was, there was apparently no other way.

Herman Wouk, in his book about Judaism, This is My God, offers this explanation:

Economists know that, contrary to the popular impression, slaves do not work hard. A slave civilization is slow-moving and easygoing; we still have traces of one in the American South. Take away a man’s rights in himself, and he becomes dull and sluggish, wily and evasive, a master in the arts of avoiding responsibility and expending little energy. This whip is no answer to this universal reaction. There is no answer to it. The lash stings a slave who has halted dumbly, out of indifference and inertia, into resuming the slothful place of his fellow slaves. It can do no more. The slave’s life is a dog’s life, degraded but not wearying, and — for a broken spirit — not unpleasant. The generation of Jews that Moses led into the desert collapsed into despair and panic over and over in moments of crisis. Broken by slavery, they could not shake free of improvidence, cowardice, and idol-worship. All the men who had been slaves in Egypt had to die in the desert, and a new generation had to take up their arms and their religion, before the Jews could cross the Jordan.

This is a message we don’t want to hear. It’s more politically palatable to assume the oppressed people will leap up singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!”, and everyone will live happily ever after. And if it doesn’t happen that way, then it must be George Bush’s fault.