We are truly tired of flowery rhetoric about freedom, self-actualization, and human rights. Not because these are undesirable realities or shamefully incomprehensible concepts. On the contrary, they are aspects of life that we strive to preserve, nurture, and make possible so that others may enjoy or attain them. Rather, I am referring to the fact that, in the name of freedom, self-realization, and elegant discourse on human rights, we have been subjected to a sordid practical relativism, to living life any which way, to justifying ourselves to avoid the harsh blow of correction, failure, or sin. I speak as a child of my time. I grew up amid the escalating clash of ideas, the allure of self-assertion, and the dream of freedom. I was repeatedly told that I must seek what fulfills me, what makes me feel good, and what showcases the best of me to everyone. My failures are not mistakes; they are “areas of opportunity.” My sins are not moral breaches, but mere products that necessarily stem from my weakness. Whatever I decide is fine, as long as it springs from the core of my creative will. But few have directed my heart outward from itself, to where Truth dwells. For if it is true that Truth dwells within the inner man—as Augustine says—Truth is at once what is more intimate than one’s own intimacy and the highest transcendence, beyond every limit of my being. True interiority is always ecstatic, always outside of itself, always seeking beyond boundaries of every kind: conceptual, ontological, moral, spiritual.
Cardinal Newman
It is precisely on this point that I find the issue of human rights to be flawed. They have been made to rest upon themselves; they have been given an enchanting trick that promises intellectual and social satisfaction, a convenient norm for us who, in addition to good intentions, have savage instincts. They seem like a Pandora’s box in reverse: only good can come out of human rights, and anyone who appeals to them to justify their existential and social positions will undoubtedly obtain the best possible good, since it involves the safeguarding of a value that cannot be quantified. Is this not the same illusion that whatever freedom decides, provided it emerges from its core of creativity, is legitimate and precious? The fact is that if anything human becomes complacent, it ends up falling ill, for we need truth for our very health.
I understand that duties are also mentioned in the discourse on human rights. They are like timid, whispered statements, meant to prevent human rights from meaning anything at all. Once again, we are faced with a trite decision not to disturb, to be more “positive” and “proactive” than “negative” and “confrontational.” The discourse on duties is skimmed over, and, above all, one thinks of the duties of others. My right makes it clear that the other owes me something in some way. But in doing so, we have destroyed the real and fundamental foundation of humanity. Human rights are not absolute principles of our existence. In my view, they are rather the extensions, the guardian instruments, of what is most radical in human life: its vocation to truth, its constitutive need for it.
Man is free so that he may seek freely. And he is intelligent so that what he seeks is not a petty lie, but that which gives him meaning—not simply because it is brilliant and penetrating, but because it is the truth, the measure of his life, even if at that moment it passes only a negative judgment on his current condition, on his moral life, on his existential claims.
Is this experience not the motivation for conversion? Is conversion not the radical human transformation toward a better state, since it is the state of truth?
And I am not speaking only of the small truths of this world, which are amusing and playful. I am speaking of that Truth which imparts this quality to all true things, the one that is at the summit of being and in the very heart of everything; the one who, though being supreme, has made himself a slave to the human being—a slave who has set him free by making him know the Truth: Himself, Jesus Christ, the Lord. Newman, for this reason, spoke of rights as a consequence and safeguard of the fulfillment of the sense of duty of conscience. He spoke of this very sense as the “Vicar ab origine of Christ,” the first of all and the creative principle of religion, since it makes us understand what is owed to Him who presents Himself within its bounds as Governor and Judge. Conscience is a prophet in its admonitions, a monarch in the peremptory nature of its commands and calls, and a priest in its blessings and anathemas. It shows us the One before whom we are accountable, and in that accountability, we are granted the rights to fulfill what He who knows us well and loves us calls us to do.