Wretchard shows us excerpts from humanitarian Theodore Darymple's harrowing journey through iniquity and its injury, and I stopped short at this sentence:
In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it.
Pulling the topic momentarily off course, if I may: That's an ethical node where some of the greater Christian church, as they move leftward into relativism — taking Paul far too literally, as if he were misanthropist — fail in their teaching to the point of heresy. The temptation of obsessive martyrdom — of finding God in whatever circumstances, the more difficult the better — leads to excuses for despots' kingdoms of suffering and a withering contempt for the failures of those living in freedom. They risk looking fondly to persecution. A man with the help of a Providential hand, we'd say, can rise above any trouble but fifty years of a post-industrial democratic West show clearly that man does the greatest work for himself and others when separated from God by nothing more than his own free will. There are plenty of trials in peace — and too many horrors under compulsion.
What's curious about Darymple's narrative is that while the dictatorial society thrives in its nihilism on a regulation of evil acts, the welfare state government doesn't — but accomplishes much of the same thing by leaning collectivist in accordance with a private plan, stripping weaker individuals of protections while inviting the more fit population to careen into a numbness of self-absorbed irresponsibility mislabeled as "rights." Fortuitously, Roger Kimball wrote on this subject in yesterday's New Criterion, quoting James Fitzjames Stephen on John Stuart Mill, "men are so closely connected together that it is quite impossible to say how far the influence of acts apparently of the most personal character may extend." The United States Constitution and its amendment process were meant to limit the power of government, so we are told by the individualists. As an absolute, not true. The 13th Amendment stands as one of the most sweeping abrogations of legally recognized "rights," insofar as the right of men to own other men; and it was an overdue redaction. Even where common law substitutes a constitution, as in Theodore Darymple's Britain, natural law insists that no man will have his rights to life, voice and property taken away without reasoned judgment — certainly not by the arbitrary wishes of a peer.
The funnily ubiquitous "right to privacy" exists only in the imagination, and the belief in it thrives best in urbanity, where personal association is highly transient and community is unstable. Anonymity does relieve us of some burdens — but not everything. After all, something is killed when a woman terminates a healthy pregnancy; someone is affected by the degeneration from another's substance addiction; one or more dependents must contend with an ad-hoc family, especially if it is condoned by the state; someone must pay the price for a threshold below which those living blithely can be summarily euthanized; and something is lost when the life of one fairly convicted of voluntary murder is considered as inviolable as one acquitted, or when those who forfeit their rights to certain protections have them returned anyway.
These things are the rights of the potent, got at the expense of the humble, and nothing more than rule of the strong — authoritarianism — on a small scale. Again, Stephen says it best, "Could anyone desire gross licentiousness, monstrous extravagance, ridiculous vanity, or the like, to be unnoticed, or, being known, to inflict no inconveniences which can possibly be avoided?" Not at all. Which is why we should be wary of those who see liberty, itself a cooperative brace among men, inconsequential to good works or, once achieved, suited for other pursuits.