Decoding Keir: human rights and happenstance

If you want to decode the baffling actions of this Prime Minister, you’d do worse than look at the company he keeps.

Writing for the Guardian in 2017, Keir Starmer’s BFF Philippe Sands, chief architect of the bizarre Chagos surrender, asked the following:

“Bedazzled by the power of statehood — that most artificial and fake of constructs — are we not also citizens of our home, our street, our borough, our city, our Europe and our world?”

Well since you ask, allow me to reply, and in order: absolutely, yes for the moment, sort of, not really, NO because we voted to leave and not if Elon Musk gets his way.

So far so very anodyne and Imagine, but it gets worse.  Sands continues and gets a bit metaphysical:

“The reform is clear: to recognise that our essential rights flow not from the happenstance of nationality [emphasis added] — and certainly not just from our national passport — but from our essence as individual human beings. That’s what the 1945 moment said, that we are citizens of the world. We should have, beyond our national passports, a global passport.”

I admit I like this idea, that we have an “essence” as individual human beings. I’m guessing though that for Sands the essence is not as essential as all that, lest you accidentally commit to the view that you have such an essence while in the womb as well as outside of it, which would make the whole business of persecuting, cancelling and incarcerating those of us who have been writing or praying to that effect all a bit pointless.

I’m wondering, then, where he thinks this “essence as individual human beings” comes from? It’s certainly not a conclusion of any neo-Darwinian argument, since Darwinism celebrates contingency and randomness and is sceptical even of species essentialism. In the theories of natural selection, from which all talk of teleology has been purged, there is little room for the concept of an essence, individual or otherwise.

If not from biology, then where? I’d go looking to the arguments of natural theology, but suspect that these form no part of his commendably well-credentialed personal outlook on things. And we must remember that St Thomas Aquinas was unfamiliar with the syllogistic beauty of the EU’s acquis communautaire — or any international treaty for that matter.

No, I suspect that his presupposition here is that individual human beings have this (flexibly applicable and only occasionally essential) essence only to the extent that his version of the law says that they do — circularity of argument being what passes for smartness in the minds of this type of lawyer.

The truth about people like Sands is that they are intellectual vandals, and colonisers of a remarkable and robust jurisprudential tradition. The common law, which they wish to replace, is a legal record of the national story, and one which — because it is generated by the real and occasionally baffling disputes of the British people — has quite a bit to say about the “essence of human beings” and how they actually live.

To put it another way, the case books of the common law, collectively, add up to a biography of our national eccentricity.

And while it is true that it is a matter of happenstance that you are born into this or that country, it does not follow that national loyalty is an “artificial construct” and is therefore discountable. For you might say the same about families as well (indeed, tyrants invariably do). We recognise obligations we haven’t agreed to, and form affections we cannot rationalise. Not all duties come from a contract, and not all legal documents command our allegiance in the way a national passport seems to.

While it’s true that nobody “chose” to be born into this country, with its history and eccentric traditions of governance, nor has anyone chosen to be born into a Britain subject to the diktats of distant international bodies overseen domestically by an unaccountable legal class.

Sands, and his ilk, all of whom by happenstance seem to be in the same professional and social circles, want you to believe that the national idea is a disposable fiction, a comfort blanket for the irrationally disposed, those whose “individual essence” has not been activated by any happenstance encounter with the exciting world of international law.

But they’re peddling a fiction of their own: that there is a universal moral calculus, rooted in an indisputable and fixed moral psychology, which can and must operate in ways which are insensitive to the cultural and historical situations of actual nation states, because those ways are, when all is said and done, determined by mere happenstance.

And even if there were such a thing as a mathematics of morality, whose variables were indifferent to the contingencies of national affection, it does not logically follow that it is the business of law to enforce it.

International “human rights”, post-nation jurisprudence – all this is ideology more than it is an attempt to develop and apply legal mechanisms of remedy or redress. The Sands quotation is full disclosure that they are working up miscellaneous strategies against the idea of a nation state, using a repurposed concept of “law” as cover.

And the point of ideology is that makes it possible to do very bad things without shame, and to treat as incontrovertibly true what is demonstrably false. Only a lunatic, or someone marinated in contemporary legal occultism, can believe that it is a defensible act of statecraft to bribe another country into taking the leasehold over part of your own, simply because a juju legal body says you really ought to.

The Sands circle assumes that to go abstract is to go clever, and the more (legally in this case) abstract you can be about things the closer you come to truth. They are contemporary lightweight Gnostics in a sense.

So, here’s a question for them: if it’s happenstance where you are born, is it not so also a matter of luck when you were born? And does it not follow from that that the certainties of today are no more or less valid than those on Ancient Greece?

Approximately 2,500 years ago Aristotle made the point that happenstance is a necessary element in a life well lived, rather than an unwelcome and discardable intrusion into it.

But then, he lacked the insight of a “human rights” lawyer.

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