For most of history, as Holland described in his book ‘Dominion’, the idea that humans have “self-evident” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” would have been baffling: “A Roman would have laughed at it.”  Yet today, “rights” language is central to our way of life. It was at the heart of the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserted, following the Holocaust, that “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” are “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Obviously, the UN declaration was inspired by the Declaration of Independence, which also called rights self-evident, but went further to name their source: a Creator who endowed people with “certain inalienable Rights.”

In a TEDx talk years ago, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made the startling claim that human rights do not exist.  

Human rights are just like heaven and like God: It’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. … It is not a biological reality, just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights. … Take a human, cut him open, look inside—you find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find there any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around. 

Harari’s talk resurfaced on the site formerly known as Twitter and sparked a lively debate among Tom Holland, author of Dominion, Glen Scrivener, an Anglican priest and author of The Air We Breathe, and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who wrote 12 Rules for Life. Scrivener took issue with Harari’s materialism and called his remarks about human rights “nonsense.” Rights are indeed faith-based, he said, but that doesn’t make them any less real.  

Tom Holland, who is not a Christian, responded that while he believes in human rights, they are not self-evident. Rather, they require an act of subjective belief. “Human rights have no more objective reality than, say, the Trinity,” wrote Holland. “Both derive from the workings of Christian theology; and both, if they are to be believed in, require people to make a leap of faith.”   

Jordan Peterson disagreed, and responded in somewhat jumbled psychological lingo that rights are somehow “built into the structure of human beings” and are therefore “not arbitrary at all.” Holland shot back that if rights really are somehow “built into” reality, it’s awfully strange that the concept of human rights only emerged around the twelfth century in a specifically Christian and Western political context. 

The whole exchange was fascinating and instructive. For example, if the idea that human rights are not universal seems strange, that just shows how deeply Western one is.

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