Shelf Life: Defending the Human

'As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not derived from any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our Creator and they represent the essence of human dignity." This was one of the most eloquent statements in modern times of the doctrine of natural human rights, and it was delivered -- with high drama, in a public forum -- as a rebuke to a political thinker the speaker suspected of a weak commitment to the protection of those rights.

But the speaker was pro-choice Senator Joseph Biden, and his target was the legendary jurist Robert Bork. In his marvelous new book, Natural Rights & the Right to Choose (Cambridge, 302 pp., $28), political philosopher Hadley Arkes explores the thinking behind Biden's assertion -- and the unwillingness of Biden himself, and the rest of the political culture, to act on its implications. Arkes asks: "Of what sense would it be to claim that we have rights that do not depend on the sufferance of a majority, and then say that our very standing as humans -- as rights-bearing beings -- may itself depend on the opinions of the majority?"

The issue that energizes Arkes is abortion, but that is an accident of history. The majoritarian impulse that today denies -- legislatively and judicially -- the humanity of the not-yet-born human being, just a few years ago denied the rights of black-skinned human beings. Then as now, elaborate theoretical justifications were concocted, but these ex post facto rationalizations barely disguised the underlying fact of power politics: We, the majority, will deny rights to you, the weak and unpopular minority, simply because you do not have the power to stop us. And there will, of course, never be a shortage of highly educated scholars who will prove (to our satisfaction, at least) that we -- piously referred to as "the community" -- have the right to do so. As long as the affected class is disenfranchised, they can be quite effectively stripped of their status as human beings. Arkes finds a classic instance of this in American literature:

The best clue to the play of mind at work here comes from Huckleberry Finn. Huck had contrived a story and told Aunt Sally that his boat was delayed because "we blowed out a cylinder-head." Aunt Sally reacted: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?" "No'm. Killed a nigger." "Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."

"For certain people," Arkes comments, "at a certain time, blacks simply did not register as real 'people,' whose injuries somehow counted." Arkes is not engaging in a facile denunciation of the outgrown mores of people long dead, but pointing the finger at today's America, and tomorrow's: De te fabula narratur.

This book is an excellent defense of human rights, because Arkes is not just intelligent and passionate but also a master at creating the kind of analogies that compel thought. One example: "The visitor from Britain gets off a plane in New York, and he will not have to show his passport before the police will protect him from a lawless assault in the street. . . . Any government that calls itself a government of law should seek to protect him from that species of unjustified harm." Justice demands that he be protected -- simply because he exists.

Someday, in the not unimaginably distant future, the progress of medicine and birth-control technology will probably make abortion obsolete; it will then be seen as a barbaric custom on a par with the infant exposure practiced by the ancients. Human nature, being what it is, will seek others to marginalize and exclude from the circle of the protected. Perhaps it will be an unpopular religion, or a political fringe group: "They're . . . weird. They're . . . not like us. Surely the Bill of Rights doesn't apply . . . to them." In that day -- when abortion is a dim memory, utterly bereft of political and intellectual defenders -- Hadley Arkes's book will remain a compelling witness to the truth about all human beings. It will be read, and quoted, in defense of those whose lives and liberties are most endangered. It is a book to be treasured.

-- After the mass murders, the state-enforced famines, and the Gulag, is it still possible that Stalinism can be revealed as worse than we had thought? It beggars the imagination. But Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (HarperCollins, 399 pp., $26.95), by the redoubtable Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, makes the case that Stalin may have been saving the worst for last.

In early 1953, the Stalin regime was prosecuting Jewish doctors on charges of conspiracy against the lives of Kremlin officials. This "Doctors' Plot" has been notorious for 50 years now, but the true dimensions of its malevolence have not been fully understood. Using newly obtained Russian documents, Brent and Naumov suggest that the prosecution of the doctors was part of a broader strategic conspiracy - - against not just Soviet Jews but the entire West. The picture of Stalin that emerges from this book is of a tyrant who was obsessed with nostalgia for the 1930s -- the era of purges and mass terror -- and viewed his Kremlin flunkeys as too soft on the U.S. and Britain. At a Presidium meeting on December 1, 1952, Stalin "berated all those present, saying 'Here, look at you -- blind men, kittens, you don't see the enemy . . . the country will perish because you are not able to recognize the enemy.'" Brent and Naumov comment: "Those who do not see the enemy must be finished off. The time was now at hand for another complete accounting."