In today's world, we often take for granted ideas like human dignity and human rights. Many of us hold them to be natural, inalienable, or universal. But we would do well to ask: where do human dignity and human rights come from? JM Coetzee reminds us in his Essays on Censorship that human dignity itself is,

... a foundational fiction to which we more or less wholeheartedly subscribe, a fiction that may well be indispensable for a just society, namely, that human beings have a dignity that sets them apart from animals and consequently protects them from being treated like animals ... [it] helps to define humanity and the status of humanity helps to define human rights ... an affront to our dignity strikes at our rights. Yet when, outraged at such affront, we stand on our rights and demand redress, we would do well to remember how insubstantial the dignity is on which those rights are based...

Human dignity is a human construct; its prehistoric roots perhaps lie in the universal human aversion to pain and humiliation. Animals suffer too, but humans, with their superior consciousness and cognition, could act to reduce it. When they collectively did so, they implicitly adopted a notion of human dignity (the birth of civilization?).

The edifice of rights was built upon this foundation of dignity. The right to life is the earliest major human right. Notably, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains extended this right to animals too, unlike the Greco-Romans and the monotheists. The equality of the right to life is a more recent idea and a higher order abstraction still.

Human rights today include the equality of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But without a 'higher' or objective truth to derive human rights from, all depends on a peoples' gallant embrace of principles. We also know that rights can be easily undermined by centrifugal traits in human nature (rooted as it is in the animal kingdom and worsened swiftly by sociopolitical turmoil), or by autocrats in the name of culture, order, security, or tradition.

'A secular defense of human rights depends on the idea of moral reciprocity: that we cannot conceive of any circumstances in which we or anyone we know would wish to be abused in mind or body.'♣ But there is no consensus on precisely what rights all humans deserve in a world with diverse histories. Then there are practical challenges—how do we match the high-minded language of universal rights with equally high-minded enforcement? What do we make of those who consent to being abused in mind or body, cease to think of it as abuse, and settle for other benefits?

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The modern age has overseen a great expansion of our rights. Global disparities remain but there is no dearth of people who believe that rights are a good thing (at least for the social group they identify with most, be it based on race, nation, class, culture). Countless rights commissions and tribunals, as well as some NGOs and the media, strive to preserve or enhance them, often on behalf of strangers across the world and often with remarkably heartening results. Clearly, talk of rights is now chic but what about obligations and personal responsibility? What good is the former without the latter? People can demand rights from their government, but who gets to demand personal responsibility from the people? What happens when our exercise of rights and freedom get increasingly divorced from personal responsibility?

As early as the 1920s, in a keenly observant and prophetic work, The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y Gassett wrote that life in the modern West "as a program of possibilities [for all] is magnificent, exuberant, superior to all others known to history. But by the very fact that its scope is greater, it has overflowed all the channels, principles, norms, ideals handed down by tradition." Furthermore, our age is stamped by the arrival of the self-satisfied, indocile, mass-man, a drifter without history, saved from the pre-modern age's harsh life and exacting gods. He now sees no need to make real demands on himself, wants and receives as entitlement all the rights, freedoms and comforts of the modern age but accepts none of the obligations, limits and standards vital to civilized life. Even the modern professional who leads the mass-man behaves no better outside his narrow domain. Ortega y Gassett called this a "vertical invasion of the barbarians ... as if through the trapdoors ... the commonplace mind knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will." This may be why Kierkegaard cynically quipped: "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use."

This drift in modern culture towards the least common denominator is perhaps why many perceive in it a strong sense of decadence. "We are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, [because they have nothing] to which to give themselves." (source) Fearful of the worst, many artists and activists today adopt humorless, neo-luddite attitudes. They say that modernity has ushered in a more abrasive social milieu, that science and technology has given more power to man than he can handle with grace; they glorify the past out of postmodern nostalgia. But aren't the imagined virtues of the past only phantoms of our mind? We can learn from the past but we cannot go back to reclaim it; our unique age must find its own destiny. Let us recall this cautiously optimistic verse by the sixth century BCE Greek poet, Xenophanes of Colophon,

The gods did not enrich man
with a knowledge of all things
from the beginning of life.
Yet man seeks, and in time
invents what may be better.