The Telegraph reports that Attorney General Lord Hermer has ‘been accused of asserting the primacy of human rights law over British government and politics’. Is he then a latter-day Diogenes (4th century bc), who saw himself as a ‘cosmopolitan’, i.e. a citizen of no one place, but rather of the whole world (kosmos, ‘the ordered world’ + polites ‘citizen’)?
At one level, obviously not. Diogenes, we are told, travelled from place to place, rejected all conventional values, often lived in a large stone wine jar and performed all natural functions in public, like a dog – kunikos in Greek, whence our ‘cynic’. Self-sufficiency, freedom of speech, indifference to hardship and lack of shame were Cynic hallmarks. Their aim was to build up inner resources, unconnected with worldly goods, that could be nurtured only by severe physical and mental self-discipline. Animals, primitive man, barbarians and the gods held the key to their ideal virtuous existence, which civilisation had wrecked with its notions of marriage, family, politics, the city, all social, sexual and racial distinctions, reputation, wealth, power, authority, literature, music and so on.
The move to humanise this stimulating lunacy was made by Stoic thinkers who associated cosmopolitan values with a common, shared rationality, drawn from divine reason, expressed by, for example, love of friends and family. ‘All men are by nature brothers,’ averred Epictetus (c. ad 50-135). As the Roman empire expanded so successfully across much of Europe, North Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, it is not surprising that Romans such as Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius identified Rome with the idea(l) of a universal cosmopolis bringing lengthy periods of peace to regions often at war (as much later did St Augustine, in different terms).
But modern human rights bear no relation to the ancient, and come at a very considerable social, financial and political cost, especially in relation to refugees. Perhaps Lord Hermer would be more suited to the UN, where ‘no question of error is to be found in those for whom the height of virtue consists in the execution of their will’ (Ammianus, 4th century ad) than the messy business of politics.
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