Take, for example, the awful human catastrophe under way in the Darfur region of the Sudan. If the United States and the West can be criticized for our role in this catastrophe it is because we have waited too long to intervene to protect the multitudes who are suffering, dying because of it.

Twelve years ago, we turned a blind eye to another genocide, in Rwanda. And when that reign of terror finally, mercifully exhausted itself, with over 800,000 Rwandans slaughtered, Americans, our government, and decent people everywhere in the world were shocked and ashamed of our silence and inaction, for ignoring our values, and the demands of our conscience. In shame and renewed allegiance to our ideals, we swore, not for the first time, “never again.” But never lasted only until the tragedy of Darfur.

Now, belatedly, we have recovered our moral sense of duty, and are prepared, I hope, to put an end to this genocide. Osama bin Laden and his followers, ready, as always, to sacrifice anything and anyone to their hatred of the West and our ideals, have called on Muslims to rise up against any Westerner who dares intervene to stop the genocide, even though Muslims, hundreds of thousands of Muslims, are its victims. Now that, my friends, is a difference, a cause, worth taking up arms against.

It is not a clash of civilizations. I believe, as I hope all Americans would believe, that no matter where people live, no matter their history or religious beliefs or the size of their GDP, all people share the desire to be free; to make by their own choices and industry better lives for themselves and their children. Human rights exist above the state and beyond history – they are God-given. They cannot be rescinded by one government any more than they can be granted by another. They inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be abridged, they can never be wrenched. ~Sen. John McCain

Via Andrew Sullivan (who has a somewhat unnerving picture of McCain in his post)

The senator’s commencement address is very high-minded. Worryingly high-minded, if you ask me. Since Sen. McCain has affirmed that we ought to argue about questions of fundamental importance, let me be among the first to disagree with much of the senator’s speech. Whenever politicians these days speak glowingly about our commitment to the “rights of Man” (the capital M is in the original) and “human rights” that are “beyond history” (neo-Jacobins, anyone?), I begin wondering what country we will attack next. And Sen. McCain does not leave us wondering long. Sudan is his target of choice. His hectoring on Darfur seems to echo almost word for word New Republic editorials on the subject. He could very well be echoing neoconservative or evangelical hectoring on the same subject, as they are all reading from the same hymnal these days.

There are no rights accorded to men that exist “beyond history.” If there were natural rights as such, I grant that God would have to be the author of them. That would make them a product of His will. But even if God were the author of said natural rights, those rights could not exist “beyond history” because human beings do not exist “beyond history.” He may as well have said that they are beyond time, as there is no way to go “beyond history” without also going beyond our temporal condition.

So what does it mean to say that something is “beyond history”? It must be to say that it is eternal, which is to make natural rights equivalent to the energies of God, as only uncreated things are eternal. Everything created is not in itself eternal, though it might be made to endure eternally by grace, but finite and subject to time and decay. “Human rights” are not the same as God’s grace. If they exist at all, they would be claims established in accordance with natural law.

I doubt Sen. McCain had thought through what this claim would have to mean, so I won’t dwell on the plainly blasphemous implications of saying that human rights are “beyond history.” No, sir, they are in some significant measure either within history or they do not pertain to our life here below at all. If they are “beyond history,” they are assuredly figments of someone’s imagination, because they cannot actually be eternal This talk of something that is “beyond history” is the sort of loose, ahistorical chatter that passes for serious political philosophy, or its nearest approximation, in our political life today. It betrays a lack of respect for history, or certainly a lack of consideration of the importance of understanding the human predicament as one constrained by time and contingency. Needless to say, if this is Sen. McCain’s idea of conservatism, count me out.

When he tells the graduates of Liberty University that “humanity is impatient” for their service, he sounds like a revolutionary propagandist. Humanity is a quality of character, the quality of being humane, at least as the word was properly used in the past, and I suggest the word has been absued when it is made into an abstract concept referring to all men.

There is a common human nature that we can call our humanity, but invoked in the way he does it comes off as empty and false-sounding as the kind of abstract Society of which Baroness Thatcher denied the existence. Following her, I might say, “There is no such thing as humanity.” Abstractions do not get impatient. Whatever can be said for the rest of the human race, it probably cannot be said that it is impatient for American college graduates to go out into the world and meddle in their lives (and this is what the senator seems to mean).

If we taught our children rather to mind their own business, practise virtue and moderation and guard the deposit of the constitutional inheritance (or what’s left of it) left them by their fathers, we would be a remarkably more free and decent nation than if we kept filling every generation with the false missionary fervour of advancing “the rights of Man.” More men have been killed or made to suffer for the advance of “the rights of Man” than for any other cause in history. If we must take a message out into the world, I suggest we find a better one than that.