John Dunn

In the aftermath of the Second World War, T. S. Eliot expressed concern that ‘centuries of barbarism’ lay ahead, ushered by the supremacy of technology. In Simone Weil he discovered a kindred spirit in the countering of barbarism with a vision of a cohesive social structure, firmly rooted in tradition. Writing the preface to Weil’s The Need for Roots, Eliot described Weil ‘as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves socialist’.

Weil, like Eliot, believed that an effective social organism can only be founded on the principle of unity in multiplicity, with all contributors considered as equally important to its progress. Everyone, everything,must be considered to be in a relationship with someone or something else in conformity with their respective natures, and thus in conformity with the right to fulfil those natures. This right is not expressed as an absolute, as it is under liberalism, but as a relation.

Simone Weil expressed this insight in The Need for Roots, her blueprint for a new post-war social organism. She wrote that ‘a right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him’. Her point was that it is the relative nature of a right which makes it effective. ‘An obligation which goes unrecognised by anybody’, she wrote, ‘loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognised by anybody is not worth very much’. Under liberalism, it is the one-sided understanding of each right as an absolute and possessed equally by everyone, that has actually destroyed rights, i.e. the right of a nature to be what it is.

‘Rights’,Weil wrote, ‘are always found to be related to certain conditions. Obligations alone remain independent of conditions. They belong to a realm situated above all conditions, because it is situated above this world.

‘The men of 1789’ (in other words Weil meant the progenitors of modern liberalism), ‘did not recognise the existence of such a realm. All they recognised was the one on the human plane. That is why they started off with the idea of rights. But at the same time they wanted to postulate absolute principles. This contradiction causedthem to tumble into a confusion of language and ideas which is largely responsible for present political and social confusion’.

Weil is making the point that it is a belief in a ‘realm situated ... above this world’ that will determine whether or not men will submit willingly to the obligations of the social organism. It will demand a reorientation of all values to the vertical, rather than a horizontal human plane, where submission to a higher principle is necessary if rights are to mean anything at all.

French theologian Jean Borella has contrasted this vertically orientated thinking with modernity’s veneration of equality, in which an individual...

...‘right is always absolute and therefore excludes all others. But it is impossible to translate this absoluteness into equality and to say, since all rights are absolute, that they are all equal, for equality destroys rights. This right is in fact the right of a nature to be what it is. Now equality is realised only on the purely quantitative pane of numerical unities (1 = 1); thus, under its sway, everything tends to numerical juxtaposition, which is only possible through the destruction of all the qualitative differences that specifically make up these natures, so that, with equality, a right is the right to nothing’. (Jean Borella - The Secret of the Christian Way)