Recently, a friend and I were discussing the boundary between personal freedoms and responsibility to a community, trying to ascertain the location of the line in the sand and why and how it was drawn in that spot. In the colloquium discussion on September 29, someone asked Dr. Horward if he believed the rights of man are natural. In societal natural selection, the strongest survive. If a ruler is to remain in control, he must do whatever it takes to either appease or reprimand his subjects, manipulating them in either process. Therefore, according to one prominent social theory, natural rights do not exist.
Society is controlled by whomever initiates the control.
For centuries, most cultures shared a general belief that rulers were ordained by a higher power. Of course, I cannot answer what the people of other times and places genuinely believed, but the fact is that until about 200 years ago, the greater portion of the earth's time and space were controlled by rulers who were ordained by works or a higher power, and that is evidence enough for me to believe that most people of most times did not actively believe they had any natural rights. This is a startling statement and very difficult for me to imagine. Growing up in the land of the free, I find it difficult to admit that the freedoms I enjoy with little consciousness of their value would be radically unnatural to the majority of the people who came before my time. I suppose the first philosopher to credit with the idea of democracy is Plato, but I don't want to dwell on him.