Ten years ago it still made sense to talk about progressive leftism, nationalism and Islamism as the dominant socio-political discourses in the Arab world. Since late in the first decade of this century these discursive frames have overlapped with each other, warped and twisted into new shapes in order to accommodate new discourses and combinations. This paper will begin with the lack of consensus in the contemporary Arab makes it a crucible of socio-cultural experimentation where questions of world-wide import are playing out. While it is an article of faith in the popular press that Islamic fundamentalism is a discourse that has spread from the Middle East, this paper will argue a counterintuitive claim that, among other experiments in discourse unfolding in the Arab world, a hybrid consisting of the tenets of human rights discourse and Levantinism is also spreading. This paper will argue that post-2011 cultural productions in the Levant represent a confluence of Enlightenment-based human rights discourse and contemporary Levantinism. Consciousness of the inalienable rights of human beings is an ideological standpoint that permits strong moral stances yet it is reducible to a legal framework. Levantinism is a protean term that has gone from a slur to “a testimony of the persistent pluralism and Mediterranean cosmopolitanism [that runs against] the obsession of ethnic purity.” Fundamentally, it is a discourse that refers to a way of living marked by conviviality. This paper shall argue that the emergent discourses of change in the Arab world often evoke a hybrid of human rights legalism and Levantine conviviality. As such, the ferment taking place in the Arab world is also at some level groping toward a discursive solution to a generalized split between legal and social worlds.