“I feel entitled to be treated fairly. I feel entitled to respect. I feel entitled to warmth and maybe even love. How childish is that? I mean . . . really! Is a lizard entitled to fairness? A lion? …….Where is it written in the rules of the universe that we humans are special and can step on bugs and eat hamburgers, yet expect to be magically spared these indignities where our own precious lives are concerned?…”
Non Entity at Strike the Root.
Comment:
I sympathize with anyone impatient with the language of rights today. It often seems as if practically anything can become a right, if voiced with enough exuberance.
But we shouldn’t forget that there’s a reason for this development. “Rights talk,” as scholar Mary Ann Glendon called it, didn’t develop in response to ‘nature,’ as NonEntity implies here. It grew up as a response to corporate power. And that’s a creation of the state and the law…
Correction: Glendon herself argues that this “rights” language comes out of the centrality of property rights to rights language in the US tradition – which makes the individual rights-holder more important than the “public good,” as envisaged in the rights language in Europe, which stems from Rousseau,
I think she blames it on John Locke – a move I don’t quite agree with… (more to come)…
Hmm. Did I imply that? I don’t remember that part at all. It’s fun watching all of the various things I’ve been adtributed with as a result of writing that. 😉
Actually, the entire thing was more about a person’s inner perspective and how that manifests in the world.
Another way of saying some of what I said is that “the only thing I have control over is how I respond to a given situation.” (Or something like that. I don’t know what or where the original of that statement is.)
It must begin within each of us. We must create the world we wish to inhabit, not demand that others provide it to us. That is what I was attempting to imply. I think.
Thanks for the post.
– NonE
Well, I’m with you there…
In fact, just clearing up what we mean might be quite a piece of activism in itself.
But just to go back to your comment.
There’s a limit to how much we can create the world we want from our own actions.
Even Gandhi ran into those limits.
And a lot of what Gandhi accomplished through nonviolence depended on the violence of fiery bomb-throwing revolutionaries who softened up the empire for him…