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Ever notice how good ideas get sliced and diced into ever smaller fragments of good intentions until bunches of different people start working against one another instead of pulling together in one common effort? I wonder why this so often happens.
I was reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and got to wondering about all the semantics and divisions people make up around good ideas like that. The basic notion is simple enough: there are some things people just should not do to one another. OK, so how do you say that?
The UDHR does a pretty good job mostly, saying things like Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” That’s pretty clear and simple. There are some people who want things spelled out though. They want the article to spell out specific things that are torture, for example. This might seem like a good idea, at first, but there is a problem with approaching a topic like this in that manner. Once you begin to cite examples of things that are torture, some people will assume that anything not mentioned is not torture and is therefore permissible.
Here’s an example, from Article 2: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. “ Why couldn’t this have ended with the word distinction? I am in favor of people not being discriminated against on the basis of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, or birth, but what about sexual orientation or gender identification or level of education or parental lineage or any number of other distinctions or qualifications that have been used to limit access to social and economic rewards or status.
If a thing is wrong to do to someone, then it is wrong to do it to anyone. There should be no distinction or excuse. To deny the right to anyone is to deny the right to all, because once the state has the power to selectively deny rights, they can decide that anyone belongs to an unprivileged group. It comes down to one central idea really: there is just one kind of human.
There are corollaries, of course:
Pretty much everything in the UDHR can be summarized very simply by saying: there is a special class of creatures called human beings and they have special qualities called rights. Every human has the same rights. All people must respect those rights without distinction.
The minute you begin to define which groups are entitled to protection, you inevitably define groups that are excluded from protection. Every time you start to define what those rights are, you define rights people haven’t got. If that seems strange, one need only remember that the guardians and custodians of the law are all lawyers. The semantics of this and that term or phrase are very important to lawyers. Words are what they make their living interpreting in a climate of extreme contention. And sometimes it seems like lawyers get paid by the word, because they sure like to use so many of them. Just because someone obeys the letter of the laws doesn’t mean they haven’t trashed the meaning of it. And just because someone has acted truly according to the spirit of the law does not mean they can’t be convicted of breaking that law. Such are niceties of jurisprudence.
But the fact remains that we progressives have thousands of little splinter groups out there in the wide world (and the world wide web) each concentrating on an issue or two - each one jealously guarding its prerogatives and its funding and competing for our support. Instead of people taking the big picture and working collaboratively on making advances across an entire landscape of issues, they concentrate on one tiny little microcosm of importance and disregard all else.
I have friends who talk non-stop about important world-shattering issues that are really, really important to them: marriage equality, gender politics, reproductive rights -- and I am all for them and glad that they are interested and believe in these causes, but when I bring up the environment, you know, the planet’s ecology, they get this bored, oh, not again look in their eyes. Oh, they sympathize and deep down in their hearts they know none of the other issues will mean anything without a human habitable planet on which to enact change, but all that environmental stuff just doesn’t get them excited the way it did when they were 22.
And that’s a shame. I am all for all kinds of progressive changes, but I wish people could keep the big picture of all the necessary change in their hearts and not just give allegiance to one little segment. In the car selling trade, they have an expression: “there’s an ass for every seat.” Well, there’s a cause for every person, too. It’s a pity we can’t all get together in consensus and do what’s right.
Of course, one of the main methods used by those who do not want meaningful change is to split up an issue into little contentious groups and let them waste all their time squabbling about meaningless trivialities instead of working together on substantive issues and change. It;s called divide and conquer and it has worked very, very well on the American left.
So go find some friends and invite them to a potluck and while they’re all full of good food, talk to them about getting together with other people: networking to effect real change, not just supporting pet issues, but banding together as a block of powerful people to demand and get real change. It may not be precisely what you want, but it will be a move in the direction of doing the right thing. We need a lot of right things to keep us and our species alive on this planet. It’s also true that real change means real risk and real work and real inconvenience and these all go better when there’s a bunch of you in on everything together.
Real change IS possible. We make it happen.
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