PART VII
SUMMARY,
WITH HOPE
1997
"It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but
the
certainty
that something makes sense, regardless of how it
turns
out."
Vaclav Havel
This
essay has been a personal quest to enlarge and clarify our human rights – and
responsibilities. I have attempted to weave an organic fabric beginning with
the individual. I have tried to include all of men’s and women’s basic interactions;
those with one another, with their families and communities and with their
mutually shared life support systems. This search has been prompted by my own
observations as an architect with journeys through the slums and suburbs of
today and through the not so equitable workings or our present legal system.
Wiser men and women than myself whose writings I have come to admire and whose
wisdom I have borrowed have also prompted it.
The individual is born into a continuum of other
individuals, of many cultures, of other biologic species and diverse
ecosystems. These women and men are unique creations conceived by unique
parents and born into unique environments of family, friends and place. The
extent of their positive contributions to this continuum will be based on how
well they are able to make use of their unique faculties. This, in turn, will
depend on a working concept of rights, which perceives that optimizing the
individual’s potential optimizes society’s chance for survival and success.
But
the individual alone is an abstraction from the real world. The need is to
clarify the whole of which the individual is one part. I have tried to outline
this as follows: the various acts of individuals I have termed exclusive
rights, those of family’s mutual rights, those of businesses or government use
rights, and those of all individuals collectively participating in their
governments as shared, or civil rights. In every case I have tried to relate
these to one another and to everyone’s mutually shared biosphere. The
individual requires an exclusive right to the exercise of his or her own
physical and mental faculties. Couples require the right to procreate, to rear,
nurture and educate their children and the responsibility to care for their
elderly. All citizens require equal access to their shared life support systems
and an equal right to the use of the natural and cultural resources thereof.
All citizens require a shared right and responsibility to protect and enhance
these foregoing rights and to resolve infringements thereof.
Freed
of tyrants, hereditary monarchs and religious theocrats, men and women find
themselves in charge of their own fate. They are the state. As such they have
an obligation to their fellow citizens and to their progeny, an obligation to
formulate and administer equitable justice. It should be one which seeks to
eliminate historic privilege; those laws written by the strong to protect and
prolong their privileges. It must also be the kind of justice which perceives
the realization of a sustainable society as perhaps the ultimate
responsibility. The function of law, then, should be to provide a framework
within which each individual, each family and their children, every freely
associating group of individuals and all individuals collectively as citizens
can best realize their potential without detriment to others or their shared
environment, earth.
The
achievement of such a rule of law will not come easily. It calls for many
restraints which, seen historically, appear intractable: population,
consumption and destruction constraints, equal right of access to resources and
representative democracy freed from special interests. Further, one wherein the
defining and adjudication of use rights is removed from partisan prerogatives
and left to be settled by professionals who have been selected by their peers.
This apolitical branch of government, expanded beyond the current court system
to include members of the scientific community will, like our Supreme Court,
act as a counterforce to the short term focus of politics, business and the
general public. Its focus will be on our children and grandchildren.
While
acknowledging our sun and its life-sustaining role in our lives we realize that
we have no role to play in its life or death. We may not likewise have control
over the visitation of some giant meteor or a devastating world plague. We can,
however, exert some control over our own destiny as participants in our shared
biosphere. How well we understand biosphere dynamics and begin to live in
harmony with them is critical. This is what I have termed the “ecological
imperative.” The main body of my essay deals with these issues as they relate
to all our rights and responsibilities.
Scientists
and technologists, still focused on reductionism almost exclusively, will need
to refocus on synthesizing the known elements of our complex, earthbound
ecosystems. This shift will be more difficult than either the macro or the
micro systems with which they are becoming reasonably familiar because this one
includes “man” as an increasingly important factor – for better or worse.
Cooperation between scientific disciplines, as with NASA’s space explorations,
will be paramount.
What we do know is that spaceship earth, like our own
man-made spaceships, is a closed system and our survival depends on whether we
can develop what Kenneth Boulding states are “symbiotic relationships of a
closed cycle character with all other elements and populations of a world of
ecological systems.” There is no place to hide the garbage, no where to flee.
Central to all rights is the redefinition of ownership
as a verb meaning the providing and receiving of complete services that protect
and restore whatever eco damage they may do. Protecting the biosphere is a
communal responsibility, an ongoing stewardship financed in part by
appropriating the competitive value of used resources. Both are verbs—complete
services and stewardship—nor is the biosphere static.
The
specifics of this essay have been about violation of other’s rights, unearned
incomes, disservices and irresponsibility. At another level they are about
crafting survival mechanisms commensurate with the problems facing us. They are
also about our dysfunctional ideologies, some inherited, some co-opted by
special interests. They are about our expanding information base and
concurrently degrading life support base. They are about redefining those
things which need to be socialized and those which should best stay privatized.
They are about redefining wealth as a sustainable process and present economic
growth as a non-sustainable one. They are about the search for new energy
resources to replace fossil fuels. Finally, they are about fear and longing
with the hope that we can disenthrall ourselves to think and act anew.
This
essay is not about any single violation of a comprehensive bill of human
rights. It is not just about runaway population, resource destruction,
externalized costs, extractive investments, human exploitation, predatory
capital or weapons proliferation. Nor is it only about compromised democracies,
repressive theocracies or petty dictatorships. And it is not just about the sum
of these or other factors. It is about the whole being worse than the sum of
its parts, creating a negative synergy. It is about how all these factors
forestall the realization of our rights, unfairly consume and destroy
resources, and threaten our collective existence. And it is about the huge
human energy potential which would be freed by their elimination.
Finally,
it is not just about the United States. It is about the world and the
interdependence of all nations. It is about the urgency of evolving a strong,
democratic United Nations, one that understands the unjust disparities between
countries and between citizens within each country, and is able to redress
them. It is also about the need for a U.N. which sees the biosphere as a
complex of dynamic events without national boundaries or private properties,
therefore as a collective human habitat, requiring collective decisions regarding
its use or abuse. It must be a United Nations based on comprehensive human
rights and responsibilities with authority to protect and enhance them.
No
panaceas are offered nor any easy roads to follow. I have attempted to expand
the concept of people’s rights and conversely their responsibilities, and to
suggest some scenarios that might help towards their realization. I have said
that democracies are our best hope because, like the human rights at their
core, they are dynamic, evolving from exclusion to inclusion. Other systems of
government tend to be exclusive and static, thus inflexible and degrading to
the human spirit. They limit and frustrate participation. At worse, they foster
conflict.
It is my hope that this essay will generate a larger
discussion and thus help foster both comprehensive rights and democracies freed
from all special interest groups. I admit to a limited discussion herein,
having no illusions as to the practical difficulties that lie ahead for the
suggested paths. I do believe in the justice of the basic ideas and thus in
people’s willingness to fight for their realization.
* * * * * * *
Experts
from various disciplines predict varying scenarios relative to the fate of
modern society. Some foresee continued population growth with its attendant
competition for and consumption of earth's limited resources leading to
inevitable environmental degradation and resource depletion. Of the many
scenarios offered perhaps the least hopeful suggest that we, as a specie, might
recede to an agrarian culture with little energy available for organization
beyond the local or regional level. Others, the Futurists among them, predict
continued expansion fueled by human's inventive genius and our ever-expanding
information base. They foresee us not only mastering the operation of spaceship
earth but moving ever outward exploring the solar system and beyond. Finally,
there are many who believe we are heading into dangerous times but still have
time to correct our course, to utilize our still remaining resource capital to
discover and construct a sustainable society without the obvious cataclysmic
shock of a specie-induced reordering. But whether we recede, expand or
stabilize, it should be clear from our own emergence as a species that evolving
is unpredictable and that even the best experts stand corrected with time. The
most we can hope for, in our survival quest, is to maximize each others
creative input (the individual and collective energy of society) in order to
address our needs. To this end an equitable justice based on universal rights
and responsibilities is critical.[1]
At
times the obstacles to freedom and justice may seem insurmountable: religious
and ethnic intolerance by a majority, brute force by a minority over a
majority, the unequal justice of rich vs. poor - in a word, "man's
inhumanity to man." Writing at the turn of the century (1905), Henry
Adams, that perceptive and brilliant member of the illustrious Adams family,
predicted the anarchist's bomb would reach atomic ferocity by the end of the
century (1999). He was awed and discouraged by what he saw and anticipated from
the new technologies:
"He found himself in a land where no one had ever
penetrated before; where order[2] was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature;
artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the
universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back
into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law of the new multi-verse
explained much that had been obscure, especially the persistently fiendish
treatment of man by man; the perpetual revolt of society against the law it had
established; the perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual
appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and
the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the principals
of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into the principals of power; but
the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial
order which nature abhorred."
One thinks of Fermi's fears under Stagg's Field
Stadium and of Oppenheimer's at Los Alamos; at such a time they might have
agreed with Adams and his depression.
But
this is no reason to surrender. Given our expanding, ubiquitous electronic
networking, perhaps we, citizens of the world, will begin to understand and
appreciate the fragile nature of our own specie and that of our biosphere and
will embrace Sherrington's "altruism," a merger of one's ego with all
other egos. We may be able, then, to convert competition for personal or
special gain to co-operative competition for everyone's gain. Listen once more
to Sherrington's words:
"But the course of Nature - and of the planet's
whole story reveal a law of primeval antiquity, namely, change, progressive
change, a law older even than of life itself. A status quo would be a breach of
law, if Nature's law were breachable.
'The
old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills
Himself in many ways,
Lest
one good custom should corrupt the world (Alfred Lord Tennyson)'.
The great religions bringing their altruism are
evidence of a new tide. Man must lead or go. To lead is all he is fit for. But
leadership does not lie in treating as prey those with whom it competes. Man is
above all a leader charged with survival of the 'values' which are in his
keeping. With these 'values' his leadership must be some form of fellowship.
The pivot of fellowship is altruism. Fellowship cultivates equality of
'selves,' equal respect for values and equal rights in values. It asks man to
be watchful against himself that he harm not his neighbor. Altruism as basis of
co-operative effort, to guide some of the ways of life to nobler common issues.
There is so much for men to do in common. A new form of 'zest-for-life' with
knowledge for its tool."
Between
these two extreme scenarios (one feared and the other longed for), and if
history is to be believed, the struggle for rights and justice will go on, with
an ever growing number of world citizens willing to carry the torch, resigned
to sacrifice themselves in the name of justice. So long as this is so, the
Martin Luther Kings, the Nelson Mandelas, the Lech Walensas, the Andre
Sakharovs, the Aung San Suu Kyis, the Chico Mendeses and the Wang Dans of the
world will not have fought in vain.
We
must also include those today who are fighting to save our habitat, to demand
we take responsibility for our children’s future. I have quoted some herein but
there are thankfully many more. We owe them all our gratitude and support.
Rights without responsibilities are but half-rights.
“Peace is
more than simply the absence of war:
it is the presence of justice.”
Martin Luther
King