They Who Live In Cities

Cities are contradictions in themselves. A city brings thoughts together, it aggregates and transmits and disperses ideas. But a city also breeds close-quarters interaction, where difference becomes more important if one is not to lose one's identity. The polis then requires laws, regulations, social niceties — the polis must become a civis, the Greek democracy must become a Roman republic.

Cities militate against the rights of man. As one famous saying goes, free will ends where the reach of a hand meets the skin of a face. Free will and free expression are bound at the very least by the free will and expression of others. In a city, that physical landscape within which the metaphysical landscape moves, it means people are less free — they keep coming too close to each other.

And so humans may only enjoy the fullest extent of their rights when they are alone, separate from the logical demands of each other human. No man is an island, wrote Donne — but the hidden message in that meditation is obvious: nobody is free, and in a city, one is free least of all.

Abraham the Hierarch

Over the last few days, I've been listening to people who tell me that Abraham the Hierarch's theory is only a theory, and not empirically true. It has caused me to recoil in horror and then look very carefully at what they've said and why they've said it.

First of all, empirical observations are empirical by definition. You see things. If your perceptual apparatus is biased or otherwise returning false data, then those observations are empirical to you but untrue. But based on what normal human beings do, it is quite clear that biology tends to trump sociology or theology for the majority of us. It is the rare human who spends more time praying than eating (not that there aren't such people, of course).

Secondly, even Maslow admitted that his theory needed greater scrutiny, as it was only a generalisation based on his observations of selected people. But there is very little opposition to his theory; about the only serious contenders are a) Max-Neef's theory of fundamental human needs, and b) the somewhat arbitrary idea that there is no real hierarchy at all.

The reason that this issue is important is that there's been a lot of attention paid to 'human rights' — women's rights, gay rights, the rights of the poor and the sick and infants and children and students and teachers and unfortunate burglars and so on. But in order to think usefully about human rights, one has to ask how those rights arise.

There are a lot of theories about that, but I find myself standing back-to-back with Maslow's hierarchy when thinking about the priority one should assign to various rights. I've not said much about these things before, but I remember that in this post I related the rights issue with the idea of professional roles, and in this post I wrote about law and government with respect to basic rights.

The key idea is that a right (whether you're with Maslow or Max-Neef) stems from the ontological condition of being human. From a biological and developmental perspective, some rights are potential to begin with and conferred by the state of being a human in a human society (e.g. the right to communicate freely), while some rights are actual from the beginning and created by the fact of being a living organism (e.g. the right to have adequate sustenance and the right to have protection from environmental hazards). These rights are not granted by natural laws (that is, there are no physical laws which prevent you from starving or being hit by lightning) but are based on the 'given adequate resources, we should maintain these' principle.

If you're a starving artist, I think I would prefer to feed you before you starve if I had to choose between giving you food or art materials. In fact, if I had only one choice or the other, and I chose to give you the latter, most societies would consider me a little negligent. A minority would argue that art is more valuable than life. Well, it seems true enough for some people, but I don't think it is true for a majority. That's not just opinion; the empirical fact is that humans (even little kids in the mall) fight about food more than about art. People who fight about art are almost always at least at subsistence level for food.

One comment I read was this: "At the end of the day, when it comes to the crunch, what really drives and motivates life are values and causes. Entire civilisations have come and gone because of them. Our continued survival on this planet depends on them."

I found this dubious. I think food and physical resources are primary motivators. Values and causes are secondary. Empire-building is tertiary. You're welcome to disagree, of course, but I suspect when you get hungry and tired enough, you will prefer to eat or sleep instead of argue with me.

Not Right?

Since ex-Senator Obama became President-elect of the USA, a miniature cyclone has been brewing about the right that homosexuals are claiming: marriage identical to that of heterosexuals. I say 'miniature' because it is actually very small, and puffed up by numbers of people who do not understand what rights are, and 'cyclone' because it feeds circularly on itself.

I've already pointed out in several posts, such as this one, and this one, what basic human rights are. Any other rights (historically and philosophically speaking) must be established by an enforceable statute; that is, an explicit formulation must be crafted by some people, ratified by some people, enforced or protected by some people, supported by people until it becomes something considered to be similar to a natural right.

I am against the idea of homosexual marriages as legally identical to heterosexual marriages for a simple reason: you can't have it both ways. By giving dissimilar parties similar rights, you dilute rights and confuse the rule of law. It is like saying that bus lanes shouldn't exist because both buses and cars share the roads and carry passengers. Or like saying that all bridges should be rebuilt to allow M1 Abrams tanks to pass freely. Or that all vehicles should be designed to burn any kind of fuel that any other vehicle can burn.

Do I then deny rights to homosexuals by my position? Yes, and no. By creating bus lanes, we create a right for buses that cars don't have. Buses can travel on car lanes, but cars can't travel on bus lanes. Then again, buses can't use certain roads or parking lots at all, while roads and parking lots must be designed to accommodate cars. We have different sets of rights for buses and cars. We can (and often do) have different sets of rights for men and women, for homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Ha, this is where the outrage multiplies. What do I mean by different sets of rights for men and women? I mean, factually and empirically, that the law makes different provisions, in some cases and in some jurisdictions, for men and women. In some places, women are favoured with a right to take maternity leave, while fathers are not. In some places, both have that right. This is where the last part of my second paragraph comes in. Society tends to weight these rights in ways that the law doesn't quite touch. The law can't force you to approve of something. It can only make it legal until people don't disapprove.

In general, because of human history's course, we tend to be more upset when women's rights, now mostly equal (and in some cases superior) to men's rights, are transgressed. It is perceived as unfair to a group who in the past, especially under certain lenses, have been less-advantaged or disadvantaged. At the same time, there have also been female-dominated societies. But equal rights based on gender are not all basic human rights; we need to understand and accept that. The way society is right now, the politics of victimhood make it easier to target a man for being anti-anything than a woman for saying the same things. It is the same for any group of victims, past victims, or perceived victims.

That is what made the US elections this year so entertaining. One of the odd questions thrown up was whether it was easier for a woman or an African-American to become President. Actually, we still don't know...

Finally, I have to say that since I'm not homosexual, I can't put myself quite in such a person's shoes. But I can't quite imagine myself exactly, completely and convincingly as a cat, a Brazilian, a god, a parrot, a turnip, a cow, an egg or anything else that I am not. Am I a bigot? No, I don't think so. I like cats, but not so much dogs; I like eggs, but not so much turnips. I discriminate out of individual preference, in individual cases.

Literacies

It took two hundred and thirty-two years for this article to be written in what is now the United States of America. Charles Firestone has essayed a look at what literacies should be de rigeur for someone attempting to be a modern citizen of a modern state.

To some, this kind of thing is elitist. But another way to look at it is this: we actually have certification procedures for many things requiring responsibility. Voting, on the other hand, as a citizen of a state normally requires only two things: being born in a certain place and living long enough to vote. In many places, that vote doesn't even require you to be able to read or to understand the language of politics (or any language for that matter).

It is as if voting is on par with other human activities that don't require other certification: becoming a parent, purchasing alcohol, owning a pet. In these three cases, abuse of the privilege (by parenting badly, getting drunk and doing something stupid, mistreating an animal) can be an offence in the eyes of the law. But voting badly is not possible, it seems. You can vote for anyone you like, and there is no penalty; in fact, voting for a moron or spoiling your vote may (in many states) incur less of a penalty than not voting at all.

But Firestone's list is a pretty good place to start if you want to aim towards an educated population. His list is one of information-related literacies: how to get information, how to check it and understand what it means, how to apply it in a way which you can rationally justify as good for your fellow citizens. He has contextualised it to the present day — for him, the first has to do with the mass media and digital information sources; the second has to do with understanding civic processes and integrating knowledge into the social framework produced by them; the third has to do with understanding modern finances, the environment, and other large-scale concepts which have impact on the whole world.

To all that, he adds cultural literacy, but shies away from actually going there. It's probably the most contentious element of the lot, but yet it is one which many states actually use as a test for adopting citizenship. The odd thing is that if you have citizenship by birth, nobody bothers to test you for that kind of knowledge. This, to me, is not a good thing.

Can you imagine how much more significant history and social studies would be if you had to pass an examination in the relevant topics in those subjects before you could become a full citizen? Imagine if you could not get a driver's license or vote in elections; imagine if you could not work without a work permit just because you never passed history... ah, what an interesting world it would be!

Thinking Schools = Learning Nation?

This is probably the hardest thing I have to say to many people I know, so I shall keep it short.

I've decided that students should not have the primary right to free speech or freedom of movement. Yes, they are human rights, almost universally so – go ahead and look it up in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, that document is flawed in that while it assigns rights to 'everyone', it also distinguishes between parents and children (see article 26). It also hedges all this freedom with caveats regarding what can be said (compare article 12 with articles 18 and 19). Articles 27, 28, 29, and 30 all create further hidden clauses which raise legal issues even if we were to claim that we respected the entire Declaration.

This is not new. It has all been said before. What's new is who talks about related issues, when, and why. On 25 June 2007, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered this very interesting majority concurring opinion concerning free speech in schools. In it, he explains why he thinks that students having the right to free speech in schools in unconstitutional despite the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

I agree with him.

=====

There, now I've decimated my blog readership. Oh well. I will continue if anyone wants me to, but perhaps I have said enough.