Grace & Peace!
I’m certainly not the only person to realize that many of the issues that are called “rights” issues these days are rather focused on individualism instead of the greater good.
I agree whole-heartedly with this–we have a fundamental misconception of what a right is. I’m a big fan of Simone Weil’s book outlining a possible reconstruction of France after WWII (called “The Need for Roots”) in which she begins with a discussion of rights and responsibilities. She writes that if we lived in a vacuum, we would have no rights, but we would still have responsibilities, if only to ourselves. Rights are not intrinsic to our humanity, therefore, but responsibilities are. This leads her to an idea of rights as formed in community but as stemming from the concept of responsibility–in other words, what I perceive as your rights are my responsibilities to you. An individual, therefore, cannot claim any rights for him or herself, but can only acknowledge that he or she has a duty to others. Weil conceives of an other-oriented society in which the ideal is that everyone will meet each other’s needs because they recognize their various responsibilities to each other.
The moment that we consistently cease to follow through on our duties to each other is the moment that a right becomes divorced from the life of a community, becomes something to be policed, little more than a legal concept that comes to us from outside community, outside our shared life together and is thus alienated from us, transformed into a sign of state power. A right then becomes a claim on an exercise of that power, and potentially a burden on our common life together, particularly when the “right” is illegitimate (which is to say, it does not legitimately arise from an acknowledgement of human dignity and our responsibilities to it, or from the legitimate and real needs of the community in question). Community becomes lost because we begin to lose each other–we begin to rely on the state to enforce rights rather than on each other.
In a culture such as ours, steeped as it is in an ethic of competition, an ethic of us
against them rather than us
for them, a culture of acquisition rather than a culture of the gift, all rights to one extent or another have become the property of the state and alienated from us. The way we conduct our lives, the way we allow ourselves to be governed, the way we transact our business, all of it indicates that we have abdicated our responsibilities to each other because we fear that others will not meet their responsibilities to us. Our fear is not unjustified, but it is nonetheless corrosive; it continues to erode the fabric of our common life together. Rights once seen as inalienable (because they arise out of our common responsibilities to our common humanity) become negotiable. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” as Yeats wrote.
Re: marriage–there’s a lot of individualist baggage over the past couple centuries that has moved it from being a clearly social institution to being a kind of “seal of approval” on a particular couple’s romantic relationship. Gay marriage wouldn’t be a question if that movement hadn’t been made first. There’s a lot of work that would need to be done in this arena in order to rehabilitate marriage…and I imagine that many of us would find what’s needed to be more than a little distasteful (like a willingness to welcome and support arranged marriages, for instance).
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
