Rights and Obligations

Karl Marx described the ideas of his contemporary Giuseppe Mazzini as “nothing better than the idea of a middle class republic.”  Of course, a middle class republic is what we have today in America, and Marx’s ideas are on the scrap heap.  The Italian Mazzini was formative in the instigation both of the Italian republic as the idea man behind Garibaldi(he is called by some the “Thomas Jefferson of Italy”), , and of the core idea of a European Union as a loose confederation of the republics of Europe; in his own time he was called “the beating heart of Italy” and over 100,000 attended his funeral in 1872.  In 1862, his followers were expecting from him something along the lines of the French “Rights of Man”, a key document of the French Revolution that served as a clarion call to overthrow tyranny; instead he set them on their ear by presenting them with a tiny book entitled The Duties of Man.  As a middle class person in a middle class republic, I could relate.

The claim that Mazzini made that so startled his followers was that we should have no rights; rights are obligations we place on others without their consent to act in a way favorable to us.  Instead, Mazzini argued we have should have only obligations as human beings that we place on ourselves, the only legitimate target of our coercion if we are truly free, to behave favorably toward others. We have duties.  It is too easy an out to characterize his position as extreme; though it was, one of our societal problems these days is that we are losing sight of what Mazzini was really talking about.  His contemporary John Stuart Mill understood when he talked about our social debt of reciprocity as essential to the preservation of liberty.  In the 20^th century, C. S. Lewis understood when, in The Screwtape Letters, he put in a devil’s mouth the idea of changing the Ten Commandments so they would read, “Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive.”

Tell me, what do the “collateral damage” occasioned by drones, the average of 14 homicides per day in America since the Newtown killings, the slaying of Trayvon Martin, the loss of life and property during Hurricane Katrina because of skimpy construction of a levee and the loss of health and sometimes life occasioned by Medicare coverage cuts all have in common?  Answer: they all represent results of the idea that we have no mutual obligations except those required by law and we have the right to minimize those.  With regard to the Martin case, Attorney General Holder is correct when he notes that expansion of rights of self defense via “stand your ground” laws has not been accompanied by any expansion of the rights of the person you see as an attacker.  Consequently, people who provoke an attack by their words or actions can claim self defense when shooting the person they provoke.  It’s legal, but it’s sort of like blaming the bull for the bull fight.  That has caused a tragedy and is likely to cause more. But the deeper tragedy is that we have lost our sense of obligation toward others.

The issue of course is how to define our obligations.  Laws by themselves are never enough.  Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, a foundation document for our Constitution, pointed out that the laws of a democratic republic do not work if they are not infused with the citizenry’s sense of mutual obligation.  J.S. Mill, as noted, pointed out that the very idea of Liberty has built into it the notion that we share a debt of reciprocity.  That has to be our starting point, the recognition that we all have benefited from the actions of others, whether we have known about them or not, and we have a societal obligation to return the favor.  The Libertarian sense of indifference to the needs of others, if shared by all, would have left us extinct with the Neanderthals.  Our gun legislation should consider not just the person being protected but also the effect on others.  We need to reinvigorate our sense of community, not just to defend it like Zimmerman was seeking to do, but to participate in its healthy growth.  It has taken a village to raise a child, and we are that child.  Then we have to accept that others, no matter how superficially unlike us, are fellow children of the village, toward whom we have obligations.  That was the tragic flaw in Zimmerman’s thinking; he recognized his own “rights” and those of the neighbors he knew, but not the fellow citizenship of Martin and Martin’s “rights”.  That also is a tragic error in the thinking of some people attacking the verdict, the idea that Zimmerman is “not one of us”, an enemy instead of a seriously flawed fellow citizen.   They, like Zimmerman, would seek to enforce extra-legal justice.  We are all victims and we are all perpetrators, and standing  our ground on our rights will not cure the problem. We have obligations.