If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (10 page)

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. This is why I've always rejected "environmentalist" as a label for myself. In its fundamental vision, the environmentalist movement reinforces the idea that there is an "us" and an "it" — two separate things — when in fact what we have here is a single community.

Elaine
. Yes, I see that. But even accepting all that, there will still be people who rank us as the most important members of that community.

Daniel
. There's no doubt about that, and their reasons satisfy them. There are still people who rank the white race over all others, and their reasons satisfy them, too. There's really nothing to be said about this beyond pointing out that the community of life got along just fine without humans for billions of years. In terms of importance to the community as a whole, I would without hesitation rank earthworms above
humans.

Elaine
laughs.

Daniel
. Well, let's see. Where to go next... Here's a question that should keep us occupied for a while: "Do you support the idea of extending human rights to primates?"

Elaine
. I take it you don't.

Daniel
. No, don't do that. You're not going to learn anything by leaping to what you assume to be my conclusion. Your job is to explore the assumptions of the person who asked this question. You have to
understand his frame of reference and figure out why it seems like a sensible question to him.

Elaine
. Okay. "Do you support the idea of extending human rights to primates?" It's loaded with assumptions.

Daniel
. Let's hear them.

Elaine
. I suppose the first one is the assumption that extending human rights to primates is something that's possible to do.

Daniel
. Couldn't we do it with an act of Congress? Couldn't we persuade every government on the
planet to do the same?

Elaine
. Not as stated. Are we going to give primates — by the way, aren't
we
primates?

Daniel
. Yes. Take the question as referring to nonhuman primates.

Elaine
. Okay... Are we going to give them the right to vote, the right to bear arms?

Daniel
. Ask the questioner. What would he say?

Elaine
. He would say... let's see... "I mean the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to enjoy the protections of due process of law."

Daniel
. So assuming that everyone in the world agreed to accord primates these rights, they'd be subject to eminent domain, the government's right to appropriate private property for public use. That's due
process of law, isn't it?

Elaine
. I guess so.

Daniel
. And, under this assumption, if a gorilla killed a poacher he wouldn't just be shot to death, he'd receive a fair trial.

Elaine
. Well... he wouldn't be considered fit to participate in his own defense.

Daniel
. True enough. So, in effect, all primates would have an irrevocable "Get out of jail free" card. Primates would have rights even humans don't have.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. I guess we'll have to settle for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Daniel
. Okay. You said the question was loaded with assumptions. What are the others?

Elaine
. Well... I guess one of them is the assumption that it makes sense to stop with primates. Is it because they're very intelligent? If you're going to extend human rights to intelligent creatures, then why not dolphins and elephants? Or if it's because they're endangered, then why not blue whales and bald
eagles?

Daniel
. So you're saying that the idea is unsupportable because of its arbitrary limitation of human rights to primates.

Elaine
. No, not exactly. I guess I'm saying it's impractical, because no one is going to accept the extension of human rights to nonhuman primates as a stopping point. Maybe I shouldn't say no one. I
mean that animal rights advocates aren't going to accept it. Why not minks and ermines, along with all
the others I've mentioned? Vegetarians might want to extend human rights to chickens and cattle.

Daniel
. True.

Elaine
waits for Daniel to continue.

Daniel
[
after a minute or so]
. You said the question was loaded with assumptions.

Elaine
. Yes...

Daniel
. You haven't touched on the most fundamental of these assumptions.

Elaine
. Which one is that?

Daniel
. Look for it.

Elaine
. "Do you support the idea of extending human rights to primates?" Was that the question?

Daniel
nods.

Elaine
. I suppose there's an assumption that it's even
possible
to do such a thing. I mean, even with a worldwide agreement.

Daniel
. Meaning what?

Elaine
. Human rights are by definition
human
. How can you say that a lemur has
human
rights?

Daniel
. It's a good point. But there's a much deeper one waiting to be found.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. I don't see what you're looking for.

Daniel
. I'm not looking for it,
you
are... You're going to have to pull way, way back to see it.

Elaine
thinks for a while, then shakes her head.

Daniel
. Okay. I'm probably rushing things a bit here. What is meant by "human rights"? I'm not asking you to enumerate them. I'm asking you for a general definition: What are human rights?

Elaine
. I guess I'd say that these are the rights people have by virtue of being human.

Daniel
. In other words, to be human is to have these rights.

Elaine
. That's right.

Daniel
. Hold on a minute. [Brings Elaine a copy of
Key Ideas in Human Thought
, edited by Kenneth McLeish and published by Facts on File.] See how the term
human rights
is defined in this book.

Elaine
[
reading
]. "Human rights are rights which all humans should possess because they are human beings irrespective of their citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, language, sex, sexuality, or abilities."

Daniel
. Very similar to your own definition.

Elaine
. Except for the word
should
. It says all humans
should
possess these rights, not that they do.

Daniel
. What do you make of that?

Elaine
. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Daniel
. Suppose I were to define a college degree as a degree that all humans
should
possess. How would you react to that?

Elaine
. I'd guess I'd ask, who says so?

Daniel
. So does the author of this article ever explain who says that human rights are rights that all humans should possess simply because they're human beings?

Elaine
[
some minutes later, after reading the article
]. The author describes it as a "doctrine," and the doctrine is a "lineal descendant of the doctrine of natural rights proposed by the founders of liberal political thought, notably John Locke."

Daniel
. So the notion that there is such a thing as human rights is only about 350 years old.

Elaine
. Yes. At least according to this source.

Daniel
. I can run off a copy of the Hammurabi Code of Laws for you, but you can take my word for it that it contains no mention of "human rights." It lays out things that may and may not be done. One can say, though Hammurabi doesn't, that one has a right to do the things that he says may be done, but
there's no implication that this right exists simply because one is human. This right exists because
Hammurabi says it exists. He describes himself as "The king of righteousness, on whom Shamash has
conferred right (or law)." "Or law" is in parentheses. I assume the translator is making the point that the word Hammurabi uses here can mean either
right
or
law
.

Elaine
. What about the Bible? I assume you've checked that.

Daniel
. Yes, of course. The word
right
appears many times, but most often in connection with the rights of the firstborn, which are just a matter of custom; in American society, for example, the firstborn has no special rights. There's nothing in the Bible like the concept of "human rights," rights that people have just because they're human. As with the Code of Hammurabi, the laws set down in the Bible can be seen
as conferring rights — for example, the right to kill a witch — but these are exactly rights that are
divinely
conferred
, not rights that are somehow innately human.

Elaine
. Yes, that's true. Then there's the... I can't think of the name... the Magna Carta.

Daniel
. Oh yes. This was a charter of rights granted by the English king to his barons in 1215.

Elaine
. Certainly not
human
rights.

Daniel
. No. Let me see that article on human rights... It says, "Unless human rights are specifically embodied in constitutional provisions, they are not legal rights." What do you suppose that means?

Elaine
. I think it means... unless the country you're living in has a constitution that confers these rights on you, you don't really have them. You can't go to court and claim that your human rights have been
violated unless the constitution says you have them.

Daniel
. So, practically speaking, you don't have human rights just by being human after all. If you have them, it's because the constitution says you have them.

Elaine
. I'd say so. But doesn't the US Constitution say that these rights are God-given?

Daniel
. No. You're thinking of the Declaration of Independence, though it doesn't use that particular expression. It says that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Elaine
. Unalienable being what?

Daniel
. Unalienable being "incapable of being taken away from or given away by the possessor." It's a curious word. Its sole application seems to be to rights. Its first such application was made in 1611.

Elaine
. Okay. But this is just an assertion, isn't it? That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

Daniel
. Certainly. I have a quote about this. Hold on a second... Here's what Thomas Jefferson
(President Kennedy repeated the assertion in his inaugural address, saying, "The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."), the principal author, wrote in support of what's said in the declaration: "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and
to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays,
or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, et cetera." Of course he wasn't referring specifically to the expression we're considering.

Elaine
. Wasn't he a Deist?

Daniel
. Jefferson's religious beliefs are the subject of endless debate. He certainly never specifically claimed to be a Deist, though there's little doubt that he was influenced by and sympathetic with Deistic
views. His reference in the declaration to "Nature's God" certainly has a Deistic flavor. Why do you ask?

Elaine
. I'm looking for his grounds for saying that the Creator endowed us with inalienable rights. They weren't scriptural.

Daniel
. No. "Nature's God" isn't the God of the Bible. He — or it — is the "uncaused cause" of the cosmological argument. Roughly speaking, it goes like this: "Since the universe exists, it must have had a cause, and since a causal chain can't stretch infinitely backward in time, there must be a first cause that was not itself caused; this uncaused first cause is God." This argument speaks only to the existence of God and posits nothing about his character.

Elaine
. But it was this God who endowed us with inalienable rights. It's still just an assertion.

Daniel
. Rights can
only
be asserted or denied. In the end, they're just something to be argued about. One side asserts the right and the other side denies it, but there's no final authority — final in the sense that it's an authority accepted by both sides — that can be appealed to in order to end the argument. Even the
law can't be appealed to, because almost any law can be changed if enough people want it changed.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. But the argument over slavery was eventually settled, wasn't it? I mean, even in the South, I doubt if you could find many slavery advocates nowadays.

Daniel
. Arguments aren't necessarily settled just because no one is around to make them. There's no one around today — at least in the United States — to make the arguments that were put forward in support of slavery as a moral option in the 1860s, but the arguments are still there. The Pelagian argument is still there, even though the church finally pronounced against it. The argument over abortion has been won
in the United States, but it obviously hasn't been settled.

Elaine
. Yes, I see your point.