|
(This is a
follow on to my earlier post on
our dignity and rights.)
The modern age has overseen a
great expansion of our rights. Global disparities remain but there is no
dearth of people who believe that rights are a good thing (at least for
the social group they identify with most, be it based on race, nation,
class, culture). Countless rights commissions and tribunals, as well as
some NGOs and the media, strive to preserve or enhance them, often on
behalf of strangers across the world and often with remarkably heartening
results. Clearly, talk of rights is now chic but what about obligations
and personal responsibility? What good is the former without the latter ?
People can demand rights from their government, but who gets to demand
personal responsibility from the people? What happens when our exercise of
rights and freedom get increasingly divorced from personal responsibility?
As early as the
1920s, in a keenly
observant and
prophetic work, The Revolt of the
Masses, Ortega y Gassett wrote that life in
the modern West "as
a program of
possibilities [for
all] is magnificent,
exuberant, superior
to all others known
to history. But by
the very fact that
its scope is
greater, it has
overflowed all the
channels,
principles, norms,
ideals handed down
by tradition."
Furthermore, our age
is stamped by the
arrival of the
self-satisfied,
indocile, mass-man,
a drifter without
history, saved from
the pre-modern age's
harsh life and
exacting gods. He
now sees no need to
make real demands on
himself, wants and
receives as
entitlement all the
rights, freedoms and
comforts of the
modern age but
accepts none of the
obligations, limits
and standards vital
to civilized life.
Even the modern
professional who
leads the mass-man behaves no better
outside his narrow
domain. Ortega y
Gassett called this
a "vertical invasion
of the barbarians
... as if through
the trapdoors ...
the commonplace mind
knowing itself to be
commonplace, has the
assurance to
proclaim the rights
of the commonplace
and to impose them
wherever it will."
This may be why
Kierkegaard
cynically quipped:
"People demand
freedom of speech as
a compensation for
the freedom of
thought which they
never use."
This drift in modern culture
towards the least common denominator is perhaps why many perceive in it a
strong sense of decadence. "We are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of
innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths,
[because they have nothing] to which to give themselves." (source). Fearful of the worst, many artists and activists today adopt humorless,
neo-luddite attitudes: modernity has ushered in a more abrasive social
milieu; science and technology has given more power to man than he can
handle with grace; they glorify the past out of postmodern nostalgia. But
the imagined virtues of the past are only phantoms of our mind. We can
learn from the past but we cannot go back to reclaim it; our unique age
must find its own destiny. Let us recall this cautiously optimistic verse
by the sixth century BCE Greek poet, Xenophanes of Colophon,
The gods did not enrich man
with a knowledge of all things
from the beginning of life.
Yet man seeks, and in time
invents what may be better.
|
