The pseudo-biblical quote, that is on constant repeat in my head, throughout most of my current days, is "God helps those, who help themselves". This verse apparently is not in the bible, having gone through my entire life until now, thinking that it was a verse brought down by the authors of the bible, and in fact it has been noted by some Christian theologians, that it is an antithesis to actual passages in the Christian bible that go against the premise of the aforementioned quote. The bible's associative verse actually says, "For You have been a defense for the helpless, a defense for the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shade from the heat..." It's a mere political cliche!So I set that quote aside for a few minutes and got down to reading a new book I picked up at the library yesterday, titled, Voices of a People's History of the United States by the historian Howard Zinn, and there was a passage in it, that rekindled my thought on the intent of this quote, that actually was coined by Benjamin Franklin, who cited it from Algernon Sydney's article, Discourses Concerning Government. In the history text by Zinn, there is a letter written by a group of slaves in 1777, who write a letter addressed to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, asking that they be allowed to serve the same purpose in life that all other free men serve in a free land as that of America. Consider for a moment that this petition for freedom in a country that was not even a year into its independence, a nation of men free to establish their own laws, and subsist of their own free lands, and were almost literally helping themselves gain true freedom! There's a subtle hint of irony though. How were free men helping themselves while, at the same time, helping themselves to the enslavement of other men, in order to gain an excessive amount of freedom that could never exist. The wealthy colonists were not helping themselves, but were instead very dependent on the withdrawal of another man's freedoms, in order to fulfill their sense of freedom. It seems as if God was helping those that depended on the help of others, and the former colonists were helping themselves to freedom at the cost of another man's ability to help himself. The strongest sentiment of the letter written by the slaves, states, that "they have, in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which ... they have never forfeited." In other words, they never willingly gave up the ability to help themselves, until they were enslaved and forced to help those that couldn't help themselves, and those that couldn't help themselves were the ones who had gained the most from the institution of slavery. Even the colonists were indentured slaves to Great Britain at one point, so the men who had gained freedom from an oppressive state, should have been the first people to be able to relate unequivocally to the slave's predicament. In the letter, the slaves were astonished, that "[the granting of freedom] has never been considered" by a new nation that had torn itself from the long reach of England, which was helping itself at the cost of the colonists.
More times than none, you can always perceive religious proverbs as a sensible tool to be applied to making sure that one's life is being carried out ethically and morally, but it is extremely important to remember that just because it is a generally accepted belief, does not necessarily make it true or correct. How many times in our lives can we actually look back on the good outcomes and say that that particular situation was overcome because I depended solely on my own resources or abilities. Overall, we all sooner or later have any instance in our lives connected to someone else's contribution. Not to say that it should come in the form of oppression or authoritative control, but people can find themselves in a beneficial situation that was provided by others in a mutual sense.
The point here, is not a religious proclamation, but rather a proper understanding of what it means to help one's self, and how that is ethically degrading to the welfare of all people, whether it be the individual or society as a whole. Today we are often presented a lot of language from politicians who view the world in one of two ways - social or independent. From this we are lead to question whether we benefit as a society or more so from our participation in that society as individuals. In contrast to one another these two schools of political thought bring about this sense of struggle between which approach caters to the concept of being more free. Conventional wisdom among more conservatives is that the individual fails to be free, or is restrained by social participation, because the individual is committed to providing efforts of responsibility to the group, therefore sacrificing his or her individual needs. In contrast to that is the societal thinker, who identifies with freedom for the individual through the mechanism of a group's responses, social responsibility.
Are we to sustain our lives together, but apart? That is the representation of strict individualism, where the individual performs his or her life's tasks expressly for the purpose of self-fulfillment. Satisfying one's own happiness is not necessarily immoral in the context of society, but it is a very limiting or constrained premise. When one considers the individual versus society, and the implementation of laws, it is clearly evident that the individual depends on society, and is strongly connected to society via the rule of law. Granted, "legal entitlements may come into conflict as well as it occurs for individual interests", but the mere fact that there is a conflict between the individual interest and society's laws, the two could never separate from one another, and the existence of a society is necessary for sustaining the individual's interests. In this scenario, the individual is more of a threat to society, then society is a threat to the individual. If any one interest outweighs the interests of others, this is dictatorial, and fails to benefit the interest of all of the individuals within a society, and therefore the society fails to sustain itself. In either case, there exists a certain level of legal entitlement, and if that entitlement tends to favor the individual over society, and all other individuals are known to exist "under a disability" ("a party is unable to or exempted from extinguishing one or more of the existing legal relations of the counterparty."). A counter-party, or an individual grasping full power of the law, alters the other individuals' abilities to utilize the law. (1)
Division of society is a clear example of how individual power deteriorates the power of all the individuals within that society. The more times an individual can portray to the society that factions of society are wrong or bad for the good of the individual, that act of isolating power has proven throughout political history that interests of the individual work against all persons. There are many ways by which individualistic power forces can split societal powers, especially when it pertains to labor forces. There are two examples that come to mind: one, is the gender differences in the job market, and how one gender will criticize the other for creating an unfair, non-competitive job market; the second is free trade workers, in that there is a struggle between domestic workers versus foreign ones.
New Deal 2.0, featured an article, titled The Other Side of the ‘Mancession’: Women Left Behind, and it pointed out that new economic stimulus legislation directed at infrastructure in the U.S. is favoring men more than women, because infrastructure jobs only involve construction and engineering - two career areas the author assumes are only male dominated. The question that comes to mind is, was legislation meant to put more investment into the economy biased towards men, and meant to ignore the female staffed industries of health care or education? This seems to be an attempt at division of society, pitching male individuals versus female, and using the platform of job shortages and unemployment as a mechanism to challenge societal needs. No economic policy at a national level is meant to benefit a faction or an individual. It would defeat the purpose of serving as an economic policy, and therefore would never work.
The free trade movement is the most astounding attempt by one party to use an unrecognized structure of international law and culture to manipulate and take advantage of global citizens without global citizenship. Free trade offers all kinds of power through law, which entitles global businesses to make movement of trade goods across borders easier and cheaper. Under U.S. law, the business is recognized as an individual, and therefore in conjunction with free trade agreements, the U.S. business apparently serves its own interests over those of the global society, and in turn the global society's individuals are not permitted by domestic laws to participate in the same international manner.These types of individualistic strategies benefit the proxy individual, in that a third party pitches two other factions of society against one another, as a way to deteriorate the power of society, and swing the power toward the third party's own interests. This dependence on necessitating an imbalance among members of a society proves that even the external individual's power highly depends on the unsettled society, for advantage. This is the "unresolved conflict of interests" and it prevents individuals from pursuing happiness, where it would cause all kinds of strife for individuals, making life "solitary, poor nasty, brutish and short." If the individuals cannot gain happiness for themselves, then society as a whole will never provide a common happiness through individual freedoms. (2)
The Tea Party's most recent attacks on government closely resemble these individualistic strategies to not just undermine a social authority like the government, but to remove all societal elements that weigh too heavily upon individual liberties, or legal powers belonging to a society of individuals. Those legal powers are what the U.S. Constitution represent, so this begs the questions: to what purpose does the constitution serve (individual or societal liberties), and does the constitution favor a social government at the cost of individual freedom? The perspective offered to us by Tea Party members is misleading, in that the constitution was constructed for the purpose of preserving the liberties of the people. The party platform, though, fails to specify how the constitution is continually amended, and that is by what is known as a "new Constitutionalism". The new Constitutionalism is a an approach to writing national laws, that allows for "multiple authority roles", not just the power of law granted to the individual, but all elements of a nation, whether that be a person, a gender, a business, or a social faction. Therefore the U.S. Constitution was never meant to only grant entitled law to the individual, instead, it goes "against the narrowly legal conceptions, against the approaches that see constitutionalism as a matter of institutional and intellectual history" and also "against the view of constitutionalism as aiming only to protect individual liberties by limiting the scope and power of government". (3)
The U.S. Constitution does not just grant the entitlement of law to the individual, and if it was intended to do that, then giving free reign of law to each individual would not be enforced, because the society would not have a government by which to do so. Each person would have their laws, and would force each other to do things of self interest, by which none of the others would abide. True anarchy. It is meant to provide law favoring many people, at various levels, and that can be interpreted as society. By having this multi-functioning law making concept at hand, it serves the individual as well as the society, but more so the society for the sake of providing liberty on a social scale.
Helping one's self is a human necessity. It tells us that we need to start at some point to recognize our liberties and rights, and make sure that there are boundaries as to how far other individuals can go, before infringing upon another person's. The law needs to be written with all members of an immediate society in mind, and not just those who have an individual stake, so that helping others is just like helping yourself in a more indirect manner.
References:
1) Vatiero, M. (April 2010). From W. N. Hohfeld to J. R. Commons, and beyond? A 'Law and Economics' Enquiry on Jural Relations. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 69, 2. p.840(27). Retrieved September 24, 2010, from Business Economics and Theory via Gale: http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/start.do?prodId=PPBE&userGroupName=orange_main
2) Faulhaber, R W (Sept 2005). The rise and fall of 'self-interest'. Review of Social Economy, 63, 3. p.405(19). Retrieved September 24, 2010, from Business Economics and Theory via Gale: http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/start.do?prodId=PPBE&userGroupName=orange_main
3) Morgan, D F (Sept-Oct 1998). A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society. Public Administration Review, 58, n5. p.453(11). Retrieved September 24, 2010, from Business Economics and Theory via Gale:
http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/start.do?prodId=PPBE&userGroupName=orange_main
No comments:
Post a Comment