human rights?
- Thread starter EmptyForceOfChi
- Start date
heliocentric
Registered Senior Member
Rights are very fickle things youre correct in saying i think, rights generally apply to we can dimmly perceive as being 'us'.
If you were a man alive in the 1700 'us' would have been your family, countrymen, race, and religion, and not much else.
Obviously our sense of collective self has expanded a fair bit since then in then (in the west at least).
Now the us can be any race, religion, or creed, although we're still clearly favourtists and probably always will be.
Interesting the past half a century has also seen animals becomming included as part of the collective 'us' as well, the idea of our own species only being worth protecting or behaving any where near compassionately towards, is just the modern equivilent of the withdrawn sense of self of the 1700s (and earlier).
The problem is people are going to have to increasingly get used to thinking in ever larger and expansive terms.
But it is hard for most people, its hard for me.
We're really only slightly evolved pack animals used to thinking in terms of very small groups of people. Its near impossible for an person to hold a mental image of 100 people in his/her head at once and still see them all as individuals. So its excruciatingly difficult for people to percieve every corner of the eco-sphere as always containing something worth saving or protecting. We're just not used to thinking in those terms.
It probably goes a long way to explaining not only almost all modern conflicts, human and animal rights absues. But also our rather blase attitude towards global warming.
If you were a man alive in the 1700 'us' would have been your family, countrymen, race, and religion, and not much else.
Obviously our sense of collective self has expanded a fair bit since then in then (in the west at least).
Now the us can be any race, religion, or creed, although we're still clearly favourtists and probably always will be.
Interesting the past half a century has also seen animals becomming included as part of the collective 'us' as well, the idea of our own species only being worth protecting or behaving any where near compassionately towards, is just the modern equivilent of the withdrawn sense of self of the 1700s (and earlier).
The problem is people are going to have to increasingly get used to thinking in ever larger and expansive terms.
But it is hard for most people, its hard for me.
We're really only slightly evolved pack animals used to thinking in terms of very small groups of people. Its near impossible for an person to hold a mental image of 100 people in his/her head at once and still see them all as individuals. So its excruciatingly difficult for people to percieve every corner of the eco-sphere as always containing something worth saving or protecting. We're just not used to thinking in those terms.
It probably goes a long way to explaining not only almost all modern conflicts, human and animal rights absues. But also our rather blase attitude towards global warming.
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