metonymy4u

From the perspective of a critique of the cruelty that is racism (or any other bullying –ism) I believe we live in a privileged era. I say this because I suspect that to an average Greek or Roman citizen of even the most culturally civil classical era, such cruelty might have simply seemed part of the natural order of things. In those times I suspect that the principle that the state existed primarily for the preservation and protection of property was an idea accepted by all but the most philosophically minded. And the notion of universal natural rights is a relatively new, and rather odd (though fortuitous), invention of another landed gentry: the aristocracy of the English baron classes at home and abroad. That it arose from their rebellion against the violence of their king is a very fortunate, and not at all necessary, accident of history for which we could be very grateful. Nevertheless, I believe many modern western city states continue to cleave to a more narrowed vision of human rights as pertaining primarily to property, and remain inadequately convinced of their duty to oppose all cruelty. So the question naturally arises, upon what ground does a contra-cruelty humanism stand? By what right do we truly possess, and use, the concept? Historically I believe we can trace it back not so much to those English barons who wrote both Magna Carta and the colonial Declarations, but rather to the Florentine renaissance of 1400 and its effect on the source of knowledge. It was during this and subsequent European re-birthings that the western ground of knowing was re-conceived. What more can be said about the Cartesian “cogito” (I think, therefore I am)? In one brilliant sentence, the source of life and being was stripped both from god and the state and placed within the individual. This one phrase, this one simple declaration is, I believe, the historical source of subsequent, really anti-political, declarations. From here we can trace the activist genealogy of Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Tenzin Gyatso, Desmond Tutu, and many others. All of whom stood up not just for the next political manifesto, but for a humanism of universal cooperativity, to the end of all cruelty.