At 10:35 AM 11/08/1999 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Ohh.. on the contrary... before I try to figure out in my head how equal
>humanity is to be achived.. it's helpful to find out if it's nessary to
>begin with... the best people to ask such a question to are usualy the
>people fighting for it.
>
Hannah Arendt, a philosopher for whom I ordinarily do not have a lot of
time, attended the Eichmann trail in the early 60s, and wrote an analysis:
"Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil".
There is much to quarrel with in that book, but there is one, blinding,
unargueable insight: either all persons are equal or none are. To
paraphrase her elaboration -- if any one group is allowed the power to
brand another as inferior, then no one is safe, for where is the ultimate
authority that backs the original choice? If the Germans can brand the
Jews as inferior, the English can brand the Pakistani as inferior, et
caetera, what is to stop yet another group from turning on the soi-disant
superior and demeaning them? And, once the camps had been liberated at the
end of the war, there could no longer be any excuse for not understanding
the logical conclusion to which ideological inequality leads.
Arendt's conclusion -- and the most brilliant insight of all the analyses
of the Nazi phenomenon, imho -- is that the one innate human right is the
right to equal dignity: each individual life is equal in value to every
other individual life. Without that assumption, no other rights can even
begin to exist, nor can civil society function for long.
AFAIAS, this fundamental insight is the grounds for feminism, anti-racism,
gay rights, and every other egalitarian movement that has sprung up since
WW2 -- either we are all of equal value, or we are all back in the jungle.
It is certainly the grounds for my personal approach to the social and
political issues that have popped up in my time.
This does not mean we cannot be different in culture, concerns, tastes,
whatever -- it applies only to our value as human beings who differ one
from another. But that is still revolutionary in its implications -- for
it means that a woman has the same innate value as a man, a Cree has the
same innate value as a Frenchman, a homosexual has the same innate value as
a heterosexual.
>From that, it seems to me, springs every other thing: if a woman has the
same innate value as a man, why shouldn't a woman be Prime
Minister/sysadmin/CEO/the best paid actor or whatever? If a woman has the
same innate value as a man, why should her choices be restricted on the
basis of her gender? If a black American has the same innate value as a
white American, how can one restrict his/her choices on the basis of colour?
It has been years (37, to be exact) since I first read that arguement, and
I have read and heard a great many attempted rebuttals since, but none that
even began to convince me Arendt was wrong.
So, there you go. The reason for *any* liberation......
Janus
feminist and egalitarian
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