rights and responsibilities

twinned values

For me, perhaps the main take away from reading Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War is the ambivalence of the values that derive from the Reformation and Humanist emphasis on the importance of the individual person, and the two different understandings of the role of the state that follow from that ambivalence. Is it the state’s function to protect the rights and freedoms of all individuals equally? Or to facilitate some individuals achieving as much as they can? (To be clear, this is my attempt to summarize as a simple opposition the complex and subtle historical argument of Dr. Heather’s original.)

Shifting from the state to the citizen, this might be expressed as two principles, the principle of rights and the principle of responsibilities. Does a person have rights over others, or responsibilities to others? To treat these as separate or even, as some seem to, oppositional is a delusion—despite the rhetorical extremes of contemporary political discourse.

Rights are not absolute (much less God given), but only exist in relation to other people, that is, in society.

This does not mean that rights are “given” by society. That interpretation is offered by those who would reject that rights are social in nature by claiming that if rights are given by society, then they can be taken away by society. That however is a purposely contentious interpretation. It functions to imply an unacceptable consequence, and therefore the rejection of the idea that rights are social in nature.

Conversely, responsibilities are not strictly social conventions but are rooted in the individual.

One’s responsibilities are manifest in how each of us actually behave toward each and every other person—and for some of us, how we treat other living beings and the fullness of the environment.

Rights and responsibilities are best understood as mirror images of one another. I expect you to treat my rights as your responsibilities. Just as it is my responsibility to respect your rights. This reciprocity is a constant balancing act, for us as individuals and for society.

This reciprocal pairing of individual and social is found in the Buddhist tradition as well. On one side is the importance of individual effort, training, practice. As the truism has it, no one else can sit on your cushion for you. And, at the same time, one receives training in the context of a lineage, and of a community, a sangha. And despite the competition for status frequently found in communities, in sanghas, awakening is not attained competitively. It is not a race, no one wins by getting there faster than others—there is no there to get to, so running harder is an Alice in Wonderland illusion. The competitive attitude is rejected in the earliest Buddhist literature guiding the actions of the ordained.

As I recall, one of the rules of the order is not to brag about the superiority of one’s own teacher, nor to denigrate other’s teachers as inferior. Also, one is not to brag about their own achievements, nor demonstrate extraordinary powers. Such competitive assertions of individual status and attainment are not conducive to awakening. The individual practitioner engages in their own practice, located in a complex web of social relations.

The most isolated practitioner is cradled in the support of the lineage of teaching, of other students, and of those who support the sangha. Perhaps the most archetypal figure of the isolated meditator is Milarepa. But even when sitting alone in his cave, Milarepa is supported by others. Who grew the cotton from which his robes were sewn? Who smelted the iron and who forged the pot in which he made his nettle stew? Who taught him the practices in which he now engages.

The teachings are sometimes called the three baskets (tipitaka, tripitaka). A folk etymology has it that this refers to the teachings being transported as written texts in baskets loaded on mules, or more exotically, on camels.

The more probable derivation, however, is that it refers to building practices, where soil or rocks or bricks are moved from one place to another in baskets passed from hand to hand.

Having received a basketful of teachings from our teachers, we have the responsibility to carry those teachings forward through our own efforts of understanding and practice, and then to pass them on to others. A reciprocal relation of individual and group.

park bench in San Francisco: lichen are a symbiotic relation between fungi and algae—classic mutual symbiosis, the point being life is cooperation, competition is an interpretation we impose on natural processes