Pursuant to the aforegoing

[avevale_intelligencer]

Comments to the previous entry have been excellent, and some of the points raised have made me think. Nobody has actually mentioned the fact that I write from a position of what is called male privilege, but I'm sure some of you have been thinking it. :)

The way we describe a problem shapes our approach to solving it. While I have no time for the annoying management-speak lie that "every problem is an opportunity,"* I do think that it is sometimes worth rephrasing a problem to see if it's more soluble from a different angle. And that's why I think we need a new word for this one.

Back in the days when I unthinkingly believed as my father did, one of the things I unthinkingly believed was that communism would never work because if everything was divided fairly between people nobody would have enough. You can see why this belief had to be unthinking, since the obvious logical corollary never consciously occurred to me, but at least it showed an awareness, on some subliminal level, that I was privileged and that that privilege rested on the backs of millions of people slaving in grinding poverty.

Similarly, now I am aware that in having had the good fortune to be born straight, white and male in one of the most developed countries on the planet I am vastly privileged, and many are less fortunate than I in one or other of these ways. And it is up to me, or so it seems, to divest myself of this privilege somehow, to renounce my birthright and go forth into the wilderness to live among the lost and the broken.

But the privilege is not the problem.

That I have three fairly oblong meals a day and a roof over my head is not the problem. The problem is that others don't. That I have the right to marry the person I love is not the problem. The problem is that others don't. That I have the freedom to walk down a dark alley alone at night wearing whatever I please** is not the problem. The problem, as many of my friends have pointed out in comments to the previous post, is that others don't. The problem is not my privilege, but others' privation, and the solution, when it's put that way, is clear; my privilege must be extended to cover everyone, at which point it becomes a basic human right.

Everyone deserves the right to be part of a society in which those who cannot work are provided with the means to survive. Everyone deserves the right to marry the person they love. Everyone deserves the right to walk the streets in safety. These are not privileges that it is unfair that anyone should have. These are rights that have not been made universally available yet. We need another word.

There are, of course, privileges that no-one deserves to have. No-one deserves the privilege of amassing more wealth than they will ever have need of or use for by depriving others of theirs. (My free-marketeer buddies may disagree. I'm comfy with that.) No-one deserves the privilege of forbidding others to love whom they please, or disenfranchising them if they make the wrong choice. And no-one deserves the privilege of violating another person's body without that person's consent for any reason whatsoever, and since you all know what I mean by that I don't expect to get any bleating about can-I-knock-them-down-if-they're-on-fire-eh-eh-eh. I would also love to argue that no-one deserves the privilege of making another person feel small and stupid just to make themselves feel big and clever, but I know that wouldn't fly.

The good part is that if the "privileges" I enjoy can be extended to cover everyone, those others will die out naturally. One hopes. The bad part is that I have no idea how to do that.

But one thing I do know is that the problem will not be solved as long as the word for the freedoms that should be everyone's is a pejorative term like "privilege." We need a new word.


*Every opportunity is a problem...now that I could get behind. :)

**Actually, if I walked around wearing what I would really like to wear I'd probably get pounded to a pulp, and no jury in the land would convict my attackers. But that's another story.

Comments

[howeird]

I thought the term was "born lucky".

And yes, in an ideal world, everyone is born lucky.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

That's the dream!

I agree entirely!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

No, really I do!

Some people call these things "human rights" or "universal rights" ... sort of like the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". But food, shelter, protection from attack by others, freedom to marry who you wish, freedom to dress as you wish, freedom to worship as you wish, these "freedoms" are things that I believe every human should *have* and not have to fight for or defend or purchase or trade away one to get another.

"Human rights are commonly understood as "inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal (applicable everywhere) and egalitarian (the same for everyone)." (wikipedia)

No-one deserves the privilege of amassing more wealth than they will ever have need of or use for by depriving others of theirs.
Applause! This (to me) is *so* obvious, and yet there are still people out there, billionaires, who are trying to build up bigger fortunes on the backs of others ... you are right, of course.

And if there isn't enough of something to give every human being "enough" (say, higher education) then it isn't fair that it should be given to those whose parents amassed the most money, it should be based on some combination of desire, ability and social utility. For example, if someone wants to study medicine, and there's a limited number of medical student places, then it should be some combination of desire to learn and practice medicine, ability to learn, and a social contract that in exchange for learning how to be a doctor, that the student agrees to work in the NHS and/or to teach the next generations of students (pay it back/pay it forward).

I hope I'm not suggesting anything too outrageous, I really just wanted to say that I agree with you.

There's some interesting (and some depressing) reading on this starting with Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

But I'm a believer that sometimes all it takes for evil to win, is for good people to say nothing ... so the first thing to bringing about human rights and "universal privilege" is that you continue to speak out.

I agree too

[(Anonymous)]

Totally agree with you, especially about the billionaires. And the latter because I suspect they are actually stopping people getting the freedoms I want all of us to have (and not all of which I get, but I digress).

The problem is that some of those rights (like it or not) are tied to money. The truth is that it is a lot easier to offer them in a rich society (and whatever George Osborn may claim, we are a rich nation) than in a society where most of the population lives in subsistence farming or sweatshop labour factories. And the only way of becoming long-term rich that anyone has made work is industrialisation.

And yes, I know about the Middle East, but how rich will the arab nations be thirty years after the oil runs out? This is a non-rhetorical question, by the way. It may be possible to turn resources riches into long-term wealth, but no-one has proved it. We didn't, we just used it to industrialise ourselves, and that is the basis of our wealth, not our remaining resources.

But industrialisation has problems. The "West" has, in its industrialisation, pushed the planet's environment to (and possibly over) the limits of what our planetary environment can handle and remain viable for life. And the industrialisation of "developing" nations (sorry, I don't like the term but it is the one we have) is making matters worse (see for example China, and the environmental problems they are having).

Now, we have some technologies, and people are developing more, that would, at least, reduce future damage, and could maybe even allow us to repair some of the damage that has already been done. The obvious thing is to give these technologies to China, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, etc., thus allowing them to industrialise in a way that does minimal damage to the world, whilst allowing them to enrich their societies so that they don't suffer the endemic hunger, disease, thirst, and so on that they HAVE to tackle to give their people the rights we want those people to have. And we have to GIVE them because those societies cannot afford to buy them.

But we can't give them the technologies, mostly because they "belong" to some entity, often, though not always, a grouping of very wealthy people who are trying to turn their "property" into more wealth. A behaviour of such entities which, by the way, the laws of many countries actually mandate (think about British Company Law, and the duties it places on company officers, of you don't believe me).

You see the problem?

That is the difficulty. yes, the people of all the world deserve the rights we take for granted (including those our present government are now claiming are too expensive to have), but there are a lot of obstacles in the way. And our own social structure is one of them. The question is can we change things to allow others a better chance? And are we willing to try it?

Thank you for a thought provoking blog entry, and I wish my comments were a quarter as clearly and elegantly written as yours are. But there you go.

Allan Doodes

[batyatoon]

I think there's a subtle shade of meaning here that needs to be clarified.

The privilege is not the right to marry the person you love, or the ability walk down the street in safety, or a standard of living that is not grinding poverty. The privilege is the position of having those things when others do not.

(Also, what on earth would you really like to wear that would justify anyone beating you up? Unless you're talking about something like "the skins and skulls of my neighbors' pets", which I would like to think I know you well enough to heartily disbelieve.)

Justify is the wrong word ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Sadly we still live in societies where people feel threatened by people "not like us" ... so wearing the wrong football kit, or a man wearing a skirt, or a woman wearing a hajib, or a person with ginger hair, or the wrong skin colour, can end up being the target of street violence (probably initially taunting and abuse, but that will escalate to violence)

To too many people, feeling weak, disadvantaged or threatened, their fight or flight instinct becomes fight ... so they will try to establish dominance or a sense of superiority by attacking people unlike them.

So conformity, becoming part of the mob etc. turns out to be a fairly sane defence in such a situation ... even if it means you end up having to claim attitudes that you don't agree with.

So dressing sufficiently differently can be seen as defiance of the mob mentality, and they may see that as deliberate provocation.

So dressing as a goth, or a hippy, or a tall white man wearing an Indian outfit ... all could lead to being beaten up.

[batyatoon]

It was the "and no jury in the land would convict my attackers" that made me sit up and say "hold on there."

I really, really hope you're not telling me that local juries would condone the beating of somebody based on what he was wearing, if what he was wearing were sufficiently scarequotes-extreme-unscarequotes. That would make me sad.