Page 18 RAIN November 1978 This article is a continuat'ion of Karl Hess's ruminations about appropriate technology (in the broadest sense) and urban blacks or poor people in general begun in his article for Quest/77- reprinted in our Stepping Stones. It's an • important train of thought. Who wants to continue it further? Printed simultaneously in North Country Anvil, Box 3 7, Millville, MN 55957 ($7.50 for 6 issues/year). -LdeM There are important practical, even tactical differences between an outlook that emphasizes rights and one that empha1 sizes responsibilities. • . . , Oi:i the broadest scale, the difference should be apparent. Politics in most·countries,'for years now, has been based upon organizing to secure rights. People organize in order to get something. They usually identify the thing being sought as a •right. Big Business organizes to get the right to operate its processes in secret and without regulation-except for the· sort that will reduce competition to a minimum (e.g. auto inspection and licensing regulations which act against homebuilt cars, medical licensing that prevents self or community_ health care, highway regulations to obstruct indep~ndent truckets not to mention highways themselves whi~h serve 1 national rather than community purposes, zoning regulatiorts to prevent experimental ,communities or alternative busi- •_nesses, and housing codes to prevent experimental or innovative construction). . Professionals, generally, organize to secure.the right to exclusively practice a craft-teachers, doctors, some mechanic~, even lawyers and politicians. Poor people organize to secure what they regard as a right to a shar~ of the incomes of working people who are not officially -listed as poor. And, of course, the government itself organizes power in such a way that it may decree the right to say who is poor,_proper, employed, rich, etc. • Throughout the system, organizjng to secure rights is general. And, throughout the structure of rights, the notion of rights as power over other people also is general. None of the rights that have become central to modern political and econ?mic activity can in fact be realized without penalizing the nghts of someone else. (The reason I-include the economic is ~-~cause the majo~ businesses·now all operate on the public utility th_eory of a right to a steadily increasing profit. Because of _e_ffectJve government agreement, this assured upward profitab1litY_-regardless of market conditions-is known officially and widely as Progress. Its lack is called a Depression.) T~ese modern rights are distinct from the ancient provisions of the common law, incidentally. Common law does not concern itself with positive rights so much as it concerns itself with those things simply felt to be unacceptable civil behavior, by individuals or by institutions-murder, theft, lying, etc. The common law derives from a notion that most human ~ommunitie.s, in ord_er to stay together and be pleasantly livable, would prefer that neighbors not kill e~ch other, or steal, and that lords not loot them. Positive rights, as they have c~me to dominate politics, say something altogether different. They do not say that such and such an act is unacceptable or impractical to community purposes. They say that such and such an action must be perfarmed-performed by someone on behalf of someone else .. Positi 1 ve rights are based solidly a_nd exclusively on,the police power of the state. They are paid for, to get at the heart of it, by taxation and .taxation is now clearly an act of force, of police authority and not the gracious voluntarism that the c,ivics books say it is. Without raw police powet_: the whole system would collapse-and everyone seems to know that. • The coinmon law, on the other hand, has emerged from .and is based upon long experience with comtn\lnity and with those minimal agreements which have made community possible or bearable. Common law is based upon suppositions that have been tried and tested over a very l~ng time and not upon the yying for short-range gains as in die realm of positive rights. One more comment before the practical applications of all this. There are no rights in the natural world. Nothing has, for instance, a right to life, although all organisms seem to exercise a very noticeable attempt to live-grass forcing its , way through concrete, mosquitos becoming resistant to pesticides, human beings living on deserts and ice-caps. In each instance, however, the organism can be said to obey the imperatives of a genetic responsibility-to try to survive. Unless· that respon,sibili~y is successfully met, the organism dies. It has no way of exercising a right to survive. It must exercise r a will and a w:ay to survive. People sometimes think of this a.rrangement as cruel, applying an understandable emotion to a merely observable phenomenon. Cruel is an opinioh. The responsibility of living is a material reality independent of opinion.
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