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By Root 2424 0

If I were directing a movie instead of writing a book, it might be appropriate for me to add a montage of images of everyday life in civilization. Young children dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” at a minor-league baseball game. An audience watching Hamlet trying to decide whether he should kill the murderous king (You do regularly go to Shakespeare festivals, don’t you?). People walking the aisles of independent bookstores, stopping to pick titles from the shelves. An ice cream truck. A picnic. But then to round out the montage I’d have to include children starving because the resources they need to live have been stolen; denuded hillsides, blasted streams, dammed and polluted rivers (I just heard that most of the rivers of southern England are so hormone-polluted that more than half of the male fish—in some cases all—are changing gender); prisons full of bored adults who’ve been convicted of crimes; factories full of bored adults who’ve not been convicted of crimes but are nonetheless sentenced to years of tedium; classrooms full of bored children being prepared for their boring lives in office or factory; factory farms full of bored (and tortured) chickens, pigs, cows, or turkeys; laboratories full of bored (and tortured) chimpanzees, rats, rhesus monkeys, mice.

The question quickly becomes: what rights do people have? More specifically, does anyone have the right to enslave another? More specifically yet, does any group of people have the right to enslave others—human or nonhuman—simply because they have the power to do so, and because they perceive it as their right (and because they have created a propaganda system consisting of intertwined religious, philosophical, scientific, educational, informational, economic, governmental, and legal systems all working to convince themselves and at least some of their human victims it is their right)? If not, what are you going to do about it? How much will it take? How far will you go in order to stop those in power from enslaving—and killing—the mass of humans, and in fact the planet?

I often give talks, at universities and elsewhere. I gave one such talk last week. Just before I walked on stage, the person who brought me there whispered, “I forgot to tell you, but I publicized this as a speech about human rights. Can you make sure to talk about that?”

I nodded agreement, although I had no idea what to say. Everything that came to me was tepid, along the lines of “Human rights are good.” I may as well say I’m for apple pie and the girl next door. Even though I didn’t tell her this, I think she read my face. She smiled nervously. I smiled twice as nervously back. It’s a good thing we weren’t playing poker.

She went out to introduce me. I thought and thought, and wished there were a lot more upcoming events for her to talk about. I wished she would start announcing the day’s major league baseball scores. I wished she would forecast the weather, and tell the fortunes of the people in the front row. But she didn’t do any of that, and soon enough it was my turn. As I walked on stage, however, I suddenly knew what I had to say, and was reminded, as I often am, how quickly the mind can work under pressure, or at least how quickly it can work those times it doesn’t seize up altogether. “Most people,” I said, “who care about human rights and who talk about them in a meaningful fashion, as opposed to those who use them as a smokescreen to facilitate production and implement policies harmful to humans and nonhumans, usually spend a lot of energy demanding the realization of rights those in power give lip service to. Sometimes they expand their demands to include things—like a livable planet—people don’t often associate with human rights. People have a right to clean air, we say, and clean water. We have a right to food. We have a right to bodily integrity. Women (and men) have the right to not be raped. Some even go so far as to say that nonhumans, too, have the right to clean air and water. They have the right to habitat. They have the right to continued existence.”

People nodded. Who but