Hristo Botev wrote:
The discussion of "rights" here is interesting.
This reminds me of a discussion the author Daniel Quinn has with a real reader in "If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways".
From a Goodreads review of the book wrote:You can think of If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways as the fifth book in Quinn's Ishmael series (the other four being Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael and Beyond Civilization); it deals with a lot of the same ideas he introduced in Ishmael. This is not a work of fiction, like the three Ishmael books, or a descriptive nonfiction work like Beyond Civilization, though; it's a transcription of a dialogue that actually took place between Quinn and a reader. And, if it's about anything, it's about how to think critically rather than about Quinn's ideas directly. He's trying to get "Elaine," the confused reader, to adopt the perspective of a "Martian anthropologist," which is how he looks at things, and how he writes his books. And he succeeds, which is what gives the book something of a dramatic arc. It's striking to see how Elaine's dialog changes over the course of the book; she gains so much in insight and critical-thinking skills that you'd think she was another person. Indeed, if she were a fictional character I might express skepticism that a real person's thought and speech patterns could change so much in four days, but she's real.
The whole book/discussion is presented as an attempt to explain how he does what he does, which he identifies as examining subjects and underlying assumptions through the lens of a Martian Anthropologist.
At some point, the two of them start tackling various subjects or questions submitted by readers, and one of these questions is this:
“Do you support the idea of extending human rights to primates?”
Daniel Quinn and "Elaine" then go on asking themselves about human rights, and rights in general. The famous statement written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that all Men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is also examined.
The whole dialog is quite edifying, but here is how it ends:
Daniel. Obviously. A whole lot of people think they have the right to decide what people can and can’t do in their bedrooms [they were talking about homosexual rights]. This was the only tool they had to use against them. The asserting of rights has become an important tool for the people of our culture, but my point is …?
Elaine. That it’s only the people of our culture who need to use it.
Daniel. To us, having to assert a right in order to have the things we want or want to do is taken to be a sort of human norm. It seems to make perfect sense — to be not in the least bizarre. One of my tasks has been to pull people far enough away from our culture to see how very bizarre it really is. I don’t mean that it’s uniquely bizarre.
I just mean that, seen from a distance — from the point of view of a Martian anthropologist — our culture is no less bizarre than cultures whose customs seem to us outlandishly grotesque. Our way of doing things would seem as bizarre to the Gebusi of New Guinea as the Gebusi’s way of doing things seems to us.