Concept Of Human Rights

Freedom And Education - Bill Ellis's Openting Statement For A Forum
By Bill Ellis

From: tranet@rangeley.org

Subject: Opening Statement by Bill Ellis

Date: 02, January 1970 9:28:45 AM EST I start my input where I left off in my input to the forum on Education and Democracy. My concern then, and now, is that our terms are contradictory. The word "education", the process of instilling knowledge into people's minds, connotes a person or persons acting on others. It is being GIVEN knowledge, usually not of one's own choosing. It is not searching for and TAKING knowledge one wants hirself. Education limits the ability to learn to topics, techniques, and times set by others. Freedom, particularly freedom to learn, connotes and recognizes that one can only learn what one chooses to learn. The teach/educate/school is in opposition to freedom and democracy.

I would like for this forum to take the argument to a more fundamental level. I suggest that if we want to promote freedom and democracy we have to recognize the mindset, worldview, and culture in which they are set. Many listservs, blogs, and websites dwell on our EuroAmerican cultures' values of self-interest, materialism, competition - - that is, greed and violence. But few have analyzed how we have reached this state of our culture. It is rooted in a long history of cultural evolution. I suggest below that we look at this history as well as suggest future actions we might take to move toward a more humane one.

The earliest worldviews, as well as the evolving human mind, were set by the nature that surrounded the first humanoids 5 million years ago when they first came down from the trees weak and unprotected. They were the prey and food for larger, stronger carnivorous animals. A few had only their larger brains and their proclivity for community to provide a niche for survival. Humanoids evolved to become thinking homo sapiens with tools and fire, some 600,000 to 150,000 years ago. Their earliest cultures evolved and were governed within the awe, majesty, mystery and cycles of nature. There we no human rights. Humans were governed by nature. Their lives, allegiances and gratitude, were to family, tribes, the sun, the animals, the forces of nature, and the unknowable. Their obligations, duties, and responsibilities were to those natural powers that permitted and governed their lives.

The cultures that grew from this natural beginning were 'dharmocracies.' They recognized, honored, and worshipped the natural order. They were naturecentric rather than anthropocentric. They acknowledge that only by cooperation and interdependence with nature, including with one another, could they, and their world, exist and evolve. This acknowledgment led each individual to work for the good of all. Production and distribution of goods and services was naturally by reciprocity, not economics. Each produced, and gave what they produced, for the good of all. They honored their responsibilities to the well being of Gaia (the Earth and all of its life forms) with no concept of rights of the individual. Two third of the world population still does not have a concept of human rights, Words for rights, as well as ownership, money, or exchange, do not even exist in the majority of languages.