This right tonight
Oct. 17th, 2006 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4I caught part of a bunfight discussion on Radio 2 at lunchtime today, between George Monbiot and somebody from (I think) the Spectator, about the environmental ethics of cheap flights. [BBC News: "UK 'must act' on plane emissions" | Report launched today by the University of Oxford]
You already know what Monbiot's line is; I don't need to rehash that here. But the other chap was putting forward a view that I hadn't heard before; he was arguing that Monbiot's call for fewer cheap flights was part of some kind of middle-class conspiracy to trample all over the "rights" that have recently "been acquired" by "poorer people". He claimed that the rich resented the poor becoming richer, and wanted to "punish" them for this by curtailing their "rights" to cheap flights -- whether they are making these flights for pleasure, work, or "education".
Questions I am not going to attempt to answer include: whether the environmentalists' predictions of the future global warming scenario are as exaggerated as their detractors claim; how many flights Monbiot has made in the last year; whether he is more interested in advertising his book than saving the world; how many of our cheap flights to European holiday destinations (of which I've made a few myself) are "educational"; whether there is a middle-class conspiracy to erode the rights of poorer people; whether the poor are in fact becoming richer, and if so, by what metric.
Questions I would like to find answers to include: where do "rights" come from? Are we born with them? If not, do we accrue them as a function of our passage through time, or are they allocated to us by some external agency? Does the discontinuing of a commodity or service which used to exist automatically constitute riding roughshod over somebody's "rights"? If we have a "right" to something, should we claim it, whatever the cost?
You already know what Monbiot's line is; I don't need to rehash that here. But the other chap was putting forward a view that I hadn't heard before; he was arguing that Monbiot's call for fewer cheap flights was part of some kind of middle-class conspiracy to trample all over the "rights" that have recently "been acquired" by "poorer people". He claimed that the rich resented the poor becoming richer, and wanted to "punish" them for this by curtailing their "rights" to cheap flights -- whether they are making these flights for pleasure, work, or "education".
Questions I am not going to attempt to answer include: whether the environmentalists' predictions of the future global warming scenario are as exaggerated as their detractors claim; how many flights Monbiot has made in the last year; whether he is more interested in advertising his book than saving the world; how many of our cheap flights to European holiday destinations (of which I've made a few myself) are "educational"; whether there is a middle-class conspiracy to erode the rights of poorer people; whether the poor are in fact becoming richer, and if so, by what metric.
Questions I would like to find answers to include: where do "rights" come from? Are we born with them? If not, do we accrue them as a function of our passage through time, or are they allocated to us by some external agency? Does the discontinuing of a commodity or service which used to exist automatically constitute riding roughshod over somebody's "rights"? If we have a "right" to something, should we claim it, whatever the cost?
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-17 06:00 pm (UTC)I have no respect for those who witter about rights without considering that they come with responsibilities; yes, we have a right to travel freely - 'free' in the sense that can have it if we pay the cost, rather than imposing it on others.
Which is, of course, the point with cheap flights, gas-guzzling Chelsea Tractors, electrical goods, cigarettes and snack food: the full environmental and social costs costs are 'externalised' - dumped in landfill, picked up by the NHS, left for future generations - all the costs which don't turn up on our credit card bills.
It follows that a mature democracy would seek ways to correct this by taxation, legislation, or coercion through public campaigning... And it follows that a society of warring baronies will reward whoever is powerful or clever and deceitful by giving them whatever they claim as a 'right' while imposing the costs on some subclass of losers in an unending dance of evasion, blame, and self-congratulation.
Where do I place George Monbiot in all this? In amongst the rentiers of revolutionary France, confident that they can seize power from an unjust King, mature enough to avoid the self-interested power-grabbing of tose English Barons on Runnymede, half-believing and half-hoping that their dimly-understood new credo of 'principles' and 'rights' and constitutional law is enough to inspire others to respect the new order and work together... And fearful of 'The Mob', the volatile and violent underclass who are might in theory share in the Rights of Man, but are best kept under control and better kept out of sight altogether.