Have you ever met the
toddler named Civil Liberties?
An essay in support of Peter Joseph’s book The New Human Rights Movement
More than 1400 years before the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Yosef was sold into slavery by his half-brothers. Yosef became part of the house of Egypt’s Pharaoh where he earned a reputation for insight and for the interpretation of dreams. The Pharaoh was so impressed with Yosef’s prediction of seven years of bounty followed by seven years of plight, that Yosef was placed into a seat of power to administer the programs and planning to get the kingdom through those fourteen years. Yosef’s planning was an early example of codifying the possessions of the Pharaoh, giving birth to Property Rights. Property Rights were conceived long before then, whenever rich families or individuals demonstrated their authority over possessions, land, stored foods, livestock, women and the enslaved. By writing down those rules of acquisition, parceling out and disposing of foods and other property, Yosef and the Pharaoh advanced civilization within the Neolithic Era.
Roughly 12,000 years ago the human
species transitioned from nomadic hunter-gather societies (tribes foraging and
hunting with no agricultural skills), to farm-cultivating, settled societies.
This transition has been termed the Neolithic Revolution and set the stage for
civilization as we know it today. This change marked a kind of technological
shift. Like the advent of the mechanization in the Industrial Revolution of the
late eighteenth century, the discovery of agriculture was also the application
of new economic technology. …When very large changes in applied technology
occur, human culture and behavior tend to change as well. Page 60.
Nomadic people did not have the energy nor the technology to collect and carry with them great amounts of possessions. Due to this, theft was nearly non-existent since those met on the trails likely did not have much of value. If one nomadic clan earned a reputation for violence and theft, then they would lose out when simple trades were needed or when asking for assistance of any kind. Plus, societies were not highly stratified. There was general equality in strength, in ability, in health, and in the toil of living.
All of this changed through the Neolithic Revolution. Once an established farmer gathered a store of foods and staked a claim to a piece of productive land, then there was need to keep all trespassers away. When difficult weather arrived, the well-stocked farmer could stave off starvation and keep his family healthy only if outsiders were kept from his bounty. As families of farmers settled nearby to each other, then could collaborate on keeping out the nomadic clans, giving rise to skirmishes and battles and defensive measures. Farmers could become prosperous to the point of hiring or enslaving people who had no land or material possessions, having them work the fields for the wealthy who had claimed Property Rights. They could show their status and wealth in several ways, with clothing, shelter, and livestock. The wealthy could find days for rest and for cultural advancements while inequality grew between the haves and the have-nots.
Before Yosef’s time, there might have been rulers who had written down their records of possessions, or ancient courts may have justified the Property Rights of one person or group over the protests of others. Yosef’s effort is an example of those codified Property Rights that can be linked into the chain of events we call history. We can show a relationship between his time and actions, and the coming centuries of practices that have established Property Rights as a major concern of governments, courts, entrepreneurial efforts and the organization of families. Yosef’s time was 3400 years ago and Property Rights are now well established due to that longevity of historical precedence.
Before 1776 A.D., in Europe and in the Americas, enthusiasm was heightening around what we call the Age of Enlightenment. During the 1600’s and 1700’s ideals began to be advanced such as individual liberty, social progress, majority rule, identifying the unwavering rights of individuals protected from majority rule, constitutional forms of self-government, and the separation of church and state, along with the pre-eminent power of logic and science. With this idealism as a catalyst, some of the richest people in the British colonies of America staged an effort to gain independence from the most powerful nation in the world, Great Britain. To be truthful, these rich, white men were distraught over many practices of the government of King George III. Many of those practices had been sapping the wealth away from these upper-class colonists. Based on a number of previous colonial efforts to declare the practices of King George to be illegitimate, a committee of five (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman) drafted a Declaration of the thirteen united States of America which was unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 and printed for distribution on the following day.
Careful reading of the document and acknowledging the history of the delegates to this Continental Congress, we can understand that much of the impetus for adopting this declaration was to better preserve the Property Rights of these upper-class, white, male colonists. Meanwhile, interlaced in this declaration is also the birth of Civil Liberties, the codification of Human Rights for all the world’s advancement since we have all been “created equal.”
Along parallels, Property Rights and Civil Liberties were conceived of over long histories. If not codified first by Yosef, then certainly his example of Property Rights can be sited within the long chain of history for our present societies. Property Rights are at least 34 centuries old. Even if the Second Continental Congress did not mean to give such heightened importance to Civil Liberties when they adopted their Declaration of Independence, still less than 2 and a half centuries ago they gave birth to those ideals that have grown to be in conflict with Property Rights. Compared to one and other, Property Rights is like a 34 year-old adult lording over the toddler Civil Liberties which is not yet two and a half years old.
Why the name Civil
Liberties and not Human Rights?
“…each
human would need to reject the social reality and evolution of eco-scientific
development and, upon birth, begin to create the entire world’s industrial
network from scratch.” Page 270.
Civil Liberties started out in a very odd way. With variations in each of the states, and by the time of adopting the U.S. Constitution in 1789, white men who owned land were given the fullest Civil Liberties including the right to vote in elections. How odd that the fullest Civil Liberties were only provided to those who could claim Property Rights. The framers of the young nation might have seen property as the proof necessary for distinguishing responsible actors from others, while not owning property marked some people as being less trustworthy.
The most essential part of “the American Experiment” was the concept of self-governance. All previous forms of democratically organized governments on this Earth had failed. All of the European dictatorships were keenly aware in the 1700’s and 1800’s that success for the American Experiment could threaten their long-standing forms of government, leading to revolts and the toppling of royal families. What gave the concept of self-governance any legitimacy was the power to vote. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1964 expressed in a majority decision that: “No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.” (Wesberry v. Sanders) The founding fathers of the United States did not trust the common man with the vote, restricting that power to land owners. The slow pace of history took until 1856 (in time to elect the 15th President) before every state allowed all white men to vote without requirements for property ownership2, 3.
By 1870, the U.S. Constitution was amended to not restrict voting rights based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitude, at least on paper. Several states did turn away from their obligations, violently and systematically discriminating against Black citizens. Yet the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War did testify to the rest of the world that self-governance could survive after such a bloody challenge of secession. As early as 1804, colonies in the Caribbean Sea and other areas due south of the United States began claiming their independence from European rulers. Colonies in Africa, on Pacific Islands, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe also fought for independence based in some measure on the success of the U.S. Constitution. In time, all the European countries too created their own models of democratically organized governance owing to the example from the United States.
The United States was among some of the last nations to outlaw slavery. That exceptional nation also was following behind many others when recognizing the suffrage rights of women by the 1920 amendment to the Constitution. This marks again the slow and sometimes unwilling rolling out of Civil Liberties in the advanced countries to those who “are created equal.” In the birthplace of Civil Liberties, 131 years passed between the Constitution of the United States and the offering of full Civil Liberties to the fifty percent of the adult population who are women. The suffragists and their supporters struggled for over 70 years to win the right for women to vote in the United States. Other struggles for Civil Liberties are continuing, notably for women and for minority races, for people with disabilities, for people of unique skin colors, for recent immigrants, for migrant workers, for the incarcerated and for those released from prison and for children.
Civil Liberties have been spreading throughout the world. In 1948, due to lessons learned over the years of World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with 48 out of the 58 member states voting in favor of the Declaration.
The Declaration has served as the foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The principles of the Declaration are elaborated in international treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and many more. The Declaration continues to be widely cited by governments, academics, advocates, and constitutional courts, and by individuals who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognized human rights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)
Since 1948, two other declarations of human rights have been
endorsed, addressing cultural needs of the Muslim religion, and another to
address the uniqueness of eastern Asian cultures and Pacific Islanders.
For eighty years the offer of Civil Liberties has been extended to most of the earth’s population yet protections are not too extensive, especially when compared to the institutionalized protections for Property Rights. In many countries, Property Rights have four types of protections: incorporation and other business methods for reducing the risk of losses, systems of insurance, police protections, and court precedence that bases all remuneration on the transferring of property from the losing party to the winning party. Over 3400 years, our societies on earth have evolved to find ways to protect Property Rights, yet we have had less than 250 years to understand Civil Liberties and how to ensure that every person’s rights are guarded and safe. How will we come up with protections for Civil Liberties?
Incorporation is a method for limiting the risk for the owners to only the funds they have invested in the corporation. All their other possessions would be protected from lawsuits. Even if the corporation acts illegally or has liabilities for broken contracts, the owners can not be sued for any greater amounts than their investments. In the cases where the corporations financially succeed, then the owners can reap all the benefits, enriching themselves without risking everything they owned. Plus, owners can anonymously sell their shares and end their risk by a simple action. Can we ever dream up such levels of protections for Life (breathing, reliable food sources, shelter and healthcare), for Liberty and for the Pursuit of Happiness?
Individuals may purchase insurance policies to reduce their losses in case of natural disasters or crime or accidents or business decisions that cause major losses. Property Rights can be protected by this second method, yet we have not developed any similar protection for media outlets and the “free press.” Nor an insurance policy in case your voice and guarantees to speak your opinion are drown out by large corporations or diverted by social media that operates for their own interest instead of the Constitution.
The systems of policing have been developed to ensure Property Rights primarily. They will investigate civil crimes after they are committed. For the protection of property though they will dress in riot gear and form human barriers. To calm some racist ideas that immigrants and non-whites being the sources of the worst crimes, police will harass immigrant families and “stop and frisk” black men without probable cause, over-policing urban areas while suburbs are allowed to manage themselves unless a citizen calls in a complaint.
From our modern frame of reference, the ownership of land is quite understandable. Putting ourselves in to the mindsets of people 12,000 years ago, questions of land ownership would be very troublesome. Since people’s lives are so short and the land is eternal, how could one person claim that a piece of land was theirs and theirs exclusively? Slowly over generations of fences, plowing, profiteering, and legal arguments, the idea that land is available for ownership, for sale and for disposal has become the standard view. The court systems of the Western societies and their former colonies have been based on settling most every dispute over Property Rights, biasing their jurisprudence in those terms. Those Property Rights are based on at least 3400 years of precedence. Slowly the courts have been transforming to consider Civil Liberties in some ways, slowly building up that precedence beside the much larger Property Rights.
No such protections exist for Civil Liberties. The citizens of Hong Kong have been watching their Civil Liberties evaporate since 1997. They appear to have dwindling recourse as the authorities in Beijing expect to express power over the choices available to the residents of Hong Kong. The authorities in Beijing still wish to dominate based upon their Property Rights and are stifling or even eliminating the Civil Liberties of their citizens to ensure the Property Rights are fully expressed without distraction. People within the spheres of influence of Russia know that poisonings and deportation of opposition figures are the default methods for taking Civil Liberties away, included in Belarus and the Ukraine, and even reaching into the United Kingdom. Dictators and military rulers around the world are figuring out ways around the declarations of human rights. Even in the United States, police activities and federal troops threaten to end protests.
Coming up with ways to ensure the Civil Liberties will be a gigantic task that may take generations. For now, we need to remain vigilant, aware that the focus on Property Rights by some may override by the tides of this world, as Civil Liberties ebb and flow in advancing our freedoms.
END NOTES:
1. (here is one of my own pet peeves: corporations and enterprises of business ARE NOT citizens!! They should not be contributing to electoral campaigns!! Corporations should not be giving second and third and multiple voices to the opinions of their board members nor executives. Those board members and executives were given one voice only. Their corporations should not be drowning out the voices of other citizens. If we allow corporations to speak as if they were citizens, then true citizens are being alienating from their Civil Liberties, being crowded out from being heard! This is especially true for multi-national corporations and for those with stocks owned by foreigners!!)
