Life

With this issue of We the People, your IdT Board of Directors immodestly but necessarily undertakes the job of identifying the 10 unalienable Rights that the Declaration of Independence left unspecified. It is the first in a series of 10 issues that will discuss the specific unalienable Rights and the 10 your Board has added. In addition we will take up the question of ecological equity. Later in this issue we discuss the first and foremost of these rights, Life itself.

Taken together, these 10 issues of We the People will restate, redefine and reaffirm what IdT is all about. We hope that this will put new purpose and vitality into our organization and, in all candor, that each of us will use it to help recruit new members as we spread the IdT gospel.

IdT's Inspiration

IdT draws a great deal of its inspiration and purpose from Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. It may be unnecessary but never redundant, to repeat the precious words Jefferson penned in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The selection of Jefferson's statement is not arbitrary, but I select it for our starting point because it is living law of the United States. John Locke, Jean Jaques Rousseau and the UN Charter on Human Rights as well as the Helsinki Convention on Human Rights are important, but the Declaration of Independence is Statute #1 of the U.S. Statutes-at-large. The phrase "domestic Tranquility," comes not from the Declaration of Independence but from the Constitution: "WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The Declaration and the Constitution describe We the People as the sovereign and endow us with certain unalienable rights therefrom. They are specific to our society and to us as the citizen/sovereign. Similar concepts could be built for any human society on earth.

The Unalienable Declaration

The Constitution can be changed either by amendment or by calling a convention for the purpose, or by a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court (Marbury v Madison where the Court assumed the right to review legislation for constitutionality). Jefferson thought we should re-evaluate and if necessary change our form of government every generation (19 years to him). He didn't think future generations should be bound by past generations. He was right of course or we still would have indentured servants and slaves. The Constitution is alienable. It followed the Articles of the Confederation which were superceded and alienated. A number of the nations of the world are governed by arrangements similar to the Articles of Confederation, most notably Canada and Australia. What is not alienable is the Declaration of Independence. It is from this source — the mother document of our nation, the document that will remain no matter what other Articles of Confederation or Constitutions we as a nation adopt — that our alienable rights flow.

What a shame that Jefferson stopped with just three Unalienable Rights — powerful as are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. What is important, however, is that he did recognize there were more when he used the pharse, "...among which are..." The IdT board discussed and debated the concept of the unalienable rights and came to the conclusion that in the framework of ecology they had to relate to processes available to individuals. The board finally struck upon the notion that the unalienable rights were the quid pro quo the citizen sovereign got in exchange for the consent to be governed. To be meaningful and realistic the unalienable rights had to provide access to ecosystem processes that would allow the citizen-soverign to survive and thrive in the society. The unalienable rights would provide the process mechanism for individuals within the society to obtain their ecological equity within the society. They are not welfare or a handout, but the assets each individual requires to be a productive, self-supporting part of the system, capable of reproducing themselves and passing the love and regard for these rights to their offspring. These are the rights Edmond Cahn called "passive rights" in his book The Predicament of Democratic Man, Cahn, Edmond, 1961, The Macmillan Company, NY. What good is the right to vote if a man or woman does not have a roof over their head or cloths to wear or enough to eat? To have the rights is to be free from the "tyranny of circumstance." The unalienable rights we proposed augmented Jefferson's three and represnt a first approximation of what we think is needed to survive and thrive in our society — from birth to death.

The Jefferson Three

• Life

• Liberty

• The Pursuit of Happiness

The IdT Ten

• Privacy

• Health

• A Humane Environment

• Humane Nutrition

• Humane Habitation

• Education

• An Equal Share of the Commonwealth

• Participation in Free Enterprise

• The Right of Residency and Movement

• The Constitutional Guarantees of Citizenship

The unalienable rights are the quid pro quo for the consent to be governed. Abortion is a religious question and a question of privacy. I will discuss it under the unalienable right to Privacy.

Power to the People

The domestic Tranquility of our nation will increase as more and more people are empowered with their unalienable rights. The bargain was to establish government to provide the unalienable rights. The unalienable rights are guaranteed to the people in exchange for consent to be governed. As the citizen/sovereign we expect our government to allocate the resources we provide it among, Justice, domestic Tranquility, common defense, and the General Welfare. The government is not an independent institution in our society; all our governments, local state and Federal are an expression of the will of the citizen/sovereign as expressed through representative governments, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The U.S. Congress has the responsibility to provide the laws necessary to the conduct of our national and international affairs; the Executive, (the Commander-in-Chief, the Princeps), is faithfully to execute the laws. The Judicial system is to protect the rights of the citizen/sovereign. Our government has been established in accordance with our Constitution and its amendments; treaties we have executed with the Indians and foreign nations; and the rulings of the courts. The Constitution is the source of the Bill of Rights and therefore has an important bearing on our civil rights.

Life Defined

Each human being is born with a genetic potential. The extent to which that genetic potential can be developed is a function of the environment of that individual. A humane society fosters the development of the genetic potential of its citizens, by providing an environment that includes the unalienable rights, the first of which is Life.

Life 1. that property of plants and animals which makes it possible for them to take in food, get energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surroundings, and reproduce their kind; it is the quality that distinguishes a living animal or plant from inorganic matter or a dead organism. Webster's New World Dictionary, 1972.

Life is an absolute. Any organism, including humans, is alive or dead there is no other state. Life is the most basic of all the unalienable rights, without Life no other rights are meaningful. The first requirement of Life is to survive. Evolution and ecology are all about survival. Beyond survival the requirements are for comfort, well being, and security at hand or easily available. All sentient Life strives for access comfort, well being, and security. The human Life centered on property rights is heavily tilted toward economic and commodity values for Life. The humane Life, without losing its animal nature or sound economic and proper values, is lived with dignity, and with full access to the unalienable rights. While my discussion will remain general, taking ideas from biology, genetics, evolution, human ecology, et al, it centers on the U.S. system of jurisprudence and our two most hallowed documents: the Declaration of Independence and the U. Constitution.

A Characteristic of the Planet

Life is a characteristic of the planet Earth as much as its diameter or distance from the sun. We very much wanted to discover Life on Mars when the Mars lander was sent there, but the answer was negative. Is Earth the only planet with Life or are there other class M stars such as our sun with Life-bearing planets orbiting them? If a planet such as the Earth were to occur only one to a galaxy, like the Milky Way, there would be 100,000,000 planets with Life on them since that is the number of galaxies in our universe. Stephen Hawking in his book, discusses strong and weak "anthropic factors" in the creation of the Universe. The strong factor says the universe was created for our benefit. The weak factor says that in any explanation of the creation of the universe we must account for the presence of Life on Earth including humankind. If there are different kinds of universes, ours has to be of the class that creates Life including human beings.

ALIGN="center">Life is Truly Ancient

From the geologic record it seems apparent that Life began sometime in the Pre-cambrian era some 2-1/2 billion years ago. Since our planet and our sun are about 5 billion years old, Life arose somewhere about 1/2 way back in the history of our planet. The earliest Life forms in the fossil record seem to be microorganisms. Humankind is but one form of Life out of millions of Life forms that have evolved since those Pre-cambrian days. There may be as many as seven million species of insects. There are some 395,000 species of plants. Humankind was once (and often still is) characterized as the tool-maker and the opposable thumb was supposed to be the characteristic that enabled man to dominate the earth. Scientists have found that many animals use tools, quite sophisticated ones, e.g. a beehive, and apes with great finger dexterity have not achieved the status of humankind. Humans make extensive use of communication and were the first to use language, although the bees have complex communication and may have a proto-language as first described by Karl Von Frisch. A few primates — chimpanzees and gorillas—have been taught sign language.

Humane morality takes morality beyond animal morality, with its law of the talon, and human morality based upon property, to a morality based upon the dignity of humankind. Humane morality is founded on moral values but intrinsic and ethical values as well. The trilogy—intrinsic, moral, and ethical—defines our world. It is not only the real world in which we live, but it is the technical, social, economic, philosophical, religious, world our minds created to assure our safety and happiness. A humane morality recognizes the value of myth and reality, and the evolution of the human spirit to become something better than it has been. There is no status quo and there is certainly no end to history in a world moving from animal and human values to humane values.

Starting Conditions

When the Declaration and the Constitution were written, the United States had institutionalized slavery. The phrase "All men are created equal. . ." could be viewed as the cruelest mockery of human rights coming from the pen of a slave owner who never freed his slaves. Jefferson and the rest of the Founders were wise enough to realize that they were setting into motion a process of social evolution—that things would be different and better in the future. The most they could do was to establish starting conditions. What followed was the result of their starting conditions and the events that ensued to stabilize them or to change them. About 100 years after the Declaration we had the Civil War. About 100 years after the Civil War we had some relatively meaningful civil rights legislation. The popularly accepted cause of the Civil War was the question of slavery, the deeper hidden agenda was an economic struggle between the Northern United States and England. England, to further its own cause, supported the South. Had the root causes of the war been human rights and not economics, the civil rights following the war might not have been cosmetic and the need for civil rights legislation 100 years later might not have occurred. One of the great ironies of the human rights aspect of the Civil War was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution—adopted to enfranchise slaves—was construed by the U. S. Supreme Court to define a corporation as a person. Non-human, non-individualistic corporations got benefits before the freed slaves. This history, containing as it does the seeds of its future development (starting conditions), should be of great comfort and concern to us as it contains the elements of humane morality—the morality into which we hope property based human morality will evolve.

It has taken 190 years to go from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil Rights Act of 1966. It took millennia to get rid of slavery: even the world's religions condoned slavery. In an earlier day, in the Roman Empire, a man's family was treated as though they were his chattel property—slaves. In some places of the world slavery still exists, some of it in bondage, some of it economic. The German 6th Army, the army that besieged Stalingrad was surrounded by Russian armies and taken away into captivity — they have never been repatriated — thousands and thousands of men.

The Uses of Death

In the whole of human history, death and the threat of death have played a prominent role in social behavior. Human rights have just now begun to play a role in politics, domestic and international, in spite of the fact that the killing continues apace. Death has been used as a method of social control for so long that it is accepted as a normal punishment for the commission of capital crimes. The Reagan Majority once the U. S. Supreme Court does not recognize the death penalty as unusual or cruel and in fact extended the penalty to classes of citizens heretofore not covered, namely the young and the handicapped. "Life is cheap," is a common phrase of the language. The greater the impoverishment of the society the cheaper Life is. The crimes for which capital punishment has been prescribed covers a wide variety of human activity. In eighteenth century England hanging was prescribed for pickpockets who went to the hangings as a good place to pick pockets.

A Cruel Society

We frequently see the situation today where the murderer is a person of scant education, crude of manner, the dregs of society, the abused child of abusing parents — the victim a well educated person who could make a great contribution to society. The sorry fact is that our society can be so cruel and depriving that by the time young persons are at the age to be contributing members of society, they have been hopelessly lost to the system. The system ravished them before they could enjoy the unalienable rights; and crime, usually drugs today, offers attractions the society cannot. Society wrongly places different values on different lives. From the Code of Hammurabi to wergeld (blood money), to modern insurance practice, society and its institutions unfairly discriminate against the disadantaged among us.

The Least Among Us

Individuals bear the responsibility for their actions. Deprived people who commit murder are murderers, and should be punished, but the victim's Life is no more or less precious than the least or meanest among us. We worry about the loss of species, that little noticed plant in the Amazon that will one day cure cancer if it could be found and its healing properties made available. How many discoveries, Life saving inventions, money making innovations, even the cure for cancer could be lost because some ghetto kid with the right genetics never found the right environment in which to develop. How many Einsteins, Jonas Salks, Martin Luther Kings, or Bill Cosbys are waiting for the chance, but fall through the cracks of society?

Deterrence or Revenge?

Whether capital punishment deters crime is a matter of great question. The States that do not have capital punishment do not have higher capital crime rates than the States that do have capital punishment. Capital punishment has been reinstated by the Reagan majority on the Supreme Court in the midst of some of the highest homicide rates in our history as the drug lords establish their territories. All of this is beside the point. The question is should a nation whose founding document says Life is an unalienable right have the death penalty? Ecologically speaking humans as animals can and do resort to animal morality and, from time to time, deaths do ensue. Individual humans, inflamed with passion, can do some pretty terrible things. Humans who have been taught to kill in cold blood (CIA agents, Special Forces personnel, Mafia hit men, drug lords) have to be trained to rid themselves of feelings and compas sion and to suffer no remorse, exactly the way the jackal or hyena kills. These people have to be trained to accept animal morality as the norm. For having those properties they are only partly human and certainly not humane. The government agents have a license to kill. Military personnel in time of war have a license to kill — they are excused from the murder injunction. People who kill in self-defense are also excused from the murder injunction. Mafia hit men are not only excused but rewarded by the system that employs them. From the viewpoint of their law they are excused. The expression from Mario Puzo's The Godfather is, "It's not personal. It's only business," in explaining murder to accomplish business ends.

The State is not an Animal

Because some individuals commit acts which are best described as animal morality, should the State seek revenge for such acts? Should the state exact the "eye for an eye" and a "a tooth for a tooth?" The State is not an animal or a person. The State is an institution founded to establish the Preamble conditions for government and to provide the unalienable rights to its citizen/sovereigns. Why should the State revert to a lower form of morality when in fact the proffering of the unalienable rights should be its major goal in order to make society kinder and gentler, compassionate and understanding. People who commit murder are by definition failures of the system. Executing them does not improve the system — it degrades the dignity of the system by degrading Life over and above what animal acts of humans do to degrade it. Far from purifying society or permanently removing persons who are dangers to society, the State says its OK to kill. No matter how righteous the cause of the State, no matter how heinous the crime, by executing the criminal, the State says its OK to kill. The example of the State is more devastating because the State goes about its business, not in the heat of passion, or the insanity of rage, but with cool precision. When the State executes people it is also a failure of our system.

The Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, executions were public spectacles, designed to impress upon people the gravity of a criminals actions. The accused was tortured, since only the testimony of the accused was admissable, (building an evidentiary case for a crime was unheard of), then the criminal was executed. Executioners were stoned if they allowed the victim to die too quickly. In one execution where the criminal was chained to a pole around which a circle of faggots was piled high and set ablaze, eye witnesses were deeply moved and described the execution as the best ever. The criminal's cries for help were so pitiful that onlookers burst into tears, exclaiming what a wonderful execution it was (The Waning of the Middle Ages, Huizinga, J., St. Martin's Press, NY, NY, 1924). No matter how cleanly surgical an execution is, and no matter how private it is, it is animal morality and the descendent of the spectacles of the Middle Ages. Modern prison executions could not possibly have the same impact upon the public as those of the Middle Ages, and those did not deter crime anyway. If we're going to kill them anyway, if the U.S. Supreme Court does not agree with the Declaration and consider Life an unalienable right, perhaps in our commercial, bottom line world, the heirs and assigns of the condemned could profit by allowing the criminal to sell his death to the highest bidder. In ancient Rome if the play called for a man to be hanged, they simply went around to the local jail, got a condemned criminal and at the appropriate place in the play they hanged him, ditto beheading, garroting etc. and burning at the stake. (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon, Edward, 1797). Certainly some movie or TV producer might gladly pay a lot of money to include the "real thing" in his show, as might a network news show. This would combine the grizzly ancient world, with the, cruel Middle Ages, with the greed of the modern world. My argument is reductio ad absurdum. Capital punishment degrades the society that uses it and reduces the state to the level of animal morality. The evolution to humane morality cannot occur under such circumstances. It's one thing for individual humans to revert to animals, it is quite another for the State to do the same.

Crime and Punishment

Should people who commit premeditated murder be excused or treated lightly? Not at all: incarceration for Life or an extended period of time is adequate. If a paroled murderer commits another murder should she/he be executed under those circumstances? No. He/she should be re-incarcerated perhaps for a more extended time. The State is obligated to provide a safe and harmonious environment for its citizen/sovereigns, it is not obligated to kill murderers as a means of providing the safe environment. Punishments short of execution, as we can see from States that do not have the death penalty, are sufficient. The State cannot take a Life and support the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Besides, a significant number of inmates on death row have been found innocent of the crimes they were convicted of committing. Should we kill a few innocents as the price of killing the guilty or is the price of killing the innocents too high? The price of killing the innocent as well as the guilty is too high if by example it sanctions killing as a method of doing the State's business.

Is a Military Draft in Conflict with the Declaration?

The use of killing, as in war, is a union of animal morality and human morality, but its use is restricted to sovereign entities, not individuals. Lands acquired by right of conquest are property, not territory. Should ordinary citizen/sovereigns be compelled under pain of incarceration to become part of a military force to fight a war and possibly get killed? Is a draft consonant with the Declaration and the unalienable right to Life. Can a society decree by drafts and exemptions to the draft who shall experience the probability of death and who shall be a student?

The Spirit of the Declaration

I believe the military draft, starting with the Militia Act of 1797 is contrary to the spirit of the Declaration. The Militia Act fell into disuse when the Civil War broke out and the militias of the Southern States failed to answer President Lincoln's call to put down the insurrection and in fact became the military arm of the Confederate States of America. The military needs of the Federal Union was met in large part by volunteers. This practice resulted in the National Guard which replaced the Militia in function. The North had a draft in the Civil War which caused severe riots in cities like New York, where many blacks were hanged from lamp posts in protest. A Civil War draftee could also pay for a substitute who would volunteer in his place. World War I called a lot of National Guard units to action. World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War used the draft entensively. The Vietnam War ended in large measure because of demonstrations of the middle class. President Johnson removed the deferments of middle class males attending college and the middle class rose up and smote the war.

All Volunteer Forces

Our present military is all volunteer. Should we return to the draft if we need large military contingents? I don't believe we should. We should continue to develop the volunteer armed forces, with a volunteer reserve. We should begin the deliberate process of producing warriors as the core of our armed forces which can only be a carefully selected group of volunteers. This group of military personnel in each of the armed forces should be under the command of warriors. The briefcase soldiers should also be volunteers and the flag officers with the MBAs can run all the bureaucratic policy and logistics necessary to mount what ever action is necessary. Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama all point to the need for a warrior class in our society who will volunteer to face death to save the nation, or to save democracy anyplace in the world.

It is not Life alone that is the important consideration. Just being alive is not enough. All the unalienable rights taken together are what gives the Life dignity and meaning it requires to qualify as human Life. Comfort, well being and security have to be present and in conjunction with the unalienable rights produces the opportunity for the human Life with dignity.

State Negligence

In an infamous case the Johns Hopkins University Hospital allowed a baby to die because: (1) it was born with Down's Syndrome (it was mongoloid) and (2) it had an imperfection in its digestive system so that it could not take nourishment. The parents refused to allow the operation and the infant starved to death. This was an example of an ethical situation in a course I took offered to senior government executives in which the topic was social ethics. It was an example of tough decisions that Life thrust upon us. I was outraged and said so. I am afraid I totally upset the mood and tenor of the class and utterly destroyed whatever point the instructors were trying to make. That child, handicapped or not was alive with a physical condition that could easily be remedied by routine surgery. The parents when they abandoned the child, which is what they did when they refused to authorize the Life saving operation, should have been charged with child neglect and their parental rights terminated. The State, in the form of the hospital (Hippocratic Oath and all that sort of thing) should have intervened as the loco in parentis and the operation should have been performed. When the infant was able to leave the hospital it should have gone into foster care and then should have been placed for adoption. Many people adopt handicapped children and provide loving care for them. The baby was not brain dead, it had a physical handicap that could have easily been remedied by surgery. The mental handicap, Down's Syndrome made Life possible at some level where Life could be experienced. The hospital and the State were negligent in the care of that handicapped infant citizen/sovereign. These types of cases resulted in the Baby Doe decisions and these infants are now cared for.

Death with Dignity

In Holland persons with terminal illnesses may check into special hospitals which will provide them with proper care to sustain them in as good a situation as their condition will allow and then at a time of the patient's choosing administer a lethal dose of a very fast acting, painless drug. By choosing their own time to die, and the conditions under which it will happen adds a great deal of dignity to their Life. The attending physician relates that many of his patients died with a smile of contentment. In those instances in the United States where attending medical attendants assisted the patients to end painfully agonizing lives they are guilty of murder. Is there a right to die?

Human Vegetables

In a number of cases where persons have been severely injured and reduced to a vegetable state, the question of terminating Life support arises. In one case where the family of such a patient sought to have the medical care cease since their daughter, while alive, was in a deep comma and had been for years, the responsible legal officials were in a quandary. They expressed that it would be an easier decision if the patient had left some statement of intention, either in her will or some other document that could be attested to as her real wishes and desires. In Holland, persons in the full command of their senses choose the moment to die. In other cases the law would be happy to pull the plug if the patient when she/he were sentient made the decision. Obviously intent has a great deal to do with the inducement of death in medical circumstances. In the absence of consent would a medical definition of death help in such a situation? What does it mean to be brain dead and is that when the family or the state could intervene to terminate vegetative Life of a human being? We are all too familiar with the eugenics arguments of the early part of the 20th Century and we saw these concepts grow into the monstrosity of Nazi Germany and the holocaust. No casual definitions will suffice. If errors are to be made they should be made in favor of Life not death as so often has been the case with capital punishment.

Human Rights = Democracy

Democracy is a meaningless concept without human rights. As the world becomes increasingly democratic, human rights come to have greater value. The earth shaking changes we are now observing in Eastern Europe are accelerating the change to democracy with its accompanying human rights. The concept of human rights is not new, and the judicial system is also very old.

As I write this seated in a nice warm room in Washington, DC, the capital of the free world, homeless people are camped out over vents to the heating tunnels that bring the steam heat to government buildings, including the White House. To say we are in a humane society with a humane morality would be a gross misstatement of the facts. What cannot be denied is that the world is changing. After 40 years of separation and repression the Berlin Wall is coming down and democracy is coming to many Eastern European nations. In spite of a resurgence of racism in the United States, in spite of the erosion of civil rights by the Reagan majority on the Supreme Court of the United States, there are indications that the evolutionary process to a humane society is inching forward and will not be denied. The people of Europe will not be denied, Japan is finding its way into the modern world. The government in South Africa is talking to the majority leaders of their nation and while standards of living both in the United States and abroad are declining due to excesses of government spending in the absence of offsetting revenue, the prospect of peace is sufficient stimulus to think of a "peace dividend."

Human Dignity

If we recognize that as Homo sapiens we are animals; if we recognize that much of our human morality, though it may be compassionate, is based upon property values that tend to degrade humans to commodities; and if we realize that there is a higher morality, a humane morality based upon the dignity of humans; as humans and as the citizen/sovereigns of the nation; humans endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—we can move from the world of brutishness. The Supreme Court acting to protect the rights of the citizen/sovereign could lead the way by recognizing Life as an unalienable right. Animals may kill each other. Our government is not an animal. Humans can degrade themselves to commodities. Our government should not degrade itself or its citizen/sovereigns by degrading them to commodities. The Founders agreed that government should act with the consent of the citizen/sovereign. In return the citizen/sovereign should secure the unalienable rights—among which is Life.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1990
Institute for domestic Tranquility