Rights as nouns verses rights as verbs.
Compare and contrast the right to work verses the right to a job.
The former is a verb. The latter is a noun.
The former is an attempt at effort. The latter is a state of condition or a state of being.
A job is employment, generally by another. A job as employment generally requires that when you work for a living, you are compensated. And most statements enumerating your rights to a job (such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) outlines the parameters for a job to which you have certain rights:
The right to just work conditions. The right to equal compensation. The right to favorable renumeration. The right to belong to a trade union. The right to reasonable working hours. The right to holiday pay. The right to dignity.
Each of these “rights” point to not just the idea of having a job, but working within a culture where when you work at a job, you are compensated–generally with money, which indicates some sort of collective economic system. The right to a trade union, reasonable hours, holiday pay and dignity–all these indicate an employer, and that generally indicates some sort of corporate structure.
All of this assumes, if not a capitalist society, at least a society where capital and money is used to barter exchanges, and where an employer has certain expectations that must be fulfilled.
In other words, the noun “Job” implies an infrastructure–because for you to have a “thing”, the infrastructure must exist in which to provide that “thing.”
And that infrastructure limits the rights of action and demands a certain arrangement of society in order to make that “thing” exist.
Consider any right that is a noun, like the right to a “job” like having the right to a “gum ball.”
For that right to be satisfied, first we must assume gum balls exist.
And for gum balls to exist all the infrastructure for the manufacturing of gum balls must exist: we need a supply of sugar and other ingredients, we need a method by which those gum balls can be produced, we need people to make the gum balls.
We need, in other words, a whole host of preconditions and a whole host of cultural, societal and economic arrangements to be set up before you can have your right to a gum ball fulfilled.
And consider: what if you don’t have a job?
Are your rights being violated?
Is firing someone a violation of their rights?
Is unemployment a human rights violation?
Note that the UNDHR weasels its way out of these conundrums through Articles 29 and 30, which places concrete limitations on the expectations of these rights: they’re only available if the law permits it, and they can’t be used to ferment revolution.
Now compare and contrast this to the right as a verb:
Work is defined as effort. In the context of “working for a living” or “working a job”, we can narrow the definition somewhat to “effort expended in order to improve one’s material existence.”
My pre-contact Native American ancestors worked. They didn’t have jobs–but they did expend effort, to gather food, to build shelter, to make primitive clothing, to create tools in order to make their other efforts more efficient.
And notice what my Native American ancestors did not have: they did not have “just working conditions.” Sometimes while hunting you could die during the hunt. They did not have “equal pay”–because generally they were not paid. (My ancestors did use money in order to regulate trade between tribes–but most day-to-day activity towards survival was not paid work.) They did not have holiday pay or trade unions. They did not have an expectation of dignity.
But they did work. They did expend effort to improve their material existence.
Unlike the right to a noun, the right to verb only implies that you have the right to expend effort and to try.
Verbs do not imply you have the preconditions to exercise the verb in a way we think of in a modern context. Nor do they imply that you will have any success when you engage in your actions.
The right to work–to expend effort to improve your material existence–means you have the right to forage for food, or to find materials to build shelter. It does not imply you will be successful in these activities.
More importantly, the right to work–the right to verb–is not violated because you don’t have a thing.
The right to express yourself through writing or painting is not violated if you don’t have a pencil or a paint brush–since these activities can also be carried out with much more primitive tools. Find a rock and scratch into a cave wall. Find some colorful mud and mix it with water.
My ancestors did this.
And unlike rights as nouns which demand other people’s action and which in theory are violated when the thing is not provided to you–rights as verbs can be performed in a vacuum.
The right to work–the right to expend effort to improve your material existence–only requires of others that they leave you and your stuff alone. It requires, in other words, that you not be enslaved to another or to society in general.
And if your work is unsuccessful: if you lie dying in the dirt because you don’t know how to gather and process acorns–you have no right to expect aid.
Though you may receive aid because that is what compassionate people do for each other.
All a right as a verb requires is that you not be enslaved; that you be free to **try.**
But rights as nouns require an entire infrastructure: societal relationships, economic structures, a matrix of codependency and social group membership which places demands and requirements on each of us.
Rights as nouns, in other words, demands us to be responsible to other members of our society–even at the cost of our own well being. Rights as nouns, in other words, requires a system of dependencies–not necessarily voluntary–in which we operate as humans in a social matrix.
Again, see the UNDHR’s Articles 29 and 30, and think through what those “limitations” talked about in Article 29.2 may be.
Rights as verbs, on the other hand, only demand that you are not a slave.
But they make no assumptions about your ability to even engage in that verb–about your ability to find the tools necessary for self-expression, about your ability to do that thing, and about the results of your efforts.
And if we stop to offer our compassion for another–it’s not because we are required to, forced to or are obligated to by force of law or by force of a strongman with a gun to whom we are enslaved. It’s because **we choose to stop and offer compassion.**
And because we can afford to offer compassion.
Those who argue that there is an equivalency: that somehow your right to “write as you will” is violated because someone won’t give you a pencil–meaning “verbs” require “nouns” to act–that’s because they lack the imagination to see society other than the one we’ve built in the West, where pencils and paper are plentiful, and where a capitalist society allows all but perhaps the most painfully poor to buy tools at a local Art Mart.
And they forget that our ancestors often wrote in the dirt at their feet using their finger.
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 