Originally published in the February 2006 edition of ThePalladium for my column Legal Personality.
Being a fervent advocate of human rights, I am morally bound to speak about how much the marginalized need us and how little they have in both in life and in the application of the law. On a different note, twenty years of Jesuit education has taught me that one cannot truly give what s/he does not have. Jesus Christ, himself, said “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” And thus, I am equally bound to say that we, ourselves, have a solemn duty to protect our own rights – some of which we do not even recognize.
American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, taught us that the human person has a hierarchy of needs. From bottom to top, he listed them down as Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem, and at the apex, Actualization. One has to satisfy the lower-level needs in order to go up the next rung and satisfy the higher ones. The problem with human rights theory is that it is often restricted to the bottom two levels (food, shelter, clothing, education, safety, etc.) – ensuring people’s survival. But is it fair to end there? A full stomach with an empty heart?
This is where these higher-level rights come in, which I conveniently call “The Rights of the Soul”. Like human rights, these rights are inalienable, inherent and imprescriptible. They cannot be given away or sold, they are not granted by law but are part and parcel of one’s humanity, and they cannot be extinguished through time. One cannot separate them completely from human rights because they are, in fact, human rights and emanate from the same continuum of liberties and freedoms. For instance, the freedom of expression is expanded to form the freedoms of art and music – of beauty… not only to express but to also appreciate and judge the same. The freedoms of religious and political belief also go higher than mere organized beliefs but to personal ones – the right to hope, to dream, to have access to the ideal and the divine. The freedom to feel – to love, to laugh, to cry, to hate, to experience the broad spectrum of human emotions and to go through them again and again. The right to privacy also goes deeper and creates a right to keep one’s life compartmentalized without the fear of being accused of duplicity against the other aspects of his/her life… to be separate his/her career, family and passions from one another.
These are only instances and, no different from human rights, there can be no real possibility of enumerating them all because these are the things that make us human (a concept which might never be fully comprehended). Not only humans of flesh and blood but humans of soul and spirit – things that allow us to reach out into the unknown, the impossible, and the divine and, somehow, make them real.
So, when will we begin to assert these rights? Many people impliedly relinquish these rights by living their lives mechanically… they work, study, eat, sleep and do it all over again the next day and the next until on end. By doing this, no matter how wealthy or intelligent, are they not oppressed as well? One who does not live his/her life all the way to actualization cannot teach another about beauty or meaning or hope. The best that s/he could do is offer material things that inevitably perish in time.
The rights of the soul that we protect turn us into beings of power and by only protecting them, will we be able to empower others.
And here I am, just finished writing a new song while I swallow the last drops of my Starbucks peppermint mocha frapuccino as an unwashed little girl approaches me and begs for a few coins. I hand her a twenty and send her off with a smile and a prayer. I then put on my black jacket and walk home.
So much for higher level rights.
