The Shredding of Our Fundamental Rights
19 July 2012
The Magna Carta - the charter of every self-respecting man - is being dismantled in front of our eyes.
This column is adapted from an address by Noam Chomsky on June 19 at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, as part of its 600th anniversary celebration.
ecent
events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it may be
worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary
of one of
the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the
issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on
King John in 1215.
What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine
what kind of world will greet that anniversary. It is not an attractive
prospect - not least because the
Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.
The first scholarly edition of the Magna Carta was
published in 1759 by the English jurist William Blackstone, whose work
was a source for U.S. constitutional
law. It was entitled "The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest,"
following earlier practice. Both charters are highly significant today.
The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely
recognized to be the cornerstone of the fundamental rights of the
English-speaking peoples - or as Winston
Churchill put it more expansively, "the charter of every self-respecting
man at any time in any land."
In 1679 the Charter was enriched by the Habeas Corpus
Act, formally titled "an Act for the better securing the liberty of the
subject, and for prevention of
imprisonment beyond the seas." The modern harsher version is called
"rendition" - imprisonment for the purpose of torture.
Along with much of English law, the Act was
incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, which affirms that "the writ of
habeas corpus shall not be suspended"
except in case of rebellion or invasion. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court
held that the rights guaranteed by this Act were "(c)onsidered by the
Founders as the highest safeguard
of liberty."
More specifically, the Constitution provides that no
"person (shall) be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due
process of law (and) a speedy and
public trial" by peers
The Department of Justice has recently explained that
these guarantees are satisfied by internal deliberations in the
executive branch, as Jo Becker and Scott
Shane reported in The New York Times on May 29. Barack Obama, the
constitutional lawyer in the White House, agreed. King John would have
nodded with satisfaction.
The underlying principle of "presumption of innocence"
has also been given an original interpretation. In the calculus of the
president’s "kill list" of
terrorists, "all military-age males in a strike zone" are in effect
counted as combatants "unless there is explicit intelligence
posthumously proving them innocent," Becker and
Shane summarized. Thus post-assassination determination of innocence now
suffices to maintain the sacred principle.
This is the merest sample of the dismantling of "the charter of every self-respecting man."
The companion Charter of the Forest is perhaps even
more pertinent today. It demanded protection of the commons from
external power. The commons were the
source of sustenance for the general population - their fuel, their
food, their construction materials. The Forest was no wilderness. It was
carefully nurtured, maintained in
common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future
generations.
By the 17th century, the Charter of the Forest had
fallen victim to the commodity economy and capitalist practice and
morality. No longer protected for
cooperative care and use, the commons were restricted to what could not
be privatized - a category that continues to shrink before our eyes.
Last month the World Bank ruled that the mining
multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with its case against El Salvador
for trying to preserve lands and
communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental
protection would deprive the company of future profits, a crime under
the rules of the investor rights regime
mislabeled as "free trade."
This is only one example of struggles under way over
much of the world, some with extreme violence, as in resource-rich
eastern Congo, where millions have been
killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for
cellphones and other uses, and of course ample profits.
The dismantling of the Charter of the Forest brought
with it a radical revision of how the commons are conceived, captured by
Garrett Hardin’s influential
thesis in 1968 that "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all," the
famous "tragedy of the commons": What is not privately owned will be
destroyed by individual avarice.
The doctrine is not without challenge. Elinor Olstrom
won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her work
showing the superiority of user-
managed commons.
But the doctrine has force if we accept its unstated
premise: that humans are blindly driven by what American workers, at the
dawn of the industrial
revolution, called "the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting
all but Self" - a doctrine they bitterly condemned as demeaning and
destructive, an assault on the very
nature of free people.
Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating
the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are dedicated to what
political economist Thorstein Veblen
called "fabricating wants" - directing people to "the superficial
things" of life, like "fashionable consumption," in the words of
Columbia University marketing professor Paul
Nystrom.
That way people can be atomized, seeking personal gain
alone and diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves, act
in concert and challenge
authority.
It’s unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed
by one central element of the destruction of the commons: the reliance
on fossil fuels, which courts
global disaster. Details may be debated, but there is little serious
doubt that the problems are all too real and that the longer we delay in
addressing them, the more awful
will be the legacy left to generations to come. The recent Rio+20
Conference is the latest effort. Its aspirations were meager, its
outcome derisory.
In the lead in confronting the crisis, throughout the
world, are indigenous communities. The strongest stand has been taken by
the one country they govern,
Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and for centuries a victim
of Western destruction of its rich resources.
After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen
global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a People’s
Summit with 35,000 participants from 140
countries. The summit called for very sharp reduction in emissions, and a
Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. That is a key
demand of indigenous communities all
over the world.
The demand is ridiculed by sophisticated Westerners,
but unless we can acquire some of the sensibility of the indigenous
communities, they are likely to have
the last laugh - a laugh of grim despair.
( Chomsky is emeritus
professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in Cambridge,
Mass.)
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