People today are often afflicted
with a sense that they cannot change things for the better. They
feel helpless, constrained, caught – in a word, fatalistic. Beyond
Fate, Margaret Visser's 2002 CBC Massey Lectures, examines
why.
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Beyond Fate
"In some respects, modern demands for human
rights are unswerving. The first two inalienable rights, for instance—that
to life and that to freedom—permit no degrees of fault: we
demand that they be upheld, right now and without prevarication.
People are absolutely not to be tortured, arbitrarily imprisoned,
executed. There are to be no condemnations in secret, no kangaroo
courts, no blackmail. Human rights most readily formulate themselves
as prohibitions: fences keep intruders out. There are supposed
to be no gradations with rights—no picking and choosing who
is to qualify. A violation is a violation, even if it happens only
once. And feelings or tastes in these matters make no difference
whatever. The Furies themselves could not be more implacable.
But because of our aspiration to rise above honour
and shame and fate, and in a spirit utterly unlike that of the
Furies of ancient Greece, we are prepared to qualify the very rules
we have made. We do not, for example, punish people who did not
intend to break the rules, or those who did so accidentally. As
long as the ideals upon which our culture was founded are allowed
to survive, we shall find it possible to pardon people who are
sorry and make reparations. And we shall insist that punishment
ought never to be meted out in revenge. The metaphorical diagram
is still used to depict human rights as outlines demanding inviolability,
however, and we have to remember that fate haunts it. A continued
preference for merciful and just interpretations of the diagram
can never be taken for granted. Such a preference is transcendent,
not natural, and it's certainly not part of the diagram. It is
therefore to be fought for with all the energy at our command,
or else we shall fall back into fate."
Beyond Fate, pp. 104-5 |
