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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > Standing up for the trees ...
Standing up for the trees ...  [message #42363] Mon, 07 May 2007 22:13 Go to previous message
NW is currently offline  NW

On fire!
Location: Worcester, England
Registered: January 2005
Messages: 1562



It's been implied several times over the past couple of years that I'm the kind of person who can't see the wood for the trees.

It seems to me to be asserting that I can't see humanity for the humans. And this is exactly right: I am deeply suspicious of those who deal in large-scale woolly concepts like "the good of humanity" - it is usually followed by phrases about "can't make omelettes without breaking eggs", "greatest good of greatest number" and suchlike.

What I, as an individual human, fear most is anyone who asserts that the collective rights of some mythical "humanity" outweigh the individual rights of individual human beings. There is no "humanity", there are only humans. Seeing the benefits to "humanity", rather than dealing in individual humans, leads to the obscenities of forcible sterilisation of the unfit, the poor, and members of specific ethnic groups as "eugenics". It leads to unthinking assertions about the alleged supremacy of law, without concern for the reasons for or effects of particular laws. It leads - because the ability of those who have power and privilege to delude themselves that they act from praiseworthy motives - to colonialism, invasion, economic servitude and slavery.

Let us celebrate individual trees! Let us rejoice in their diversity! Let us relish both the sapling, and those decaying fallen trunks that provide such interesting habitats.

But please, let us not say ... whatever happens to ten, or twenty, or thirty or howevermany percent of the trees, the wood is the important thing. . Each tree has value, and without trees there is no wood.


"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
 
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