bunpeiris Literature

Duties Vs Responsibilities: Law & Order Vs Justice 8 Protection of the weakest

1.There is technical Progress, but this is not the same thing as the progress of humanity as such. In every civilization this process is very complex. In western civilization-which used to be called Western-Christian but now might better be called Western-Pagan-along with the development of intellectual life & science there has been a loss of serious moral basis of society.

During these 300 years of western civilization, there has been a sweeping away of duties & an expansion of rights. But we have two lungs. You can’t breathe with just one lung & not with the other. We must avail ourselves of rights & duties in equal measure. And if this is not established by the law, if the law doesn’t oblige us to do those, then we have to control ourselves.

When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behaviors. Everyone understood what he could do & what he could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, rights at the expense of the duty.
Dissident Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Noble prize for Literature in 1970)

2. Solzhenitsyn & I differ most sharply over the defense of civil rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one’s country of residence, the openness of society.

For me, these rights constitute the basis for a fully human life & for international security & trust. I have no doubt whatsoever as to the value of defending specific individuals. Solzhenitsyn assigns only a secondary importance to human rights & fears that concentrating on them may divert attention from what he sees as more important matters.
Father of Russian Nuclear Bomb, dissident writer Andrei Sakharov (Noble Prize for Peace in 1975

3. The words law & order have so frequently been misused as an excuse for oppression that the very phrase has become suspect in countries which have known authoritarian rule. Some years ago, a prominent Burmese author wrote an article on law & order as expressed by the official term “nyein-wut-pi-pyar”. One by one he analyzed the words, which liberally mean ‘quiet –crouched-crushed-flattened,’ & concluded that the whole made for an undesirable state of affairs, one which militated against the emergence of an alert, energetic, progressive, citizenry.

There is no intrinsic virtue to law & order unless ‘law’ is equated with justice & ‘order” with the discipline of a people satisfied that justice has been done.

The Buddhist concept of law is based on “dhamma’, righteousness or virtue, not on the power to impose harsh & inflexible rules on a defenseless people. The true measure of the justice of a system is the amount of protection it guarantee to the weakest
Aung San Suu Kyi (Noble Prize for peace in 1991)

Weep with these novels as if the reality itself wouldn’t do

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/tess_urbervilles

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables