Our Awesome Responsibility

The countries of France, New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovakia, Austria, Egypt, and the municipalities of Brussels and Quebec have defined animals as "sentient beings." This means that in those places animals are not property, but rather "legal persons." This designation allows humans to litigate on behalf of the legal rights of animals.

As a person who has known, intimately, several dogs and a couple cats, I can attest to their sentience and I have no problem with extending that recognition to the entire animal kingdom. That said, I "own" a dog, my wife and I have owned several, and it makes me wonder if in those places would my ownership, my property, be recognized.

Under US legal precedent there can be "no property in the body as such." As far as I know, this legal principle has only been applied to human bodies, but does the legal personhood of animals open the door to, say, making the farming of animals illegal? It's a classic slippery slope, but the truth is that human laws are always slippery slopes.

Property rights are widely considered to be "transferable rights to exclude all others from one or more use of a certain thing." In other words, if our bodies were considered property under law, if human bodies could be legally owned, then, by extension, slavery would be legal. Indeed, it was the recognition of Black people as "legal persons" (e.g., "sentient beings") that ended the cruel practice of slavery in the US. The fact that bodies are not property also means that our bodily rights are not transferable, which allows for the widespread illegality of prostitution. It likewise means that there are uses for which we can be legally forbidden to put our bodies, such as imbibing illegal drugs, committing suicide, or increasingly, having an abortion.

I'm going to assume that most people reading this are morally opposed to the notion of humans as property, but I wonder about my own body. Certainly, I own it, right? Legally, none of us own even our own bodies, although most of us believe we should have the "rights" of ownership over our own bodies. And indeed, many of us have signed legal documents that transfer our bodily rights to others under certain circumstances. My wife had power of attorney over her mother's property, including her body, during the final years of her life.

But that's different, right? Caring for others, be they elderly or children, isn't the same as ownership. But isn't it? So long as we stop short of abuse and neglect, those bodies legally "belong" to us. In this regard, those of us who care for others bear an awesome responsibility and we must remind ourselves, every day, that these bodies in our care, these legal persons, are not property.

From an Indigenous perspective, the original sin of colonizers was the concepts of property and ownership. Prior to their arrival, Native Americans considered themselves to be stewards or caretakers of land, animals, and plants rather than owners. The sin was in taking these living things, these legal persons, these sentient beings (and yes, there is a growing body of evidence that plants are sentient), and turning them into objects.

"You can't thingify anything without depersonalizing that something," wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. "If you use something as a means to an end, at that moment you make it a thing and you depersonalize it."

Philosopher Simone Weil defines "force" as anything that "turns anybody who is subjected into a thing."

We don't own our children, but we are responsible for them. We are their stewards and caretakers even as our world increasingly views them as things. Few admit it, but every for-profit education company thingifies children as a means to an end. Standardized testing likewise thingifies them, exploiting them as unpaid labor in test score coal mines. Indeed, much of what passes for "classroom management" or "punishment," to the degree that force or the threat of force is the fulcrum over which our levers work, objectifies children, turning them into something to be treated like property. Even when we turn them away from what they want to learn to focus instead upon what we want them to learn, we are, at one level, thingifying them. And if children object to any of this, if they assert their rights as legal persons or sentient beings, they are turned into things through force.

Our responsibility as stewards of children is an awesome one, made even more so as we consider these cultural forces toward objectification and commodification.

If I had my way, this passage from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet would be posted on every classroom or nursery wall:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

When we love them and let them play, we live up to our awesome responsibility.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!