Post #5

Even though, in my opinion, the video linked to this question didn’t really address said question, I think that human rights inevitably become intertwined with climate change. From the beginning, the things that put man in a position to even change the climate of an entire planet come from violations of the human rights of many. We would not have had a global trade system without the vicious exploitation and violations of the human rights of those in the global south by those in the global north. The workers who powered the industrial revolution had many of their fundamental human rights violated by those who governed their nations, all in the pursuit of profit. The exploitation of people was essential to their ability to most effectively exploit their environment, changing our climate at a disturbing rate. The workers in industrialized Britain, for example, had no choice but to work in the factories pumping toxic chemicals in to the atmosphere. More relevantly, today workers in the Chinese factories that make everything we in the west gratuitously consume have no choice but to work in these factories, violating their human rights. More directly, many Pacific Islanders have seen their island homes partially or completely reclaimed by the ocean due to rising sea levels caused by our reckless abuse of our planet. The industrialization of the west, which is clearly the driving force of climate change, definitely has the horrible side effect of violating the human rights of those we consider lesser, unimportant in the global order.

Endangered cultures are those cultures which are in danger of dying out; ones in which the youth does not learn the ways of the culture from which they come either because of some outside force like a paternalistic government seeking to assimilate them in to the accepted ways of the nation which has been drawn around them or because they themselves see no value in learning the old ways of their culture for reasons such as economic opportunity elsewhere in the big city. To some degree I agree with the sentiment of Davis’ TED talk (basically that there is great value in preserving native cultures and that their practices and views of the world strengthen us as human beings,) but in a another way I disagree: the future I see will inevitably bring us together as one people. Technology is progressing at an astronomical rate and leading researchers have predicted that we will achieve singularity by 2045. Singularity is the point where man will be able to merge with the artificial intelligence we’ve created (more basically our brains will be able to communicate directly with computers,) in my view fundamentally changing the way we view consciousness and humanity. This will inevitably lead to every person being hooked up to these machines, creating an internet of people. With all of us completely and instantly connected to one another, there will effectively be just one person, the amalgamation of all singular parts in to one inconceivable whole. Discussions of preserving cultures and languages will be irrelevant, we’ll just have one language: binary and conflict will be a thing of ancient history. It’s an exciting thought that makes a lot of our current thinking about the world completely irrelevant.

Eurocentrism is viewing the views and practices of other cultures through the lens of European values and beliefs. Noor believes that our way of looking at the world is not inherently right and that we must not judge other countries by our own standards. I believe, however, that this view is equal to the philosophical belief of cultural relativism which states that your morality is derived from the norms and practices of the culture to which you belong and that as a result you cannot judge the morality of others based on your own morals, as they are derived from the larger beliefs of your own culture. I believe that there should be a central set of moral beliefs by which we judge all peoples equally.