Equality & Mutuality

Thanks for the challenging discussion on the question of rights versus (in addition to?) responsibilities. With some of these issues in mind I came back to Newbigin this morning and found that he had already said what I was trying to say, only with much greater clarity. His issue is not primarily with ‘human rights’ but the much more important question of what it means to be a human person. He sees an important contrast between the Enlightenment view of a human being and the biblical view. He begins with a sketch of how the Enlightenment taught us to see ourselves:

The Enlightenment saw the human person as an autonomous center of knowing and judging in such wise that any heteronomy [subjection to the rule of another] was to be rejected. The implication of this view is that each person has the right to develop his or her own potential to the maximum, limited only by the parallel rights of other persons. The governing principle, therefore, will be that of equality, since every person has equal rights. Equality will mean that - ideally - each one will have all that is needed for personal development, and each one will be the judge of what those needs are. Dependence on another is, in this view, incompatible with human dignity.”

There is some noise being made these days about the postmodern ‘return to community’ but I doubt that this will challenge the ideals of independence and personal fulfillment as the central features of personal identity. Individual autonomy is so central to our understanding of who we are and within this framework it is natural to see equality as the ‘governing principle’. Newbigin goes on to describe the ‘biblical vision’ of the human person:

“The biblical vision of the human person is different at every point. In this vision there is no true humanity without relatedness, which means that mutual dependence is intrinsic to true humanity. The governing principle, therefore, is not equality but mutuality - ‘one anotherness’, if we may create a noun out of Paul’s constant reference to the duties we owe one another. The image of God in the human person is bound up with this interrelatedness and interdependence as man and woman (Gen 1:27). There is no being human except in relatedness, and the true relation between human beings is expressed in the phrase: ‘Be servants of one another.’ In this vision, human persons find their dignity when they surrender their autonomy to one another, and lose it when they place their ‘equal rights’ at the center. And the center which holds the whole ‘frame’ together is the God who enters into a covenant of faithfulness with men and women created to mirror divine faithfulness by their faithful relatedness to one another.”

Is this a valid contrast or has Newbigin oversimplified things? It seems to me that he has captured the more basic question that is behind the whole debate of rights versus responsibilities. Is ‘mutuality’ a broad enough concept to encompass some of the ethical issues we face? For me this should certainly be at the heart of the church’s understanding of ethics. If anything, mutuality seems like a more demanding governing principle than equality because it forces us to give up on the idea that we as individuals are at the center. I suppose the supreme example of this is Christ himself who surrendered his ‘individual rights’ in order to show the way to something far broader and far more lasting.

If you have a lot of time and want to follow Newbigin’s argument in its entirety you can do so here. The article is called ‘The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches,’ and the above is taken from page 56.