(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Dead bodies. Innocent people. On the run. From war and poverty. Hundreds of dead bodies. Once born, vulnerable and therefore dependent on care and recognition. So we are all through life. A dead body that was once an infant, which introduced something new to the world – freedom and hope. Who was once seen by others as a person, had a name, lived an everyday life. Which is now being washed ashore on Europe's shores or sinking to the bottom of the Mediterranean cemetery. As refugees from North Africa.
So far this year, about 36 000 refugees have taken over the Mediterranean, reports the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). And almost 1800 has lost their lives in trying to cross the same ocean.
Since all bodies are grief-only, explains philosopher Judith Bulter in the book Precarious Life, we must be compassionate. Let's touch. Move. We care. Take responsibility. As long as someone at home misses the dead. As long as someone loved them, but can no longer do just that, we must help the shipwrecked – before it's too late. For life, not only is grief – not least it is fatal, Butler reminds us. The sea from Syria to Lampedusa thus says life.
The lottery of life. Therefore, it is a lottery of life regarding who comes home to someone – and when for others it is no longer so.
To remedy this injustice, editor Truls Lie in Ny Tid (no. 15/2015) proposes a global tithe based on Norway's oil wealth. Ten percent to the most disadvantaged on our common planet. Based on the latest figures for the Government Pension Fund, also called the Oil Fund, this amounts to as much as NOK 700 billion. The tithe will go to humanitarian aid, including to the still-living bodies that still cross the Mediterranean. That is what we, with Norway's oil wealth, owe to these refugees and other vulnerable groups in today's world, Lie claims. Something the Value Commission (1998–2001) already proposed in its final report from 2002, and which the Graver Committee (2002–2003) followed up in the review of the Petroleum Fund's ethical challenges in NOU 2003: 22.
As long as someone loved them, but can no longer do just that, we must help the shipwrecked – before it's too late.
But why? In Lee's apt wording, this is because "[we] are [...] just completely coincidentally born [...] in the welfare state".
From this observation, the lottery of life constitutes a double existential insight.
First and foremost, such a global tithe is reasonable based on the fact that we humans exist at all are born into the world. Even without asking for it. Live – right here and now. Something that is an existential coincidence. Like a lottery game. Since it could have been completely different. This calls for a moral humility towards the vulnerability of life. Our everyone's abusive and sorrowful bodies.
Especially regarding global justice, such as redistribution among the world's poorest. That could have been us. One day may strike even mediated Norway. For example, when oil production ends.
The second existential insight into Lee's proposal for a global tithe revolves around Norway's oil capital itself. The story of expedition chief Jens Evensen's political negotiation as well as engineering art from the early 1960s is well known.
But it is of course extremely fortunate that there is a globe with such resources whatsoever. It's easy to forget. Thus, it is the lottery of life that is why the country called Norway today possesses enormous values from the continental shelf.
The question thus becomes: Is the wealth of that reason "our"? Or does it belong to all the people who inhabit the globe?
Cosmopolitan. It is precisely this issue that Immanuel Kant raises in the book The Metaphysics of Sites from 1797. And he concludes: "The spherical surface of the globe unites everywhere." Kant's real estate philosophy is thus cosmopolitan. No one has chosen to inhabit the globe – and no one can choose it away either. This existential futility therefore brings people together. In addition, Kant sounds almost like an echo of anarchist propriety – which is nevertheless rooted in a moral humanity that requires respect for the integrity and freedom of every unique human being. And again, the lottery of life reminds us that the globe's economic as well as territorial conditions could have been – and can be – completely different.
Such is reminiscent of Kant's discussion of "cosmopolitan hospitality," that is, to keep the door glowing for anyone who may be property-less, but who equally inhabit the earth.
From Kant, it is therefore no longer as easy to say what is "our" Norwegian petromania and what belongs to all other citizens of the same world.
The philosopher Seyla Benhabib has thought further along the lines of Lies and Kant. She claims that Marshall aid for both the Middle East and the Mediterranean is the only sensible solution. Everything else is short-term and will not least result in a still infinite number of human dignity violations. Such an economic gift package, on the other hand, will contribute to stability and justice in the region, which is likely to have global effects – insofar as the Middle East and the Mediterranean today are the source of many conflicts that extend beyond the region itself.
Blue bullet. Imagine the globe. Out in the black universe. This blue sphere as it looks from space, and the way it must have looked to astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human on the moon – who suddenly turns to the globe and snaps a photo, all the way out.
In 1958 – the year after the first Sputnik satellite orbited the Earth – philosopher Hannah Arendt publishes the book The Human Condition. Here she describes an "earthly alienation" – an existential fear of man going out into the universe. Leave their home and go to a place where we do not belong, have nothing to do. For our world is here and now, and our lives are among people on earth – the common human surface of the blue ball.
Seyla Benhabib claims that "Marshall aid" for both the Middle East and the Mediterranean is the only sensible solution.
At the same time, Arendt's existential snapshot anticipates what Frank White in a 1987 documentary called "the overview effect." That is, this photograph, this view of the globe from the outside, brings forth awe and responsibility towards life. An existential realization that we all inhabit the same blue ball. A tale of the common home of men. In a world that we happen to be born into, and will die in, and what Arendt calls the basic conditions of human life.
Humanitarianism. The snapshot of the blue sphere thus provides the potential for a crucial moral and political realization: a picture of us humans as cosmopolitan citizens of a common real estate globe. But not least, it gives a picture of the freedom to act in this world. This describes Arendt as birthrate, that is, the ability to constantly initiate new beginnings. As children are constantly being born into the world, new beginnings, new opportunities come.
Thus, freedom demands responsibility. Responsibility for yesterday's political decisions, and thus for today's global destinies. Responsibility for everyone else – since such new beginnings can affect any human being who must at any time inhabit the blue sphere.
This points to what Arendt calls the right to have rights: a moral right to never be legally unlawful, so that no one who inhabits the surface of the earth can actually be without legal protection – but rather possess human dignity, or humanity, as she calls it. Respect for humanity is not about the pursuit of the so-called good life, but rather the struggle for life itself – survival whatsoever. Being a human being – in the world, among other people.
But such recognition is not the case as long as bodies are washed up dead on Europe's beaches, and then placed in nameless mass graves that no one can mourn. Thus, the lottery of life – as existential recognition as well as moral sensitivity regarding the blue globe – has turned into its own opposite, namely Arendt's horror scenario: alienation in the black holes of the universe.
Lysaker is a philosopher and associate professor at the University of Agder.
odin.lysaker@uia.no
