Human Duties, According To Saramago

José Saramago was an exquisite writer and a controversial thinker, who never minded to express what he thought out loud. A good part of his work is dedicated to the critique of the values, or anti-values, of today’s consumer society. And it was he who spoke of human duties.

Saramago was characterized by being a committed intellectual. His prose, sharp and loving, shows how absurd and contradictory many “truths” turn out to be that are taken for granted …  Today we reveal some of them.

The origin of human duties

During his 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, José Saramago spoke of the need to establish universal ethical principles. The author of the Gospel according to Jesus Christ stated:

“A Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proposed to us and with that we believed that we had everything, without realizing that no right could subsist without the symmetry of the duties that correspond to it. With the same vehemence and the same force with which we claim our rights, let us also claim the duty of our duties. Maybe this way the world will start to get a little better. “

Saramago’s basic idea was to postulate that if human beings do not agree on some basic values, it will be very difficult to guarantee the rights by which we must abide by.

The letter of human duties

Only after 17 years after José Saramago made those statements, the initiative began to take shape in a concrete proposal, thanks to the impulse of the Saramago Foundation and the World Future Society study center.

A group of intellectuals from the Autonomous University of Mexico set out to prepare a first draft of what could be universal human duties. Its purpose is to prepare a final document, with the assistance of experts in all branches of knowledge, to present it to the United Nations (UN) and request its approval.

The first draft is made up of four main axes : 1) Justice and the Rule of Law; 2) Education, culture and social media of communication; 3) Sustainable development and power generation; and 4) Borders, migration and vulnerable groups.

Human duties

Based on the axes defined during the initial discussion, the UNAM group has defined that these are the human duties on which the proclamation of the new letter of obligations should revolve:

• Eradicate hunger in the world and not waste food.
• End illiteracy and educate with quality.
• Share knowledge and expertise to achieve comprehensive health.
• Medicines must be free or reasonably priced.
• The State must regulate the prices of medicines so that they are not subject to the laws of the market.
• Be truthful and respectful when exercising the right to freedom of expression.
• Use energy efficiently and take steps to save it.
• Eliminate extreme inequality in societies.
• Offer hospitality to immigrants and refugees.

• Provide optimal conditions for free competition between companies.
• The market must be regulated to increase world wealth and individual well-being.
• It is everyone’s obligation to pay taxes.
• Focus scientific knowledge towards the preservation of life.
• Respect the environment and contribute to its decontamination and preservation.
• Respect the habitat and way of life of non-human animals.

Let them be laws

Pilar del Río, widow of Saramago, has said that it is intended to promote this catalog of duties so that it is adopted by the different governments and has the force of law. He recalled the words of the Portuguese Nobel Prize for Literature, when he said: “if as citizens we let everything go by and adapt to the only possible reality, we will be settling for very little.”

He added that for Saramago the worst of all human attitudes was “desistance”, or the act of giving up dreams, purposes and objectives.

Despite all these good intentions, the truth is that the way for those principles to become laws does not seem easy at all. Still, the authors of the initiative are willing to fight until they succeed.

Images courtesy of Chistian Shloe