From Human Rights to Human Duties

Ethic degradation, environment degradation, economic and social decline always go together. In particular in Italy, the normalization of the relationships between citizens, State and Society appears as an urgent need before any technical, financial or economic measure. Any sustainable development project (at micro as well as macro level) must be based on the reconstruction of a widespread sense of individual responsibility. It is not possible to trigger positive models if wider and wider sectors of the economy and society will be even more elusive with a progressive erosion of social solidarity. Any positive initiative will grow on weak roots and will be considered as a funny or naïf idea or as the usual pseudo-environmental fashionable trend of few snob intellectuals. The problem is that in Italy the State encourage citizens in using, for any occasion to satisfy their needs and rights, meta-legal strategies such as the help and protection of a powerful mediator. The degradation of the public sphere is accompanied by the corruption of the private one and the systemic destruction of the key-categories in the relationships between public and private dimension becomes an urgent emergency as some recent more or less political Italian news may demonstrate. We all are thus requested to hamper the permanent transfiguration of the public dimension into privilege and the civic one into complicity. In a society like ours, dishonesty is likely to be as a advantaging option and the idea of democracy is despoiled at any occasion: the only possibility we have to escape this tunnel is the re-building a community based not only on personal rights but also on personal duties. For example environmental protection must be linked not only to a vague right of the next generations, but also to precise duties of the present generations. As Ancient Romans said: we are planting trees whose shade and fruits will be enjoyed by others. In the same way our personal political commitment is a duty which stay before the rights of the next generations.