entitlement vs. gratitude

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

~ from a very excellent article, What the New Atheists Don’t See by atheist/agnostic (I forget which) Theodore Dalrymple

Human rights have increasingly become the defining idea in Western morality over the past two centuries. They have changed our conceptions of right and wrong, of permissibility and impermissibility, atleast as importantly, they have changed the very nature of moral debate. It bears repeating, therefore, that human rights are essentially an invention of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Traditional systems of morality worked on the principle of obligation: act this way, don’t do that; you must; you shouldn’t. Human rights reverse this and tell the person what is his or her due. The person from whom something was expected becomes the putative recipient of care or provision with hand outstretched in righteous demand. … Human rights are not the correlative of obligations, as its defenders might claim, but the converse; instead of being a mirror-image way of expressing duties, it is—in its cumulative effects, even if not explicitly—a denial of them. That is why all the enculturation mechanisms of turn-of-the-millennium Western societies—education, the Babel of the media, peer pressure—have bred two generations with little or no sense of their own obligations. At most, conservative-minded politicians whine about the “need to balance rights with obligations.” Such blandishments are good for rallying cheers of support, but they do so to no discernible social effect, for the “obligations” that the audience have in mind are always those of others, never of themselves; their own enculturation processes are too strong to work in any other way than to highlight grievances—and so to see themselves as sinned against, not as sinned.

~ excerpts from the very thought-provoking book, Why the Rest Hates the West by Meic Pearse,

This is not to say the concept of human rights are bad—they have served as good guidelines for how other human beings should be treated. However, for those of us who are the lucky few of the wealthy west, they should be primarily guidelines for what we strive to give to others, instead of what we demand to receive.

Tread carefully, because we really are entitled to nothing. And if we do not act responsibly and gratefully with what we have received, then perhaps it too will be taken away.