From 2nd Elementary School of Paleo Faliro. Athens. GREECE.
Proposed by Mary Frentzou
marifrent@yahoo.com

The last word on Respect

AC Grayling
The Guardian

Saturday December 9, 2000

It has been well said that one cannot hope to be respected by others unless one respects oneself. With even greater insight, Maeterlinck noted that if one lacks self-respect, one cannot properly respect others either. "If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly," he wrote, "even so shall you love your neighbour." Because respecting others matters, and because one's respect is worth little to them unless it is based on self-respect, one does well to cultivate it, based on all that one can thoughtfully and generously credit to oneself.

The first impulse on meeting a new acquaintance must be to respect him, for the sake of the innate dignity of humanity in general, and for the possibilities inherent in any individual in particular. A new acquaintance might turn out to be a new friend; he might turn out to be a person who, to the benefit of the world, has one or more human virtues or graces - for example, talent, kindness, courage, integrity, warmth, humour or charm. He might turn out to be a man who suffers, which deserves respect in the form of sympathy, or who dreams great dreams, which deserves the respect of indulgence. Grounds for respect are legion, and mostly familiar.

Human virtues and graces deserve to be honoured because they add to the world's sum of good. To hope to find them in new acquaintances, and to begin at least by acting as if they exist there, itself deserves respect. If the new acquaintance turns out, on ceasing to be new, to lack them - for example, to be greedy, dishonest, unkind, selfish or worse - then one withdraws respect: which, if the world were a better place, would be felt by people as the worst punishment possible.

Respect is an attitude that one free individual gives another, either in hope at the outset, or as a result of finding out that the other has, does or exemplifies things which merit it. It is not the same as admiration - "Fools admire", was Pope's terse observation, "but wise men approve" - nor of worship, which is an attitude that comes too easily to the human species, many of whose members seem to need to feel it. "Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before," Oliver Wendell Holmes said, adding that if the idol in question were not made of wood, it could just as well be made of words.

In addition to the graces and virtues, achievement, or at least endeavour, count among the principal things that command respect; and so does right intention. Best of all there is respect itself. A person who respects others, and therefore gives them their due, and deals justly with them, always with understanding and latitude, is chief among those who deserve the respect of others. Imagine a society in which everyone mutually respected each other in these ways: and ask whether it would need laws and prisons.

But it is not just other people who deserve respect when due. Edgar Watson Howe claimed that "man is still a savage to the extent that he has little respect for anything that can't hurt him". Nature - leaving aside lions and earthquakes and their like, which can indeed hurt one if wrongly encountered - falls into this category, in the sense that too few people respect the non-urban environment, including the chickens and sheep they eat, and the forests that are felled to provide grazing for the beef cattle from which their burgers come.

Lack of such respect is already reaping vengeance, in the form of floods and droughts and BSE, but even this does not persuade our senators to agree on how to respect the natural world more, as the recent failure to agree on control of global warming shows. The opposite of respect is contempt: which is what failure to agree, in so important a matter, seems most to deserve.