TooMuchBaijiu wrote:Well, I don't like to see it as a pure black-and-white issue. I said that there's no reason for social individualism to be infringed, WeiWenDi made a decent point regarding mandatory education and other such programs, and I backtracked (without trying to make it look like I backtracked) a little, because I made the mistake of saying "social individualism" when maybe I should have said "civil liberty".
Anyway, I suppose I could put it this way. Let's do a 1-10 scale, with 1 being anarchy and 10 being totalitarianism. Liberty vs. Order. I figure you would want a society scoring somewhere around 2, while WWD would want one around 6. I suppose I'd want one scoring 3 or 4, or maybe 5 in times of crisis.
I think with too much order we become slaves to the state, and with too much liberty our society becomes dysfunctional. So I'd say we'd need enough order to allow our society to progress, but enough liberty to see that the people can do the whole life, liberty, and happiness thing. However, if I had a choice between living in a society with too much order and one with too much liberty, I'd choose the latter, if for no other reason than the fact that the behavior of individuals is easier to correct then the behavior of government, as you no doubt agree.
Hehe - I think you just articulated my tightrope-walking simile better than I did, sir. Kudos!
And I think you've got me pretty much pegged, though I'd almost say I'm more of a 7 than a 6 - though now we're just splitting hairs. Democracy is a very decent form of government, and I far prefer it (particularly in its mass-line forms) to any style of totalitarianism (which is just individualism wherein rights are extended to only one individual), but at the same time there is a levelling effect which I find distasteful - though all humans may make a claim to the same basic dignity and equality, somehow this gets extended into an area where it appears that all
opinions and all
values must be made equal, and
that I find objectionable. Intelligent Design
does not deserve the same level of respect from our educational system that Darwinism does, for the simple fact of the matter is that
Darwin was right in the basics of his model.
TooMuchBaijiu wrote:And to restate the same paragraph in D&D terms, I'd say it's easier to steer a Chaotic Good society toward becoming Lawful Good than for a Lawful Evil one to do the same.
Huh. There is a problem, though - people have this pesky tendency to
rebel against Lawful Evil governments, whether it's Qin Shihuang's China or Ollie Cromwell's Lord Protectorate of England or the Somoza dictatorship of Nicaragua (to name just three examples close to hand). Now, that's not to say that the Han Dynasty, the Restoration government of Charles II or the Sandinistas were angels by any stretch of the imagination, but they were all of them marked improvements over their predecessors.
TooMuchBaijiu wrote:Not that I want to start a debate down this road, but I can't agree that the social contract is "mythology" any more than state societies are. While no, "there was never a point in human history where individuals came together and decided 'well, you stop stealing my shit and I won't brain you with my spear", I'd something similar did happen, with no one really knowing what it was or observing it as such. The oldest governments, state societies, nations, cities, etc. sprouted up organically, and order was created out of necessity, where people had to sacrifice a portion of their income (or harvest, or whatever) to maintain that order. That sounds like a social contract to me.
Not to go all PoMo on your arse, but the fact that people didn't know what it was and didn't observe it as such is significant. Civilisation would not have been possible without pre-existing social arrangements and societies, particularly the agrarian ones which gave rise to Civilisation-As-We-Know-It-And-As-Copyrighted-By-Sid-Meier, have always been organised around one form or another of
religion; now, if you want to pick and choose which aspects of the socio-religio-cultural matrix were important and label them a 'social contract', that's your call and there's no ground for me to say it's 'wrong', in the scientific sense of the term. But in all honesty, it's every bit as arbitrary and empirically improvable as saying 'God did it'.
There may have been an order, but ascribing to it any consciousness
outside the consciousness that that order had about itself is a mythological exercise.
Objectivist wrote:Do you say this because of social networking? I think we've drifted very far from an individualist society. Especially under George W. Bush and Barack Obama...I think the United States of America is more authoritarian now than they have ever been in my entire lifetime. I see more people lining up to be part of "groups" or "collectives" than ever before. What most of these people do not understand is that when you live in a society that respects all people as individuals everyone is protected the same under the law. It is collectivism that separates us and teaches people that they are not a unique individual...that they fit into special "categories" that either help or hurt them in some way.
I'd like to see what you mean by too much individualism?
Saying that the Bush-Obama national security state is collectivist misses out on a couple of highly important dimensions. For example, the way it
justifies itself is purely individualistic: it is
your life,
your property,
your security that is in danger, traditional civil society cannot help, and the national security state are stepping in to protect that. The difference between 'security' and 'order' is that security is about neutralising threats to the individual, whereas order is about maintaining the social fabric as a whole. (That's actually a point I'd like to see communitarians like Amitai Etzioni make more clearly, as he in particular sometimes confuses the two. Yes, security and property rights are important, but we can't let them be our overriding concern, as opposed to justice.)
Also it is
not collectivistic in that it demands only a bare minimum of legal compliance rather than active participation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought by
volunteer armed forces; there is no draft and there is likely never to be one. If there were a conscription policy of some kind, it would be a
lot harder for the American government to retain the national security state, fight multiple wars simultaneously and station troops all over the world in the interests of being the world's policeman. Ironically, being more collectivist might actually cause
fewer wars, because more people would feel more directly invested in their country's foreign policy. Hell, look at Switzerland, Sweden and Finland - all of them have mandatory conscription; of the three of them, the last war to have been fought by any of them was the Winter War.
As to the second point, such as it is, it could use some parsing.
Firstly, your complaining about groups and collectives in the context of social networking is more than just a little silly. Facebook 'groups' don't serve any function outside themselves, people who join them are in no danger of being subsumed by the group at all. The worst that can really happen is that they might 'donate' their Facebook status or Twitter update or whatnot to some cause and tell all their friends to do the same.
Secondly, if it is a person's
choice to join a group or a collectivity, why should that be a problem for you? Isn't that part of the notion of freedom that you champion?
Thirdly, you talk about collectivism as though it is some kind of insidious and malign doctrine. It isn't. Everyone is a member of at least one collectivity by virtue of nature alone: the family. Every human being I've ever met (I haven't yet met a clone or a test-tube baby) was the offspring of two other human beings. According to the usual course of events, those two human beings have the responsibility for feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating and raising their child. The child in turn feels bonds of affection for her parents. Yes, the child is wholly unique - but at the same time she is the biological product of her parents, the linguistic product of her culture and, most importantly, the existential product of her God.
Now, I believe we are becoming too individualistic in that our current social order is attempting to unravel and usurp its own foundations. The welfare state - to bring this back to topic - is but one symptom of this individualism, in that individuals no longer felt it their religious duty to provide for the destitute, the infirm and those otherwise unable to help themselves (thus leaving the State to come clean up the mess). I think it does an enormous amount of good, but at the same time I regard it as a splint for a broken leg: useful while the bone sets, but not something you want to have around forever.
The growth of the individual-security-oriented state, combined with the distorted power of markets governed by oligopolies with the means to advertise, seek rent and exploit cheap resources, have the socio-psychological effect of leaving people hanging. In such an environment, people of weak will will seek existential affirmation either in vulgar nationalism and daemonisation of the Other (waving flags, wearing wigs, accusing the President - baselessly and in denial of all available evidence - of the crime of having been born outside the country), or in mindlessly keeping up with the Joneses, or both. As Wendell Berry once put it:
Wendell Berry wrote:Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
...
As for myself, it would appear that my own reaction is to deliberately take shelter in a Romantic mediaevalism of distinctly postmodern flavour while listening to Blind Guardian. So who am I to talk?
