Liberty: a time for choosing
This is from commenter “Erisguy”:
When liberty dies in the hearts of a people, no court, no law, no constitution can save it. And by now a majority of “Americans”…wish only [for] their side to rule unhindered by law, evidence, reason, morality, custom, tradition.
Imagining themselves oppressed because the government doesn’t pay for their abortion, contraceptives, and sex changes; because the government can’t cure their transmissible diseases; because the government lets them hear voices they don’t want heard, they will bring about oppressions not seen on this continent since the Aztecs.
I used to think the thirst for liberty was more universal and more basic than I now think it is. Oh, I never thought it was everywhere, and I always thought it had to be nurtured and encouraged in order to flourish. But I thought that a lot of people – maybe even most? – had a sort of innate hunger for it. And I thought that in particular in the US, with its history and its self-selected immigrant population in the past that valued liberty more than those who stayed behind, we had an even larger proportion of people to whom liberty meant not just something, but a great great deal.
After all, when I was growing up, we used to learn about Patrick Henry saying “Give me liberty or give me death.” I doubt children learn anything about him now except that he was an evil white man.
What happened? One thing that happened was the failure to teach the value and tradition of liberty as well as to live it – and not just a failure to teach it, but the growth and spread of the teaching of the left, which is antithetical to liberty. Of course, liberty includes freedom of speech, and therefore we don’t shut down the teachings of the left. But the right allowed the Gramscian march, particularly through our educational system, and the left achieved total domination there without the right fighting back powerfully enough to counter what was happening:
Reagan knew over fifty years ago what the danger was:
Actually, the Founders knew the same principles about two hundred and fifty years ago. They may not have known all the details, but they understand the concepts and the dangers.
And the following quote is the nightmare vision of Dostoevsky, as expressed in The Grand Inquisitor portion of The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor is here addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Alhough the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is free will. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it.
I’ve divided it into paragraphs that are not there in the original, the better to clarify what’s being said [my emphasis added]:
Command that these stones be made bread–and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone– was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee…
Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…
…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!
The Brothers Karamazov first appeared in 1880, and Dostoevsky died just a few months later. That sounds like a long time ago, but it’s really not that long in the scheme of things (for example, three of my four grandparents were born before then).
I first encountered “The Grand Inquisitor” in the 60s, when we read it in high school. I didn’t fully understand it at the time (not that I fully understand it even now), but it gripped me with a memorable power, and I understood it well enough to be frightened by it, to get the gist of it, and to consider it important.
A lot of years have passed since then, and it only seems more important now. It always was equally important, of course – as Reagan makes clear. But sometimes it seems more urgent. It certainly does now.
[NOTE: The “Grand Inquisitor part of this post appeared in an earlier form here. The title of the present post comes from the title of a famous speech of Ronald Reagan’s in 1964.]
Unfortunately, far too many have forgotten or never learned our founding principles. Too many crave safety over liberty, not realizing heavy handed government only provides safety for an elite few, and poverty and/or gulags for the peasants.
This will not end well for my 8 grandchildren. Wish I could be in my robust 40s to defend them and my children. But they will have to defend themselves. Perhaps that is how it always was. We grow old and our voices become “old fashioned”, younger generations have to learn the lessons over and over again.
“We grow old and our voices become “old fashioned”, younger generations have to learn the lessons over and over again.” – parker
Sure seems to work that way.
And learning the lessons through experience is a hard way to do it.
I think the yearning for freedom IS innate. People have yearned for freedom under every empire and totalitarian regime and during every war and genocide. If Americans were really oppressed, a lot more of us would certainly yearn for freedom.
I don’t know. It seems to me that we might want to fit into our group more than have freedom. I don’t want to say this. We seem desperately to need cohesion. I’m using “freedom” to mean the ability to work at any job, read any book, marry any woman, say any thought, write anything..,i.e.exercise our 27 amendments.
It seems that we are so social and so herd-like that we are the epitome of tribal. Almost all of us are good, not evil, but courage is not conspicuous. Heresy is about the worst thing we can commit.
I think the reason for this is that orthodoxy was critical for our tribes to survive. There was no voting on attacking those strangers in the mist, coming for our food stores and our women. Liberty must have been a strange concept when every day was life or death and everyone was dying or in pain or suffering from skin infections or diarrhea or coughing.
We don’t realize how much we have been Enlightened after Descartes, Newton, Locke.
@Dnaxy Agree we need to look more carefully at our collective life as a species to understand how these disasters happen. We, as Americans, seem to focus consciously on our individual lives and liberty very well, but take our collective identity for granted. I think that is why America has been so thoroughly blindsided by the Gramscian march through the institutions. I think that is partly why you say “We don’t realize how much we have been Enlightened after Descartes, Newton, Locke.” I would add when we look what came after the Enlightenment and its social and political manifestation in the American Revolution,we have the second Enlightenment revolution – the French. In three years it went from a dream of universal brotherhood to The Terror. It is enough to say here that Marx was deeply disappointed by the failure of the subsequent French revolutions of 1830 and 1848. No doubt Marx would be getting as excited as his spiritual descendents are over the activities in Portland or Seattle. What Marx and his successors never have understood is that French style revolutions collapse of their own inner contradictions far more quickly than capitalism or democracy. The future is always uncertain, but however this current contest between the American and French revolutions works out the fruit of the Gramscian march through the institutions is unlikely to be lasting.
shadow on August 15, 2020 at 8:17 pm said:
I think the yearning for freedom IS innate.
* * *
Erich Fromm begs to differ.
It is innate for some, but definitely not for all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
In other words, some people like being told what to do, and even more, they like telling other people to do it too.
“I think the reason for this is that orthodoxy was critical for our tribes to survive. There was no voting on attacking those strangers in the mist, coming for our food stores and our women.” – Dnaxy
The beauty of America (and the Enlightenment in general, when it was still coupled with Judeo-Christian ethical morality) is that the government, through the Constitution, was structured to protect our food and families from marauding strangers so that our tribes could live together in peace for the first time in history.
The Left is tearing us back down to the tribal stage of suspicion and enmity.
Just when you thought they couldn’t go any lower …
https://thefederalist.com//08/14/cancelling-the-9-11-lights-dishonors-new-yorks-heroes/
(h/t Legal Insurrection)
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/08/nyc-cancelling-9-11-tribute-lights-over-coronavirus-fears-after-allowing-weeks-of-protests/
Perfect theme. Here’s my complimentary share.
Last night I spent 35 minutes listening to Tea Party era Congressman Ken Buck, who’s new book “Capitol of Freedom: Restoring American Greatness” is out — a gift-worthy item for election season.
And I watched his American Thought Leaders interview which includes his 7 minute tour of the Hall of Statues that he uses to illustrate Constitutional principles undergirding American Exceptionalism. (Re-watch worthy.)
Vivid stuff. I toured several Washington museums this time last summer to the first time, after a conference held at Trump International (The old post office building — now sumptuous, magnificent, with five star luxury attention). I’ve not been to the Capitol building yet and I missed the Archives (The Declaration) again.
I’m cynical about pols, but this history lesson was reverent and compelling about the American vision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pBOj_V4uis&t=1704s
Title: “Radical Left Tactics to Divide America, Rewrite History—Rep. Ken Buck | American Thought Leaders”
Topics
0:00 Intro
1:30 TikTok ban
5:14 Touring the Capitol
8:00 America isn’t a democracy
9:36 Antifa violence
18:01 The “anti-fascists” are the most fascist of all?
22:22 Inside Statuary Hall
31:28 Challenges in education
Most timely, educational, and topical.
“…reversed…”
Well, de Blasio gave it his best….
(Dollars to donuts he’s furious right now.)
Trump’s younger brother Robert has died. FNCs obit video notice is rather complimentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1cQqtBHPUw
(I heard suspicions of Covid-19 for causing his ill condition, but have seen no confirmation.)
“One thing that happened was … the growth and spread of the teaching of the left, which is antithetical to liberty. Of course, liberty includes freedom of speech, and therefore we don’t shut down the teachings of the left.” neo
Any teaching “antithetical to liberty” is by definition, totalitarian in nature. It is a fatal mistake for a society to allow what amounts to ideological treason to flourish. Any and all totalitarian ideologies must be outlawed. You do not allow a cancer to flourish and totalitarian ideologies are the most deadly of cancers.
“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.
But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague. — Marcus Tullius Cicero, from a speech given to the Roman Senate, recorded in approximately 42 B.C. by Sallust.
The recent iteration of security over freedom was the Patriot Act. Did the Patriot Act usher in the surveillance apparatus in America?
The Grand Inquisitor said that people valued bread more than freedom.
But just about everyone in America today *has* bread, even in a metaphorical sense. There are not many people starving, other than the mentally ill,
What people are trading freedom for now is a sense of belonging. Being part of the ‘circle dance’, to use Kundera’s phrase, and enjoying the pleasure of righteously condemning those outside the circle, is more important than individual autonomy or freedom of thought.
Reagan: “This is the last stand on earth”. In the first clip. Amen.
Geoffrey Britain: thanks for remembering Marcus Tullius Cicero. In Latin, the C is pronounced as K. My pen name is to honor his memory, and to remind myself to try to emulate him. He was right, and that was about 2000 years ago!
We have learned little and have thrown much away. We are fixing in November to give our fortunes, our lives and our sacred honor away to an evil force in exchange for a pittance.
AesopFan cites Fromm:
“a creative element – ‘freedom to’ – the use of freedom to employ the total integrated personality in creative acts. This, he argues, necessarily implies a true connectedness with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse: “…in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world…”
I regard his “in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world…” as pure drivel. Spontaneous? Leads to unification “anew(?) with the world”? What happened to the old self that it required renewal? Probably thousands of dollars on the psychoanayst’s couch yielded renewal.
Wiki says Fromm “was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist.” Psychoanalysis is a huge Freudian fraud; social psychology is its cousin. “Humanistic” suggests he was atheistic, and socialism is hardly endearing.
Sorry to disagree with you, Aesop.
It did at one time. But among the current sub-population of eye-batting, neotenous, nit-wit hedonists, it means almost nothing; unless you redefine “freedom” to mean leaping up and down arms-over-head in a crowd of beach goers, and making fish faces while snapping selfies.
And even among older adults, the herd-directed neediness, and frankly, moral and physical cowardice, expressed by what is certainly a majority, is, and here I differ radically from Daxny and Gude, inexcusable. I don’t care if it is hardwired into some people. Normal people cannot live long-term with other humans who are continually chimping out, or who sell themselves out, rather than engaging in the labor of building themselves up.
Does anyone here have pity for a physically weak man who is not the victim of an accidental debility, age, or some external misfortune? Quite clearly not. He is contemptible.
If we can see this so clearly, then why are we so reluctant to judge other forms of cowardice?
Yes, Americans were a self-selected population at one time. Little wooden boats on a stormy sea and all that. And, yes, they never were perfect libertarians and gentlemen. In fact, some of the New England types were from the start, a somewhat meddlesome and dictatorial kind: eventually no better as Unitarians than they were as Christians.
But in general, Americans were either a frontier people, or a people who respected a frontier influenced ethos.
That changed with the New Deal when an open ideological war in the form of ridicule began to be waged on the very notion of self-sufficiency, self-control, direction, and personal responsibility, by people whose philosophical anthropology and personal preferences were temperamentally antagonistic to these concepts.
A rich, privileged, crippled and adulterous President, his neglected and ugly lesbian wife, an administration stocked full of resentment filled socialists intent on using social security as an instrument of refashioning politics along social solidarity lines; and the country has never been the same.
I don’t think you can teach an appreciation of liberty to a collectivist (and collectivism is implicitly totalitarian), any more than you can teach a dog to play a fiddle.
When these people say what it is that they really want, and how they wish to live, and expose their primary predicate as “caring for each other” (meaning you affirm and underwrite them without limit or end) and their sacraments as mutual ass sniffing and collective affirmation circle jerks – and after you realize that that is about as appealing to you as would be drinking 7 day old water out of a fish bowl, you finally realize that there just is no middle ground.
Oh. As in Sicker-O” Ha. Just couldn’t resist.
There is an old 1950s movie based on a true story about a spy in the British Embassy in Ankara in 1944, who sold the schedule of the D-Day invasion to the Germans; who, were too suspicious to credit the information. His code name, given him by the Germans, was Cicero. Stars James Mason as the spy.
Dialog snip. Upon being informed of the Von Ribbentrop selected code name, Moyzisch, the German attache directly handling the spy says to Von Papen the ambassador (approximately) ” ‘Cicero’, Has it any significance?” to which Von Papen replies, “None that I know of other than the surprising fact that Von Ribbentrop has even heard of ‘Cicero’.”
Available on YouTube
My favorite – at the moment and for some time past – piece by Cicero: The Dream of Scipio.
He may have gotten the cosmology wrong, but, before the fame of this work developed among the general public in the last decade through the Internet, it constituted quite the slap upside the head to smug types who claimed that everyone thought the earth was flat in Classical or Medieval times; or, if more knowledgeable, barely, that only a few Greek geographers had ever posited a spherical earth.
We are ever disappointed that more men do not wish to be free; but we never marvel over how many want to be tyrants.
2020 choice. Alien borg AI overlords vs Demoncrats…. hard choice huh?
AesopFan on August 15, 2020 at 5:34 pm said:
“We grow old and our voices become “old fashioned”, younger generations have to learn the lessons over and over again.” – parker
Sure seems to work that way.
And learning the lessons through experience is a hard way to do it.
That’s because there is little difference between new and young generations, in terms of soul character. It is often the same soul being recycled by Satan.
There’s an interesting SF story which is to some extent a takeoff on Dostoevsky, transported to an interstellar framework. (author is George RR Martin, best known for ‘Game of Thrones’)…the protagonist is a Knight Inquisitor, sent to suppress an outbreak of a heresy which seems particularly wicked…but as the Inquisitor studies it during his starship voyage, he can understand why it is attractive to people.
After landing, he confronts the originator of the heresy, pointing out how ridiculous it is. The originator doesn’t disagree–he admits that he made it all up. It is better, he says, for people to have something to believe in, irrespective of the truth-value of that something.
The story is online here:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-way-of-cross-and-dragon/
DNW commented “Does anyone here have pity for a physically weak man who is not the victim of an accidental debility, age, or some external misfortune? Quite clearly not. He is contemptible.”
I guess I’m in trouble with some people, then, since, while I’m a man, I don’t believe I’ve ever been mistaken for a physically strong specimen of the type. Oh, I can be enough of a help when moving people; but I don’t think physical fortitude has ever been my strong point.
It does concern me sometimes when I consider that, if worse came to worst and the economy writ large were to crash and burn for instance, such that a bookish type like me would be rendered fairly useless for what had been standard employment in the ‘before’ world, I’d presumably have to get my bread by more manual-labor sorts of means wherever I could find it. I have nothing against that, but it’s just a question in my mind whether I could hack it, or whether I’d start to slowly slip to the back of the line in natural-selection terms. I would hope that my physical constitution could adapt to a full day’s work on a farm, for example, before too much time had passed. But I’ve never put my body to a hard test like that (moderate-level day hikes don’t count) and given my kinda-sorta advancing age, to start now would be a challenge, to be sure. Not everybody passed the survival test in olden times, after all.
For the same reason, sometimes I think maybe it’s better in one respect that I missed out on ever having children — judging from my own template, there would presumably have been some significant chance of their being below-average height, nearsighted: not what you would regard as the especially enduring type. Of course it would have depended on my wife’s contribution, too; and childhood diet, exercise, health care, etc. I am not a genetic determinist. For this and various other reasons, I would have wanted to get my sons especially involved in working on farms and things like that in their youth. Having that experience would be a grueling but wholesome way to grow up.
Long story short, I can have pity for such a one, depending on the reasons for someone’s being in such a state. Sometimes the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Also considering the austerities imposed by the monastic life is a factor in my position. I imagine there is a certain proportion of monks in the world that might not pass the physical test either, but to say that they are contemptible merely on that account would be irksome to me.
Oh, also, that new word “neotenous” was a good bonus!
Philip Sells:
The philosopher can be harsh and uncaring at times, but “He’s A Lumberjack and He’s Ok!” or something. 🙂
DNW; Philip Sells:
I am more contemptuous of lack of moral strength and courage.
Physical strength is a nice feature for men, but I admire plenty of men without it. Of course, society needs men with physical strength and it is necessary in certain jobs. What’s more, most women are attracted to it – all else being equal. But for a lot of women, lack of it can be overcome by a man with a lot of charm, humor, and other personality qualities (and I suppose for some women, money would be one of those qualities).
Philip Sells on August 17, 2020 at 12:31 pm said:
Heaps of coals, and from a monk no less. LOL
Well Phil, I think that what I was doing was attempting to draw a parallel linking the two concepts of the moral and physical to some degree: wherein the potential for both existed. I figured I had hedged enough with the provisos I offered. But I guess I forgot about monks whose discipline required that particular kind of mortification.
I don’t agree with that ‘cultivation of a sensitive weakness’ spirituality theory; but, on the other hand, a single sex monastery full of so-called “physical culture” enthusiasts might obviously attract the wrongest of the wrong kind of crowd. Whew. I don’t even want to think about it.
In any event, I think your self-critique is too harsh and limiting, and I am sure that if you married and had sons, and any man under 80 probably can in principle, everything would be fine. Think of high school, and all the less than tall guys on the wrestling team, and running cross country. I think any healthy guy has potential.
As far as being thrown back on the land, the only people farming in the way you describe, who I know personally, are some Amish farmers and timber-men (or sawyers/sawmill owners). And I doubt that the average college jock would be capable of plowing behind mules, or doing the field work they do, without acclimating and most especially learning the pacing and techniques which save and direct physical energy efficiently. (Think of the first time you tried to split wood without knowing how to approach it)
I was, I hope it becomes more apparent upon reflection, essentially talking about evasion, and slacking as it manifested in parallel both physically and morally; with particular regard to the promotion and maintenance of independence and self-governance.
Lastly, I’ll have to reflect upon the fact that occasionally someone might actually read what I have written; and to more thoroughly anticipate the collateral discomfort it might cause these innocents. Profession hall monitors and other sniveling sycophants excepted, of course.
Neo says:
Yes, of course. Though I would say that what society needs from fit men is of, or should be of, no interest to fit men; as that should be the default position, and every other condition defined by some exculpatory circumstance, not by the sly and cynical choice of some languid slacker.
This again, gets to the point and principle of reciprocity as the basis – or not – of natural law based morality; and the conflict over the connotations of justice: justice as “desert” and as a proper return on action and productivity , vs “justice” as “equity” or redistributive equality and “care”.
We saw some of that, “society needs men with physical strength and it is necessary in certain jobs” dispute, play out in the old controversies over fire department qualifications. Eventually, so it seems, it was settled along equity lines, those who lacked the physical strength to ever perform the critical life saving work, being given positions – so the public perceived – that otherwise would have gone to those who had once capable of doing so and who had once been in the front lines, but now were winding down through injury or age.
Again: What right do the weak have to claim the self-sacrificial protection of the strong? Trying to answer that question will take you to the heart of your own anthropology and theory of law and society P.D.Q.
Good thing that totalitarians (choose your flavor) never had strong thugs and enforcers to do the bidding of the tyrants. Too subtle for a deep thinker? Keep digging, it takes a strong back (I did my share when much younger).
DNW:
The weak neither demand nor claim the self-sacrificial protection of the strong. These days it doesn’t take Hercules to defend people, if the defender is trained and armed. But the strong tend to gravitate towards protective roles such as police and/or military (or the training makes them strong or at least stronger) – they are the sheepdogs. If we are to have a society, that tends to always be the way it’s structured. It’s not because of some personal quirk of the weak who are refusing to do their share.
I am physically weak – not unusually so for a woman, and I try to stay somewhat fit, but I’m certainly not strong nor would I win a fight with anyone except a small child. I don’t claim anything of anyone in particular, but I prefer to be part of a society the vast majority of whose members understand that the strong will protect the weak for the good of all society, and that it’s not every man (or woman) for him/herself.
This seems obvious, and certainly is not a personal idiosyncrasy of mine. It is the basis of most (all?) societies except those that have irretrievably broken down.
Hi, DNW. Yes, I did see your actual point, and certainly I don’t think I would be in the same attitudinal category as one of these Antifa types or something, or for that matter that pajama-fellow meme that was going around a few years ago, any superficial external similarities aside. (Although, to be sure, working from home lately has seen me in sweats and T-shirts on the patio more than usual.) We definitely agree that slacking is not what we want to see.
My post wasn’t meant as a jab at your comment – just that it got me thinking about things that have been on my mind for a long time. I realize, too, that I was snipping your sentence there out of its context in doing so, but think of that as a mere literary conceit. 🙂 (I am not a monk, though I’ve met a few. The time may yet come when I leave the world and go to a monastery, but we’ll see.) When I was thinking of farming work needing a lot of physical effort, I suppose it goes to show how out of touch I am with the modern requirements of the… er… field. 🙂 But also my working assumption, in the case of a real SHTF collapse, is that one might not be able to count on the usual supplies of electricity, fuel and so on, so the more old-style methods might become a necessity in some places, particularly if I wanted or needed to get FAR away from cities (or what would remain of them) and their nonsense at that point. I admit that I romanticize agriculture.
That’s a very interesting question that you frame there about the nature of the weak having claims on protection by the strong.
And Neo, also your point about moral and other kinds of strength is relevant. I suppose I have something to offer there, though it’s taken some time to manifest.
How did we get onto this again…?
LOL. The individual price of liberty.
Whenever this discussion comes up, and I admit that I am responsible for mooting a particular aspect of it, the exchanges keep sliding off the rails through reversion to the very assumptions which I am challenging either the validity of, or the formulation.
Take the word “society” for example. Whatever it once meant to sociologists or economists and still might mean in that value-free context, it has lost whatever casual or taken-for-granted quality of identification it once had in the conveying a sense of a moral community having shared ideals and values and human sympathies. Then too, it is often used as a rough synonym for all those living within the formal polity: even though those who may be counted as members for the purpose of enumeration, are in no wise members in any sense implying feelings of, or even real calculations of mutuality and reciprocal advantage.
We don’t have a single natural society in the U.S. and our only real connection is economic and the formally political. The ideological connection is gone. We tolerate each other not out of love, or sympathy, or advantage, but because of formal, and purely legal and somewhat vestigial bonds.
Men, most of us, will unthinkingly and reflexively, step between our wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and presumably well-disposed or neutral other females. I’m sure that most of the guys here have found themselves doing it more than once.
But we are not talking about family here, or a neighborhood or even a national community of shared interest and mutual sympathy. I am therefore trying to direct the question to one of the broadest principle, and to tease out if possible, the judgments or evaluative reasoning from which such an axiom as “the strong are (imperative) to protect the weak” is drawn.
We are not all real family. We do not all share the same life-way interests and values in even the most general formulations nowadays.
And it is simply not true, that distributively, the strong, protecting the antagonistic and subversive weak, results in mutual and logically distributive benefit.
One might argue that such action benefits the continued existence of the polity. But what is the point of prolonging the existence of a polity which has become antithetical to one’s own interests? [ And here there is a potential analogy with the dispute over whether “your” nation and the principles of its organization exists to benefit you as the present inhabitant and your posterity, or has some self-justifying existence to which you must pledge your allegiance and commit your fate]
Your reference to the “sheepdogs” is of course meant largely to be metaphorical. But while granting it as some kind of analogy, it is well to remember that what are being referred to are more or less mindless dogs, bred to be instruments of others, used to and for the benefit of others so that these others can avoid the same labors and risks these animal-tools undergo.
Animals, humans included will no doubt express protective interests in natural societies, or in situations such as ours, where the artificial, politically motivated, and contingent nature of our ready to hand associations can be – because of like-mindedness and actual shared interests – be taken or experienced as an organic or natural society.
But we don’t have that.
Geez.
Backspaced too much out.
ADD bolded.
“Men, most of us, will unthinkingly and reflexively, step between our wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and presumably well-disposed or neutral other females and a perceived threat.
DNW:
You know exactly what I mean by “sheepdog.” And obviously it has little to do with actual sheepdogs except metaphorically.
However, if you want to talk about actual sheepdogs or other herding dogs, my understanding is that although they are bred for protective qualities and also highly trained, their breeders and trainers are accentuating and using their natural instincts as killers, and channeling it in a different way. It’s actually quite interesting; See this if you’re not already familiar with it.
People, on the other hand, make their own decisions, and ordinarily (as I said earlier) strong people are not forced into protective professions but rather volunteer for them (police, firefighters, etc.), except for the military draft in times of war (we are not talking about families, here, which is a different situation).
I am unaware of any functioning society that doesn’t have this basic protection of the weak by the strong as a general principle. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t last long against either external or internal threats.
But you wrote, “it is simply not true that…the strong, protecting the antagonistic and subversive weak, results in mutual and logically distributive benefit.” I never said it did. I didn’t think we were limiting the discussion to protecting “the antagonistic and subversive weak.” Obviously, it would depend how antagonistic and how subversive. Society is not a suicide pact. The really antagonistic are criminals, and they are punished and/or locked up and/or even killed if the crime is bad enough. And the subversive are sometimes locked up as well, if they are (for example) spies or traitors. It used to be that rioters and/or looters and/or arsonists were in that category, as well. Part of the problem with what’s happening now is that we’re not doing that.
Lots of interesting stuff in this thread to chew on. I’m trying to think of a way to circle back and connect it to Neo’s original post. I’m not sure I can do so, but here, I’ll try the following. Again, there is barely a speck of original thought in any of what follows (and I suffer from the additional handicap of having consumed a considerable quantity of ethanol before sitting down to write). But here goes:
Liberty and the nation – it occurs to me that America has become multiple nations inhabiting the same physical space. This resonates with what is suggested by DNW’s last in this thread:
It is an intriguing thought. Envision a set of several overlapping networks composed of individuals, each of whom is part of a certain nation (however defined). When overlaid on a surface, such as a map, with interconnecting lines drawn between all members of a given nation, these form overlapping lattices.
Hypothesis: the natural political imperative is to disentangle these lattices, like the resolution of a mixture of oil and water at rest. Where this concerns us is in the fact that to do so requires first a mutual recognition of likeness among the points in any given lattice (that is, self-consciousness, not imposed from without); then a decision to associate like with like, arrived at on the part of those which are like to one another (that is, mutual self-association – again, not imposed from without, though the latter could be a secondary motivator in practice); finally a choice of context in which to realize this association – that is, will it be in a virtual space such as Facebook groups, or in physical territory (“meatspace” in the crass cyberpunk formulation) by means of forming settlements together of whatever size. (And on the last point, again potentially the aspect of voluntary association rears its head – that is, will it be a function of volition on the part of the associators, or will it be imposed from without – internal exile, concentration camps, etc.) Also worth noting here is that, in olden times, the virtual-space option did not practically exist.
Maybe different nations currently inhabiting the physical space called “the United States of America” have different concepts of and attitudes toward liberty – its meaning, purpose, and usages. The healthiest overall course may be to let it dissociate into its constituent nations by the mechanism that I have posited above, based in part on association of compatible understandings of liberty.