Declaration of Life

MadArchitect · Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 5:40 pm Post subject: Re: Dissident Vs Dissident

Dissident Heart: I mean, Slavery has been a fundamental part of human society for millenia

Only in certain societies. It would be ridiculous to characterize slavery as fundamental to human society as a whole when there have been so many individual societies with no real form of slavery. Even most of Europe in the Middle Ages dealt more in largely voluntary feudal ties rather than slave labor.

The same can be said for any significant civil and human rights movement: history is full of examples where liberty, freedom and justice have not operated.

And equally full of instances where what we perceive of as recent humanitarian advances were actually the norm, or even their inverse. Two factors come into play: first, what societies do you intend to survey, and second, what are your working definitions for liberty, freedom and justice. The second factor is probably more significant than the first, as it precedes the other in logical priority. If you want to compass history in search for your own ideals, it's best to know what those ideals are. Simply saying "liberty, freedom, and justice" is not enough -- these things are not writ in stone; their value changes historically; and when you come right down to it, no one has presented an argument (at least in our context) for why these ideals or values should be taken as universally valid.

Society can breed discontents, and it can work to develop tools of mercy and forgiveness, as well as values such as education over punishment, or participation over submission, or solidarity over competition...I think the difference is obvious, and worthy of experimentation.

Against this, I will not argue. But there's a rather broad measure of work that lies between this sort of experimentation and "a radical reconfiguration of how we organize society," which is what you initially suggested. The latter, taken as a program of social reform tantamount to upheaval, is potentially disasterous.

Best, I think, to take the advice of the Socrates of "Republic", who, despite authorizing a vision of society that is radically different from any existing, warns that such a society exists only in the imagination and would be dangerous to try to implement.

There is no individual apart from community, or society apart from individuals

The latter makes perfect sense. The former, far less so.

but I don't accept some 'intrinsic' nature of Society that is not malleable in relation to the choices we make.

Then perhaps you're not looking closely enough at society. Society serves essentially two purposes: 1) security, and 2) the organization of labor. It will reflect and support the ideals you name so long as they either coincide with those two purpose or, at the least, offer no terminal conflict.

I don't accept that definition, nor do you.

Don't presume to tell me what I will and will not accept, particularly when the opinions are my own. You're treading awfully close to the point of being totally dismissed. If you value dialogue and hope to actually bring anyone around to your own view, you'd do best to tread more carefully.

If this were the case, the Gestapo officer rounding up weak and sick Jews for decimation would be ensuring security and enforcing the law;

In the particular instance of Nazi Germany, it was. And particularly in Nazi Germany, where the notion of law had been very closely conflated with the "will of the Fuhrer." As regards your specific example, I'd suggest you look as some of the later chapters of Hannah Arrendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Were such actions just? No. But this line of argument does nothing to undermine my assertion that law and justice are not directly related.

unless you are willing to adopt such irresponsible relativism, and I know you aren't, then you will confess to your desire to see the Law as enforcing Justice, which is how we protect our Freedom: not simply providing security. Security is a means to protecting Freedom and ensuring Justice.

You've got me pegged wrong, brother. I don't count it as irresponsible to note that law is relative to whatever society you choose to examine. Nor would I characterize law as right. Law has no moral value save the negative moral value of defining the contingencies of citizenship -- pass this line, and you no longer have the rights conferred on citizens. Nor would I characterize security as a principle working in support of freedom or justice -- security is a desire arising out of the needs of self-preservation and the desires of ownership.

The desire for security is also a liability, and the emphasis a person places on security will, more often than not, encourage that person to surrender some portion of their freedom and/or act against the interests of justice. We certainly live in a society that daily trades its freedom in for security, and we've done that long before the World Trade Center attacks, though the post-9/11/2001 debate over civil rights v. security makes for a particularly compelling argument for my case. And the security that we demand over ownership may be traced back through the course of history as one of the root causes for the tight-fisted conservative tendencies which give rise to serious social inequalities.

Returning to justice and law, suffice it to say that I believe that law may sometimes lapse into the domain of justice, but not as a matter of course or policy. Justice is something that happens largely outside the confines of a legal system, which is really only the machinery that maintain the balance of a given society.

Peace also involves Joy, and Healing, and Forgiveness, and Celebration, and Creativity, and Festivity, and Rest, and of course, Love.

These are, for the most part, not notions that I would characterize as necessary to peace.

Interbane: Love is a word whose strength of meaning is reserved for family members and close friends.

This is an argument Freud makes in "Civilization and its Discontents" in critique of the Christian ideal of unconditional love. To love unconditionally, he says, is to slight the love that we have for those closest to us. What does it say to a friend, lover, family member and so on to say that we love them the same as we love a villain or a toad? That, at least, is Freud's argument.


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