Reading through your response here, I’ve realized my own position as regards all these things revolves around the core idea of personal sovereignty (which I think is an ideological offshoot of liberalism initiated by Locke). I will try to make my response as brief and clear as I can.
Intelligence agencies are designed to be secretive, yes. In that sense we should understand it as part of their nature.
As I see it, criticism of the government (and/or its agencies) arises (and is legitimate) when one or more of a given individual’s needs or ideals (I do think that these should be expanded upon but I will refrain for the sake of brevity) is not met in conjuction with their activity being blocked, even though the behaviour does not interfere with the personal sovereignty of others. (The “blocking” I have in mind here is in particular bureaurocracy.)
I think that the criticism would first arise against the bureaucracy, but because bureaucracy often plays a role in keeping the power structure of the government solid, if only by extraction of fees, a government is very often disinclined to remove the bureaucracy. The criticism then extends to the government as a whole, and not infrequently to its most conspicuous branches of power (which includes ‘defensive’ apparati).
This may sound highly strange, but I think that such an option (extending personal sovereignty and breaking of mutual obligations with the state) would still be worthwhile even if the state enacted a policy such as that these individuals should then not remain within the borders of the country, and if they were not accepted by another country or able to find some neutral piece of ground (given the world’s current borders) they would be (though technically diplomats of their own sovereignty) considered in breach of the laws of their country of residence for residing there, in the same manner that a foreign individual is in breach of the law for residing in a country he does not possess a permit to be in. I do think in such a case it would be fair to give them a reasonable amount of time to leave (though they may have nowhere to go).
The reason I think this is because it is less important for me that individuals be able to break away and form their own nations, than that the terms of their relations to the countries of which they are citizens become clear.
It should maybe be considered that this may only be important to an ideology which understands people as having a right and responsibility to their own person. In this case I think it would be important to understand what is voluntary and what is involuntary, and it is my contention that our relations to the state is in great part involuntary.
I would also defend this position by saying that our understanding of the world comes from our outlook as individuals within the world, so it is only from that core that we can make coherent relations between beings in the world. So this is again about education and understanding our place in the world and our abilities and our constraints to action.
I also think that a proper education is open to people to make for themselves. The main reason I call for an educational reform is because education where I live is mandatory and the contents of education specified by the state beyond the point of imbuing individuals with the skills needed to continue their own education. The mandatory nature is significant because the large amount of time spent in educational facilities could obstruct one from pursuing one’s own potentially more profitable education.
Besides this I have concerns with some of the content. From my own experience, much of my time in public schooling was spent starting at an overhead and coping it out in my own notebook with little teacher participation, I also learned highly useless facts like what soldiers called canned meat in the trenches, and I hold these to be evidence of the highly dubious nature of my studies and use of my time which could have been spent much more profitably otherwise.
There is also issues about ideological education. I think children are far too sheltered to form an accurate representation of the world early on. Unless we can discover an objective teleology for humans, I think that protection of personal sovereignties (that is, against each other, and where the standard is physicality, and not mental or ideational impedance, besides abuse — which should also be further developed and clarified as a concept, and what constitutes “mental or ideational abuse” should be limited when there is no physical restraint or threat to bodily harm involved except perhaps when it involves psychological abuse of an adult towards a child maybe under 14 years old) should suffice for a code of conduct which is not formed by the enactment and completion of particular tasks.
Giving somebody X amount of time to leave, even if they have nowhere to go means a couple of things-
1.) You have to punish them if they don’t leave, which doesn’t result in anything too terribly different from what we have now. The ‘You are free to declare you aren’t under the authority or protection of the state’ part sort of becomes in name only.
2.) You create a situation where any criminal is free to simply walk out of the country if they decide they don’t want to be punished by the laws of that country thus becoming somebody else’s problem if they make it out. And they wouldn’t even be sneaking. You’d have a scenario in which shipping your prisoners to some other country becomes a cheaper legal solution to imprisonment, which will lead to huge diplomatic issues, nevermind the moral implications.
In short, doesn’t a nation have an obligation to keep and deal with it’s own lawbreakers, and doesn’t that obligation run afoul of what you’re saying here?
In the U.S. (in case you missed it,) politics have become pretty heavily left-right polarized by our standards. One side has a stranglehold on the education system and decides what is taught there without input from the otherside- a few rural communities notwithstanding. So I can relate to a need for education reform, though I think privatization has a large role to play.
If a nation decided it was necessary to criminalize those who do not want to be citizens any longer under a title like “illegal immigrant”, then I have no problem with that either, it serves the same purpose I gave in my previous post for allowing citizens to break mutual obligations with the state.
Also, if someone was in any given country and committed a crime within that country I see no reason why they wouldn’t be held liable to the laws of that country. Being a citizen of a country doesn’t change one’s obligations to observe the laws of a state in which one finds oneself, and that would be the same in this case.
EDIT: Although, I’m not sure if you were implying this by your 1), but I realized it is not necessary to enshrine what I am saying in law, because someone could technically do it in protest, it only might become necessary to do it openly and stop using the country’s facilities thus criminilizing themselves in protest, in the manner of civil disobedience… it might be slightly more complicated that way, but anyway I appreciate you putting the idea in to my head either intentionally or indirectly.
Hey Artful, I think you and I have basically run out of fun things for me to disagree with you on in this thread, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on my semi-challenge to your notion of personal soveriengty- that is, that while intelligence agencies and other secretive organizations do strip us of some measure of it, everything in society-building is a trade off, and giving up some of our soveriengty for the sake of communal power may be required to preserve the bulk of that same sovereignty. Any disagreement there?
Disclaimer: This post is maddeningly long, I have attempted to answer your question thoroughly, but still at the end I left a third part as yet unanswered along with an explanation and possible direction for future discussion if it is desired.
To answer this I have to go the long route, which is to say I don’t have an immediate answer but it is something I think is well worth considering. The problem here is in a way historically new and is a product of the post-cold war political environment. I don’t even think this problem has been very well addressed, but I think the general assumption follows the lines you proposed (“giving up some of our soveriengty for the sake of communal power may be required to preserve the bulk of that same sovereignty”) pretty much universally.
Admittedly this is a problem that I am not able to overcome with overzealous enthusiasm, but I think it is very significant and deserves consideration. So as not to totally cop out I can say that the only alternative that readily comes to my mind would be something like decentralized government with citizen armies that would be prepared for defense against invasion. That would entail an entirely new form of governance (I at least cannot think of any historical examples of such a thing, except perhaps something like ancient and late medieval city states) and would have to be clarified (which is not the course I am going to take in this post).
I did attempt to approach the issue without giving a solution in one of my latest posts. To begin to have anything worthwhile to say about it I think I would need to move from the ground up, rather than top down giving a solution and examining its flaws and merits.
Here is the part of the post when I gave something of a rationale for why I think there might be a conflict of interests. Because you’ve no doubt already read it you might just want to see it to know which part of my previous post I am referring to:
I might also be inclined to just examine this concept in itself. I don’t immediately agree with this, but rather than making an absolute judgement on the matter I would rather examine the goals and implications of what we desire from personal sovereignty, safety, and ‘communal power’.
I think we have to examine what the value of personal sovereignty is to different people, there may be another way of going at this particular issue but allow me to explain my rationale here. America’s Declaration of Indepedence is probably one of the foundational documents to codify this ideal, and I think we can consider Thomas Jefferson a philosopher worth some attention on this issue:
While I don’t necessarily agree that humans are created equal by nature at their birth, I think that a government should be accepted and appreciated based on its function of aiding and maintaining its citizens in the three final ideals, else it should be considered more a hindrance than a good. (I might also make one more change and swap the final wording “pursuit of happiness” for something like “pursuit of his conception of the good”, though that phrase is admittedly clunkier.)
That image of government is an ideal, it does not necessarily specify a reality. A government could in theory or practice not fulfill those goals or set about other, even opposing, ones. Because the government is an ideal, its character and maintenance must be realized by those who hold that ideal. In other words, one cannot expect that others will hold the same ideal and fulfill it for them. That is where personal sovereignty comes in, one has the right to and responsibility for ones own person, and those qualities are inseparable in practicality.
(I add that practically because we could say something like, an individual is deficient who is incapable of taking or enacting certain responsibilities for his/herself. We might hold an ideal wherein that individual still has right to his/her person. I might agree with this ideal (and in a sense I do) but there is a practical reality wherein that such an individual has been afflicted by nature in such a way that he might find himself for example incapable of defending his sovereignty or in fact pursuing his conception of the good.)
This poses great consequences for examining any society and its possible mode of functioning. I might even be inclined to think that “equality” was a myth (whether believed by its original theorists or not) which rendered an accurate conception of the workings of a polity impossible without disregarding the myth of the natural equality of capacities for theorizing.
The outcome is not only what we mentioned, a natural aristocracy, but also a breakdown in the entire ideal of “life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness [or one’s conception of the good]” in practice, unless those most capable (or able, or excellent in ability) freely choose to pursue and maintain that ideal for all (the thought here is if those individuals of greatest ability pursue their conceptions of the good at the expense (that is, when it comes in conflict with either the sovereignty or even the conception of the good) of others, then the ideal “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [or conception of the good]” is compromised as an idealfor the society as a whole. In other words, you have a society divided and at odds. I would also add that this division can occur not only when certain individuals are of greater ability in their individual person, but also (that is, even when they may be of lesser ability relative to another individual) when their ability is interpolated into a collective (for example an organization or an institution) whose collective power outweighs that of individuals, or even other conglomerations of individuals.
**Note, at this point I have not made any claims about what should happen, but have only made an attempt to describe the situation as it is likely to occur in practice.
Allow me to take a moment and explain why I am going this long route to answering your question so that you don’t think I am merely trying to waste time because I have no answer. The problem you posed to me was:
In order to give a sufficient answer, it must be clear what personal sovereignty entails, what its purpose is and what its possibilities are, and the same goes for what you call communal power, so that we can measure the benefits of each against the other and know what we are giving up and why.
I hope I have adequately demonstrated above (or at least begun to give a conception) how personal sovereignty has different meanings and different consequences for different individuals.
(This is also a criticism of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’.)
Because of the division and conflict of the interest of individuals, the question you asked, whether it is required (and I would like to change the term from required to desirable if you will allow it) that sovereignty be given up for communal power, must necessarily be answered differently by different people who are fully aware of their interests.
That is my answer to whether it is desirable. If I had to answer whether it is required, I would have to give a much more ‘realpolitikal’ answer and say it is required if those individuals who are not interested in giving up their sovereignty for communal power are without choice in the matter.
I realize also after writing this that the conundrum you posed could also be understood to mean something like “Is it be better or worse to give some part of our sovereignty which is lost by the presence of secretive agencies established with the intention of protecting that part of our sovereignty which remains from threats — and (potentially) increasing the reach of our abilities by acting as an instrument in our collective hand to accomplish deliberative actions, or procure resources, which are greater than our abilities as individuals would allow?”
Right off the bat I will say, for some individuals it is indeed better, and perhaps far better, to make this trade. This would of course depend on what stake they have in the status quo of the society — if ones conception of the good is to a sufficient or greater degree fulfilled by ones society after the trade off, then it would be foolish to risk that fulfillment of the good unless an even greater fulfillment of one’s conception of the good could be had with a risk proportional to the increase in that good —
— making an allowance for a hypothesis that it might be in human nature to not risk even a merely sufficient fulfillment of one’s conception of the good for the sake of a greater good if the risk entails a complete loss of that good should failure ensue, while still allowing that the risk may be taken if the degree of perceived goodness is to be gained is of an extreme nature, despite the risk of losing all (an example might be someone with a good job, stable assets, high life satisfaction, risking everything to obtain unimaginable wealth) provided that their belief in their capacity to obtain that extreme object of goodness makes the undertaking appear (merely) possible but not highly improbable.
So much is my opinion of whether the trade off is better or worse for those whose conception of the good is sufficiently or to a greater degree fulfilled by the status quo.
Because I am using “the status quo” as my measure, there also has to be another variable, which is whether these individuals (either those discussed immediately above or those about to be discussed below) are able to alter the status quo sufficiently in their favor without breaking off the relationship between the community of which they are a part and the agencies which provide for the protection (and possibly other services) under question. If individuals are able to alter the status quo in their favor, then the system is more flexible and it could increase the satisfaction of certain individuals, thus potentially rendering it more desire to maintain that new status quo. The problem which arises here is that as various individuals alter the system in their favor, consequences could arise such that the interest of other individuals become sacrificed. The effect of this would be like a seesaw of various individuals experiencing greater degrees of satisfaction while others experience lesser degrees of satisfaction. It would be an entirely new question of whether such a ‘balancing mechanism’ could acheive an equillibrium of satisfied individuals.
It might also be the case that a sufficiently large number of individuals are satisfied by the status quo that the remained who are dissatisfied possess an insufficient amount of power to either alter the system against the weight of the greater number, or else act outside of the system to obtain their satisfaction by other means. What is possible is that some outside entity may attempt to co-opt those dissatisfied individuals and interpolate their weight into its own sphere to be used against the original society which did not satisfy those individuals’ conceptions of the good sufficiently, or even attract the dissatisfied individuals by means of deceit for some other entirely selfish purpose, but this is outside of the realm of the discussion so I will leave it.
In the case for those whose conception of the good is insufficiently or to a lesser degree fulfilled, the situation bears resemblance to that desribed above, particularly with consideration to their ability to affect the status quo within the current relations of the state.
It of course is relevant to what degree an individual’s conception of the good is not satisfied by the status quo. This is a subjective experience, so for the sake of theory we must imagine that the individuals in question’s conceptions of the good are chronically unsatisfied to a degree which jeopardizes their perceived meaning and worth of the political arrangement and/or life (an allowance could also be made that the individual’s perception of his/her ability to affect the status quo would be equally important provided it jeopardized their perception of the meaning and worth of the political arrangement and/or life).
If the individual’s perception of the worth of the status quo, and their ability to alter it, was sufficiently low as to endanger all valuation of the worth of the political arrangement, it would be worthwhile to attempt to break relations with that arrangement for the sake of an ideal, even if the accomplishment of that ideal was unlikely, and sometimes, if the distress of the individual is to a suffiently high degree, the attempt to break current relations and make some new effort might be impulsive and ill conceived, or may even become manifest as random and destructive behaviour without consideration for any constructive program whatsoever.
Now, after writing the above, I realize there is yet a third way of reading the conundrum, which is: “Is there a better way of ensuring the safety and providing for the power of the community to reach its collective conception of the good wherein personal sovereignty is either not at all, or to a lesser degree than in the present state of intelligence agencies, sacrificed to that endeavour?” (If the “collective conception of the good” is the one laid out by Thomas Jefferson and modified slightly by myself is taken as that conception then it will influence how this question is answered, I think that should be clear.)
This is by far the most difficult question to answer. I am wondering if you will allow that I leave it for the moment because I have written so much here already, though I fear it may be what you desired to get at most of all. Rest assured that if you ask me to I will do my best to provide an answer to that as well, but I would have to warn you that it is also something I think would have to be approached as much as possible from the ground up — though I may be tempted to explore the solution I proposed at the beginning of this post of a decentralized government with a citizen army prepared for defense (and of course considering not only whether the loss of sovereignty would be of a greater or lesser degree, but also whether there might be some way of measuring whether the benefit to an individual’s pursuit of the good is of a greater or lesser extent satisfied under such circumstances.)
That would be very difficult as well because it would take not only a consideration of that system but a consideration of those aspects which are considered important to our current discussion being weighed against situation of the current system, which in itself would necessitate that we understood the “current system” in some fixed manner and not as a changing historical entity which it is in reality.
If you can think of a different way that your question could be better addressed then you may propose it and I will do my best to move along those lines.
I also realized I didn’t make a few other potentially important analyses.
One is the utility of intelligence agencies — though this does require an enormous amount of data about potential threats as well as the operations of those organizations which we admit are impossible for us to know in detail.
Another is an analysis of whether the risk of providing a largely unaccountable agency with large degrees of power (access to intelligence, weaponry, manpower, even indoctrination and mind war techniques (search Noopolitik, Psychological Operations, and the book Mindwar by former Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino) outweighs the benefits of their presence, even for those who are well served by the status quo. (I might say that for certain individuals it would still be worthwhile to maintain the status quo for example if they were in a position to hold the institution accountable, for example if they held a high ranking position in the agency).
Echos of Rousseau, where he concedes that the State has to be small and broken up in order to be democratic. I think what you described would be fair for its citizens, but probably not able to defend itself on the world stage.
As I'm seeing it, you've said that the primary purpose of the State is to provide what the people can't provide for themselves,so things get complicated when the need not being met is one that only the State can provide, and they can only provide it by blocking the activity of it's citizens. Defense being a prime example of this. That's not to say I disagree with your principle, only that I think all such principles become compromised (corrupted?) when put into the practice of politics.
Yeah, I didn’t see anything in there I disagree with.
Not necessarily. It may be that even though each of us defines personal sovereignty differently, there is nevertheless some threat out there (not the same threat for each of us) that puts them each at risk, such that communal power protects from them all. So for example, if some State cannot adequately protect themselves from a takeover by radical Muslims, there may be some people in the State who would not be adversely affected by this- perhaps some that would welcome it. But a State that cannot adequately protect itself also cannot protect itself from the Chi-coms, or Western Imperialism, or genocide, or perhaps immigration-born disease, or any number of things, such at everybody’s sovereignty is threatened by at least one of them. So that’s my explicit disagreement. My implicit disagreement from the above is that a society composed of people with all various ideas of what their personal sovereignty means to them is a bad idea not the least of which because they won’t know what to apply their communal power to. The Founders thought they were endorsing indivdual ideas of sovereignty, but the statements they were making were in the context of a universally Protestant culture in which it was unthinkabe (and I’d argue undesirable) that it would ever be anything else. In other words, “Let us white male Protestant land owners agree to persue our individual ideas of the good” is not the sort of inclusive statement we read it forward to be today, nor would it have functioned much at all well if it was.
Yes, that makes sense to me, with the caveat as I pointed out above that no particular undermining of the status quo is guarenteed to be preferable to any particular person who isn’t well served by it.
Which is as good an argument as any for not actually attempting to create a society in which such diverse conceptions of the good are encouraged to thrive. Or at least that’s my take away from it.
As long as the smaller states kept good relations with its neighbors, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to unite against larger threats in the same way the Greek city states did against Persia, yet kept their own constitutions.
This problem in truth is based on a lot of individual factors about what exactly the role of a state is and holds a lot of historical baggage.
I want to say, hypothetically we can say the state might refrain from interfering in the relations between citizens except in extreme cases of violence, aggression and theft.
But even still this wouldn’t be that easy because we have to take into many historical factors, like for example who owns the land. There may be those who own significant portions of land and those who own none at all, and those who own none are at the whims of all those who own land, and it would be similar in relation to a government if the government had something like crown land or public property I suppose but which could not be put into use by individuals to secure their survival. In this case the personal sovereignty of those individuals who are completely without resources is already comprimised because they must look to the desires and demands of others to secure merely their life (and we are taking this partly in relation to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (which I said should be conception of the good, I will respond to your critique of that below)).
So there is already a contradiction between life and pursuit of happiness. I won’t even make a statement to say what should be done, but suffice it to say that even if the government plays no involvement and is without possibility of corruption in this sense, conflict will not be avoided.
I think one of our differences (and this is relevant to what I will say below) is that you see most threats coming from outside of the community, whereas I see most threats as being internal. This would not be completely different for the idea that I gave above about small city states, the one potential difference is that if the state was small enough and the individuals had familiarity with each other there might be a common bond of interest greater than large anonymous states where everyone appears as strangers and competition to each other.
Because we are currently working with different ideas about what might be (or should be?) the ends of purposes of personal sovereignty I would still disagree with this on the grounds that certain of the citizens might be radical Muslims or wish to embrace the Chinese brand of communism, which if was accomplished wholeheartedly they could be under protection of a new state which they felt their conception of the good was met (if in truth they felt so).
Another instance might be if any given individuals felt that their livelihood and conceptions of happiness were in conflict with the current state, while its true that external threats might arise, there still might be those who would no longer care because they weren’t losing anything from it and had even grown feelings of animosity towards the state.
I did make the stipulation in my last post that these individuals could be in such a significant minority that their desires would not matter in any weighing of power. That is — their exclusion or threat against a state would be virtually none, but still they might exist.
I think this is really the more important factor because the individuals I attempted to describe above are probably in a significant minority in any state except under drastic times. In common times even those discontent generally soldier on with thier way of life and obligations, and will even defend the state both in speech and in deed.
I do not even want to take the approach here of a disagreement with what you’re saying, instead I will ask some questions and make some observations (which you may disagree with if you find them unreasonable) and we will see where we go from there.
As I see it, the situation you indicated here:
"a society composed of people with all various ideas of what their personal sovereignty means to them is a bad idea not the least of which because they won’t know what to apply their communal power to. "
is in many ways the current situation, but has also been the situation historically (perhaps to a greater degree at certain points). I think this problem is altogether more prevailent in a democracy (I think we can agree that what occurs today isn’t a democracy in the strict sense but could probably be described as a mixed government). Because it is a mixed government the problem of applying communal power is not as overt because the citizenry does not in fact choose the direction of its application — we might say through elections, which I suppose would have to be in one sense fair, but in another I hope you will agree that the ruling portion of society has always been fairly certain of their ability to persuade the majority of the population to go along with their plans of action. Some quotes to illustrate this:
I would say that the allocation of communal power in fact, and even the makeup of the government and its duties, is in very little measure driven by the demos — an exception I would make is that even to gain the support of opinion certain practices and institutions must be in place which keeps the community from total unrest.
For this reason, I think a conversation about personal sovereignty should be narrowed to the actions and allocations of energy of each individual’s own energy, and so far as the actions of individuals influence the state, and so far as the operations of the state is in contact with the lives of individuals, the state will be considered.
For this reason I feel only able to address the first part of your problem here:
“a society composed of people with all various ideas of what their personal sovereignty means to them is a bad idea”
and not the second part:
“not the least of which because they won’t know what to apply their communal power to.”
You further develop the problem you’re raising with:
“The Founders thought they were endorsing indivdual ideas of sovereignty, but the statements they were making were in the context of a universally Protestant culture in which it was unthinkabe (and I’d argue undesirable) that it would ever be anything else. In other words, “Let us white male Protestant land owners agree to persue our individual ideas of the good” is not the sort of inclusive statement we read it forward to be today, nor would it have functioned much at all well if it was.”
Which, in the context of personal sovereignty which I am raising (with the goal of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ (or one’s conception of the good)), would need to be related to the actual actions of individuals within a state, and not of the state itself. I am not sure if you would like to see the implication of the above codified in some way so that “Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” would instead be in some way more specified to indicate what the ideals of as you put it “white male Protestant land owners” held as a conception of a good and as a teleology of the society. I suppose I will have to await your opinion on that.
The discussion being developed here is in particular with regard to intelligence agencies which are in place to secure the power of the state.
If the contours of liberty in a state are specified and not to be deviated from, the state would no longer warrant the name “free”, unless you would consider any totalitarian state free in the sense that you are free to pursue the actions condoned by the state but not otherwise.
The example I used above about conflicting interests of individuals outside of state interference was land — the ability to access land to secure survival (shelter, food…). If a teleology of a state becomes fixed (that is, liberty is exactly defined and not left open), especially in regards to the actions and goals of individuals within the state, then the state is effectively supporting the interest of some particular segment of the population against that of the other, and besides limiting the concept of what defines freedom, hence taking the path towards an unfree state, unless again we would define a state as free so long as one is free to pursue the actions condoned by a state but not otherwise, however limited those condoned actions may be.
I think the only direction for this part of the conversation is to outline what constitutes liberty. I hold that the interests of individuals are frequently in conflict and so the only way to ensure liberty is to allow for perpetual conflict of interests without state interference and if domination arises (either from the state or among individuals) then let that domination stand forward under its true name but not take the name of liberty.
If the goal is to set a teleology for the state under a conception of the good, then I think that what must be discussed is what constitutes the good with awareness of how the conception of the good relates to diverse individuals so that a clear conception of its working order can be formed.
What I have written above has been an attempt to show that liberty inevitably breeds conflict and, not only does domination of some party by the other result inevitably, to take a different course would in effect result in a state which is not free, and I think this has always been the case — that states have never been free for all individuals, only a myth of freedom has been propagated in society, most likely for the sake of calming public opinion of whichever segment of the society is currently disenfranchized.
None of that is to say I don’t value freedom, only that I consider freedom in practice untenable (that is, true freedom on a communal level does not exist in practice) and as a common conception of the good must be supported by a myth.
I would have liked to post the study referred to in this article (The article is in the Washtington Times, which is a conservative newspaper by the way):
I don’t know that that’s still viable with the resources required to fund a modern army.
I don’t know that I see most threats as coming from outside the community. I’m just focusing on those ones because I’m talking about national defense. I think national defense is interesting because it breaks a lot of libertarian assumptions- the idea that you pointed out of a State only intervening to protect its citizens from each other in cases of murder and theft and so on loses a lot of it’s appeal for me primarily when considering that a state first and foremost has to continue existing despite other states.
I addressed that, or at least I think I did. Yes, an indiviual citizen might be a radical Muslim or a Communist, but they are very unlikely to be both, and a poorly defended nation is vulnerable to both. My point is that it is not necessarily true that if people aren’t invested in the status quo, then they aren’t invested in the protection of the state, because there is no guarentee of what will replace it in a world like ours in which there are any number of possible threats to a weak state. A citizen who thinks “I don’t need to be invested in the communal power of my State because it is good for me if the Muslims take over” isn’t accounting for all the other things that could happen instead of that.
I don't know that democracy is connected so much as immigration and education, though democracy may exacerbate it. It's easy for me to imagine a democratic state in which virtually everybody is Buddhist, or socalist, or Catholic, or what have you. In fact, it appears to me that the United States was more democratic when it was more unified in in that regard- though I'm not asserting causation there, merely that the two do seem able to coexist.
There’s always a ruling class, especially in a pure democracy. The goal in a constitutional republic would be to exert some sort of control over who they are and how much they can get away with.
Mostly. I had in mind your idea that a State protecting itself from radical Muslims as good isn’t a given because there may be radical Muslims in the State that would welcome a takeover as I said this. But yes, most of the problems that come up with that disunity are going to be internal, for sure.
No, that would be to turn into a legal matter what should be handled by the community. I believe as you do that for the most part the State should be leaving its citizens alone except in grave matters. I just also think that's impossible if the citizens can't largely police themselves according to a shared notion of the common good. The price of diversity is that the State must adjudicate matters where once the family or the neighborhood or the Church was sufficient.
I have a slight brain fog today, so I apologize if my posts seem less coherent than usual. I’ve also tried to make my tone more moderate than this morning — I had woken up as a crotchety old scrooge.
Ah okay, in that case I agree with you on the foremost importance for considering defense. I wouldn’t consider myself a libertarian exactly, it is mainly that I see an internal contradiction in liberalism which I am trying to work through, I tried to explain it in the last post (particularly towards the end) — I don’t think there is such a thing as freedom, from the state or even for the individual in a state of anarchy, or at least freedom cannot be an absolute ideal because it is always contradicted. I think it is mainly a myth (though not entirely) — that would be a pretty odd position for a libertarian. I still do think liberal politics are the best thing we currently have, though on the other hand I feel its internal contradiction is becoming greater and so it is partly for the sake of liberalism that I wish to criticize it (if that makes sense)…
I am rambling on a bit.
I know that there are a number of smaller countries without large armies that keep themselves secure (countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Czech Republic, New Zealand come to mind) I am pretty sure through military alliances. So it would be something along these lines I might consider viable, particularly if the alliance was intended for external threats and did not involve itself in internal affairs. I would also probably think it best to provide checks against even these types of organizations — that alliance could be staffed in the case of an emergency by the armies of each region, like a kind of communal feudalism, with perhaps a smaller core organization made up of all the members that would possess certain larger equipment.
Okay, I think this morning my head was so lost I was on the wrong track with what you were getting at. I concede to you on the point you’re making, though I still think the particular individuals (or potentially groups) could be something like rogues within the nation and so use it parasitically while still planning or hoping for the chance to carry out some subversive deed. These individuals are not really my interest, though I do think they are one of the issues for liberal politics to consider without compromising itself (that is, without becoming illiberal), but it’s not of utmost importance to me because I am more interested in how people can live together, and live together well — the reason I bring up conflict is because I am inclined to think it inevitable, particularly in liberal politics, which is again one of the internal contradictions I feel it would be well to work out. I argue against these groups just as much as anyone else…
You are probably that pointing to democracy is probably too narrow to grasp the entire issue, so I should watch out for that. I really do think I was a bit too foggy this morning, but it occurs to me now that an even more important reason would for diviseness would be a shortage of resources, whether it be land or any moveable good — which of course is no one’s fault… I suppose the reason that might have led me to think democracy is because people tend to look to the system to correct the issues, which might exacerbate power struggles and move them to a national level, and also spread the repercussions (for example by proliferating legislation).
I suppose the reason that internal conflict is important to me is because in the absence of internal conflict I don’t see intelligence agencies or defense as a problem. I also see something like invasion (in a worst case scenario) as becoming an internal conflict — that is, once an outside invader has breached the border and occupied the country to impose rules, the problem is internal. So in this way I feel like if internal conflict could be sorted out — even if there had to be some kind of “managed conflict” (I am not necessarily advocating this), then I feel that communal power could be allocated without contradiction.
Well you make a good point here, but I might also try to selfishly use it to again advocate smaller communities. I know that in the US you have the state system, because I am not an expert in your politics I can’t say how well they work, and I’m not even completely sure how they work, but another possibility would be if each country worked on a smaller level than states so that there was more involvement and interaction among individuals and their communities.
In other words, perhaps something like mixing the government further so that let’s just say we kept something like the current governmental system with the only change being that small cities (or neighborhoods depending how large the city was) would work along the lines of participatory democracy (nor direct democracy), but still have parliaments (in other words just a revision of the mayoral system).
In this way there could be a replacement for the neighborhood and it would encourage involvement in calm debate. This would also be something like what I meant by “managed conflict”… so that individuals could express and even have a platform for their own point of view without the risk of absolutism that untamed democracy might be subject to. Of course the countours of that would also need to be worked out with reference to constitutional powers.
Well it took me a week to respond to you for no reason other than responding to you actually requires effort. So don’t feel like you’re obligated to write back when you aren’t feeling up to it.
I’m basically a traditionalist conservative, reacting to libertarianism in the way that you are reacting to liberalism. I see a lot I like about libertarianism, but I see an internal contradiction in it as well- left-libertarians seek to liberate people not just from the State, but from each other, where as the other sort seeks to liberate people from the state to enslave them to corporatism. In either case the end result is a society that’s not worth living freely in.
Yes, miliary alliances [i]with the United States.[/i] Which is a little like saying those little birds in Africa are protected by a military alliance with the hippos they sit upon. More accurate still if the little birds sat up there continally chiding the hippo for eating too much and spending too much energy on making sure his tusks are sharp and the wallow secure. Perhaps those birds do do that, in their little birdy way.
That aside, I don't actually disagree with this point of yours very much. My overarching point here is that there is no ideal solution and no ideal state- only passable ones and disastrous ones. I think you may well be right that one possible solution to the problem of State would be to have a collection of basically free city-states that govern themselves, coming together only for matters of defense. I think they would sacrifice some security by doing things that way, but everything is a give and take, and perhaps the risk of security is worth the gain in liberty to them. Some other State may solve the problem with a single, unified power that is difficult to oppose, but sacrifices some internal liberty for that power.
Do you mean to say that you’d be more inclined to accept a powerful defense and robust intelligence service in a country that had fewer internal conflicts? That’s an interesting idea for me, I hadnt thought much about the connection before.
I don’t think I can agree with that first bit. A foreign invader that cross your border is still a foreign invader, and an external influence. I’d need a lot more explanation to justify that. It sounds like we’re saying the same thing in the rest though, if I read you correctly. I am viewing a society (and only a society) with a shared noton of the common good as being a society with fewer internal problems, and thus a society that can more accurately allocate it’s communal power. If everybody (or everybody who matters) is a Catholic, that goes a long way in determining agreeable ways to spend national resources, including what threats to protect from. Reduces the need to spy on one’s own citizens and all that other stuff nobody wants to see, too.
I have no objection to that except, as noted above, I think a collection of smaller communities is paying a premium for the extra liberty they enjoy over one larger State. If their ‘grand experiment’ for lack of a better term constitutes that they pay that price and see where it leads, then so be it. Maybe it will work out!
They have changed a great deal over the years. The Civil War basically established that the Federal Government was the true power in any situation that actually matters, and state governance is limited to trivialities. Even things that should be decided on the state level have enormous pressure from the Fed. in the form of ‘matching funds’ - the Federal Government offers to pay huge contributions to roads, or schools, or what-have-you, but only if they are handled in the way that Fed decrees they ought to be.
At this point in my life (I still feel I’m young enough) I don’t have any set conviction on where my political allegiances land, though as I said of the currently available political forms I prefer liberalism, with the stipulation that I find a lot of contradictory trends, mainly because “freedom” is an ideal, not an empirical state.
This and
I guess one of the problems of political philosophy is that it’s only a theory until its put into practice and generally practice will determine the true form. Probably the only way a change will be made is if there is some kind of crisis which either necessitates a change, drives a certain segment into instigating change, or else if some portion of the population believes it to be of such great benefit they embark upon the task. I do personally feel like current politics could use something like what I have suggested (with greater development in regards to the workings of course), but I don’t think it will happen unless there is some kind of crisis, or if more people come to see the world the way I do, the latter I think is unlikely mainly because of the western education system and media, but you never know…
I can’t be sure you will come to agree with me in any case, but I explain it like this:
I am taking internal affairs to be the things which happen within the borders of a given polity which the laws and customs of the country having bearings upon. In this sense, if a country was conquered and brought under new government, the practices that follow the change of leadership would be internal affairs. A polity could also welcome foreigners into their country without resistence (which may be foolish, but not impossible). The reason I have chosen to see it this way is because the form that the polity takes can have a great bearing on the response to an invasion of this sort, whereas if the conflict was entirely external the form of the polity would only be important insofar as they make arrangements for some kind of military deployment or border control. In other words (though it is not necessarily advisable) it is possible for an entire polity to be structured like a military encampment.
I am interested in the workings of the government there and elsewhere, though I have less to say about those particulars. I did read somewhere that one of the reasons given for expanding the power of the Federal government over the states was for the sake of democracy, though I have no idea if that is actually true and honestly I have some doubts.
The suggestion I made about further mixing the government to provide greater democratic involvement on a community level while perhaps keeping things like a senate with longer terms and the electoral college would possible have some effects which would not be looked highly upon by the central governments of countries, mainly because I can imagine if citizens have more involvement in governing they will become to a greater degree aware of the influence of legislation and decisions on their own community to a degree they hadn’t been previously.
I’d go further and say that dramatic political changes not only tend to happen as a result of some crisis, but that’s probably the only time they should happen. The risk of untried theories is simply too high in a system that works well-enough. Of course, as we discussed, whether it works well enough is going to be in the eye of the beholder to some extent.
I don't know. It seems right on paper. But the USA started off as a country where only wealthy land-owners had a say in politics by design. We've already extended suffrage in every plausible direction and the internet gives even poor people access to anything they want to know about any subject, and the Washington Post says the result is we're an oligarchy- which is to say nothing changed. So I'm not sure. Maybe the importance of individual participation is overrrated, or maybe measuring social justice by who has the influence is asking the wrong question, or....something.
Artificial organizations have to create artificial need for their continued existence.
Governments were not supposed to be living entities with a will independent of the people they govern. But once that happens, in order to continue to live, the government must instigate the belief in the need for that government.
You might be right here. As much as I sometimes bemoan the political system, I also feel a deep disappointment with the attitude of many citizens. I suppose I just haven’t shed my last vestige of idealism. I am probably holding onto it to keep myself away from total cynicism, maybe until I have something better to give my idealism up for.
But yeah, it is disappointing how many use their efforts and resources — not universally of course, but in great quantity it does seem like many want little more from life than food, entertainments, and to pump out babies. Is that all there is to life?
Let’s say oligarchy is just a word, and toss it out for a moment to look at what we have. The U.S. is stupendously wealthy, and has become continually moreso with the occaisional bump along the road. It has poor people- but only if you define poor by numbers of dollars, and only THEN if you compare that number of dollars only to that of other Americans. In the US, poor people live like the upper crust of truly poor societies. In terms of freedom, people get to basically do what they like, when they like, succeeding and failing on their own merits. There are restrictions we disagree with, and perhaps restrictions that we’d like to see added, but I think it’s fair to say than in each case if we’re honest with ourselves, we see that the majority (or a sizable enough minority) doesn’t side with us, and not that we are at the whim of a capricious, malicious State. One could say it’s a good sign when a nation worries more about where it’s heading than where it is- especially when it’s done so for multiple generations.
So if we’re an oligarchy, we’re one where the poor prosper, people are largely free to do as they wish, there is no immanent fear of conquest from without or revolution from within, and the situation has persisted long enough to be called a stable product of initial oligarchal conditions. So if we refuse to resent oligarchy for the sake of the term alone, what’s the actual problem it represents? Is the condition of billionaires being more likely to get their way than the rest of us in politics an evil irrespective of the tangible results?
Well for me oligarchy is both the product and sustainment of a certain ideal and way of life. That ideal is not freedom (but that doesn’t mean freedom cannot exist in an oligarchy), the ideal is a pursuit of wealth for its own sake (yes, for the sake of what wealth leads to, but that isn’t specified, the system is based on the accumulation of wealth alone).
The problem with this from my perspective is that there is a teleology here. Liberalism did not begin with the ideal of freedom alone, in some ways I think it could be argued that the ideal of freedom developed into its most complete expression as liberal theory developed, not at its outset, most likely because after unlimited acquisition was unleashed it only made sense to accompany it with the freedom to do what one wishes with one’s wealth.
But because there is a teleology (the acquisition of wealth), freedom is not the absolute ideal and becomes a contradiction within the state. Freedom can ultimately be sacrificed particularly if it is the freedom of those who are without wealth (that one must buy one’s way through the world). This would not be as great of a problem if we weren’t entering into an era of scarcity and strong (and increasingly ubiquitous) institutions. It is for this reason I feel like a crisis is approaching. If I am just paranoid and wrong okay, I would probably prefer that, but the reason I pursue this thought is because weak effects of this are already present in western political systems. In Europe there are widespread housing crises and unemployment. Locke advocated enclosure of the land under the stipulation that those who put their labour to previously raw and useless material would turn it into something socially praiseworthy — even the lives of menial workers would be filled with greater abundance than those in the state of nature.
There is so much here that presupposes an idea of the good — what abundance is good, and today it is manifest in products like iphone, brand clothing… for these reasons (today) we say we are better off than a primitive people. But the same enclosure and ubiquitous institutional arrangement also ultimately blocks other forms of cultural flourishing that do not depend on acquisition (and in a sense even those ‘products’ suffer because of the utility (for money making) of planned obsolescence (the disutility for use)). Even culture has become an industry, architecture must be designed and specified to its most cost efficient quantum…
All of this is the result of a reductionist view of the world — we look at the scientifically fundamental part (in the case of the good, pleasure and pain) and as a consequence we (and by “we” here I mean “our” instutional structures, and not only the state apparati) disregard the manifestations of what makes valuations possible (beauty, for example, is pleasurable because beauty in itself is good) except with regard to the bottom line — now, beauty is good because it sells.
The reason I think this is reaching a crisis today is because liberalism arose out of a time when a different valuation of the good was still omnipresent, but today that old view is almost entirely disappearing, and it is disappearing primarily from the public sphere — because it is in private hands that capital rests. The first casualty is our habitat (and I don’t mean “nature” in the sense of “mother earth”, I mean the human habitat has become lifeless — we flock to cultural oases on our vacations, whether it be historical cities, towns, or even museums, but our daily habitats are increasingly sterile and utilitarian — in the sense of efficient rather than creating happiness.)
This is my problem with oligarchy, because the power of oligarchical governance is vested in money it necessitates the continuance and propagation of this way of life and must even block other forms of development and cultural growth — whether intentionally or unintentionally, because other forms of growth are institionally disadvantaged by the regulatory process.
The reason I advocated more democracy at least on a base level was the hope that maybe with more power invested in the entire political community (not just in its elites) the “goods” of everyday life might spread. The reason I agreed with your last post and doubted my own advocacy was because I think that the demos has also become invested in this new mindset and way of life, and I even thought it unlikely that people would ask for anything more than cheaper food, a new iphone, some hip clothing, and free day care and a television set to raise their children for them.
I am sure Locke was familiar with Aristotle, so it makes me wonder whether he was cognizant that he was advocating the maintenance of oligarchy — because he was not a dumb fellow I might even suppose he was aware of it indeed.
I do value liberal politics, but that is because of the high value it places on freedom and opposition to tyranny, not because it is amenable to oligarchy. It is just that I see tyranny as becoming an increasingly possible outcome to the political arrangement which would endanger the best of what liberalism has given us.
Historically two alternatives have been given to liberalism (since the modern age) which is socialism and communism. Communism did not even hide the fact that it was amenable to tyranny, Marx called explicitly for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” — for that reason alone I do not see it as a viable option, but there are other reasons as well. And socialism has actually done much to sustain and even strengthen the capitalist qualities of liberalism and more deeply entrench its power by expanding the state apparatus.
This is also the reason why I seek a new alternative to the current system, but one that maintains its best qualities (in this case that would be the high value put on freedom). It is not something I feel I have accomplished and am ready to share with the world, but it is something I feel is important. And no, I don’t think oligarchy is good.
Is that all there is to life?