so given the questions of existence, what am I to do?
what should I believe in? how should I act? what should I hope for?
Now these important questions of existence, questions we face once we are born,
these questions can be expanded to include us… what are we to do? what should we
believe in? How should we act? what should we hope for?
for example, the question of, how should we act? Is really a political and
moral question. the begining of political science begins with a question,
what is my relationship with others? we are individuals who live and die within
a complicated social context… I am born and I am faced with the question of
how do I act with my sisters and brother? our parents dictate our actions
and behavior we have with each other…and then we enter school
and we discover other complicated behaviors that our classmates have…
and all the while we have teachers who watch over us and dictate our
actions and behaviors we have toward each other…and we
act and interact with each other, this behavior is both individual
and is collective/social…….it is a very complex series of rules we
learn in order for us to engage with each other… you can touch people
in certain places and you can’t touch them in other places,
you can say some things to some people but not certain things
to other people…and sometimes the rules we play by, are
vague and incomplete…and then we enter adulthood,
where we should have learn societies rules by now…
and sometimes, we have some who don’t understand the rules
and why there are so important for us to have rules……
in fact, we could call political science and morality, the rules we
collectively decide to live by…the question becomes this,
why these set of rules instead of another set of rules?
society/the state seems to take the easiest road of actions,
in other words, society choses to follow the path of least resistance…
put into place the rules that will get the least amount of resistance…
so the individual question, what should I hope for? collectively becomes,
what should we hope for? indeed, what should we hope for?
this idea of what should we hope for, becoming a religious question
as Kant understood it, doesn’t seem to make sense because of the vastly
different understanding of the religious that each of us has………
so what should we, collectively, hope for? this is political science…
which is guided by history, philosophy, economics, biology……
history tells us what previous people tried and we can see their
success and/or failure written in the history of said people…
one thing there is not, a universal understanding
of what it means to be human and we don’t have
a universal rule book that can guide all of us…
why not? because universal rules can only work when the
situation is equal for everyone, universally. When the environment
is the same for everyone, then and only then can a universal rule book
be applicable……. we cannot expect the rules for one group, say an Eskimo tribe to
be the same rules as people living in New York or even a tribe living in Africa.
different environments require different rules for human beings…….
if I were to move to the frozen tundra of the north and live with the Eskimo’s,
the rules of behavior would be different for me, then if I stayed here in
sunny California…or the rules would be different if I moved to say, New York,
or if I moved to London… and yet, we run into a interesting thing, human beings
are human beings the world over… we have the same needs, wants, desires, hopes
as all other human beings……but given different environments, different possibilities,
we must change our behavior to match the different environments, the different possibilities
we find ourselves in…this suggest a certain malleability of human beings…
we can adapt and change given the different situations and circumstances and
environments we find ourselves in…
so this question of “what can we hope for” can and does change given the
different situations and environments we find ourselves in…
so it seems to me that what we might be looking for is not the changing,
adaptable part of us as human beings, but we are looking for the
permanent fixtures of human existence and by that I mean,
what exactly does it mean to say, human being? is there some
permanent, fixed aspect of being human that we can point to and
say, yes, yes that is a human being.
does the question of “what can we hope for” change with each changing
situation, with each new environment? or does the question of “what can
we hope for” remain the same for us individually and collectively?
the fact that I have all questions and no answers doesn’t really help me…….
Kropotkin