Thanks for this. Touches something very core right now. When you say, "Sooner or later, a society, to really survive, requires a cooperative system of ethics." I want to agree but most days I'm not at all sure. Maybe not just survive but thrive or flourish. Isn't the rub that autocrats manage, in many ways, for their societies to survive just fine without cooperative ethics? Sometimes for decades. I guess that's where the 'sooner or later' part comes in. Although these days it feels like we're in 'later' territory for when the value of a cooperative ethics would take root, much less be a conventional consensus.
I wonder if sometimes prolonged suffering is required to restore that shared belief in cooperation. This may have been true for the Czechs under Communism. After Prague Spring was brutally crushed, love and truth finally prevailed. But it took decades to get to Prague Spring and then twenty more years for that suffering to mature in the Velvet Revolution. Sometimes bravery is the face of "nothing left to lose."
That may really be true - far more so than any of want to acknowledge. People tend not to make revolution when things are going well. The society usually has to pretty badly fall apart for it to be necessary.
Good point Omar. I guess I'm working the word "ethic" very broadly. The argument there would be that an autocracy is a "system of ethics" - which has to do with following the leader and some sort of belief in a natural hierarchy ("the divine right of kings" was one attempt to codify the ethics of autocracies). I probably was being a little rhetorical flourish-y in supposing that an egalitarian system of ethics is more stable than some hierarchical pyramid. I guess I really do just want to believe that liberalism will win out - even if the preponderance of historical data is stacked against it.
Many solid point. This is the best: "democracy is more a metaphor for liberalism than a manifestation of it." I have been thinking on these things while visiting Prague again. That completely miraculous nonviolent triumph over the Soviet regime in 1989. Václav Havel relying simply on love and truth to prevail. Maybe a little dramatizing, but mostly love and truth. How did it happen? Millions of people across Europe began to feel it, to decide to come out of the shadows, to rally together.
John Lennon's "Imagine" is just a pretty fancy until it catches hold of a generation who decides to act on it. So many things that are taken to be self-evident now -- that industry is the only power that matters, that anything driven by love or truth is too fluffy or abstract to matter, that marketing and data science are the real levers of power -- can be revealed to be hollow constructions if enough people agree to say so. I'm reading Havel's "Power of the Powerless," and this is precisely his point. What gets normalized is only normal because it remains unchallenged. I continue to live in defiance of what's normal in the U.S. Havel's legacy in Czechia is the closest I've come to a viable alternative vision.
Totally agreed. More and more, I'm going to feel that "industry" is the source of our oppression and is really not so different from the kind of political oppression the Eastern Bloc experienced. We just defer so much of our freedom and power to industry and let industry manage our lives for us. It's just unbelievable, the more one thinks about it.
In a badly written book The Market as God, the moment we are talking here abt is where we question the'cash value' of the idea. Mr. Kahn here hits on how there come to be two kinds of people, as the Righteous Mind book shows -verifiably, reproducibly conservatives hitch their wagons to the Big Leader's train, in small acts in one larger life act that gives them the moral morale from doing the right thing. In this verifiable world, the bodies who offend his highness earn their grinding under the wheels. Haidt's research shows that " the Authority" personified, does not exist" on the radar" morally for the left leaning one half of people. Those of you who have not read Righteous Mind, because it looks like a self help book in its packaging? There are no morals prescribed in that book, Be Lucky that there is real science being conducted in the social sciences. If the Haidt theory is correct, we have no institutions almost, remaining, that prioritize the lives of the upcoming seven generations over the short term projective projectile strength of the empire you are in. Those to my mind would have included an intelligent independent judiciary and an increasingly powerful epa to advise and to sanction overconsumption. Haidt's two teams of moral actors maybe does not have the cash value of the monomania it might take to enact good in a weird playground world. Prohibition was the work of a single idea across these tribes. Maybe it is time we acknowledge the ERA lost because it asked for control over women's bodies and else that too many women reasonably saw as beside the point of joining the dance , in their minds all of life could be a conversation, and therefore why show all your cards now? CATHERINE LIU is coming out soon with a book contra the "for the experience " school of liberal reasoning. Looking forward to that, she says she is arguing contra Trauma and contra Experience as trump words to shutdown conversation. Like saying all is for the lived experience wld be to ignore the economic component to everything Sam is addressing here.
Yes and yes and yes. Putting the puzzle together for me.
Thank you Pauline!
A lucid, thoughtful analysis. Thanks, Sam.
Thank you Portia! Really appreciate it.
Thanks for this. Touches something very core right now. When you say, "Sooner or later, a society, to really survive, requires a cooperative system of ethics." I want to agree but most days I'm not at all sure. Maybe not just survive but thrive or flourish. Isn't the rub that autocrats manage, in many ways, for their societies to survive just fine without cooperative ethics? Sometimes for decades. I guess that's where the 'sooner or later' part comes in. Although these days it feels like we're in 'later' territory for when the value of a cooperative ethics would take root, much less be a conventional consensus.
I wonder if sometimes prolonged suffering is required to restore that shared belief in cooperation. This may have been true for the Czechs under Communism. After Prague Spring was brutally crushed, love and truth finally prevailed. But it took decades to get to Prague Spring and then twenty more years for that suffering to mature in the Velvet Revolution. Sometimes bravery is the face of "nothing left to lose."
That may really be true - far more so than any of want to acknowledge. People tend not to make revolution when things are going well. The society usually has to pretty badly fall apart for it to be necessary.
Good point Omar. I guess I'm working the word "ethic" very broadly. The argument there would be that an autocracy is a "system of ethics" - which has to do with following the leader and some sort of belief in a natural hierarchy ("the divine right of kings" was one attempt to codify the ethics of autocracies). I probably was being a little rhetorical flourish-y in supposing that an egalitarian system of ethics is more stable than some hierarchical pyramid. I guess I really do just want to believe that liberalism will win out - even if the preponderance of historical data is stacked against it.
" Sooner or later, a society, to really survive, requires a cooperative system of ethics." YES!!!
Thanks Cathy!
Many solid point. This is the best: "democracy is more a metaphor for liberalism than a manifestation of it." I have been thinking on these things while visiting Prague again. That completely miraculous nonviolent triumph over the Soviet regime in 1989. Václav Havel relying simply on love and truth to prevail. Maybe a little dramatizing, but mostly love and truth. How did it happen? Millions of people across Europe began to feel it, to decide to come out of the shadows, to rally together.
John Lennon's "Imagine" is just a pretty fancy until it catches hold of a generation who decides to act on it. So many things that are taken to be self-evident now -- that industry is the only power that matters, that anything driven by love or truth is too fluffy or abstract to matter, that marketing and data science are the real levers of power -- can be revealed to be hollow constructions if enough people agree to say so. I'm reading Havel's "Power of the Powerless," and this is precisely his point. What gets normalized is only normal because it remains unchallenged. I continue to live in defiance of what's normal in the U.S. Havel's legacy in Czechia is the closest I've come to a viable alternative vision.
Totally agreed. More and more, I'm going to feel that "industry" is the source of our oppression and is really not so different from the kind of political oppression the Eastern Bloc experienced. We just defer so much of our freedom and power to industry and let industry manage our lives for us. It's just unbelievable, the more one thinks about it.
In a badly written book The Market as God, the moment we are talking here abt is where we question the'cash value' of the idea. Mr. Kahn here hits on how there come to be two kinds of people, as the Righteous Mind book shows -verifiably, reproducibly conservatives hitch their wagons to the Big Leader's train, in small acts in one larger life act that gives them the moral morale from doing the right thing. In this verifiable world, the bodies who offend his highness earn their grinding under the wheels. Haidt's research shows that " the Authority" personified, does not exist" on the radar" morally for the left leaning one half of people. Those of you who have not read Righteous Mind, because it looks like a self help book in its packaging? There are no morals prescribed in that book, Be Lucky that there is real science being conducted in the social sciences. If the Haidt theory is correct, we have no institutions almost, remaining, that prioritize the lives of the upcoming seven generations over the short term projective projectile strength of the empire you are in. Those to my mind would have included an intelligent independent judiciary and an increasingly powerful epa to advise and to sanction overconsumption. Haidt's two teams of moral actors maybe does not have the cash value of the monomania it might take to enact good in a weird playground world. Prohibition was the work of a single idea across these tribes. Maybe it is time we acknowledge the ERA lost because it asked for control over women's bodies and else that too many women reasonably saw as beside the point of joining the dance , in their minds all of life could be a conversation, and therefore why show all your cards now? CATHERINE LIU is coming out soon with a book contra the "for the experience " school of liberal reasoning. Looking forward to that, she says she is arguing contra Trauma and contra Experience as trump words to shutdown conversation. Like saying all is for the lived experience wld be to ignore the economic component to everything Sam is addressing here.
God, you read a lot. I still haven't read The Righteous Mind, insanely enough.
The ongoing riots in the UK show that illiberalism is a form of capitalism. It also has other variations - fascism and colonialism.