David Foster's site,
ChicagoBoyz, linked me to a site called
askblog, including this quotation:
[T]he cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. … [T]here are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa. Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.
Another interesting post at the same site described a conservative tendency to arrange issues along a civilization/barbarism axis, while progressives tend to think in terms of an oppressor/oppressed axis.
a conservative tendency to arrange issues along a civilization/barbarism axis, while progressives tend to think in terms of an oppressor/oppressed axis.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure those axes are orthogonal to each other, so much as skewed with a high degree of projection of one onto the other.
Eric Hines
Sure, I didn't mean to suggest that they were orthogonal, just different ways of ordering thought. Maybe "spectrum" would have been a better word than "axis."
ReplyDeleteThey're basically saying what, that a good person will make a good king or dictatorship, but that an evil person would make a bad democracy and dictatorship?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that's true, but I take the point to be a broader one about the entire culture: not just the king but all the citizens, in a good culture, will work well together either in a fairly authoritarian or a fairly libertarian framework. Or to put it another way, if the culture is right, there won't be much that the government needs to do, so it won't be so important whether it has total powers or not, in its limited sphere.
ReplyDeleteThis seems intuitively correct.
ReplyDeleteWhich likely means that it's mostly wrong and I just like it, but it's worth holding in one's head while asking many other questions over the next year or so. The different perspectives conservative vs liberal is also worth some thought. It seems true at first blush in America, and I think the Anglosphere in general. Beyond that i can't say. I will search for examples and folks I know in other places.
Just a footnote about axes: In a euclidean space of several dimensions you can span the space with different sets of orthogonal axes, but an axis from one set won't have any necessary relationship to one from another set. The selected axis civ/barb in one breakdown has no necessary relationship to the selected sor/sed axis from another. They can be parallel, orthogonal, or something in between.
ReplyDeleteA single axis does not describe the whole space.
But wrt the actual topic: a few random notes.
ReplyDeleteSimilar regulation of behavior has to happen in any case. Will this be through government rules and enforcement, or social pressure and social enforcement? I include among the social rules those that make certain things unthinkable--just never appearing on the radar for most people. ("Who would kill a perfectly good baby before he was born?")
And: "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
Right, but if you choose to map something on a couple of axes, you hope they have some relationship, such that the picture you get will tell you something interesting. I think Eric may well be right that these two axes aren't obviously related. It's kind of an interesting thought, though, because I suppose my Camelot culture would rate high on civilization vs. barbarism and low on general levels of oppression. It's always a little depressing to look closely at Golden Ages and find out that they were Golden for a few lucky people and an absolute nightmare for the run-of-the-mill population.
ReplyDeleteBut really, the point of the linked website was more that every human problem can be analyzed as failure of civilization over barbarism, or as one more example of the Man Putting Us Down.
And again, right: granted that society isn't going to be worth living in unless people control themselves somehow, what's the best kind of control? I have a strong prejudice for flexible, bottom-up systems whenever they can be made to work. When someone has to lay down the law from on high, I view the system as broken. But of course, for some problems, only the law from on high will work. And then my entire religion depends on authority from on high. It's just that God does it better than people do.
ReplyDeleteTrying to analyze every human problem in terms of a single characteristic is a pretty common oversimplification.
ReplyDeleteAnd I argue elsewhere that no finite rule-based system is going to be complete; only paying attention to God is going to work perfectly. Which we don't do that well--or at least I don't.
There's much in what you say, but I was actually troubled almost by the opposite problem: a "civilization-barbarism" spectrum is so all-inclusive it could almost mean anything. It's not to far removed from "Good-Bad."
ReplyDeleteAnd I argue elsewhere that no finite rule-based system is going to be complete; only paying attention to God is going to work perfectly. Which we don't do that well--or at least I don't.
ReplyDeleteEven agreeing on what God actually wants is something we're bad at...suggesting that even this does not "work perfectly." Or won't until the global Caliphate takes over and tells us all exactly how to obey God's commandments.
I was actually troubled almost by the opposite problem: a "civilization-barbarism" spectrum is so all-inclusive it could almost mean anything. It's not to far removed from "Good-Bad."
And the way Leftists use the words "oppression" and "oppressed," the same might be said about them...but in both cases the words tell us something about what looks good and bad to each.