Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
So, trimming away the fluff, your answer to the question "What is the most critical issue facing your society" is: "the Enlightenment"?
The most critical issue your society is facing.
- Thread starter aronnax
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Anyone ever hear about the 4th Turning? It's supposed to be a book outlining American generational cycles and it might be somewhat relevant to the problems we are facing now. (In the USA anyway)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory
It describes how individualism rises and falls every 80 years or so as culture and counterculture swap places. In a broad sense I can see its point but I'm not sure what good it does anybody.
This article on the rise of cheating also seems relevent.
http://failuremag.com/feature/article/cheating_culture/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory
It describes how individualism rises and falls every 80 years or so as culture and counterculture swap places. In a broad sense I can see its point but I'm not sure what good it does anybody.
This article on the rise of cheating also seems relevent.
http://failuremag.com/feature/article/cheating_culture/
This statement sounds about right to me
On why I think fraud is America's #1 issue, Mr. Bill Black:
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/03.12/flawed.html
Of course, fraud could just be a symptom of relativism, radical individualism, an entitlement mentality, and modernism roaring forward full speed ahead. Hmmm
Jehoshua
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Not at all, I certainly disagree with a lot of enlightenment thinking, and I would say that there may be precedents in the enlightenement that later due to a change in understanding warped into problems manifest today. But the enlightenment did maintain a particular objectivity in regards to truth based around the idea of reason, it is not the problem itself.
The problem today really emerged in the later part of the 20th century, post world war two from the cultural millieu and social trends of the time rather than through a concerted ideological push by enlightenment types and could best be summed up as simply as the dominant social-cultural trend of the present in the west. Ergo "I can do what I want, because I want to, You can't tell me whats right and what to do"
OK, fair enough.
But there is a great deal of what is going on in Europe as well that shows a growing strength of conservatism and the consequent decline in moral behavior. First, I think we can safely say that we are in a place of discussion where the definition of terms is one of the greatest obstacles to understanding. But further the problem is that it isn't a question of "either this or that" but rather one of "pieces of this and pieces of that".
And few places is that more clear than than in the "individualistic" versus "community" spectrum. Now in the American case both sides claim to be more for the individual and for the community. And in some respects it is true on both sides. "Liberals", in the current American usage of the word, stand for more personal and individual liberty on a whole range of issues. But more community oriented policies on many social and economic issues. That is, the community should look out for and protect people, but not control them. The community should try to make things better for the future, but so that the individual can enjoy more choices for themselves consistent with all the people having choices. "Conservatives", to use the modern American usages, think the individual should have economic liberty, but also full economic risks, and that the community should not protect its weaker members or do anything to protect the community or prosperity for future individuals. However they can be deeply authoritarian and the "community" side of their natures is to control people and take away individual liberty and choice in favor of order and control. The lords and masters do as they please. The peasants and serfs do as they are told.
But you are wrong to think this is a recent trend. This is in fact the 19th century reasserting itself.
Now you could say I'm confusing terms. And to be fair I've really never given a damn about political theory to lock in the 18th and 19th century terms to never changing definitions when the common usages of the words have in fact changed a very great deal.
This, on the other hand, presents a very real problem, and failure to understand the problem. Because the recent trends in economics and economic policies is actually extremely authoritarian. It is not about the self now, any more than it was about the self 100 odd years ago in the company towns where the managers controlled all aspects of the workers lives. Or 100 years before that on the slave plantations. Or 100 years before that for the peasants and the serfs. Neoliberal economics is as deeply authoritarian as any feudal lord could ask for. In fact it's kind of an ideal of the feudal lordships that "feudal lords" never quite managed in actual history. The lords and masters may be "radically individualistic, dismissive of any authority," except their own over their subordinates.
Now if I understand you you are bemoaning a lack of authority for individualism. And feel this is our downfall. But what you don't see is that our downfall is when the individualism is being subordinated to the authoritarian tendencies of an elite that serve no master but themselves.
In short, we are moving in the direction I think you want us to be moving in (to the extent that I have grasped your point) and is is having the opposite result than that which you want to accomplish.
And that means that your basic premise is wrong.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Jehoshua, you are not using modernism in the correct sense. It doesn't simply mean "what is modern," it has specific connotations concerning late 19th-early 20th century thought, culture, and society.
Education (Public schools need a revamp, no I have no idea how to do it. College education needs to be more affordable, again no ideas.) , poverty, socio-economic inequality, upward social mobility, Wall Street (Go Iceland on their ass and prosecute and jail some bankers), drugs (Treat it like the public health issue it should be treated as. Increase support for clean needle programs, rehabilitation clinics, HIV/AIDS testing, those caught for drugs should be diverted from the criminal system toward the drug courts that can force them into rehabilitation and other programs) , prisons (Now I have some ideas on prison reform: (1) Get rid of privatized prisons; (2) Separate violent and non-violate offenders, separate gang-members; (3) Increase educational opportunities, job training program, and offer more work release and early parole) , gang violence, and campaign finance (A public financing law is absolutely vital) off the top of my head.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That, and great big smeg-off concrete buildings. Although only in a context probably not relevant to this thread.
Tremble in the face of our giant concrete triangular phallus capitalist oppressor!
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
It's okay, the first thing that comes to mind for me with modernism is ten page long Ezra Pound poems. Carry on.
holy king
Deity
Jehoshua
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I think your using modernism as referenced to the particulars of a a certain cultural and artistic phenomenon of the period, whereas I am using it to refer to the underlying mentality that that movement had, and which exploded in the late twentieth century.
Indeed modernism as your using it was predicated ultimately on a rejection of tradition and the patrimony of the past on what was new and progressive, within a particularly individualistic framework and it did reject in many quarters the lingering objectivity of enlightenment thinking as well. Im saying that these modernist tendencies combined with the radical shift in the later part of the 20th century is a great problem, and from a philosophical standpoint it is undeniably infused, apart from the artistic and so forth particulars, with modernism.
azzaman333
meh
The disturbing influence that religious groups have over supposedly secular nations.
Long-term economic sustainability seems a pretty important issue. Australia is fairly dependent on mining, but there's only so much crap in the ground that can be sold, and only so much longer in which it will be possible to sell it. China is miles ahead in terms of renewable energy, and it does not seem that Australian politics looks to the long-term enough to deal plan for what comes next. Perhaps I see this as a bigger problem because it will have a large impact on my own economic future (won't be much fun working in a dud economy).
Edit: actually, the Aborigine answer is pretty compelling.
Edit: actually, the Aborigine answer is pretty compelling.
Jehoshua
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Of course sending a message that racism and so forth is innapropriate is good. But in Britain it seems that otheriwise reasonable expectations of civilised behaviour are now being so perverted that its inhibiting the freedoms of anyone who has views even remotely opposed to the idea of say homosexual marriage, or who criticises Islam, or who objects to to put it bluntly a liberal social agenda.
When schoolgirls are being arrested for merely asking to move to another group because they couldn't communicate with the one they were put in due to a language barrier, ostensibly due to racism, and when civil servants are fired without a hearing due to a personal view that fanatical islamic extremism is a problem (this being another instance), that is not a good direction I would think for a society to go in.
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that said, as I mentioned I personally do not think Britain is a totalitarian nation in the manner the article said yet. It is a bit "full of it" I think. But I do agree with it in the sentiment it expresses that Britain has a problem and is on a very dangerous trajectory.
Jehoshua
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To say "confusing" is actually being generous. You are completely garbling political theory and clearly have no idea what conservatism actually is. I study political theory, I know what Im talking about, what your calling conservatism neoliberalism pure and simple and to dispute that is simply to remain ignorant of political science.
On the contrary your misunderstanding the problem. The current trends are radically individualistic, and this radical individualistic almost paradoxically leads precisely to the disregard of the powerful for the common good that you point out, since they themselves really are just as individualistic as most people in society and as such are concerned (for the most part, exceptions exist everywhere) with their own self-interest over anything greater than themselves such as say law, tradition, the society. In short they don't subordinate their personal objectives and opinions to any greater authority or principle for the governing of the nation and the right ordering of a society.
Ergo this authoritarianism is a product of radical individualistic tendencies, something that has been around for a while (a while being a couple of centuries, which isn't that long in the greater scheme of things) but has really become rampant in the last 60 or so years and torn the social fabric of many countries to shreds. Indeed I like to point to a papal encyclial libertas praestantissimum on this topic, since it pointed out in 1888 that if what the "patrons of liberalism' (as it put it back then) said was really true, that this sort of authoritarianism would result if that trend became dominant and there would be nothing so egregious and profane that the rulers could put in place that people would not become forced and bound to submit too due to the rejection of a higher authority which could restrain those who rule. This I think, and you would seem to agree has come to pass.
I find it so ironic whenever I hear this line of reasoning. You always ignore that in "recent decades" the West has abandoned progressivism for a retrenchment of reactionary conservatism.
Maybe you missed the memo, but "the West" is not just the USA.
