I’m sure Nicola or Kate will wax more eloquent regarding last night’s debate about welfare, but thanks to the fact that they are done with midterms and I am not, I’m waking up earlier, and I have questions that went unresolved.
- Is it really possible to believe that coercion is exclusively synonymous with violence — that is, that no one is ever coerced to action by circumstances (economic, social/cultural, etc.)? It seems obvious to me that the scope of options a man has is circumscribed by circumstance — sometimes so tightly that only one option remains. The normative question aside, is it even coherent to say that Jean Valjean could and should have chosen to let his sister’s child starve?
- It’s widely agreed upon that intermediate institutions are usually more efficient (and sometimes even more effective) than the state, and that they allow people to connect to others in a more direct way than through taxation. But their effect on civil society as a whole seems to be a bit more ambiguous, because the people to whom one feels connected through a non-state institution are only a subset of the community in which one lives. Is there hope for communitas in postmodernity? And if so, what mediates it if not the polity (and therefore, by extension, the state)? (I suspect localism might be the answer, but cities have governments too.)
While fishing for links for this post I discovered an impressive number of charitable organizations called “Communitas,” or some variation thereof. I approve of the branding but hasten to point out that the fact that so many different organizations have such a name moots any persuasive value the name would have. And the link I eventually found, while AWESOME (Wikipedia does virtual sociology, goes meta), doesn’t quite cover it either — unless we’re trying for communitas through vanguardism.
1. No. I think Will’s question to Dr. Brooke last night was an excellent articulation of why the coercion = force claim breaks down, and I was sorry that Dr. Brooke didn’t really answer it.
2. I think we’re working with two different definitions of community. The identification of the community with the polity doesn’t work in large polities (because, let’s face it, I care a lot more about Kate than about a stranger in Nebraska), but that doesn’t mean that community is meaningless. Of course communitas is possible in postmodernity, but it’s going to look very, very different. (Blogosphere, question mark.)
1. He generally seemed to be a cautionary tale in the dangers of living and thinking for so long while adhering to the same ideology–he professed that he couldn’t even understand most of the questions that challenged his premises.
2. Large polities, check. But part of the reason I wrote this was because I’d really like examples of non-state institutions that treat even small (but not completely homogenous) polities comprehensively. Also, I’m skeptical of blogger communitas, because I think there’s something irreplaceable about common lived experience in enabling something so transcendent as communitas to work — which is why I’m trying so hard to find a way to unite a group of people whose only commonality is that they live together.
Couldn’t agree more with Point #1, Dara - the most blatant evidence of that had to be the “Can your stomach be a gun?” question, which went completely over his head…
Is it bad of me to want to send him to OSGaY?
With regard to the misunderstanding about coercion and force, please see my response under “Why-bother-with-caritas.” The focus on mincing this terminology is misguided. The use of the term coercion arises out of an attempt to push the audience’s thinking beyond concrete, perceptual acts of “force.” The cognitive need is to be able to distinguish between market events (your employer decides you are incompetent and fires you) and attacks (The KKK threatens to kill you or your employer unless you leave town because you are non-Caucasian). It may seem to be an obvious point but people whose ideology focuses on “class-oppression” want you to think that you “own” a job and thus firing you is tantamount to theft.
The explanation I give in the other post in reference to individual rights should help point a reader in the right direction but one cannot get from here to an understanding of Dr. Brook’s position without a good deal of further effort. I’m sorry that it is not possible to make it easy.
If a reader happens to have a strong technical or math background, it is possible that by college you have had an epiphany (in the secular sense) in regard to a field such as fluid dynamics, electronics, EMF, calculus, etc. By this I mean that before, you knew a set of rules or formulas, but one day you grasped how the set of forces or equations were all tied together. You realize that your previous understanding was fragmentary and you are astounded by the unity and elegance of your new integrated perspective and the ability that it gives you to decipher what a day before were complex problems. This is not about simplification; it is about proper conceptualization. Perhaps someday readers of this blog will see the connection between such things as freewill, individual rights, force, and the many related principles such as productivity, independence, justice, etc.
With regard to the comment on, “can your stomach be a gun,” the notion that consistency to a single ideology cripples a man’s ability to grasp a tortured analogy is rather specious on the face of it. It implies that one should actually become a Marxist so that one can comprehend the questions of Marxists. Or become a Pentecostal to answer their theologically entwined questions. And further that ideologies are neither right nor wrong but merely fashionable views that one should swap between to expand one’s perspectives. Study different ideologies, yes. Abandon nonsense for reason, yes. But abandon reason for nonsense? Certainly not.
The issue of understanding the students’ questions is not about ideology but rather of one’s semiotic domain and the frames of reference and examples one is exposed to in different speaking venues. I apologize if my tone includes a bit of indignation, but I think it is rather presumptuous to put the onus on Dr. Brook rather than to ask whether the questions themselves were obtuse. Let’s be fair: the specific phrase is not by any measure a common analogy. (Google it yourself - still zero hits.)
If I get the question right (and I don’t know that I do), allow me to point out that your stomach is an internal, personal facet of your existence. Perhaps what was meant was, “Can depriving someone of food be equivalent to pointing a gun at him?” Which requires one to clarify “deprive.” (Stealing food that is owned vs. declining to donate food.) Note how such “Gun-Stomach” questions evade the cause of the stomach’s condition. It reflects an orientation towards thinking about “satisfying needs” (enforced distribution) Vs. how men create food by productive effort and trade with one another. It is common to get questions in the vein of, “How can you be free if you are hungry?” I can’t undertake an explanation/definition of freedom in this reply but let me just turn it around and ask, “How can you be free if you are obliged to provide for another’s needs?” (Note that parenting is a chosen obligation.)
I hope this reply provides food for thought. Some ideas are indeed very dangerous. But a brain cannot be a gun.