iwpoe wrote:

I don't know what that would properly mean. The end of public education? The end of economic policy? If you mean something other than the facsimile of some pater familias that hasn't existed for a least 2 centuries or the empty social reassurance of fathers and mothers that they are very important, you surely mean to call for a massive social reorganization.

Some of the problem is that the dichotomy between collectivism and individualism, so much in vogue when the worry was communism, was never quite right in the first place and is simply no longer relevant. At the very least, modern *global* society is constituted by a bloomin' buzzin' confusion of actors brought into a kind of harmony by powerful bureaucratic organizational practices not only essential to the state but which are also essential to all large economic actors active globally today. If you insist on the individualist/collectivist vocabulary- the modern world is, structurally speaking, one in which every single living person in society is a publicly acting individual *on the basis of* a massive impersonal collective structures. I mean, generally speaking, getting away from the kind of world we're in would mean, today, living in the wilderness, and even that is probably a privilege of a greater social structure making that kind of living unattractive to the vast majority of actors. Even libertarian-supported ideas- for instance bitcoin -are simply attempts to further depersonalize a collective structure. This cannot possibly fix the situation such that a man must make his own life for himself.

The problem with trying to "end" these structures- "the cost" -besides the fact that the practical limitation of the time requires that actors on a large scale, which would be necessary to end the modern way of doing things, generally must be coordinated by the very use of the structures to be eliminated, is that society's modern biological being is entirely sustained by this level of development. You can't scale back what's been accomplished because you simply couldn't support the way we live otherwise. If you could change things by magic over night you likely would reduce the world population catastrophically by half and the world standard of living similarly.

I wish for quite radical decentralism and traditionalism. I wouldn't pursue it in a radical way but I don't see why we can't pursue it gradually. Economically I am something of a Schumacherite and distributist. Obviously, I dispute the more alarmist claims against such positions, such as about the ability to supply food and the like. Indeed, I would argue the current state-capitalist system is unsustainable - socially, culturally, economically, ecologically, and spiritually.  I don't know if I would get rid of all state schooling, but I'd localise it.

 I don't think it likely traditional conservatives like myself will achieve much in the foreseable future. I don't put much store in practical politics at the moment. But I don't see why we shouldn't hope for what little victories we can get.​ After all, it seems to me things can get much worse in the modern world, and likely will. The time when we traditionalists can shrug and turn our backs on politics, and be left alone to live our lives in peace with our families, communities, and faith, may not last for ever.

 I mysef think the individualist-collectivist disjunction is flawed precisely because it leaves out the centrality of intermediate associations. Individualists tend to focus on the individual alone and collectivists on a grand collective such as society and the nation. They both ignore, not just each other, but the essential mediating role of associations like family and community.

Much more could be said, but isn't it enough to say from a natural law position that to reproduce (in the broad sense of raising children) is good, in general, because it is one of our natural ends.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Much more could be said, but isn't it enough to say from a natural law position that to reproduce (in the broad sense of raising children) is good, in general, because it is one of our natural ends.

Yes, and that's a further thing which increases my scepticism towards Natural Law accounts. There seems a conflict between our Animal and Rational natures - unlike (for the sake of the argument) other animals humans have personal immortality and thus no need of that blind instinctive striving for population immortality. This is not to say there aren’t good reasons for having children but I don’t think it can be these.

 

seigneur wrote:

There you are again.

You mean 'go', Ronnie.

seigneur wrote:

Do I have to explain to you what is wrong with this statement or do you see it yourself?

You're going to have to explain it.

seigneur wrote:

I'll try to explain.

Then you give not an explantion but an exposition.

seigneur wrote:

Just look around you. Books, houses, parents, other people, laws, government, etc. Turn on your TV and you will see news about all that. This is society. Doesn't it want anything? Doesn't it do anything?

Not strictly, no. I might be willing to admit "doing" as an appropiate verb, but not 'act' in the strict sense of having a volition.

I mean, look, I flirt with Hegelianism; I'm not ignorant of what you're talking about, but society doesn't have a will. There is an intelligibility to society, and there is something like the manifest structure of society that one might talk about *as if* it were the possession of some single person, but society does not decide, plan, or act except metaphorically. When we all vote on some single group activity there is a metaphorical sense in which we all 'act', but one cannot directly map the psychology of the individual onto the ontology of the group.

You cannot, for instance, have a discussion with "society". You cannot be a friend of "society". You cannot owe a debt *literally* to society, as such. Society does not, as such deliberate and decide. Society does not, as such, have duties or moral responsibility, though it coordinates people in ways that entail that they, individually, have certain responsibilities.

seigneur wrote:

Are you seeing those things? Are we living in the same universe?

We are. I think you're being sloppy. I wouldn't usually critique your metaphorical language. Many cases are perfectly fine- e.g. "Ameirca declares war." -but not when one uses it to make inferences that only apply to individual wills, as you had done previously.

seigneur wrote:

Marriage is not required for reproduction, this is true. However, provided that society cares about self-regeneration, then society would give such a signal of caring, e.g. by instituting marriage in the relevant sense, i.e. heterosexual marriage.

I don't know if that's true. "Society" presumably cares about a lot of things- eating for instance -but it doesn't seem to follow that it needs to institute by statute a singular institution of "fixed status" for the proper facilitation of eating. It's intelligible that reproduction *as such* could take care of itself, and indeed, it seems to.

seigneur wrote:

Marriage has been instituted all over the world if you have not been blind to the history of the last few millennia. Surely there was a reason why this was done and why marriage is still the central concept of laws in every country. Just show me a country where laws don't acknowledge the value of marriage. They do, and there's a reason for it.

I didn't deny this. But you rest your case for the reasonability of the exclusivity of marriage on reproduction just as such, which seems both manifestly false and false on argument.

Denial of the intelligibility of *your account* of marriage is not denial of the intelligibility of marriage nor of all accounts.

seigneur wrote:

If you think the reason for marriage is not "inherent" or such, well, I am not in the business of convincing you, because someone who thinks that society does not exist is already convinced of weirdest things.

I denied that. I'm not in the business of convincing you to read, sir.

Also, I will point out that you have only given expositions of marriage in terms of its instrumental value for reproduction (which itself seems to have at best obscure inherent value, if any) not its inherent value.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/05/2015 11:40 am)

It is not society as such that's a mere metaphor but 'society wants' 'society needs' etc in most cases. I've said this before quite a few times, and you seem to insist on reading me along the lines of this silly atomic individualist narrative you started with.


A couple is real, but when I say "a couple wants to buy a house" I am using a loose metaphor to mean that Bob and Sally both want or some one of them wants while the other at least participates. I do not mean that the couple, as such, has a desire as separable from the desires of its members. The couple, as such, may have properties not reducible to the properties of its members, but most psychological properties belong properly to the members, not the couple.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/05/2015 2:52 pm)