Fanello - this civil society crap the EU and US are plying on us is more
appropriately termed bullshit. Mind control has reached a new level of
absurdity.
Regards
Joe Baptista
On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, Jay Fenello wrote:
>
>
> Anyone watching the President of the
> World Bank on C-Span may be wondering
> about his references to "civil society"?
>
> Here's what someone in the know has said:
>
> "Civil society is supposed to be the counterpart
> to business and government in policy making networks
> (cynical intepretation: the US and EU got really
> scared by Seattle)."
>
> Here's more . . .
>
> http://www.civsoc.com/issues.htm#issue1
>
> Full cultural citizenship, full participation in a liberal democratic civil
> society, requires citizens to undergo a certain difficult and often painful
> process of individualization. Citizens must learn to see both self and
> other as free and equal individuals, as individuals who stand apart from,
> or who are not exhaustively described by, the attributes they possess as
> members of particularistic ethnic, religious or class-based communities. To
> persuade citizens to undergo this process of individualization, special
> cultural resources are needed. Among them are moral ideals that define as
> praiseworthy the participation in this individualizing process. Two such
> moral ideals proper to modernist liberal civic culture are the ideals of
> authenticity and autonomy. Authenticity -- roughly, the mandate to become
> "who one really is," and autonomy -- roughly, the mandate to "be one's own
> person," have shaped personal life in the West for over three hundred
> years. To the extent that these moral ideals have been effective, they have
> produced citizens whose individualized identities have made them capable of
> full participation in civil society. However, the credibility of these
> moral ideals is entirely dependent upon notions of human identity --
> notions like "real self" and "free will" influenced by Enlightenment
> culture. To the extent that Enlightenment conceptions of reason and
> knowledge are called into question, the moral ideals of authenticity and
> autonomy lose their persuasive power. A civil society cannot exist without
> the cultural means necessary to reproduce its members. If the ideals of
> authenticity and autonomy are no longer effective in producing the kind of
> individualized identities required for full cultural citizenship, new
> ideals must replace them. But what form will these new moral ideals take?
> How will personal life in the post-Enlightenment West be transformed by
> these new ideals?
>
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Jay Fenello,
> New Media Strategies
> ------------------------------------
> http://www.fenello.com 770-392-9480
> Aligning with Purpose(sm) ... for a Better World
> ------------------------------------------------
> "If we want to change the world, we have to
> begin by changing ourselves" -- Deepak Chopra
>
