Hi David -- I suffered another computer crash last week, which set me back a few days in responding to your posts.
> See the Archer link I posted earlier. > I find this hierarchy in my experience all the time. > As an organism I need to eat and mate, > as a citizen, worker and consumer I work, > buy and vote, and value the country I live > in, people I share it with, western culture, science, etc, > that make this life & society possible. Lots of hierarchy > here, and often some conflicts. As a western european > individual I see lots of collective processes that are > required for me to be possible at all, and as an active > individual I generally have to act in response to and > participating in collective activities. Ones individuality > is often private, publicly we largely have roles to > perform. We may need more democracy and equality > to give us more opportunity to act as individuals and > citizens as opposed to mere employees and subjects > and consumers no doubt. I reviewed Margaret Archer's article and grimmaced as I read her description of the postmodern collectivist: "Postmodernism has massively reinforced the anti-realist strand of idealism in social theory and thus given ballast to social constructionism. This is the generic view that there are no emergent properties and powers pertaining to human agents, that is ones which exist between human beings as organic parcels of molecules and humankind as generated from a network of social meanings. The model of Society's Being is social constructionism's contribution to the debate, which presents all our human properties and powers, beyond our biological constitution, as the gift of society. From this viewpoint, there is only one flat, unstratified, powerful particular, the human person, who is a site, or a literal point of view. Beyond that, our selfhood is a grammatical fiction, a product of learning to master the first-person pronoun system, and thus quite simply a theory of the self which is appropriated from society. Constructionism thus elides the concept of self with the sense of self: We are nothing beyond what society makes us, and it makes us what we are through our joining society's conversation. Society's Being thus impoverishes humanity, by subtracting from our human powers and accrediting all of them-selfhood, reflexivity, thought, memory, emotionality and belief-to society's discourse." I'm confused by her term "anti-realist strand of idealism", as I thought idealists have always been regarded as anti-realists, and I don't see social constructionism as an idealistic movement. But she certainly confirms my previous statements deriding the loss of 'selfness' in our modern era. If the individual is not an agent of value, then mankind has lost its agency, since "society" only represents the collective behavior of an animal species. To my way of thinking, this mindset diminishes the value of philosophy and any enlightenment one might gain by going against the 'conformist' view. As a citizen of a western country founded by rugged individualists, I also take objection to your assertion that "we may need more democracy and equality to give us more opportunity to act as individuals and citizens as opposed to mere employees and subjects and consumers". I suspect you're being facetious, but "equality" has never fostered democracy and is antithetical to individualism, whether citizens are "mere employees" or successful entrepreneurs. Citizens prosper by educating themselves, improving their working skills, and assuming the risks necessary to advance their status in the community, not by conforming to the lowest common denominator. Isn't that what Pirsig meant by Arete -- the 'excellence of a man'? Do you enjoy being coerced into paying the state to support a dependent underclass? This liberal ideology (to which, I regret, the U.S. has now succumbed) reduces individual initiative and freedom, while increasing the prospect that our respective nations will wind up as third-world countries. You can have your social egalitarianism. Personally, I don't see this surrender to the masses as cultural "idealism", but unreasonable, unhealthy default to a less enlightened age. Regards, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
