14 Comments

Heh! I read Enid Blyton when I was young, too!

But I think you have a very important thesis there, assuming I'm understanding correctly - that there really is an irreducible tension between individuals and society, as well as among those various individuals, and that composite means a necessary tension of rights and responsibilities.

Unfortunately, people like Margaret Thatcher have left an awful lot of us no longer able to see that. When people like Emmanuel Macron or the Klausenschwab try to invoke shared sacrifice, I can't, for the life of me, imagine anyone responding, since it's so glaringly obvious that when they say WE shall have to make sacrifices, they mean YOU PEASANTS will have to make sacrifices.

Well, it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out as the collective west. There's an old saying that we're all only a few meals away from barbarism, and I think we'll see that field tested REAL SOON.

*Sigh* Gonna be a nasty winter, eh?

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I stopped reading fiction (including science fiction and fantasy) 30 years ago or so, but I think you're correct that it is useful for getting a handle on the zeitgeist.

"Liberalism" is based upon a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of the human animal -- all of its follies and excesses stem from this basic misunderstanding of human biology. Those in its thrall are floating on a frothy imaginary atop the deep and abiding sea that is the natural world.

It will not end well for them.

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Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022

"Old Man's War" is a terrible book.

The Culture novels are better, and I do think you're right in seeing the Culture's "society" as one of permanent childhood. Every novel in that universe is about escaping suffocating childhood--whether it's by playing a game with high enough stakes or by having a nice little war.

It's interesting that you see the Minds as parents. I considered them just as childish and just as eager to escape. If I recall correctly, many Minds spend their days in fantasy worlds, only forced to confront the "real" when something must be attended to. Like adolescents on social media, Minds give themselves stupid, jokey names . Otherwise many Minds become artificial hermits, kill themselves, or wait with bated breath for the sign that there's An Alternative ("Excession").

"The Forever War" was great. I thought it was profound and funny (in a way that "Old Man's War" tries and fails to be).

The best science fiction since the late-70s has to be Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun". It's reflecting cultural forces very different from the above. The book's mystical and cosmic, where nothing's as it appears, and humanity persists in brutish ignorance amid the ruins of liberal and scientific progress. The modern reader finds the narrative at once alienating, disorienting, and invigorating. A devout Catholic, Wolfe envisions the return of the consecrated human community and the subsequent re-enchantment of the world.

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Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022

As you show, imagining Utopia is a difficult project. It's a pity that Marx didn't write more about his idea that in the ideal state you could fish in the morning, read in the afternoon and make music in the evening (or words to that effect). Bank's universe is in some ways ideal in that want is minimised and freedom maximised, but as you point out, that in itself is not enough. There has to be involvement in the mechanics of living, in some way, to enable people to be fully aware and responsible. Passing it all over to an AI is not the answer, now or in the future.

However, we will soon be in a position to forget about ideal states. Civilisational collapse seems to be coming along on an unavoidable trajectory. For example, see: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/23/is-there-enough-metal-to-replace-oil/

and:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/02/how-bad-can-it-get/

Not to mention the current EU project to destroy itself at the behest of the US Government.

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Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022

I've often thought of the notion of "individual" rights as emerging directly in opposition to the idea of the tribe: the freedom from having to owe obligations due to tribal affiliations often not of your choosing. As such, the Enlightenment rights were often "negative," in the sense of not being bound to some authority. For example, the right to free speech, as an Enlightenment idea, was that no authority can oblige you to shut up--but you can't oblige anyone to believe you or take you seriously, or even hear you.

The seeming change in the way free speech has been transformed is, of course, in line with your observation about how "rights" have become a tool for projection of power, as the right to free speech seems to be increasingly taken as the right to br heard, or even a right to be believed. These interpretation of the rights bring with it the "right" to have contrary speech blocked, lest they interfere with the right to be believed, among many other contradictions, that go well past the limited Liberal conception of "rights."

In so doing, we are reintroducing tribalism, albeit of a slightly different form. Rights defined as the means to extract obligations from others recreates a form of "tribal" obligations that the Liberal idea militated against, ie, in order to remain a good tribal member in good standing, you have to meet these obligations so that those whose "rights" are recognized by the tribe have thrir due--not unlike what the medieval nobility were due, in a way--not just giving a share of your produce or perform corvee labor, but social conventions, ie you bow before the local samurai who has the right to be bowed by peasants...and the right to behead the uppity lowborn who dares otherwise--and the rest of the tribe recognizes his right to do so and will help him get what he is due.

In this sense, it is not clear to me that the transformation of rights is necessarily a new development. The stylized version of the beginning of the Middle Ages, after all, starts with all the freeborn Germanic warriors supposedly being more or less equals--I assume this is the etymology behind German noble title freiherr? Of course, the right to equality among the warriors meant the right to oblige the peasants yo support that equality. (I have a hunch that the rise of racism in conjunction with slavery in early 19th century US was another perversion of the rights-obligation duality). The question is whether this "re-tribalization"/"refeudalization" can comence without sociocultural glues that accompanied their predecessors. Obvious "communal ties" that define tribes--kinship, language, etc--reinforced by common rituals whose significance everyone "believed in" underlay the system of rights-obligations duality within the same tribe (broadly defined), assuring at least acquiescence even if not active acceptance. Do we have their equivalents in a modern society? How much can they hold before they break?

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I have to disagree with the implication that courage, discipline, patriotism are viruses that aren’t important to Liberal society. I’m using your convention of typing a capital ‘L’ here.

Conservatives don’t have a lock in patriotism. The most liberal man to run for US president, George McGovern had all of those virtues.

Starting on November 11, 1944, McGovern flew 35 missions over enemy territory from San Giovanni, the first five as co-pilot for an experienced crew and the rest as pilot for his own plane, known as the Dakota Queen after his wife Eleanor. His targets were in Austria; Czechoslovakia, Nazi Germany, Hungary, Poland and German held Italy.

Then there was that other liberal Democrat, John Kennedy who by all accounts had a lot of these virtues too.

As for Heinlein’s take on these matters, the recurring motif of corporal punishment in his novels, not to mention the sexual arousal of Lazarus Long and wife after killing a group of strangers intent on killing him and raping his wife in Time Enough for Love” suggest sexual kink more than admiration of courage and patriotism.

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Gonna ponder this one. I have a hunch that I won't find much to complain about.

I read SST back in the sixties. I still think that it had as much effect on my enlisting as the familial history of military service (My family is like the lieutenant in Forrest Gump, we haven't missed a war since 1812).

I am not certain that a society can go back. I am trying to work it out in my head just how that would happen and I am coming up dry. I think that the society has changed sufficiently to disallow any simple means of returning to a concept of shared sacrifice and duty.

I suppose that while I understand that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I think that unless the liberal west gets smacked around really hard, the steady decline I envision will be essentially inevitable. I think that the closest historical analogy in the US is the roaring twenties and the subsequent depression. There are more than a couple of folks out there that believe that the depression and the reality check that it offered was the driver for the phase II of the Great war that allowed us to recover for the halcyon years of 1955-1970.

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