blatham wrote:This is getting all-together too chummy. May you wake up tomorrow and find you have become George Galloway, heroic Scotsman.
That'ill do it. However Galloway is such an outrageous liar and charlatain that he has some perverse appeal.
Quote:My fundamental position is negative. That is, I reject the authority of any body or person to over-rule the individual in his/her personal life choices (with all the usual 'consenting, knowledgeable, mature, etc' caveats). I reject, most particularly, any claim from any body or person that they are in possession of unique or priviledged moral truths regarding anyone other than themselves personally.
Perhaps OK, but this requires some limits. What if the life choice of the person next door is to play loud redneck hymns all day & night, so you can't hear your Mahler or have the peace to make up your metaphors, etc.? What if he organizes and demands that you avoid all criticism of his music, and that it will be played in the elevator at least six hours every day, starting at the hour you habitually leave? What if he insists on labelling you an hymnophobic and including instruction in the schools on the dangers of hymnophobia and the benefits of hymnodiversity?
I suspect lots of people on one issue or another hold what they regard to be universal moral truths. Many of them even read the New York Times. Indeed most of the columnists who write for that paper appear to me to believe they have particular access to various universal truths. I have observed expressions coming even from you that suggest to me that you have certain beliefs that you regard as uniuversal and applicable to all.
Not much wrong with any of that in my view. The problem comes in how we govern our actions in response to these ideas.
Quote: Additionally, my observations of humans in community suggest that we are prone to particular behaviors or temptations as regards violating that negative position above: we tend to scapegoat; we tend to organize in 'us' and 'them' categories with the 'them' people getting the short end of the stick; we tend to seek power, status and superior wealth over others in the community and we will then seek to maintain it, denying it to others; we tend to seek/demand conformity; we tend to put controls in place on sexuality.
True enough, and some of the 'communities' that do this are quite liberal and secular too.
Quote:Thus, to my mind, the proper function of community institutions will include safeguards against these temptations in order to maintain, as completely as possible, the negative liberty position for each of us. In actual practice, this entails protecting the minority from the majority and protecting the individual from the authority demanding conformity, and protecting the weak from the powerful.
I agree, but the devil is in the details. I suspect the radical religious right evangelicals, you and Lola find so dangerous, very seriously regard themselves as a beleagured minority, fighting hard to just slow down the loss of their perogatives at the hands of a very rich, powerful and demanding secular establishment with its own notions of conformity.
There just might be an objective reality involving some immutable truths. That means that, with regard to them, some of us might be right and others wrong. Regardless of that, none of us wishes to let go of his ability to assign merit and value to things, discriminating the good from the bad, the desirable from the undesirable, and to act (within reason) on those judgements.
I believe it ultimately comes down to the recognition that all humans have moral worth ithat is ndependent of our opinions of them, and that we must retain a certain respect for it. Tolerance.
