The trail to “where I’m going” has gotten pretty steep, so it may be a while ’til I can wave from the summit.

The summit, if I’m not hallucinating it, is something like: ‘Culture’ is culture-bound.

This is not so. I have argued, tentatively, that many of the oppositions created between the group and the individual are artificial. but I have nowhere said that the community is more important than the individual.”

Sorry if I have not runderstood your ideas correctly. There I go again, getting some exercise by jumping to conclusions. I do a lot of that.

I have trouble deciphering your positions. I have a million anecdotes from my life to illustrate my points. I tend to work from an experience backwards to see where it fits in the generalities of the big picture. Just my way of doing things.

Glad to see that you agree with most of what I wrote. It’s a start.

Re: The 4 propositions on which you “agree” with ShrinkWrapped

I’d like to ask you a question that’s preparatory for a later question. If I have this answer, I can follow-up by speaking to you, rather than making a speech to some merely-hypothesized audience.

I would describe the diction of those 4 items as ‘philosophical’ or ‘scientific’; i.e., they give me the impression that you (pl., ShrinkWrapped included) are articulating what seem to you to be universally-quantified truths.

Question: Do you consider those 4 propositions to be culture-bound, or not?

Thanks.

A country that is able to have 95% of its working age population be productive is going to be more prosperous and have competitive advantages over a country that is only able to get 80% of it’s working age population productive. So, there are advantages for a country that is able to make effective investments in the education and sanity and social cohesion of its people.

It is also probably necessary to stipulate that having people starving in the streets would negatively affect our quality of life due to the ugliness of it all. Not even really a moral principle — I’m just willing to spend a few dollars so I’m not tripping over corpses on my way to work. To my mind, those two principles are all you need as the rationale for most government assistance.

I would also stipulate that an economy in which middle class incomes are rising is more conducive to steady growth than an economy in which the income growth is enjoyed only by the wealthy. It is a point of economics, rather than of morality.

It is rare that you need moral philosophy to judge whether the benefits of a government program are worth the costs — which is the conversation that we as Democrats want to be having.

To my mind, indulging in moral philosophy gives conservatives too much leash to run off into their abstract ideology.

The decisive differences that drive our political debate aren’t issues of moral philosophy but issues of risk assessment. For one side, the preeminent threat facing the country is Islamic terrorism and they are willing to spend trillions of dollars fighting it. For me, global warming is a bigger threat. This is hard to adjudicate because it is so wrapped up in people’s experience of anxiety.

Only a small fraction of our tax dollars goes to ‘supporting others.’ And the 50% rule of thumb is empty.

A country in which the citizens pay 20% of their gross income for Federal taxes and 10% of their income in state taxes and 20% of their income towards health insurance and 10% of their income towards student loan payments would not be better off than a country that paid 50% taxes but the government paid for health care and higher education.

You believe in the idea that the individual is not as important as the community.

This is not so. I have argued, tentatively, that many of the oppositions created between the group and the individual are artificial. but I have nowhere said that the community is more important than the individual. You cannot find any such statement by me, because I don’t believe it. For me, the community is without value if it is not first understood as an aggregate of individuals, all of whom must first be valued in their individuality. And that is a liberal idea. Most of the cultural developments of the past fifty years that discomfort conservatives (not without reason) are expressions of that belief.

What we have in your debate with SW is the same process by which we try to determine laws, rules, and customs that we will all accept and abide by, even if with some grumbling. You believe in the idea that the individual is not as important as the community. I hope youm realize that that is the primary tenet of tribalism. IMO, humans are trying to move away from tribalism toward a proper balance of individualism and tribalism. That is what almost all the political arguments have been about and will continue to be about.

You mentioned free speech as one area of agreement between you and SW. That is a departure for a liberal because in many bastions of liberal thought there have been attempts to limit free speech. Some of the worst have been on various campuses where they have attempted “speech codes.” Good for you for being for unrestricted free speech. I am aghast that Helen Thomas has been fired for speaking what she believes is the truth. Do I agree with her? No, but she opened our eyes to her true beliefs by speaking out. And that is just why free speech is very important. It brings out thopse those wrong headed ideas.

Social Security is another area of agreement. Well, I’m a receiver of Social Security. Have been getting the checks for 15 years now. They have helped my financial status, no doubt about that. However, when I first applied for SS I looked at my record of payments (my taxes plus my employer’s taxes) into the system. They amounted to about $125,000 over a period of 47 years. I’m no actuary, but I did a rough calculation of what that money would have been worth had it been accumulating in a passbook savings account at 4.5% interest. It was enough that I could have afforded to pay myself what the SS program pays plus I would own the account and could leave any remainder to my heirs. When looked at that way the program is not such a good deal for those who pay in for a long time. The government was supposedly providing a forced saving program that would provide income in my old age even if I screwed up and didn’t save anything myself. Okay, but they didn’t invest the excess money they were taking in. If they had, the system would not be in trouble now. The idea of SS was a compassionate one done with good intentions. Problem is, the pols could not resist spending that excess money and hoping things would, well, just turn out well. The idea of a forced saving account was okay, but the execution has not been. Therefore, I’m not necessarily a big supporter. What will they do next is my question? My guess is that since I managed to save and invest some money for my old age that they will tell me I no longer qualify for the plan. Sorry about that., you old capitalist. There are others who didn’t save for their old age – they come first. Oops, there I go showing my cynical side again.

Thanks. I found your first paragraph helpful in understanding what you’re talking about. I was led astray by your hyperlink to the philosophical literature on ‘moral responsibility’ (a tar-pit!) in your previous post.

I’ll try backing-up and re-reading now.

You elevate my discussion undeservedly to refer to any “theory” of affective connections. I have used that phrase, to my mind, in the manner of ordinary language, to refer to the emotional responsiveness and psychological identifications that humans can develop in relation to each other, at even the most distant remove and minimal degree. ShrinkWrapped could speak about these much more professionally and knowledgeably than I. Like the phrase itself, the phenomenon I refer to with it is no more than what can be observed countless times a day in countless and even the smallest human interactions.

As easy as it is to observe the manifestations of human empathy, it is also easy to observe daily the small failures of it, and to note in history the monstrous failures. While technology expands the range of our empathy, and our sense of moral responsibility – and these observations are hardly extraordinary or uniquely mine – it also expands the range of our moral failures. As in the Holocaust, the technology can be a tool in the breaking of affective connections, in the degrading machinery of mass murder, but it also expands the opportunities to feel empathy and still not act on it. At the end of the eighteenth century there would have been no expectation that an American government and people would – could – act in response to the mass murder of some group of people many weeks of travel away in mostly Eastern Europe, or of some ethnic minority somewhere in Africa. Now we can act – always with uncertain effectiveness – and failures to act will always raise moral questions that would not earlier have arisen.

An extraordinary element of the Posen speeches is that Himmler considers questions of empathy, as an obstacle to be (proudly) overcome in the exterminations, as, in a range of other affects, to be required as a matter of honor in relation to other Aryans while being withheld from inferior peoples. Only dehumanization makes this possible, and it is a conundrum of human personality that is well known in the Nazi phenomenon. But there are so many people far more expert than I on this subject, no doubt you too, who have thought about these issues with greater concentration than have I.

Could you fill in how your theory of “affective connections” deals with negative affects and the way they can underpin (anti-?) moralities? Himmler’s Poznań speech [full German text; English excerpt; excerpt on YouTube] makes a good test-case, I think.

Thanks.

That we have evolved a system whereas the power of coercion requires a majority vote, and is guided by the rule of law, is a great civilizational achievement, but a rose by any other name is still a rose. Power is power. I surprised you have the gall to try that slight of hand on us.

You have said a lot about empathy, but empathy is a personal matter. As a spiritual consideration it is better that people not wallow in selfishness, a meaningful life cannot be self-centered. Most religions preach that. Those are noble sentiments. But you have remained vague on exactly how you relate that to government.

You say the one and the many need not be opposed; but as a matter of fact the are often, though not always, opposed. It’s like eminent domain: a new freeway may mean I have to give up my house. I may agree in principle that freeways are good (better traffic flow) but I really don’t want to move. I won’t unless I’m forced. That’s why we have rules about when government can use its coercive power. It has to be for a good reason. If I am forced to move at least I can know that it was done by a fair process. We, as a nation, have agreed to certain rules limiting the power of government and generally agree to live within them.

But you seem to be arguing for some reevaluation of the relationship between the individual and the government. Outside of a general mushy moral argument that we should be more caring of others, what are you proposing exactly? What formal changes in our present system of rights and duties would you change?