With all the troubles and angers floating around, I thought I’d post something I started awhile back and just finished:
America at its root is an idea, one so simple that most people forget the actual source: That all are created equal.
That idea is a power that cannot die. As with any truth some will turn, or hide, or lie; it has happened before, and will again. And as all true ‘sin’ began with the desire to direct and control others, the fall of man will repeat itself until the last human being, throwing off the chains, rises at last and joins that eventual whole of humanity who accept the absolute value of individual potential and freedom, which springs from being equal.
America, as it stands today, is a slow, painful evolution of a body politic, which originally catapulted from ideals, from concepts which span time. Even if America, as she stands now, falls into disrepute or disrepair, what is American, that permanent mark on the mind of man that the foundation of a country on then imperfect, but better than its peers, equality, (which has grown better while not becoming perfect,) will remain.
America, like the Magna Carta, like Rome, like Athens and so many others, is part of the thread of humanity; at the very least it is a required step in what looks, from our too mortal vantage, like endless stairs.
None have risen to challenge the premise of America on this world. They only claim to do better than us. But yet there is no place of greater freedom, anywhere. As time wears, like every nation, as warned of every body politic, corruption is wearing on our strong foundations. But even that too will resolve in time, and our painful, slow trudge will continue. The road to a freer humanity is not an option, is not a trivial goal cast aside by any particular body politic. It has been the arc and purpose of history as we know it.
In our lives, it is easy to forget that we are blessed to live in this age. Especially, for Americans, it is easy to forget that we are the people of the wealthiest, farthest-reaching nation in history. No empire in history enjoyed the national, individual, political, military and societal power we unthinkingly wield and think of as too little.
But the temporality of a life is only worth having if we somehow better ourselves. We will not grow when mired in the sand of doubt; endless fears and musings over tomorrow and other people are the road to self-immobilization.
Now, do not read and think I’m asking for apathy; it is right to take action for what you believe. But, while doing what you think is right, while forwarding what you believe, do not surrender life, that so precious blessing, for theory and despair. All of man’s history is a testament to things turning out better than they were likely to.
Tomorrow will dawn and bring with it what it does; the only absolute end is far away, it is not now and is not close, and is entirely premised on our sloth and idle: if our race remains here when the Sun begins its death then we will have truly earned being forgotten in the abyss. But not yet, not now, we are but a speck in the moment on this world; all of human history is. But all of human history has been about something that no other moment in earth’s natural history has: Freedom in life. Freedom to choose to be more than the animal, crawling from one moment of terror to another, from the pitiful elation of a short-lived meal that will soon enough decay into hunger once more.
Every day, since man discovered the power of fear over his neighbors, we are assailed by ‘doomsday-ism’. That now is the moment of an epic, irreversible battle, which we have but one chance to win, for eternity.
While there are moments of darkness in the history of the world, the reason those seconds of true and absolute morality are so searingly remembered is their rareness, and their clarity.
The vast majority of moments, the vast majority of lives, will never know such things, nor should they. It is a service to ourselves to remember that those telling us of ‘historic moments’, (and more importantly to them personally, their place in them,) are no helpers on a path, no wise men saying what needs to be said; they are charlatans, self promoting their delusional wish to be remembered and making everyone around them a sacrifice to their narcissism.
Every life will bear its moments of clarity and change, without them life means nothing. But a life, among the billions, is not the director of billions, is not the chosen, for any or whatever cause, to irretrievably change everything for everyone else. To be such, to think of such, is to cast away individuality, to throw aside free will.
We will always be at our best when we utilize every moment and we choose to act, when we decide what to do; and are not led by the meaningless drives which ruled our ancestors and give calls to fear their power. Tomorrow will come, and bring what it will, it will yield to the tools and intellect of man; but if we spend all our time making new tools for an imagined tomorrow, we will have not only its real new problems, but all of the old ones to face as well.
All are but in themselves a single grain of sand on the beach; but if not for all the grains of sand together there would be no beach.
And but for all of human history, with its ups and downs, there would be no today; and without today’s good and bad, tomorrow is little worth.
World's Only Rational Man 
🙂
America may be an idea but if enough people who hate that idea gain power than the idea
can and will fade away for a long long time.
Not really. Even those who wish to deny true rights to others desire them for themselves. That hypocrisy, shown by any bad prince, (which would be a general phrase for illegitimate government in this discussion), hastens the end of the prince, not the people. They’re the one constant; and they find ways.
The recent discussion of the ‘cash economy’ is a great example. When the prince grows too onerous the people work around it. Not always massively, but they do. If the prince presses their boundaries too far he finds self-preservation a dangerous addition to the people’s emotions.
Many may not have found their comfort pressed yet, but it is the magical foolishness of bad princes to always drive people back to a love of freedom eventually.
I don’t think there are any general sentiments that I disagree with here, but I just kind of mused along absently about the relationship between equality and liberty, which is by no means always harmonious. At best they are in kind of a healthy tension.
I know that enforced equality is a very different thing from “created equal”, but there must be some kind of primal human drive to try to make/keep things equal, which probably harkens back to our tribal/communal roots. That is, the yearning to be free maybe co-exists uneasily with a yearning to live in a utopian state without disturbing inequalities (which implies resentments, which imply a potential for violence). (I’m not talking about the hypocrisies and blatant absurdities in actual attempts to implement “egalitarianism,” but the power, almost religious power, of the ideal.)
Thus (the point here), the taking away of and/or giving away of freedom maybe cannot be explained simply by top down control; the controllers have to be tapping into something deep and primal to get at least some degree of consent. The libertarian idea of freedom is also egalitarian, in a different way: the more freedom people will have, the more their creative energies will reduce overall inequalities. But this is a hard sell in the world where “equality” as an abstract and fairly religious ideal holds sway.
As for the inevitability of progress in liberty, I don’t know. Maybe that’s healthy and realistic, maybe that’s unjustified idealism.
Why aren’t equality and liberty harmonious (presuming we’re talking about them as non-era specific items, things that aren’t premised or requiring a certain age or technology)? Your personal liberty is with you; and by recognizing your personal liberty, and you recognizing mine, there is equality. Equality is in the opportunity to try, to make choices; those choices should always be contained to ourselves, save for those made with the free agreement of others.
If someone interferes with another’s liberty then neither has equality.
I personally see a running problem these days, where something that is very corporeal, very temporary, is linked to liberty and rights when it doesn’t belong. I think it would be better for everyone to revert to a very fundamental view of such things, imagining only those things which can survive without the protection or use of modern society and technology; and then extending the utility of such basic things via the concept of ‘in common use’. We have the right to speak, for instance; in one era papyrus, then the press, now the internet are natural extensions of that right, not because of the things, but because of the right to speak. (Remembering then that other people are not required to listen! Creating in our ability to yell, and theirs to ignore us, equality.)
Many attempts and desires to make things equal have two parts. One, good intentions. Which I think is easily comprehended as is; man’s mercy is one of his special traits.
And two, structure preservation; the vain pursuit of equality has always been an exceptional method of social hierarchy maintenance.
But again, I think it’s important to take equality, liberty and freedom out of the material realm, and append the powers of such things (equality, liberty, freedom) to the material as judges beyond the limits of men.
We’ve always had some level of ‘agreed’ trade for the comforts of society, those have grown less onerous through history. In the past the terms were effectively decreed by the self perpetuating system of governance. With the US that changed a lot, but the premise remains that some kind of trade in liberty must accompany societal stability. But if you had asked, 200 years before the US came into existence, whether a nation would vote its own leaders, have no king or despot and continue to exist, I think many would have called you mad. But yet, even then, (before then also), people were starting to think and consider, what if?
The libertarian concept as you present, I would call focused on the material and doomed because of it. At its very root, material equality is not going to happen, everyone is different, they won’t be the same height, or weight, or strength, or as smart, or fast, or just about anything. The imperfect world doesn’t allow it.
But that’s the challenge, it’s so easy to look at another and imagine better choices, outcomes, whatever. Partially because we can theorize about another instead of facing ourselves. The ultimate end of equality and freedom is the open hand, that instead of grasping at strands of air that will never be caught, just feels the breeze of the all too short moments life surrounds us with. And instead of judging that breeze, just enjoys it, or lets it pass.
It’s gone in starts and stops throughout history. But it has not ended, nor do I see reason to believe it will. If it does, if everyone gives up their individual ability to choose, to be free, then man will have stopped right where he is at the time it happens. And man will come to an end.
Looking back I don’t think I explained anything clearly at all, though to be fair to myself, I was just running after some thoughts and not aiming for a formal exposition.
First off, I was taking a “developmental” or “arche-historical” view. To spell it out more, I once saw the following arrow diagram in some anthropological book, summarizing the history of freedom in the broadest possible terms:
none are free –> one is free –> all are free
Before deciding whether its true or not, let me just lay out what it’s proposing.
1) “none are free”
This is the archaic, tribal, “primitive” arrangement. Nobody is free in the sense that all human relations are strictly ordered, many actions strictly limited, and a whole bunch of intricate taboos govern pretty much everything. The taboos essentially (their basic purpose) enforce a kind of “equality”–that is, no conspicuous differences are allowed to develop that would make people violently jealous, causing the community to erupt in wasting internal conflicts that would make co-existence impossible. Fighting over women would be an obvious example. So, you take the woman who the community decides you take and that’s just the way it is. You are not just “free” to choose that luscious babe over there, and then that other one over there.
2) “one is free”
For whatever reason (and there could be a bunch) the tribal society moves into the “big man” stage. The group confers some power on the “big man,” or allows the “big man” to keep some power he has usurped, perhaps as some kind of practical necessity. Humanity discovers (or stumbles upon) “freedom.” It is a clumsy thing, poorly understood, but the “big man” possesses a little of it, and so it’s out there for people to notice. People accept the limited freedom possessed by the “big man” because he can enforce the social order that otherwise keeps the peace, mainly by (still) enforcing equality. (The irony and contradiction in that–of the free and unequal big man enforcing unfree equality–are perhaps the grain of sand in the oyster that come into play in the next stages. The pearl of the oyster being freedom–keeping in mind that such an oyster doesn’t exist yet as such.)
3) Interim stage, “some are free”
Freedom has now been around long enough in limited forms that people can recognize what it is, more or less, and what it confers, and they can see that it is a good thing, and want, and get, more and more of it. The freedom of the “big man” comes to be claimed by, or conferred (by whatever circumstances) upon, or usurped by, some privileged groups, castes, etc. The inequalities grow–very, very different world from the primal community above. A much more advanced world. But a much less equal world. Civilization is born.
4) “all are free”
This is the stage where the internal contradictions of some being free and some not are too great, and they collapse one by one. A little bit of the historical inevitability that MG was describing, perhaps. At this stage, we can philosophize about freedom like we’re doing now and accept it as a “first principle.” It is a “first principle” indeed, in terms of importance and in terms of what we know is good, and in the fact that it belongs to everybody, but it is not “first” in terms of being “first” sequentially.
In the archaic human community (1 above) such a monstrous thing as “freedom” would be instinctively regarded with horror, because it would appears to be an imminent threat to existence. A guy free to seduce whatever babe he wants and walk up and down in front of the other huts showing off his trophy babes? You’d have a bloodbath in seconds, and then you’d have blood feuds, etc. etc. But culture (for whatever reasons, and perhaps through some of the stages outlined above) has progressed to the point where it can allow more and more freedom.
A longwinded way of saying what I tried to say to begin with, freedom and equality are, at best, in a somewhat tense relation (but I think it’s basically a good tension), and sometimes outright opposed to one another (depending on the situation and stage of cultural development, etc. etc.).
We can reach a philosophical enlightenment about freedom, sure, and to some extent MUST, but to me, it’s only realistic to see the “egalitarian” drive (which we all believe in) as not necessarily in harmony with the “freedom” drive (which we also all believe in). The “egalitarian” drive may be more primal, in fact, and not always necessarily in good ways. Likewise, freedom, may be more tenuous and “artificial” than primal equality. Regardless, it seems necessary to take these communal impulses into account if we’re talking about social and political philosophy.
We can see in McDonald’s an example of freedom, of equality, and of these strange but deep rooted egalitarian impulses. McDonald’s represents a highly developed stage of society, with a lot of freedom (to order what you want) and equality (nearly everyone can afford it, and all customers get the same deal). It has also been the target of activists who want to smash its windows and are somehow deeply enraged by McDonald’s. They are (to me) clearly driven by some kind of egalitarian impulse, which kicks into some enraged form somehow by the mere existence of McDonald’s, that most egalitarian of institutions. Of course, we can point out all the weirdness and hypocrisy and self-contradiction, but where’s this coming from? To me, it’s a manifestation of that archaic egalitarian impulse. They don’t like people being free to obtain all that warm, tasty, waxy paper wrapped goodness. Because . . . . because . . . . somewhere there’s someone who can’t afford it? Maybe that’s the justification, but in the archaic community you wouldn’t walk around chomping down on your Big Mac either. It would be a profound offense against the communal order, taking more than your share and parading it in front of people and pissing them off.
Anyway, am I saying the “anti-McDonaldsists” essentially hate civilization? Do they want to return to the egalitarian state, which is necessarily less free, but somehow more “pure”? I think to some extent they do. And I can laugh at them or have contempt for them, but only up to a certain point. Maybe there’s a part of me that hates McDonald’s, too, in some other kind of way, that big, gobbling, globalizing, plasticizing, parking lot paving destroyer of better and more wholesome (but less free) ways of life. (Not arguing a point here, just poking around my subconscious.)
I think these kinds of undercurrents are pretty real–even if many of the historical particulars turn out to be wrong. How much weight do I want to give this kind of stuff in defining freedom and equality? How much should I just ignore it and move on to the deeper (non-temporal) fundamental principles? Well, I don’t really know. I’m just noting first of all that it’s there, and second of all that it’s probably important enough to factor in.
All of this is not to counter MG’s most recent reply post but just to clarify (hopefully) the original points I was trying to make. We may of course be talking about apples and oranges.
I don’t think you need to worry about it, there’s no need to be fair to yourself; to me this was a kind of written train of thought, so I’m fine with however you approach it.
My conceptual issue with the anthropological chain is its presumption of societal structure. My mind can’t really accept more than the two extremes: Creation where man is full-borne or Evolution where man springs from the beast.
To birth a magical humanity with what might as well be called enlightened savagery seems a bridge too far. How do you prevent the natural inequalities that occur in the wild? How are they adjusted for when they happen?
Creation presumes freedom, or the apple would never have happened. (Remember, the best test of freedom is the ability to make the wrong choice.) There isn’t much to imagine or theorize in that train of thought.
Evolution however, presumes a proto-condition where the animal drives rule. In those there is no real society limiting actions. Just the ability to enforce your choices. Practically, it’s a perfect individual freedom for the strong, without any equality in physical artifact (physical artifact being physical objects of any duration). (God made men, Sam Colt made them equal! And this is important because the physical artifact, created by the intellect, overrode the power of simple strength.) To think about that in regards to females: The Alpha or a younger, stronger male is obviously in a position to do what they will, so long as they back up their demands with violence. (And of course, others can challenge those demands with violence; a monstrous, but literal, non-physical equality.) In the case of a challenge for authority, would it really be any different from a pride-lord being challenged? There isn’t a lack of freedom there…any can choose to try for anything, they’re equally free to try…and this stage of equality comes from being able to match violence with violence, or violence with intellect. That isn’t putting those things in tension to my thinking, equality gives the ability to try, nature cheats the ability to try of being materialistically equal (strength, speed) because of its vagaries.
In such a system they all have considerable latitude, and even the power to deny their help to the group, which might well hurt the group notably. But such a system still has greed, and as the pride-lord eats first, why would early humans act any different?
So I guess what I’m saying is that, while proto-man was bestial, and his life was brutal and short, he enjoyed extreme freedom…in accord with his ability. (That makes the actual historical position of ‘from each according…to each according’ a fascinating idea.) The problem with brutish freedom and equality was in the ability, and interest in, denying it to others at will. In a way this merges both 1 and 2 in the same era based on the whims of he who leads (and probably recommends Machiavelli’s advice to Princes).
Thus I’d say that as inequality is created by the greed of the Alphas, we come to the ‘some are free’, that the special human ability to detect inequity created a constant stress with ‘those who lead’. The most important transition leading to this was probably the beginning of understanding that there is a tomorrow that can be planned for. Blood feuds also require the era of knowing there’s a tomorrow. But in knowing there’s a tomorrow, the hungry hunter knows that his first hunt tomorrow won’t sate his hunger, to sate his anger a trade must be made.
That stress would force those who kept and began to try to confer power without violence (an act of self preservation, not nobility) to make concessions. (If you want a child to take over the Alpha for instance, and they’re not able to win it in a fight, you need to make concessions to those that might fight, to allow the transition. So what do you do? Give up your eating first at the morning kill? By doing so, by yielding an old power of the Alpha, physical artifact equality starts to exist. By providing physical artifacts the discussion is diverted from the conceptual, and the intellectual (our greatest power), both of which continue irregardless of the physical; and is turned to the momentary physical, which can so easily blind people with trinkets; especially when brawn was the norm. If a man’s stomach is sated he might leave the desire for the Alpha female alone, for instance.) So to create a world where soft power transmission occurs consistently you need to remove other people’s real power. And most importantly their capacity for spot violence. Why is murder our oldest law? Did killing the pride-lord, who didn’t hunt anymore, really hurt the group? Or did he convince others it would and thereby protect himself from violence with intellect? Did the first one to make a blanket law like that realize that by limiting it he limited himself? Or was that the concession he had to make to protect himself from another looking to advance?
So in a way I’m stating my belief that we’re seeing a return to origins. We were born in freedom, freedom that we paid dearly for the existence of, but, we didn’t have the ability to really enjoy because enjoying it meant enforcing it. Now with technology and much learning we’re growing into the ability to enjoy nature’s birthright. But we’re also growing out of the primitive limitations placed on it by the animal mind, we no longer need the constant battle for Alpha to have our will. We don’t need to premise our rights on denying them to others. But in that, we have to leave behind the physical artifact equality or we will revert to the Alpha mindset. (Like the OWS protests, all of which were really concerned with physical artifacts, and compelling others regarding those. Since the physical always has some kind of limit there will always be grounds for citing inequality in physicality.)
I have great fear over any definition of equality or freedom based on (note the based on) goods and materials. They are so transitory, there will never be a time when everyone is equally fed, there is no point to such a goal. Nor will there be times of truly equal housing, clothing, education. They’re simply not possible because people, by nature, are different. And when we cross into things that are beyond our immediate power to produce, things which require others, we return to a world of equality based on our ability to act against others, to the Alpha made by spilling the blood of the last Alpha. That’s a theoretical equality and I can see maybe the outlines of your tension between it and freedom, but still see that in such a thing others have freedom against him too.
Thanks for all the discussion, feel free to say more if you want.
Interesting, MG.
“My conceptual issue with the anthropological chain is its presumption of societal structure. My mind can’t really accept more than the two extremes: Creation where man is full-borne or Evolution where man springs from the beast.”
In our discussions I don’t think we went all the way back to hominization, which to me is a different (though obviously related) question. I started from an already hominized group. Having said that, the social/communal nature of man is much more important to me than it is I guess for you. You’re positing(i think) the first human as a fully realized individual. I accept that philosophically, but not developmentally or anthropologically, because of the social nature of the being. (Even a modern human can’t be fully realized without the social and lingusitic–e.g. the “wild boys” who missed the linguistic triggers and never developed a complete human consciousness, or autism.) The way I reconcile that is, once you have the human person, well then of course, yeah, it becomes perfectly obvious that–naturally and justly and rightly–the person has to be seen as an individual, and potentially a fully realized individual. But the actual path to development was different, I presume, as it is even with us. A loose analogy might be mathematics which developed in all kinds of quirky irrational ways but once it was there you find something universally true and beautiful that has been hiding in there the whole time and waiting to be realized or understood. So it is with the human, maybe?
“To birth a magical humanity with what might as well be called enlightened savagery seems a bridge too far. How do you prevent the natural inequalities that occur in the wild? How are they adjusted for when they happen?”
I think there’s a non-magical explanation for that, which is suggested by your “Sam Colt made them equal.” (I’m following the line of certain anthropological thinkers here, so this is not really original.) The alpha structure breaks down as soon as you’ve got the primeval equivalent of a Colt (say, rock or stick). A pissed off male is suddenly equal with an alpha, at least in an enraged state, with a weapon in hand. And a circle of pissed off males with weapons are VASTLY superior to an alpha. The communal order develops (or so I am positing) out of this threat and the awareness of it. Hence, a strong, interlocked, communal, egalitarian order with a lot of taboos that very strongly discourage blatant inequalities UNLESS they develop around ritual structures or the “big man” (who is not really a humanized alpha animal but a “position” that slowly and fitfully developed out of the egalitarian set-up). So, going back to the hominization question, I think the first humans or proto-humans are not in an alpha arrangement, but in an egalitarian arrangement. That’s the human soup where the free individual can slowly emerge.
But God knows, this is deep crap. It’s not like I’m rigidly maintaining this position. So easy for me to be wrong.
As for the creation/evolution question in there, I’ve more or less resolved it for myself, not in the sense of “this is how it happened” (which I don’t know) but in the sense of being able to believe that humanity emerging from the animal (your “springs from the beast”) is not inconsistent with there being a created order or even man being a created being. The question of “the fall” is much more difficult one for me than the question of creation. (That is, how on earth can we envision an “innocent,” pre-lapsarian human?)
I personally just view it is a continuous arc, so I was wandering further back in time. I’d agree that man’s social/communal nature is important, but I see it as a development from the pack animal. I wouldn’t say the first human was a fully realized individual, but I would say they had all of the components to be so; and lacking the societal strictures, a more ready ability to exercise those components we call freedom. But I somewhat think you’re perhaps putting too much into the definition of fully realized, based on the view you have from inside society; that’s a judgement call, with too many moving parts which aren’t actual constants. An individual can not be an individual if it needs external approval for it; that defeats the point since an external source will create rigid expectations which will produce more clones than individuals. That someone doesn’t fit in society doesn’t mean they’re not individuals. Society to me is another creation of man’s intellect, the pack wasn’t strong enough; we made rules which made it stronger, they became ‘society’ when participated in. Mathematics are an interesting concept in this since they’re absolutes that don’t need man or any of his knowledge to exist, we merely apply our presentation of the ‘thing’, which is a constant; how is a human individual any different, is it not an individual or is it merely one that hasn’t been equated yet?
I think we’re kind of agreeing and disagreeing on order and purpose; some of the steps I agree occurred, but I definitely don’t give egalitarianism much credit. I think we can still see the Alpha around us at times, in politics especially, so I don’t think it broke down, though it is much more controlled (and I’d posit, destined to be erased entirely, in time).
The pissed off male always had the equality and freedom to vie for the Alpha.
The first weapon had the power to either shorten or lengthen the rein of the Alpha depending on who had it. But with that first weapon came increased hunting effect, which caused increased population; I’d guess the exploding population had more to do with stabilizing internal relations. I’d also guess the best weapon maker took and kept Alpha pretty handily, and encouraged stability with force; creating a feedback loop. (The best weapon-smith takes the lead, we eat better, our population grows; we hunt more and fight each other less, and our population grows more. The animal decides it is satisfied easily, our tools provide that quickly.) I don’t really see egalitarianism doing much, save for the times it is inflicted on leaders by the body of a group. In primitive society I think most structures had to do with keeping things ‘safe’ for the parties involved, and not pushing too far because doing so was a risk; risk being the prime calculus for survival. That calculus told existing leaders when to stop fighting, and upstarts when not to also. But it did not halt fights or animalistic action.
So my shorter response is: The animal isn’t egalitarian, it’s just trying to live. But unburdened by virtually everything, the animal is free.
I suppose I should lay out my opinion on it in a longer post at some point for clarity.
I agree that evolution doesn’t disprove a created universe.
The fall I think is pretty easy, were they free or not? Made in God’s image means free to choose and act. They did. The real question of the fall is what purpose of God’s was forwarded by his allowing it (or that he will achieve in spite of it)?
Thanks for the deep response, as always, MG. I’m lagging way behind — I haven’t even got to the other paragraphs of your previous one. I’m hitting lots of work now and I’m afraid I can’t keep up, but just to let you know I’ve been reading and appreciating. To clarify, the “fall” itself is easy for me to understand, but I have trouble envisioning a “pre-fall” humanoid type. (Though I accept it on the faith level.)
I definitely feel the work part myself lately.