On 1/10/19 2:26 PM, Prof David West wrote:
Second, Individualism. The list recently struggled with the idea of labeling
(categorizing) people and my response to your question and observations about
individualism will echo some of the labeling conversation.
I will resist being labeled an "individualist" because every characterization I have seen on this list is
grounded, in one way or another, on "individual rights." I do not believe that indivdiual's have
"rights," even the inalienable ones, that are not derived entirely from "individual responsibility."
I think I share some analog to your rights/responsibility duality. But I also think they are part of a social
construct/contract. "Rights" and "Responsibilities" only make sense to me in the context
of some group. I think in most cultures *many* of the rights and responsibilities of the
"individual" are so implicit in the culture that we don't think much about them until we get around
to conjuring up a constitutional governance document or facing a judge in a courtroom.
I am ultimately and absolutely responsible for, not only myself, but, labeling
again, all sentient life. While this seems absurd on its face, it is directly
analogous to the Bodhisattva. (A goal, not an achievement!)
Why draw the boundary around sentient life? Why not include *all consciousness* or *all life* and then extend that to *all patterns of matter and energy*? I'm not asking this
challengingly... I'm suggesting that in the same way expanding past "me" to "my family" to "my tribe" to "my nation" to "my
race" to "my species" to "my genus" or "family" or "order" or even "kingdom" makes some real sense.
Corollaries follow: 1) absolute responsibility also means absolute accountability,
including if a mistake is made ("do the crime, do the time");
I think the question of "accountability" vs vaguely related concepts like "retribution", "revenge",
"rehabilitation", "recovery", even "return to grace" is important but probably worth deferring here.
2) a critical dimension of responsibility is acquiring the kind of
'omniscience' that assures non-attachment;
These are somewhat the opposite of "Willful Ignorance", methinks?
3) every act (behavior) I exhibit is both informed and intentional;
In some limit, yes. But along a spectrum it would seem. Until one has achieved said
"Omniscient Non-attached Enlightenment" there is room for weakly informed and
therefore mis-applied intentions. The truck-driver hurtling toward the minivan loaded
with a model family (including a couple of cute dogs) may well have been swerving to
avoid a deer when his poor information lead him to believe that he could do so without
crossing lanes, jumping a barrier, and flying headlong into said family (in this version,
the truck-driver is neither a sex offender nor substance abuser and the brakes may or may
not work but in either case aren't being effective enough to avoid the inevitable fiery
collision).
And then we have the concept of "willful ignorance". Are you perhaps
suggesting that every act/behaviour has a component of willful ignorance?
and 4) the necessary assumption that everyone else is an "individualist" of
this same stripe.
We can assume that every one else is the same animal, whether they know it or
not. Harping on my willful ignorance, we could accuse those who don't know it
of extreme ignorance with or without extreme willfulness.
In the above I am an admitted fundamentalist fanatic. However, the culture I grew up in,
both secular and religious, strongly echoes these ideas. Growing up, I was exposed,
pretty much constantly, to the "Paradise Built in Hell" kind of individual,
group, and social behavior. (Obviously, that was not the only thing to which I was
exposed.)
I think I was as well, though some reflection exposes various pockets of
hypocrisy that I was unprepared to recognize at the time. I think something
actually *changed* during my generation, where *willful ignorance* (still
harping) replaced engaged responsibility.
This is a lot of what I am curious about... what that equation is, how it is
balanced and how we got from there to here (or even whether here and there are
anything but the same thing?).
A Geography professor at Macalester College sparked a lifelong interest in
Utopian communities. In addition to the physical environment,I was interested
in the 'mental' environment of values, principles of social organization, etc..
I have found a lot of other 'echoes' of my concept of individualism in those
that managed to survive multiple generations (a rarity).
Intentional Communities (almost by definition Utopian?) have been around for a very long
time and often fail within a generation, sometimes under the weight of their own
extremism, sometimes under the weight of "backlash" from trying to
overconstrain human instinctual drives (e.g. all the things that the 10 Commandments
feels compelled to be explicit about).
Complexicists might prefer Utopian societies exhibit Utopian qualities through
emergent properties. Jenny Quillien's writeup on her trip to Bhutan exposed a
partial example of this (perhaps).
Hope this was on point to what you asked about.
I think more to the point is to stimulate some off-axis discussion which perhaps provides a little
parallax relief from the familiar left/right debates (rants) that we (not just this group, but
society at large) seem to lock into. I sense that your own experiences and unique path through
life leads you to a similarly unique perspective. The topic of categorization recently seems
mostly to be an issue I think Glen calls "over-quantization" or perhaps it is
"premature-quantization"? This is also why I harp on breaking the RNC/DNC stranglehold on
election (including debate) processes... I want to be making my own choices in a much
higher-dimensional space... even if I might be resigned to the hazards of representative gov't (as
opposed to the hazards of a direct democracy).
