Waldemar Ingdahl wrote:
> >From: "Michael S. Lorrey" <retroman@turbont.net
> > > Perhaps I didn't use the correct English term, I didn't mean a nice
> > > government but the society that is not the government.
> >
> >Understood, but are you hypothesizing a civil society without government
> >present or just community movements that will create a civil society
> >while ignoring government? Typically if you try to ignore government,
> >they get really suspicious of your motives.
>
> I'm not hypothesizing, the civil society is all around us now. It is the
> institutions that people have created like clubs, associations et al. They
> have been severly blocked by the state that often has taken over or
> incorporated their activities (corporativism). No body created this (like
> the market economy) it was created by spontaneous order. I think that
> transhumanism has much to gain from supporting this, since they often create
> a more dynamist environment than etatism that often creates a stasist
> environment in society through its controls.
Ok, understood. Many civic groups have been and can be formed to help minimize
crime, for example. neighborhood watch groups abound around the country, and are
quite effective in many circumstances. There's a rather easy to see and track
correlation between high crime and a lack of community involvement and spirit.
Those that think the police are there to protect them are hopelessly wrong.
> Once again I must reccomend Virginia Postrel's "The future and its enemies".
>
> > > Indeed, I think the US naturalizes about 1 MILLION legal immigrants
> >every
> > > year. In Europe there is hardly any mobility even between the countries
> >of
> > > the European Union. And the EU has erected a strict barrier against the
> >rest
> > > of the world.
> >
> >Its our only real source of population growth. The US is, according to
> >some, a group of nations (legalistically this is true, its a federation
> >of sovereign states) on a cultural level. There's the various
> >metropolitan city states, the industrial northeast, the south, Texas (a
> >planet all its own), the south west, the northwest, and the populist
> >midwestern states, and Alaska. I'm sure that many in europe look at the
> >mobility between all of these states and cultures as a big contributor
> >to not only the dynamism but the civil distress that goes on here.
>
> But they are wrong.:-)
To a point. The benefits of a population that is less mobile is that you get to
know your neighbors much better if your families have all lived in the same
neighborhood for a couple generations. You are much more sensitive to odd
circumstances than you would be if you lived anonymously in some anonymous
building somewhere and never knew your neighbors. There is a distinct difference
between a society built on personal privacy and a society built on impersonality
and anonymity. One is built on trust and respect, while the other is built on
distrust and fear. A highly mobile society is more likely to live, IMHO by the
second instance than the first.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:25 MDT