From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2003 - 17:01:19 MST
On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 05:54:07PM -0500, Technotranscendence wrote:
> No, I'm not going to give my take on Mishima here! (How many will get
> that reference here without resorting to google?:)
The nerdy student on the first row raises his hand. :-)
> Instead I want to ask a general question:
>
> Is patriotism an Extropic value?
>
> Related to this is nationalism an Extropic value?
Hmm, what would make anything an extropic value? As I see it,
the thing would have to lead to greater personal extropy and
possibly also greater extropy for others (I wouldn't use the
term for something that decreased my extropy while helping
others, or something that increased my extropy but decreased it
for others).
Clearly helping out one's group can be such a win-win
situation: we get gratitude, reciprocal altruism, our shared
values are supported and so on. But how far can this group be
extended while still keeping it win-win? In some situations
this seems to be doable almost to any degree, like in science.
But we are far more limited in other aspects. We are usually
happy to help family members and friends, relatively helpful to
people similar to ourselves or part of our community, less
supportive of remotely linked people and even less supportive
for people we do not know or feel we have any kinship (genetic,
social, mental) with. While I might agree with my close friends
to hire a brawny guy to protect us and our shared interests, in
a much larger group there is a diffusion of responsibility and
the marginal cost I am willing to pay for hiring protection
goes down.
I would say patriotism is the virtue of supporting and
promoting one's group, one's true patria, so to say. Clearly
extropian if it is reciprocal as above and the group is
something that could be called extropian. But that is separate
from the issue of where one draws the line around it (or even
how many groups one belongs to and how they are nested - am I a
transhumanist, a Swede, an European, an intellectual, a human
or person living in Hagalund foremost?). One common answer to
that is that one should regard one's nation as one's primary
group. That is what I would call nationalism. But as it is
commonly stated it is not obviously extropian or even rational;
nations can be defined in many arbitrary ways, are often very
large groupings defined more by a shared administrative
hegemony than any real similarity and the goals of the nation
group are often not win-win with one's own goals. So my answer
would be that in general, patriotism is extropian, but
nationalism is not.
People with a more altruist bent might want to include even
cooperation with one's group when one does not benefit but the
group does. But the same reasoning seems to hold; unless there
happens to be a congruence between one's own values and
identifications and one's nation, nationalism doesn't seem
extropic.
Of course, my definition of patriotism might be seen as too
narrow. But the common definition that is more close to
nationalism ("Love of ones country; the passion which aims to
serve ones country, either in defending it from invasion, or
protecting its rights and maintaining its laws and institutions
in vigor or purity") often simply seems to merge with it. I
prefer to distinguish between the virtue of loyalty and how
wide group gains this primary loyalty.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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