Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

JOSLIN ON CONTINUING THE LONGEST RUNNING SYSTEM OF MODERN GOVERNMENT

by Bill Joslin

I have an admission, a confession…

I still, after all these years, see classical liberalism and the anglo-enlightenment as a shining jewel in history; rare and valuable. But it was flawed. The flaw pertains to reifying critical concepts of its success into universal ideals. Namely equality (ideal) out of isonomy (realz), tolerance as an ideal versus tolerance of trivial and arbitrary differences (the real).

Now I don’t see that these were critical flaws but rather a result of kinship and common sense being embedded in a long history of social norms of a homogeneous polity. They, at the time, didn’t need explicit statements on the limits to these concepts because they were “self-evident” and taken for granted within the normative domain.

Overtime, what was taken for granted was forgotten, and Christian sentiment of universal love blew these operational necessities out of reality and into civic ideals.

I would find much joy in holding this centrist stance, but in good faith cannot. I cannot because kin-selection backfilles for these flaws (homogeneity in the founding cultures) and paints a scene of future failure (universal franchise pushes kin-interests into the polictical sphere i.e. loss of unity in the polity).

Civic values can provide that homogeneity but will always be vulnerable to lower resolution means (biology, ethnicity, race)

We can correct CL, IMO. We can correct the errors. This line of development would put us toward the middle. Completing the enlightenment – which is really what we are doing. But we can’t do that without addressing identity and identity properties (kinship). Which right now puts us at the edge of the fringe.

(The flaws currently poked at CL are not what CL was in its initial incarnations but rather what the romantics did to CL after they became the agenda setters in the 19th century)