Lars Gustafsson on the Bruckner vs. Buruma debate

This is a short article pleading for us to respect and honor reason over and against irrationality:

  There is a logic of tolerance, which remains to be formalized by some future philosopher. Let me, as a starter, suggest two fairly obvious axioms:

- Tolerance of intolerance yields intolerance.
- Intolerance of intolerance yields tolerance.

In other words, in questions of reason and freedom, societies, like individuals, have to make a choice. You cannot have everything at the same time. This holds for original dwellers as for newcomers alike.

Gustafsson is right that our socieities are founded upon reason and cannot forsake it, lest they crumble to pieces. What his very short essay does not explicitly point out is that this reason is closely linked to individualism, which must (always?) trump multiculturalism. Irrationality is indeed a problem, but the source of our conflicts seems to lie closer to western individualism – and the associated lack of identity people feel in its wake. Most of the cultural rules under discussion are not per se irrational, just blatantly counter to our sense of justice and individual freedom. The problem lies in figuring out how to let people be themselves as much as possible, while maintaining our so-called core western values. And here i would agree that we should give in as little as possible – lest we loose our own identity.

web 3.0: the political web

Museum of Media History has a video online which claims to map out the future of the internet, or at least of some forms of media, until 2015. It is the most uninspired and unexciting vision of the future of the web that i’ve come across. i for one, most ardently hope that the next ten years have more in store than an (epic?!) battle between Google and … the New York Times! It’s well done, though.

So having been most not-inspired by the above clip, i thought i’d share my thoughts on what the future of the web might hold. We all know that web 3.0 is supposed to be a semantic web. I think it will also be a political web.

What will this political web be? It’ll be yet another swarm of social web sites, only this time, instead of linking you up with your pals, they will actually structure your interactions with your co-workers, your fellow citizens and your fellow activists. These web sites will allow you to define the exact structure of an organization and implement it online. You will be able to maintain extra large groups of people who need never meet, because they will manage themselves online, deciding who gets to do what, who will hold what position, where to get funds, what to do with the funds, etc., by voting on member-submitted propositions, from their computers.

These websites will offer an extreemly open framework within which any possible type of organization can be easily created, from a template. People will be able to set up a political party, an activist organization, a company in less than 10 minutes and have the entire workings of it managed for them. Creating a new social organization will be as easy as creating a new blog.

These organizations will be fundamentally democratic, because the web is fundamentally so.

People will find novel solutions to age old organizational problems, because there will be virtually no cost anymore to trying out new types of organizations. We will be able to experiment with how we work and live together as easily as we’ve experimented with web 2.0 applications.

These systems will facilitate our interactions without controlling them. People will belong to a multitude different organizations (like they now are signed up at all the web 2.0 sites), trying them all out until we hit on the right ones. By then it will be time for web 4.0.

online democracy

I have been pondering of late the possibility of a new type of website, something that would operationalize the process of governing small political or social goups, clubs or any form of organization. The website would allow you to create a new group and supply this group with a blog, wikis, emails etc. The primary feature of the site would be that no one person would be in charge of managing the group, but all management decisions (admitting new members, removing undesirable members, appointing officers, representatives, collecting dues) would be taken through online votes: anyone could submit a predefined type of action (ban user soandso) and if enough members voted in favour, the system would automatically implement the decision (blocking soandso from the group next time s/he logged in).

I’ve posted a somewhat more complete description here. Now all i need to do is find some way of making this happen, should it prove to be a good idea…

Pascal Bruckner on Identity

Pascal Bruckner over at Signandsight (english translation of a french original) writes in exactly the same vein as Fukuyama a few posts ago:

Multiculturalism is a racism of the anti-racists: it chains people to their roots. Thus Job Cohen, mayor of Amsterdam and one of the mainstays of the Dutch state, demands that one accept “the conscious discrimination of women by certain groups of orthodox Muslims” on the basis that we need a “new glue” to “hold society together.” In the name of social cohesion, we are invited to give our roaring applause for the intolerance that these groups show for our laws. The coexistence of hermetic little societies is cherished, each of which follows a different norm. If we abandon a collective criterion for discriminating between just and unjust, we sabotage the very idea of national community. A French, British or Dutch citizen will be prosecuted for beating his wife, for example. But should the crime go unpunished if it turns out that the perpetrator is a Sunni or Shiite? Should his faith give him the right to transgress the law of the land? This is the glorification in others of what we have always beaten ourselves up about: outrageous protectionism, cultural narcissism and inveterate ethnocentrism!

This tolerance harbours contempt, because it assumes that certain communities are incapable of modernising. Could it be that the dissidence of British Muslims is not only a function of the retrograde rigorism of their leaders, but also stems from a vague suspicion that all the consideration show to them by the state is little more than a subtle form of disdain, basically telling them that they are just too backward for modern civilisation ? Several communes in Italy are planning to reserve certain beaches for Muslim women, so they may bathe unexposed to male eyes. And within a few years the first “Islamic hospital,” complying in all points with the prescriptions of the Koran, may open in Rotterdam. Anyone would think we are reliving the days of segregation in the southern United States. Yet this segregation has the full backing of Europe’s most prominent progressives! Theirs is a fight on two fronts: minorities must be protected from discrimination (for example by encouraging the teaching of regional languages and cultures and adapting the school calendar to religious holidays); and private individuals must be protected from intimidation by the community in which they live.

This time a great european intellectual is promoting Enlightenment as the solution to our current multicultural problems. Again, this is an element of the right solution: old cultural traditions must be modernized to help them cope with our modern world; and condescendingly approving of them without trying to improve them will not solve anything. The rejoinder that we cannot be sure that our modernism is actually any better than anything else (we humans have been so often so wrong about our intuitions) cannot be simply sidelined. Nevertheless, the solution cannot lie in simply tweaking these old traditions enough to allow them to cohere with european moderninty nor in indoctrinating immigrants into european ways of life.

Fukuyama on identity

In the latest edition of Prospect:

In the west, identity politics began in earnest with the Reformation. Martin Luther argued that salvation could be achieved only through an inner state of faith, and attacked the Catholic emphasis on works—that is, exterior conformity to a set of social rules. The Reformation thus identified true religiosity as an individual’s subjective state, dissociating inner identity from outer practice.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written helpfully about the subsequent historical development of identity politics. Rousseau, in the Second Discourse and the Promenades, argued that there was a big disjuncture between our outer selves, which were the accretion of social customs and habits, and our true inner natures. Happiness lay in the recovery of inner authenticity. This idea was developed by Johann Gottfried von Herder, who argued that inner authenticity lay not just in individuals but in peoples, in the recovery of what we today call folk culture. In Taylor’s words, “This is the powerful ideal that has come down to us. It accords moral importance to a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature, which it sees as in danger of being lost… through the pressures toward social conformity.”

The disjuncture between one’s inner and outer selves comes not merely out of the realm of ideas, but from the social reality of modern market democracies. After the American and French revolutions, the ideal of la carrière ouverte aux talents was increasingly put into practice as traditional barriers to social mobility were removed. One’s social status was now achieved rather than ascribed; it was the product of one’s talents, work and effort rather than an accident of birth. One’s life story was the search for fulfilment of an inner plan, rather than conformity to the expectations of one’s parents, kin, village or priest.

Fukuyama then goes on to describe the identity problems of immigrants in Europe and to prone the solution of greater integration into national identities. Though this certainly would help, i’m not so sure it is the best solution. Turning Muslims into French Muslims would resolve some of the unrest; in the end, however, it is the all-encompassing Modern State that is at the root of the problem, the solution lying more in breaking up this institution than in forcing everyone into it.

via 3QuarksDaily.

States, Corporations & Insurance Companies

I believe our societies have come to an organizational impasse, one where states are pitted against gigantic corporations while at the same time being burdened with the duty of providing for all aspects of their citizens’ lives. This situation is proving ever more difficult to sustain because some states can no longer stand up to market forces or corporations and also because these states can no longer financially fulfill all of their social duties.

A solution, i believe, is to divide the economic sphere of society into three types of entities instead of just two. States must be split into two separate entities: on the one hand a minimal state (S) responsible for legislation and infrastructure (more or less the libertarian state) and on the other hand Insurance Companies (I) that would pick up all social responsibilities of our current states (social security, retirement, etc.). Corporations (C) would remain. This new division of power would have a number of advantages.