Ideas matter. The idea of a social contract matters, of civil society. Would one prefer some kind of ideal like life, liberty and the pursit of happiness or a permanent state of violent chaos?
Check out what Thomas Hobbes wrote about living without any order or rules or social contracts whatsoever:
"where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength . . . no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
-- Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651.
In 2011, let's take something as basic as water. If there were no rules on water usage, what do you suppose would happen during this year's droughts? If there was no government service, how do you suppose people would acquire water on a daily basis? Yet destruction of government is exactly what Tea Party ideology stands for. Yes, ideas matter -- especially when put into practice.
I finally finished Philipp Blom's excellent tome, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 2010), which plunges the reader into the fizz and excitement of interconnected thinkers, dreamers and philosophes of the 1700s. Do their ideas matter now, more than two hundred years later? Hell, yes! To be taken up in the next post.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
4 comments:
Not to mention no controls on water pollution. The tea baggers would like to get rid of EPA, and go back to the good old days of burning Cuyahoga, DDT available for sale and so forth.
JC
Oh this is GOOD!
Kindly check out my Thursday post tomorrow...
Warm Aloha from Waikiki;
Comfort Spiral
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Was reading today about the domestication of humanity during evolution. The Tea-party seems to be a group of throwbacks.
I was having a conversation about this on the cell phone with an old friend while stuck on expressway. To quote my son, about the Teabaggers, "If they want to live in a world without a government, they should all move to Somalia and see how well that works out."
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