Homeschooling: Don't do it Germany!

It's interesting that this discussion has almost come full circle to advances in science relating to going to the moon.

So if it weren't for Nazi germany, we may not have made it to the moon yet... Even though I am a big fan of space technology, I think it would have been a good trade for even a single life saved...

magerette said:

So, you're trying to confuse me by going back to the original topic, eh?

I'm not very good at arguing abstracts, so you'll have to explain how we have less freedom now than we had before because of 'neoliberalism' ( I had to look that one up—dictionary says it's ' a liberal who de-emphasizes traditional liberal doctrines in order to seek progress by more pragmatic methods,' whatever that means. I'm taking it to mean change we're not believing in.)

Was your original argument (before we got derailed into the perils of nationalism) that the US is more selfish(i.e.,materialistic and greedy )than it used to be and that personal liberties have suffered because of it? Socially, that's certainly not the case afaict.

Click to expand...

There are two philosophies of freedom, one emphasizes personal freedom and the other maximized freedom for all. The former is classic liberalism, the original liberalism that wanted the government to stay out of peoples business as much as possible. The later form is social liberalism where the government is supposed to ensure that as many as possible have freedom, which means that restrictions might have to be made in instances where ones freedom infringes on another's freedom.

Where as social liberalism was the primary force in early 20th century US and still is throughout most of western Europe, Reagan and Tatcher went back in time to classic liberalism. This new approach is known as neo liberalism.

In the case that started this thread a social liberal would begin to ask the question how both the parent and the childs "freedom" can be maximized. This is put against the question whether or not a parent should have the "freedom" to school their own child.

In both cases the word "freedom" is put forth as the end goal, yet with completely different results. This puts the concept of "freedom" itself under question, especially when used in rhetoric. What kind of freedom is asked for, is it a freedom of ones own wishes and desires, or is it freedom for all who live in the society? Is the former a sign of selfishness, or is the latter trying to hide a state that force everyone to do it's bidding?

Freedom is a problematic concept, and the path that have been popular in the US recently advocates the former version, which have put many in far less freedom than they would have in western Europe.

That said, I might try to answer the whole nationalism/war angle later on but I just woke up.

Back in the good ol' days, with the USSR going full steam, there was a good bit of discourse regarding "positive" and "negative" liberties. The Communist view was that the classical liberal view of freedom was a mere technicality — "the freedom to stay at the Ritz or sleep under a bridge" — since in reality your freedom is constrained by your economic power, which is extremely unevenly (and, they argued, unfairly) distributed. They characterized this view of freedom as consisting of "negative liberties" — the freedom *from* interference by governmental power.

Their proposed definition included "positive liberty" — the rights *to* things that give you access to life choices. These were thought to include the right to gainful employment, education, health care, and roughly equal standards of living.

The Commies obviously didn't pull it off very well; they ended up with neither negative nor (all that much) positive liberties. However, I think their definition of liberty is closer to the way the word is seen in Europe. I.e., there is a willingness to sacrifice some negative liberties to gain some positive ones. The equation has worked out a good deal better in Western Europe's social democracies than it ever did in the Communist world.

I think that this underlying difference in the way we understand "liberty" lies behind a good deal of the difficulties in communicatioin we have about political topics. You're shocked that we're cheerfully willing to accept stuff like gun control, compulsory state schools, or explicitly redistributive tax policies -- and we're equally puzzled that you're so dead set against the same, plus public health care.

Perhaps the problem tends to be that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, often can be mutually exclusive!!

JemyM said:

There are two philosophies of freedom, one emphasizes personal freedom and the other maximized freedom for all. The former is classic liberalism, the original liberalism that wanted the government to stay out of peoples business as much as possible. The later form is social liberalism where the government is supposed to ensure that as many as possible have freedom, which means that restrictions might have to be made in instances where ones freedom infringes on another's freedom.

Click to expand...

Your definition of classic liberalism sounds a lot like what I'm used to hearing as the definition of libertarianism. I don't have the benefit of a university education, so bear with me as I try to follow you.

Where as social liberalism was the primary force in early 20th century US and still is throughout most of western Europe, Reagan and Tatcher went back in time to classic liberalism. This new approach is known as neo liberalism.

Click to expand...

So what I think of as the primary force in early 20th Century America—basic capitalism (and robber baronism) balanced with a few minimalist reforms brought about by unionization and the Wobblies and so forth—is actually a form of liberalism? I do understand that Reagan and the 'drown government in a bathtub' concept is about removing the protections government affords individuals from the power of corporate entities in the hope that those entities will then magically produce universal prosperity and a survival of the fittest which supposedly benefits society in general, but I'm surprised to hear it referred to as neo-liberalism, or any kind of liberalism. Perhaps I just don't understand the term liberalism itself properly, as I see it more as a combination or fusion of these two elements you're separating out, the tussle between how much freedom you can allow an individual before it negatively impacts another individual, and how much authority you invest in your government to keep that balance.

…In both cases the word "freedom" is put forth as the end goal, yet with completely different results. This puts the concept of "freedom" itself under question, especially when used in rhetoric. What kind of freedom is asked for, is it a freedom of ones own wishes and desires, or is it freedom for all who live in the society? Is the former a sign of selfishness, or is the latter trying to hide a state that force everyone to do it's bidding?

Freedom is a problematic concept, and the path that have been popular in the US recently advocates the former version, which have put many in far less freedom than they would have in western Europe.

Click to expand...

I'm really not getting you on this one. I don't see the state here as forcing everyone to do its bidding, or as one that gives individuals less freedom than they have in Western Europe. I don't think America is doing as good a job at taking care of its citizens' health or education as you are in Sweden or as it certainly could and should be, and I am someone who often wishes I could live in a nice western european social democracy, but whatever lack of freedom there is going on here is principally economic, not political, as Prime J touches on below.

I will grant you that the country has taken a turn rightward in the last fifty years that has a potential to begin restricting liberties and may well do so for awhile, but I don't see it as a permanent fixture. We tend to have serious reactionary elements within our society and they often make by far the most noise, and even precipitate wars and social movements, but the general trend since the country's inception has been for greater and greater blending and personal equality, less restriction and more individual choice. It's very hard to take liberties away from people once they've learned what they are.

That said, I might try to answer the whole nationalism/war angle later on but I just woke up.

Click to expand...

Let me know when you achieve world peace.

Prime Junta said:

Back in the good ol' days, with the USSR going full steam, there was a good bit of discourse regarding "positive" and "negative" liberties. The Communist view was that the classical liberal view of freedom was a mere technicality — "the freedom to stay at the Ritz or sleep under a bridge" — since in reality your freedom is constrained by your economic power, which is extremely unevenly (and, they argued, unfairly) distributed. They characterized this view of freedom as consisting of "negative liberties" — the freedom *from* interference by governmental power.

Click to expand...

As in 'throw you in the Bastille for stealing a loaf of bread' style government power, I'm assuming. The automatic power of one (privileged)class over another, then.

Their proposed definition included "positive liberty" — the rights *to* things that give you access to life choices. These were thought to include the right to gainful employment, education, health care, and roughly equal standards of living.

Click to expand...

As opposed to the bare bones of our 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?' I agree there's a lot left to interpretation there, but it seems to be going in the same direction.

... I think their definition of liberty is closer to the way the word is seen in Europe. I.e., there is a willingness to sacrifice some negative liberties to gain some positive ones. The equation has worked out a good deal better in Western Europe's social democracies than it ever did in the Communist world.

I think that this underlying difference in the way we understand "liberty" lies behind a good deal of the difficulties in communicatioin we have about political topics. You're shocked that we're cheerfully willing to accept stuff like gun control, compulsory state schools, or explicitly redistributive tax policies — and we're equally puzzled that you're so dead set against the same, plus public health care.

Click to expand...

Very lucid, and I am much more able to follow you. I agree there's a different framework for the whole concept of what constitutes liberty or freedom, as I've illustrated by my own lack of grasp regarding Jemy's terms. Your explanation makes me think that perhaps our mutual incomprehension is rooted in Europe's history of class structure and struggle stretching over centuries, which we only mirror very dimly here. Here the individual has always been seen as empowered (if only idealistically), authority as negative except when entered into with the full consent of the wary who are banding together more for personal safety than for a common good. Think little isolated communities separated by great distances in a hostile environment with no monarchial influences except taxation without representation and you see that liberty devolves down to the local/individual level pretty quickly.

I actually do think the ideas of social democracy are extremely logical and beneficial, and worth giving up a few personal liberties for, myself, but then I'm the flaming commie around here.

Folks from your side of the pond like to remind us of Hitler and Stalin, but you tend to forget that we also have a long, long history of bloody revolutions and uprisings to overthrow their likes. The history of Europe, at least, *is* a history of class struggle — to a very large extent, anyway. That history of violently overthrowing our own governments shapes our attitudes to them, and theirs to us.

Interestingly, I think you guys often seem to suffer from a type of cognitive dissonance with regards to your own history -- the Indian Wars, slavery, and the Civil War were very much violent manifestations of class struggle, and as such they don't really fit your self-image of being the land of the free, home of the brave... which means you get into all kinds of weird contortions when discussing them; ranging from pooh-poohing it (example), to abject self-flagellation over the unpardonability and horror and what not (when in reality, every culture in history was either doing it or having it done to them, depending on how strong they happened to be).

While I think that Ken McLeod was being wildly hyperbolic, there *is* something to that quotation of his:

Ken McLeod said:

Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons.

Click to expand...

(To stay in that mood, try this.)

Well, of course as soon as one primate gets a little power, he's going to lord it over the less powerful primates and take their stuff. I wasn't trying to gloss over anything evil about us by saying we didn't have the same history of *centuries* of class struggle--just that we had a different perception of class. I think we've ended up in similar places of overthrowingness and empoweredness and all that. If anything, the individual had a lot larger, more top heavy and much closer system to overthrow in Europe to get there.

I would argue that 'taking it from nobody' kind of glosses over a few centuries of taking it from each other, though, but that's a kickass video.

I was, actually, agreeing with you… sort of. What I'm saying is that the idea of class struggle is something you guys consider pretty foreign; you have a very strong myth of living in a classless society, to the point that it's a part of your self-image. The archetypal American hero — the guy you like to identify with, and the guy anyone with aspirations to popularity tries to pretend he is — is the self-made man who overcomes all obstacles with sheer grit and gumption. (Substitute "she" where applicable /me looks at S. Palin.)

Ironically, in Europe the revolutions have tended to happen from below, whereas in the US they've happened from above. Your biggest social revolution -- the emancipation -- was very much a top-down process, driven by political choices made by Northern, Southern and national political leaders; the slaves themselves weren't in any position to do more than help.

It's definitely true that the talking point so dear to all our politicians, The American Dream, rests on the idea of, if not a completely classless society(I don't think even Americans are that niave) one where class is fluid and easy to transcend. The self-made individual is indeed the stereotype and the figurehead in that picture, but I think all of us are neglecting a really potent aspect of American nationalism and American destiny—the fact that it was in essence crafted by western Europeans, and European philosophies and experiences. Kind of interesting to see how things have diverged, and how they haven't.

On your second point I think there's some ambiguity. Yes, emancipation was the end result of a political process, but why? Because of the (grassroots and worldwide) abolitionist movement, which became extremely powerful and vocal, and heavily influenced the judgments made in the political arena. There were also a lot of economic factors involved, of course, but I think there's reason to read in a bit of class and culture struggle not purely coming in an exclusively top down way.

magerette said:

On your second point I think there's some ambiguity. Yes, emancipation was the end result of a political process, but why? Because of the (grassroots and worldwide) abolitionist movement, which became extremely powerful and vocal, and heavily influenced the judgments made in the political arena. There were also a lot of economic factors involved, of course, but I think there's reason to read in a bit of class and culture struggle not purely coming in an exclusively top down way.

Click to expand...

My point is that in the struggle against slavery, the slaves themselves were almost a side attraction. No slaves or former slaves assumed a leading role in that struggle: they were all white and free. Nor did any former slaves make it to high political office subsequent to the emancipation. The Civil War was a struggle between the plantation-owners of the south and the industrialists of the north, with slavery a bone of contention between the two; the slaves were almost bystanders.

Europe, OTOH, has no shortage of genuine social revolutions (failed or successful), with massive popular movements overthrowing the existing political order. Hell, it's only about 20 years since the latest major round of that sort of thing, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we saw another such round within the next 20. Even the American revolution and the war of independence were rather genteel affairs by comparison.

When we're talking about stuff like what's going down in Greece, revolution is very much on the table. It happens here; it's not something in history books and action films. It's real. The Greek government must be shitting their pants about now.

The American mythos is one of struggle against a foreign oppressor; the European one is that of revolutionary struggle against domestic ones. You tend to see the "enemy" or "oppressor" as some foreigner from outside; we see them just as often as one of 'us.' Your attitude toward government will be fundamentally different if you accept as a matter of course that the things can be overthrown, violently if need be, if they go seriously bad. We have that. You, despite all the rhetoric about the Second Amendment and such, don't.

The problem is that most Americans hold the founding fathers as some sort of proxy to God. As being perfect. And the constitution as the ten commandments... Many are also too proud to admit their system is broken...

Then there was always the English solution; send your problems overseas, first to America and later (when they revolted at the idea) to Australia!!