From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Wed Sep 11 2002 - 15:01:18 MDT
On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> Dale wrote:
>
> > If the pleasure of ethical life is flourishing and belonging, the
> > phenomenological experience of reconciliation, debate, rivalry,
> > intrigue, compromise, deliberation, and display proper to the
> > political realm is pretty much the pleasure of freedom. Best, Dale
>
> ### This is an interesting perspective but rather alien to me - while I
> appreciate the pleasure of a spirited debate, I feel that freedom stands in
> inverse proportion to the amount of politicking you are forced to take part
> in. If you truly like politics, as opposed to merely using political means
> to achieve ethical goals, there might be something wrong with your
> character.
>
> Rafal
You wouldn't be the first to suggest this, and in any case it is a very
common attitude. In America, for example, I would say the great majority
would actually claim that freedom is largely freedom FROM politics -- this
is largely because here, as in most of the relatively rich North Atlantic
industrial democracies, we have come to confuse politics with social
administration. It is only in moments when one is thrust, often
accidently, into activism or deliberation about some issue or problem
about which one feels passionate concern that people are re-immersed into
political life and realize that a citizen is more than a consumer or
job-holder.
The fact that people seek ever more of the meaning of their
lives in private rather than public life is understandable but regrettable
in my opinion -- I believe that this is a kind of abdication that renders
us deeply vulnerable to those to whom we deliver over the reins of
authority by default. Remember that the root of "privacy" is privation.
If my attitude toward the pleasures of public seems utterly alien, I am
reminded of a similar attitude expressed in a book loved by many
extropians, which really resonated with me, Aristoi. This is p. 16:
"I'm a bit nervous," Akwasibo confessed. "What sort of thing goes
on at these receptions?"
"Pleasure. Display. Rivalry. Intrigue." Gabriel smiled.
"Everything that makes life worth living."
It's not that I don't recognize how frustrating, gruelling, and
even ugly it can be to engage in the processes of public life -- it's just
that I think people too readily overlook the pleasures of politics for
disdain of their costs.
It seems that extropians, transhumanists, technophilic greens, and
others have quite an urgent and urgently needed array of arguments and
perceptions to share with the world as people debate the relative merits
of technological development and turn to varieties of religious
fundamentalism in fear of their destabilising effects, for example. This
is a terrible time to retreat into separatist enclaves of intellectual
movements outside the conversation of actual people in the world, or even
literal fantasies of separation, private islands or outer space colonies
where one imagines one can be permanently free from the annoyance of
perspectives different from one's own.
Best, Dale
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