From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Thu Sep 12 2002 - 15:14:47 MDT
On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> ### I absolutely agree that a retreat from the
> world of politics is a losing position, rightly leading to privations,
> rather than privacy.
In distinguishing privacy from privation you are disagreeing with what
seems to me the important point -- I say privacy IS privation. Privacy is
privation from the public. Think of the old Greek distinction between the
oikos and polis, the private rather authoritarian (for ancient Greeks)
space where bodily functions are maintained as against the public
institutions of court, market, assembly where citizens deliberated the
matters of the day and distinguished one another for each other. It is
common nowadays to simply valorize the private as positive and demonize
the public as negative, in part because public life is so ugly but this is
doubly mistaken -- stealing from us the pleasures of civic freedom and
relinquishing our hold on civic autonomy.
> Yet, a libertarian must remain acutely conscious of the fundamental
> wrongness of politics, which is the art and practice of using and
> manipulating organized social violence, lacking which political bodies would
> be merely discussion societies.
For me this is a disastrously impoverished conception of political life.
It is as if you think only soldiers, judges, police, legislators, and,
momentarily, possibly, voters in a voting booth or activists in the
streets are engaged in political activity. As if politics is either the
thuggishly ugly act of firing bullets or the arridly ugly act of
bureaucrats administering social needs. No wonder you hold it in such
contempt! For me I am never more political than when I am teaching a
class, organizing a project, arguing a point with a group whose
disagreement risks my reputation. Politics is not just organized violence
-- but organizing as such. That's why Aristotle called human beings
"political animals".
Interesting though this is for me, I'd guess this seems
either off-topic or to just argue BASICS for many list-members, so we
should probably continue trading political intuitions offlist. As a
gesture toward list relevance, however ineffectual, I'll note in passing
that the rather unqualified celebration of privacy as sacred space and
the demonization of public life as at best a boring chore well deputized
to drones and at worst some kind of institutionalized criminality, goes a
long way to explain why otherwise freedom loving people often greet David
Brin's rather sensible proposals in The Transparent Society with horror
and rage. IMHO.
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