George Rebane
It all depends on your definition of how is it ‘good’ for whom. The notion (meme?) of assessing and/or building a good community started as a thread in my ‘… = Sleazebag’ post. But it deserves its own venue, because the arguments from the Left and Right will reveal much of what is considered by both sides to be wrong with America today. Being residents of a small and remote rural county in these Sierra foothills allows us to dissect this issue from its generalized national scope down to the level of our own intimate main streets.
In the following, I use ‘culture’ as defined in the RR Glossary & Semantics category.
Let me proceed with some premises and questions.
Premise1 – Americans should have the ability to choose what kind of a community they want to plan, build, and live in without fear of being forced by their government to do otherwise.
Premise2 – America will be a more peaceful, cohesive, secure, and productive country with a spectrum of communities each determining locally how much diversity it wishes to enjoy within its geographical confines or region of influence.
Premise3 – A culture (be it social, technical, religious, …) will survive only to the extent that it has environments in which it can be nurtured and inter-generationally herited, and in which it can practice discrimination so as to minimize the diluting influences of competing cultures. Corollary – absent external forces, ‘multi-kulti’ environments tend toward a dominant culture starting with the elimination of the weakest cultures in its mix.
Premise4 – Americans should have the ability to group themselves according to any criteria and/or attributes they consider proper, so long as such groupings do not form for the explicit purpose of eliminating or harming another grouping.
Premise5 – Local sustainability and self-reliance promotes the stability and self-determination of communities. Corollary – self-determination and individual liberties are minimized to the extent that a community is forced to rely on outside single-sourced resources.
Premise6 – Cultures arise, live, and die. No one culture should be penalized so as to prevent the natural decline of another culture. All cultures of today need not be here tomorrow.
Premise7 – Utility (what is ‘good’) is a subjective measure usually consisting of multiple attributes. Neither a single utility, nor any of its specific attributes, are necessarily shared by more than one culture. Therefore, all cultures are not of equal worth to anyone.
Premise8 – No individual has the right to force a group to abandon the local/regional practice of any established culture’s traditions, celebrations, observances, … .
Question1 – To what extent are any of these premises unconstitutional?
Question2 – To what extent would the implementation of any of these premises be detrimental to the overall quality of life (QOL) in the United States? How?
Question3 – Which of these premises do not belong in the evaluation of an existing community and/or informing its formation and ongoing maintenance?
Question4 – Given that no such working set of premises exists for a ‘multi-kulti’ or ‘one-kulti’ community, what premises need to be added, deleted, or what whole new set needs to be introduced?
We recall, that the aim here is to come up with a useful set of premises for either evaluating a community as to its QoL, or describing (designing) one as a more appropriate ideal for the American landscape. One of the characteristics of an “appropriate ideal” is that its form is stable from the viewpoint of its citizens.
[25sep12 addendum] I add these thoughts in response to several great comments in which readers have stepped up to address the above premises and questions about the making and make-up of good communities. Again, the terms I use are in the sense that are defined in the RR Glossary & Semantics. For easy reference I will structure the following.
1. According to my lights, people assemble into communities to enable and maintain their Bastiat Triangle of rights – security, property, liberty – which is fundamental to the apologetics put forward in these pages. Culture subsequently arises in such communities for utilitarian reasons – behaviors and traditions that give pleasure and maintain a mutually accepted social contract.
2. A cohesive society naturally stratifies in its organization – higher levels tend to prescribe generalized principles, lower levels get into more detail about acceptable and proscribed behaviors. And in descending into lower levels we see diversification, not every cohort at a given level of organization behaves and solves its problems the same way.
3. Nature shows us that ideas/methods/memes/… arising from a rich and diverse broth of how different groups of people live their lives contributes to the overall benefit, quality of life, and survival of the society. Nature goes on to tell us that homogeneity (i.e. systems of high entropy) is the prime characteristic of a path to dissolution and destruction. In short, large societies of one mind and uniformity don’t do well when confronted with either new dangers or new opportunities.
4. Private property – its accumulation, use, and sustenance – is the prime motivator of human efforts that are at the margin of satisfying elemental survival needs. That is, after you know that you’re going to live in the short term, you start gathering and building stuff that will allow you to do so in the longer term.
5. The fundamental relational attribute of private (as opposed to collective) property is its ownership by an individual. And ownership comes down to what its owner can do with property. Specifically, in a de facto or existential sense you own a given property ONLY to the extent that you can dispose of it as you wish. Modern de juris professions of ownership turn out to be a bamboozle on all concerned, and mostly foisted by government.
6. The Bastiat Triangle is the most basic and minimal structure of human rights – one cannot weaken one of them without at the same time weakening the other two. Social orders (governments) on the way to autocracy attempt to give lie to this principle, and thus declare themselves rogue to independent people of goodwill everywhere.
7. To me, the French revolution’s ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ is the first collectivist Big Lie. The three – individual liberty, equality of means and station, familial altruism towards all – cannot be increased in concert. For example, liberty and equality are opposite ends of a see-saw, you cannot increase one without diminishing the other. But that effective, good-sounding triad and rallying cry has united and motivated fuzzy thinkers to their own detriment for over two centuries now.
So when we come to communities, I see great benefit in a society that is allowed to practice beneficial discrimination in the widest possible sense. Chairman Mao cynically proclaimed, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ to invite a diversity of ideas from the people to advise the new Chinese communist regime. He didn’t, but the invitation had, and still has, a universal human appeal. Everyone understood that good ideas would pour forth from people of goodwill to help build a new and better nation. It has taken China over a half century to start accepting such diversity of thought, and all to their benefit.
I see tremendous benefit in the existence of many different cultures and ways of thought within a sovereign nation state. People subscribing to such belief systems should be allowed to be as exclusionary and discriminating as they mutually desire, as long as they do so within the confines and means of their own property.
Capitalism as the overarching principle of organizing the creation and distribution of wealth can readily tolerate and foster enclaves of various forms of collectivism, even communism, within its midst (historically it has done so). In America, the Constitution provides no strictures against people freely coming together to live in such communities, and having intercourse with such other communities as they wish. I believe it is one of the many perversions of today’s laws that have diminished property ownership to the extent that such communities are no longer possible.
Yet we still see benefit in doing things our way in our town that need not be copied elsewhere. Nevada City is a prime example of where people have willingly come together to forsake liberty for certain standards of equality. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the local collective does not violate the ‘takings clause’ of our Constitution. If you moved into town understanding the local laws (contract), then you did so willingly for what you thought was the greater benefit. But neither you nor the established collective (local town) should have the ability to force its way of living on other communities.
The problem with such freedoms is that some communities could become exclusionary on the basis of some very questionable (distasteful?) principles, e.g. race, religion, economic standing, education, …, country of origin, culture, sexual preference, etc. But if they are allowed to set up and maintain such communities, what is our problem with it? Say, that their exclusionary practices caused them to suffer. Could they then not change to another mode of behavior until they found what suited them for the long run? After all, they would be doing so with and within their own properties while paying the appropriate taxes of the land to enjoy the larger public and private benefits.
And in such a landscape we would see communities embracing a rainbow of ideologies and cultures – some would be Amish, some Mormon, some secular humanist (Marin County comes to mind), some would be of Slovenian extraction with public celebrations of Slovenian traditions, some would only let richer people in like Aspen, and so on. But all would live in environments in which they could dispose of their properties as they will when death or other reasons for displacement require.
While there is much more I can say here, let me finish for now and invite more thoughts on the benefits or evils of which I have described.
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