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Do you have good intentions?

Le Penseur
It can be a shock to discover that most people think they are good people.  It is this idea of being good that stops extremists from talking to each other. "I am so good that you must be evil".  You can know when you hold extreme opinions because you will refuse to even talk to some people about their political views.

When a population is becoming extremist they pass laws to ban certain modes of speech and when the majority are extremist they just lock up their extreme opponents.

Being good is about morality. The morality of States differs from that of individuals. Individuals usually believe that killing people is a terrible sin but States employ armies and armed police that kill people. You may believe that greed is wrong but it is always the billionaires that are feted by States - and so on for every aspect of morality from vanity to adultery.

So what is a moral State?  Modern discussions of morality concentrate on moral actions but the "good" has a form, it is a pattern.  This is more obvious in the case of the social "good" than for the individual "good".  Imagine a garden maintained by a village. A vandal throws weed killer over a part of it. The change for the worse is obvious in the garden, its harmony is disrupted and the crime is obvious. Imagine a town centre arranged as shops around a small park with ornately covered walkways between the shopping areas and a place for open air entertainment in the middle. People are relaxed, chatting and shopping.  Now introduce a parking penalty of the average weekly wage and a 20 minute limit on parking, the scene changes, there are far fewer people and those that remain are rushing from place to place.  Imagine a classroom of twenty children, they are peaceful, there is no bullying, they attend to the lessons but are relaxed, the group has an active, harmonious form.  Now imagine a change in the classroom such that speaking at any time is encouraged and never stopped or corrected - the harmony is broken and social bullying breaks out as one child speaks over another, learning almost ceases. 

The challenge of political philosophy is to describe the form of the social good and then to introduce regulations and laws that support this form.

The modern media and politicians play a vicious game of analysing social morality in terms of the individual moral highground. This is a fallacy on two grounds. Firstly the individual and social good are not necessarily the same.  Secondly, morality is based on the form of the good and a single good intention, although producing an apparently moral action, may not benefit the harmony of the whole. We cannot build a good society as the sum of good intentions but need to have an idea of the form of the good society before we begin. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Another fallacy in many political philosophies is the ambition of good intentions.  Any gardener knows that they do not have the resources to maintain a garden that is too big but a whole area may be like a garden if each garden for each property is well maintained.  So it is with the social good, it is an accumulation of good forms into a whole.  An ideology that proposes the merger of vast areas of land and people under one administration will fail.  Each region and group of people has its own characteristics that must be allowed to blossom; we can negotiate cooperation between the regions but must never demand that they all follow the same internal laws.  Globalizers beware.

I believe that most people have a similar idea of the form of the good.   Marxists believe in state ownership and control, they imagine the outcome of this system to be similar to that imagined by any liberal or modern conservative, a country composed of happy workers operating productively.  It is their ambition that is at fault.  Fascists believe in control by edict, their problem is the same as that of the Marxists.   The form of the good is complex, it cannot be created by simple edicts and central control.  It requires freedom as well as order.

The exception to the shared idea of the form of the good is postmodernism. Postmodernism and poststructuralism are direct attacks on the form of the good.  They are the political philosophy of moral inchworms who follow the newest changes to consensus morality, mindlessly merging personal and political morals without any sense of the form of the good.  This political philosophy is the greatest threat to mankind in modern times.  It is blind and will lead us to perdition.

8/1/13

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See

Postmodernism-poststructuralism-postmarxism


The London Riots and the Mediocracy

The BBC Guide to postmodern journalism

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