The "Open Society" is the doomed society
Any living society is based on a shared way of life, a "public orthodoxy": once it abandons that and is "open to whatever," it is disintegrating, and will soon cease to exist.
St. Paul and I Agree...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
I think we've been an open society for a long time. Either this process takes a while or an "open society" is not self-destructive.
ReplyDeleteNope: we now simply enforce a new "public orthodoxy": see Brendan Eich's dismissal from Netscape. He was apparently a fine CEO. But he did not hold the "correct" opinion about SSM, so he lost his job.
DeleteIt is not that "open societies" are not as good as "closed" societies: they do not, in fact, exist. They are an impossibility, given human nature.
Then what do you mean by "once it abandons that and is 'open to whatever,' it is disintegrating, and will soon cease to exist."?
Delete"They are an impossibility, given human nature."
DeleteLogical impossibility is more like it. No need to invoke human nature.
Strange claim. Absent calamity of the military or natural disaster variety, does ANY society "cease to exist?" My perception is that societies change and evolve into other societies, which is not the same thing at all.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we can say ancient Egyptian culture did not cease to exist. Just like we can say "that tree did not cease to exist: it just turned into dirt."
DeleteBut my "strange claim" is a very common way of speaking -- see Spengler and Toynbee -- and I think it works just fine, so long as one is not determined to read tendentiously.
Ancient Egypt would seem to be evidence for my claim rather than yours.
DeleteIt was certainly modified -- Hellenization being the first big example -- by increasing travel and trade.
But even after major military calamity #1, its conquest by Alexander, the Ptolemies referred to themselves as, and comported themselves as, successors to the Pharaohs.
And after it was annexed by Rome in 30 BC -- major military calamity #2 -- the Romans for a long period of time mostly ratified the Ptolemaic system until Constantine began the process of forcible Christianization.
And then of course there was major military calamity #3, the Muslim conquest. The Egyptian language only persisted for a thousand years or so after that!
And Cleopatra is not really "dead": her corpse hung around for a while, and her name is still spoken frequently, and people put on plays about her, and every atom that was in her is still with us...
DeleteOh, and by the way, there were not forced conversions under Constantine.